Umami

by Laia Jufresa

  Last night, in the bathroom, Pina picked at her scab and then watched as it changed color under the stream of tap water. It went from the dark red of dry blood to a light, almost pretty pink. It’s only the size of the edge of a nail and it almost doesn’t hurt. But it does hurt a little. Enough to make up for the fact that she only counted ninety-seven swallows.

  *

  Pina likes roads, but not when they come to an end. It bugs her when someone says, ‘Nearly there.’ She gets antsy and starts to hope they never get there; that they get a flat. Or maybe not a flat, because that would slow them to a stop, and what Pina wants is to keep on moving forever and ever. What she wants is for whoever’s driving to miss the turn and keep on going. Pina likes the going, not the getting there. Right now, for example, they’re just going. No one’s saying ‘nearly there’, because they’ve only just set off, and Pina feels at peace; her heart isn’t racing; nobody is going anywhere without the others. Her mom is at the wheel. She has her hair in a bun and you can see her dancer’s neck, which Pina likes so much. Her dad is looking the other way, out the passenger window. The headlights on the camper illuminate the road ahead.

  They used to have a normal car. Pina liked lying underneath the rear windshield on top of the trunk cover. That’s what she remembers most of all about the car: how she’d watch the clouds and trees rush by, and lie under the rain without ever getting wet. She also remembers how her dad didn’t want her to travel like that, but her mom did, and that one day, to prevent them from fighting, she said she didn’t even like traveling under there like that anymore, which was a lie.

  Then, one day, while she and her dad were doing her homework in the living room, they heard a loud, persistent honking coming from outside. Eventually, Beto drew back the curtain. Pina watched from the sofa how his faced transfigured, and then how he dissolved into laughter. She ran to the window and there was her mom in the street, doing pirouettes and jetés around a red Volkswagen camper to introduce her new toy. She’d left that morning in the regular car and come back in this carriage, which has been getting them around ever since. Dad’s reaction that day had been contagious. Pina strokes the memory like a cat, and like a cat, the memory purrs, giving off the precise feeling of that afternoon: him and her doubled up in the living room, and her mom outside, dancing on her own, but for them.

  *

  Chela puts on some music. It’s Tracy Chapman. Pina likes the song ‘Fast Car’ because that’s exactly how the camper goes. Sometimes, if the journey is really long, her dad says, ‘OK, enough, right?’ and changes to his Mozart CD, which has a dinosaur sticker on the case. Pina put it there because it’s old-fogey music.

  ‘Mozart is just baroque oom-pah-pah,’ Pina once said, and her parents had fallen about laughing. She knew that what she said was funny because she’d heard someone say it during one of Aunt Linda’s rehearsals, and everyone had fallen about laughing then too. The truth was, she didn’t know what it meant.

  ‘Don’t mess with my man Amadeus,’ her dad had said.

  Now Pina wants to ask if he remembers, but she can’t be bothered to raise her voice over the roaring camper. Sometimes, even without the roaring, Pina can’t be bothered to speak. She doesn’t like breaking the silence. Like a bubble she can choose when to burst, or like the highway ending, she prefers to put it off. Sometimes it’s not possible, because the air is heavy after a row and it falls to her to come up with something else to add to the air to clean it, even if she doesn’t want to. Sometimes she knows even before she tells a joke that her parents aren’t going to laugh, but she tells it anyway. Because when there’s a dirty silence in the car or at home, it doesn’t matter if the joke is any good or not: her parents just won’t be in the mood. But she has to tell it anyway, like covering a stain with a doily. Just as people on the news go on hunger strikes, her parents go on long laughter strikes. And Pina often goes on talking strikes. She’ll only talk a lot with Ana, and occasionally with her dad, who asks her lots of questions. With her mom she won’t talk so much because whenever she tells her anything it’s as if Chela knew it already.

  From her position stretched out on the backseat, Pina turns to face forward. The buckle on her safety belt digs into her but she tells herself to put up with it. She wraps a blanket around her and feels better, but now she doesn’t see the landscape as it whooshes by so the road is pretty dull. She changes position again, now in a grump. Then she raises her feet and presses her toenails to the window. It’s cold. When she takes them away the mark is left on the condensation. It’s like leaving footprints without having to go anywhere. When they disappear, you just put your foot back. When it gets too cold, you put your foot back under the blanket. It’s like her mom, who comes and goes, and then, just when Pina thinks she’s not going to remember her anymore, comes back. She spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about that. Because of the fight, of course, but also because of the floor all around the pool. It was made of clay paving stones. When the soaking-wet kids ran past they left their footprints there, and then, gradually, the footprints disappeared and it was as if they’d never been there. Pina thinks that the boy who scratched her hand the night before isn’t as bad as the other boys. The other boys from Planet Earth.

  She sleeps for a while, and when she wakes up the sun is coming up. They’re parked up by the side of a tollgate. Pina sits up and looks out the window. Her mom is buying a cup of coffee and her dad must be in the bathroom because she can’t see him. She puts her mouth up against the window the way her mom hates. When she sees her, Chela points to her polystyrene cup, which is her sign for, ‘You want one?’ Pina shakes her head. Chela shrugs her shoulders twice, which is her sign for, ‘Your loss’. Pina counts the things around her. There are five people at the food stand: two of them are vendors and they’re wearing aprons and puffy, layered skirts. There are four cars at the tollgate: one of them is a truck and another has bicycles tied to the roof. There are three dogs loitering around the stand. There is one dad coming out of the bathroom. Chela points at her cup, now facing Beto, and he shakes his head. Chela gives another two shrugs. Pina thinks, ‘Coffee strike.’ There is one dad, one girl, and one camper waiting for one mom who’s chatting with the two vendors.

  *

  They set off again. It’s light now and they’re getting close to the dip in the road that Pina always dreads, but at the same time craves to see; from up there you can see the layer of scum you’re heading into. Mexico City sits waiting under the scum. Mexico City lives under the scum. Sometimes a few towers or roofs might poke out from beneath it, but in general, in the first hours of the morning, the scum is sealed: like something you could bounce up and down on. But it does let you in. The scum swallows you and makes sure you forget all about it. This is its chief characteristic: as soon as you enter the scum, you stop seeing it. Pina knows this, and yet she struggles to believe it every time she’s there on that slope, looking down on it; at how thick, how gray, and blue, and brown it is, and semi-solid, like a dirty meringue. She just can’t believe she’ll forget about it. And she tries to keep it in sight for as long as possible, but the scum always disappears eventually. Only once or twice, around mid-morning in the schoolyard, has she thought she could make it out above her, high, high above the school, blurring the outlines of the taller buildings. Pina greets it quietly: ‘Hello, scum.’ According to Theo, Mexico City kids have that scum in their lungs, and they pollute the places they visit just by exhaling.

  About halfway down the slope, the camper pierces through the scum. It disappears in an instant. Pina is doing everything she can to keep the scum in sight – ‘see it, see it, see it’ – when her mom lets out a scream. The camper lurches, then carries on as if nothing had happened.

  ‘What the fuck?’ her dad says.

  ‘A bathtub! There was a bathtub!’ her mom answers, pointing to a spot that’s impossible to make out among the trees and going at that speed. At the first chance she gets, Chela comes off the highway and starts dr
iving up and down side streets. Beto asks her to get back onto the highway. The sudden change of direction has riled him: he wants to make it to the office on time. Chela ignores him. Pina pinches herself. It starts to rain. Theo would say, ‘That’s the scum peeing on us.’

  *

  They spend a long time swerving puddles and stones, none of them saying a word, and with the music off. Despite herself, Pina starts to think her dad is right and that her mom just imagined the bathtub. But she doesn’t say anything because she’s on opinion strike. Her mom says she didn’t imagine it, that they should leave her alone, that she’s going to find it. And she does. They turn a corner and there it is, clear as day. All the houses in the street have either gas tanks or water tanks or plants on their roofs. Except for one, which has a bathtub on it: it’s filthy and old, and has gold feet.

  ‘It’s got lion feet!’ Chela says, as if this made up for the horrible hour they’ve just spent looking for it. And for a second Pina expects a burst of laughter; silently, she tries willing her dad to laugh like he did when Chela bought the camper, so that the three of them can all burst into an infectious, unifying fit of hysterics. But her dad just says, totally dry, ‘De-lux.’

  Chela parks up behind a driverless taxi and gets out of the camper like she knows where she’s going, protecting herself from the rain with her flimsy cardigan. She looks a bit weird with her flowery dress in this place were the taxis live. Pina gives herself permission to talk again.

  ‘Why are the houses gray here?’ she asks.

  ‘They’re stained by the smog,’ answers her dad.

  ‘Is this where the scum lives?’

  Beto says, ‘Yes.’ Then straight away, ‘No.’

  Pina explains that she already knows what the smog is. Her school closed one time because of it and she was allowed to stay in her pajamas all day long for days on end.

  ‘You’re not going to make it to school today,’ her dad says.

  ‘That’s alright,’ Pina says, and she passes Beto his tie.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, but doesn’t put it on.

  The metal door her mom has just knocked on opens, and a fat man appears in the doorway. He’s not wearing a T-shirt, and he only lays his eyes on Chela for a second before closing the door again. Chela shrugs and Beto raises his eyebrows, which is the sign for, ‘I told you.’ But then the man comes out again, now wearing a T-shirt. A little girl peeps out from behind him, staring at Chela.

  ‘Maybe she has no mom,’ Pina thinks. ‘Maybe she wants mine.’

  Chela talks to the man, points to the rooftop, puts her hands together, and eventually it looks like the man says something back to her. She walks back to the camper. Beto leans in toward the driver’s door and winds down the window.

  ‘How much have you got on you?’ she asks.

  Beto opens his wallet.

  ‘Five hundred pesos.’

  She takes all the cash, leans half her body through the window, rifles through her bottomless handbag, takes another couple of bills and, as a parting gesture, grabs the coins sitting in the camper ashtray. Beto is still holding his empty wallet, which is now gaping at the middle like a black fish freshly gutted by the monger. Chela is radiant with all that money in her hands and her hair sticking to her face in the rain. She blows Beto a kiss. Pina takes her money from her backpack and offers it to her: it’s a ten-peso coin, but Chela doesn’t accept it.

  ‘Save it for the bubbles,’ she says, and she blows another kiss, this time to Pina.

  ‘What bubbles?’ asks Pina, but Chela has already turned around. It’s her dad who answers.

  ‘She means bubble bath. To put in that thing.’

  They watch as Chela hands the man the money, and he hands it back to her. She gives it to him again. He gives it back to her. This happens three or four times until at last the man pockets the money and lets Pina’s mom into the house. She closes the door behind her. This is when Beto, who up until then had been sitting with his head leaned back against his chair, sits up. He moves his nose in toward the windshield. Not long after, they see Chela appear on the rooftop accompanied by a lanky boy. Pina’s chest is beating so hard and fast that her admiration feels like fear.

  ‘That’s my mom!’ she wants to say.

  Her mom is shouting something to her dad. They can’t hear her, but get the gist of what she’s saying from how she’s moving her hands. Beto lets out a sigh.

  ‘Don’t get out of the car,’ he tells Pina as he opens his door. Before he’s even closed it again he’s landed his feet in a puddle, soaking his socks. He slams the door, damning this and fucking that, and runs to the house, trying but failing to protect himself from the rain with his hands. His white shirt goes see-through. Before he’s even knocked, the same girl opens the door. She looks at Pina for a second, then closes the door behind Beto. ‘That’s it,’ thinks Pina. ‘The little girl has won: she’s going to keep my parents and I’ll end with the fat, shirtless man for a father.’ She shakes the thought from her head by turning her attention to her mom on the roof. Chela has broken into dance.

  The lanky boy watches her, laughing nervously until Beto emerges onto the rooftop. The lanky boy leaves them to it. Pina tenses up, then climbs onto the front seat to watch her parents argue in the rain. Her mom’s happy and her dad’s furious, that much she can tell from the camper. Between them, they manage to pick up the bathtub. It’s heavy. They put it down. He shouts. She gesticulates. They pick it up again and inch their way towards the edge of the rooftop. In one single motion, they tip the tub over. Brown water pours out. And that is the last image Pina has of her parents together: they’re standing on the roof of a house in the middle of the scum, tipping filthy water onto an already flooded street.

  ‌

  ‌IV

  ‌

  ‌2004

  I planted the corn. The rest is just watering, tending, and jotting down any observations in the margins of my books. One of them is The Urban Milpa Manual, published by our very own Alf in 1974. On the front there’s a photo of the mews before it was the mews. In the background you can see the huge house that was here originally and the rest of the plot, which is fully planted, with a group of hippies working ‘the field’. Among them I can pick out Alf, just as skinny but with lots more hair: dark, frizzy and long. And on the house’s facade I spot the bell, which would fall eleven years later and bury itself in the passageway forevermore, like the sword in the stone.

  The plan is to plant the beans once the corn stalks reach a half-meter. The beans will give back all the nitrogen the corn has taken from the soil. Apparently this is important. I have to plant two or three bean shoots for every corn stalk and guide them so they climb. The nitrogen trick will make the new soil last for lots of cycles. This is what they call crop rotation and it will ensure we made a sound investment: my dad with his money, and me with my summer.

  Once the bean shoots reach the third of the height of the corn stalks, I’ll have to plant the squash seeds. We’ll see how the whole thing pans out if I have to survive high school at the same time. For now, the yard looks breathtaking, if I do say so myself. Apart from the milpa area at the back, the rest is now a lawn and the planters are full. I just have one empty planter, for the tomatoes I’ll plant when my brothers are back. We put the old picnic table back where it was, but now it sits on grass. The turf cost the most out of everything, but Dad’s happy; he comes out barefoot in the afternoons after the rains. We dry the benches with a flannel and sit out there. I read and he plays his new toy: these exotic Indian drums called tabla. The name tabla makes it sound like it’s just one drum, but in fact there are two of them: a big one and a little one. Before you can play it you have to learn how to talk tabla. Dad goes to class once a week and each night he rehearses little sounds which he then tries to reproduce with his hands. I’ve got the basics down already: Right hand: Taa, Tin, Tete, Tu. Left hand: Ga, Ka. Just don’t ask me to reproduce them on the drums. Dad plays until his tendons start to ache.r />
  ‘You don’t last very long,’ I tell him.

  ‘Oh yeah? Well, your buddies’ parents get wrist-ache just pushing a mouse around. How sad is that?’

  Dad thinks he’s so special because he doesn’t own a laptop or have an email address. When he turned forty he promised himself he’d learn a new instrument every two years. But since Luz died he hadn’t taken up anything. Then, a few weeks ago he came home with the tabla. Mom hasn’t commented on it, which means she approves.

  Yesterday a letter arrived from my brothers. It doesn’t matter how many email chains she forwards us, Emma also keeps her faith in snail mail alive. The letter is written in English, as custom dictates, but it’s a shop-bought card instead of the artsy handmade ones she used to sit us down to make once a week at camp. I was crazy about writing letters, but my favorite part was sealing the envelopes with colored wax, which you had to melt and press with the copper stamp Emma had with her initials on. We keep one of the letters framed in the living room. Our four hands are printed onto it, each a different color, and even though it’s started to fade, Luz’s tiny print there means no one dares touch it. Maybe it’ll disappear entirely. Acrylic, I think it is. Or maybe gouache. I’m going to ask Marina how to restore it.

  If you ask me, my brothers have it easy. Men in general have it easy: they spend pretty much their whole lives gawking at girls’ chests without even having to wait for their own chests to grow something worth gawking at, or for their hair to grow only to then spend their lives shaving it off. Pina pulled me up on this last point, though.