by Laia Jufresa
‘You, sit,’ she says, and Marina sits at the breakfast bar where she tends to slump while Chihuahua cooks up fights. Well, he cooks meals that end up as a fight when Marina can’t manage to eat them.
Marina feels like she’s sitting in front of a movie, the way she likes them: with the sound off. She watches Chela braid her hair, rub her hands together and make herself at home in the space, getting out sugar, flour, and milk (all those raw materials Marina buys then leaves untouched, like someone who collects perfumes for the bottles). Then, out of nowhere, she brings up the question she’s been meaning to ask: does Chela know Linda?
‘Of course,’ Chela says. ‘Linda and her husband knew my husband before we all moved here, from the orchestra.’
This surprises Marina.
‘Is he a musician too?’
Chela frowns.
‘No, Beto’s a bureaucrat.’
Marina doesn’t say as much, but that’s exactly what she’d imagined. Nor does she mention she finds Beto rather attractive, with that particular appeal of sad men.
‘Cultural bureaucrat,’ Chela continues, ‘there’s a whole breed of them in this country. You’ll hear him playing guitar in his free time, but he’s got a banker’s soul. He’s a good dad; I’ll give him that. But he was a tyrannical husband. Not violent. Quite the opposite: a complete walkover. I’m the only woman I know who got a divorce because of a crisis of boredom. In fact, we never did get a divorce. At least not as far as I know. Do you know anything about that?’
Marina laughs.
‘Why didn’t you knock on Linda’s door?’ she asks.
Chela looks at her as if she hasn’t heard, which isn’t physically possible. Marina makes a mental note to try this in the future: when someone asks her something she doesn’t want to answer, she’ll just stare at them, as if waiting for them to talk.
Chela passes the flour through a sieve, making a mound in the salad bowl, and with her finger she carves a crater at the peak. She breaks the egg over the mini volcano then throws in some sugar. With a fork, she whisks it all together. Next, she puts some butter to melt in the microwave, announcing, in the process, that by French standards this would be ‘cheating’. She whisks and whisks and then covers the mixture in the bowl with a dish towel.
‘You have to let it rest a couple of minutes,’ Chela says, opening the fridge. Without the slightest fuss, and in one swift move, she takes the moldy carrots from the tray and throws them in the trash. She refills the plastic cups and stands by the screen door looking out onto the water tank. Marina is still at the breakfast bar.
‘I couldn’t bare to. I think Linda might hate me. Víctor won’t. But she might. She’s so opinionated, so spirited. Plus, she copes with four children when I couldn’t even handle one. I don’t think she’d even let me in the mews, actually.’
Chela looks at Marina through the reflection in the door, raises her glass and says, ‘Thanks for letting me in.’
Then she turns around and lights the stove.
Now Marina thinks about it, Pina is also absurdly beautiful. A kind of oneiric beauty, with those Buddha-like almond eyes and that perfect, slim nose. It’s a wonder she can even breathe. She shouldn’t think like this, she tells herself, when it wasn’t all that long ago that that little girl drowned. Marina is never pleased when Pina turns up unannounced, because the Pérez-Walkers pay per hour, not per kid. Plus, her presence changes the order of things, so that Ana and Theo, who on the whole leave each other in peace, are suddenly overcome with a feverish urge to rip each other apart in front of their guest. When Linda hired Marina, she told her she was the first nanny the kids had had in their lives. With four kids! Marina doesn’t get how she can look after them all and play the flute, or the cello, or whatever it is she plays, the one-woman band. Suddenly, the pedestal she’s put Linda on seems out of reach. Obsolete. Would Linda really not open the door to Chela? Marina thinks she would, then that she wouldn’t: she doesn’t know what to think. Would Linda be pissed if she knew that Marina had let her in? She takes a certain pleasure in the idea of going against the woman she so obsessively compares herself to. In their next class she’ll tell Linda that she got stoned with her old friend Chela. Let’s see how she likes that.
‘The first one always turns out badly,’ say Chela, as she rolls a perfect circle of whitish batter around the pan.
‘How come you know how to make crepes?’
‘I picked it up in a hotel in Belize. Crazy life, eh? That’s what people around here must say about me, right? Lost, irresponsible, a terrible mother.’
Marina wants to tell her the truth – that they’ve never once brought her up – but she doesn’t know how to break it to her so that it sounds less offensive. She gets to her feet and opens the door to the yard. The smell of butter is making her feel woozy. Linda spreads the mixture with a silicon spatula that Marina bought on offer and has never used. Marina watches, trying not to show her utter fascination. She cups her beer with two hands as if it were hot chocolate, and takes comparative notes. Could she be like this woman? A lover of men and food and freedom? Will she ever feel at ease cooking? Or fucking?
‘A wholesome woman. A whole lotta woman. The whole shebang,’ Marina thinks.
And Chela, as if intuiting some of what’s passing through Marina’s head, says, ‘I turn forty this year.’
What’s that supposed to mean? Is forty old? Marina does the math. This woman, so much more of a woman than she is, is closer to her mom’s age than to her own.
‘How old is Pina?’
‘She turns twelve tomorrow,’ Chela says. ‘That’s why…’
She doesn’t finish her sentence and Marina doesn’t probe any further. Tiny volcanoes erupt on the surface of the crepe. Chela flips it. There’s something planetary about the side now facing up: a pattern of concentric circles that vary in color where one part took a millisecond more or less to cook. Marina decides to change the tone of the conversation; the last thing she needs is to take on Chela’s drama.
‘It looks like the growth rings on a tree,’ she says.
‘I haven’t seen her since she was nine,’ Chela says, and she slides the crepe onto a plate. The side facing up now is whitish like a pasty baby, and doesn’t have growth rings or indeed anything that speaks of the universe on it, apart from some disconcerting craters where the volcanoes erupted. Chela starts a new crepe.
‘Pina?’ Marina asks, stupidly.
Chela nods, keeping her eyes on the pan. Every time the edge of the batter mixture goes solid, she presses it down with the spatula and the liquid rushes in to replace it, until it too sets. She didn’t apply this level of neurotic vigilance to the previous one.
‘Do you know why I called her that?’ Chela asks. ‘After Pina Bausch. Do you know who Pina Bausch is? She’s a seriously important choreographer, a genius, a…’
Her sentence deflates. Chela focuses on her spatula like a child in front of a videogame; her eyes detect setting edges in an instant, and without blinking, so the tears that start to fall from them don’t seem to have any relation to her, or to what she’s saying. Marina once went to a water park in the port of Veracruz with a wave machine where jets of water would shoot out. That’s what Chela’s face reminds her of. She flips the crepe and it’s ruined, its rings disturbed too soon by the spatula.
‘I haven’t seen my dad for a year and a half,’ Marina says.
She’s not sure why she said it, maybe to distract Chela, or maybe because she’d like to be able to talk like her: to cry without making a big song and dance about it; to say through tears and laughter, ‘My dad could make you a perfect club sandwich, blow gigantic soap bubbles, and then drink too much and answer everyone with his fists. Well, everyone except me. Not every night, but like the club sandwich: from time to time. And sometimes he’d break things: my mother’s teeth, my brother’s ribs.’ And Marina would like to add, ‘And I, like an idiot, could never get mad at him.’ But all she says is, ‘A ballet choreographer
?’
‘Bausch? Contempo. Contemporary dance, you know what that is?’
‘More or less. You’re a dancer too, right?’
‘Not anymore.’
‘What, one day you just said enough is enough?’
‘No. I couldn’t find any contempo in Mazunte.’
2002
Back in 1982, while I recovered from the bike accident, Noelia took up the habit of calling me as soon as she got to work. Since we had nothing to say to each other, having only just eaten breakfast together, she would give me a report of the traffic she’d encountered on the way from our house to the hospital, putting on a voice that she thought made her sound like a sports commentator, but in fact only made her seem like a tattletale.
‘He overtook me on the right!’ she’d say. Or, ‘I saw a man hit by a car right outside a church. There are no morals anymore!’
When, almost twenty years later, she began chemo, I took it upon myself to give her a report of the traffic I saw from the bus window on my way back and forth from the institute or the market. But it was invariably so lame, so half-hearted and obviously half made-up that Noe eventually ruled that I didn’t have a driver’s sensibility and was better off telling her about my fellow passengers on the bus. That was much more fun. I like to think that never learning to drive saved me a lot of ball ache. I would have let everyone overtake me, left, right, and center. Boy, it would have driven my wife nuts, me calmly waving on my aggressor.
Back to 1982. Once Noe had finished her traffic update, we would hang up and I would draw in bed. The rest-and-recuperation instruction manual they’d given me in the hospital was too boring to actually read, so I’d asked my night nurse, AKA my wife, and she gave me the gist of it: Forbidden to work. And that is how I came to spend my recovery period drawing, a hobby I’d loved as a child, and something I’d spent almost my entire adult life putting off. I soon realized that every time I had a pencil in my hand I’d draw houses. Design them, if you like. All those months spent cooped up in the house of my childhood, adolescence, and adult life (more or less on the spot where I’m writing this now) convinced me I should have been an architect. Architects have the sensibility of an artist, a pinch of philosophical coherence, a healthy dose of opportunism and even their share of scientific rigor on a basic, structural level (the level that stops houses falling down on top of them). But more than all this – and in radical contrast to anthropologists – the work of architects actually serves a purpose.
*
Umami starts in the mouth, in the middle of the tongue, activating salivation. Your molars wake up and feel the urge to bite, beg to move. Not that different in fact, albeit less powerful, from the instinct that drives your hips to move almost of their own accord during sex. In that moment, you only know how to obey your body. The body knows what needs to be done. Chomping is a pleasure, and umami is so darn chompable. Chompable isn’t a word, but I don’t like chewable. Chewable is what they call those vitamin C tablets. Chompable seems more ad hoc to me, more of a treat, more sinful. Or, as Agatha Christie would say, ‘delish’.
In cookbooks they use the word ‘rich’ to describe umami. I like ‘rich’ but it doesn’t translate well into Spanish, because in English it connotes something complex, filling, satisfying, while rico just means tasty.
If we delve back to the beginning, perhaps umami doesn’t start in the mouth at all, but rather as a craving, at first sight.
*
I dug out a letter I wrote to Noelia from Madrid on July 21 1983.
All I can say, my love, is: Bravo to me! I’ve made a friend! He’s a philosopher. He was leaving the library the other day at the same time as me. Next thing I knew he’d crossed to my side of the street, and we went on like that for twenty minutes, until we reached the same block, both of us suspecting the other of following him. Later we laughed about it, of course: it turns out we’re neighbors. He’s Spanish and he’s called Juan (aren’t they all?). Best part is he’s just as lonesome as I am because he recently came back from a long exile in Mexico. We’ve got into the habit of going for a drink – or four – when the city heats up. Yesterday I asked him where I should go to buy some bathing trunks, because I’m thinking of making the most of the dead hours (so many hours without you!) to learn how to swim. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? If I do learn, when I get back, we’ll go to Acapulco. We’ll go even if I don’t learn. I’m craving the sea like never before. It’s Madrid’s heat (dry as dry can be). It leaves me KO. Anyway, the point is, my Noe, that Juan answered my bathing-trunk query like this: ‘In Madrid they’ve hit upon the ultimate ontological proof, and it goes like this: “If it exists, you’ll find it in the Corte Inglés.”’
*
I was always grateful to Noelia for not filling our house with archetypal cardiology paraphernalia. In some egocentric etymological retracing of the Latin word cura, Mexico’s ‘curers’ seem to think their role also includes ‘curating’. Nine out of ten of the doctors we knew regurgitated, ad infinitum, exactly the same exhibition in their offices: ‘Mexican Paperweights – a retrospective’.
Handing out paperweights is an elegant way to take the register at conferences, and they come in all shapes and sizes: glass paperweights (usually pyramid-shaped); copper paperweights (boasting Bajío-style motifs); hard plastic paperweights (in the shape of a pill); rubber foam paperweights (always anatomically graphic: the heart and all its nooks and crannies, with the name of some drug written in florescent type under the alveoli); rock paperweights, brass paperweights, aluminum paperweights. Paperweights that have nothing to weigh down, because even doctors have had to get with the times and start using computers. And scattered around these gallery pieces we find the accompanying explanatory exhibition texts in the form of diplomas, photos of dogs and children, odes to the Beatles, Mexican flags, gifts from patients who, having faced the light at the end of the tunnel and then been brought back, become remarkably magnanimous (metal knights, little painted plaster saints). One recently recovered patient gave Noelia a gold charm in the shape of heart. She had it melted down and turned into earrings. Truth be told, we weren’t entirely innocent of the curating crime ourselves: we too collected our fair share of superstitious figurines, although that was during the Year of Reproduction.
The reason I’m thinking about this – about the aesthetics of doctors’ consulting rooms – is because I’ve spent the whole week seeing doctors. What can I say? Going to hospital isn’t what it used to be. To start with, it’s no longer my friends who look after me, but rather their putative children. They respect me because they knew who my wife was, but I can’t find it in me to respect them, because none of them seem old enough to shave, let alone treat me. It’s not what it used to be because back in the day a trip to the hospital meant time away from the institute: a day off. It’s not what it used to be because back in the day I would walk out of there with my ego well and truly boosted (the doctors would compare me to the most virile flora and fauna: an oak! A bull!). Nowadays I leave bewildered, afraid I’ve been hoodwinked; the same feeling you get after talking to a plumber. None of that flora or fauna stuff: I’m just told in the most mechanical of terms that this or that pipework is blocked.
It’s not what it used to be because before, after my appointment, I would go up to Cardiology and sit in my wife’s little waiting room: to make her uncomfortable, for a laugh, of course, but also to marvel at that other personality of hers, that other person Noelia was at work. So mine, and yet – it was clearer there, with her in her medic’s coat, than in any other place – so irrefutably only hers, so beyond me, so much something other than what we were together. In flora-and-fauna terms, an autotroph.
*
Anchovies, tomatoes, and Parmesan cheese all contain glutamate. That is, they are umami-y. The same with chicken and beef, Worcestershire sauce, kombu seaweed, some hellish spread called Marmite which we tried in England (I hated it, Noelia loved it), mushrooms, and – though only on
the inside – our wedding rings (both my ring, which I wear on my finger, and Noelia’s, which is tied around my neck with a piece of embroidery thread Linda gave me from her sewing kit the other day at the Mug). Now I wear it like Linda does: like a necklace. On the inside of the rings – which are both gold, because deep down we were traditionalists – it says: Umami, 5-5-1974.
We got married in Morelia, with my tiny family and the whole army of Vargas cousins. They gave us dishware, vases, and a German Shepherd which we passed off to the first nephew who said ‘I’ll take it!’ They also took a ton of pictures, which we keep in a box. They’re color slides. On our tenth or maybe twentieth anniversary we projected them onto a wall while our friends drifted around the house sipping martinis.
On our wedding day, Noelia wore white flowers in her hair but a pink dress, which not one of her aunts failed to comment on. Preempting their disapproval, I wore a white suit to compensate. They didn’t appreciate that either. It had bellbottoms. My mustache was bushy enough for a bird to nest in. What bad taste we had in the seventies, and how shamelessly we wore it. I’m sure if I got out those slides now I’d be scandalized myself by those aunts’ outfits.
Another option we considered for our rings was to engrave them with the word Bonito, then the date. The idea came to us because it was in the scales of the bonito fish that they first identified monosodium glutamate, which is the salt umami is made from. What’s more, the word perfectly summed up our relationship: bonito, meaning lovely, meaning beautiful. But in the end we threw that option out the window and opted for the ‘less pretentious’ umami. Go figure.
*
Noelia liked the color pink and not only wore it on her wedding day, but pretty much every day (The Girls, too, when they came along). Pink shoes, pink skirts, even a bag in a hideous Barbie pink; the kind the humanitees can’t abide. They’ve outgrown it. If the humanitees ever wear pink, it has to be Mexican pink. The humanitees, at least in springtime, wear a strict Luis Barragánesque palette: yellow, white, Mexican pink. The rest of the year they wear dark clothes in shiny materials that completely outshine them. Nothing, on the other hand, could ever dull Noelia’s natural sparkle. If this were one of those pretentious academic articles, like the ones I used to be an expert in, I’d say, ‘Nothing diminished her intrinsic luminescence.’