Umami

by Laia Jufresa

  ‘Totally!’

  ‘Dirtow is the dirty yellow on the edges of sidewalks where you’re not meant to park. Cantalight is that melony orange you only see at twilight. Briefoamite is the ephemeral white of sea foam.’

  Chela has her mouth full so she says yes with her index finger. ‘Go on,’ she gestures.

  ‘Green-trip is the color of ecological guilt-trips.’

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘Suddenlue is when you’re fine one minute and sad the next.’

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘Hospitachio is the pistachio green color of hospitals. Burgunlip is the color of your mouth after a few glasses of red wine. Insomnlack is for the dark rings under sleepless eyes. Rainboil is that complex blend of petrol colors you see on the tarmac at filling stations. You know the one?’

  ‘You’ve got a talent, missy,’ Chela concludes. ‘And remember: talent doesn’t grow on trees. My happy thing is my hotel.’

  It’s not actually hers, but that’s what she calls it: ‘my hotel’. Entitlement never goes unnoticed by Marina. Chela recaps her three years on Mazunte beach: she started out waiting tables, and slowly climbed the ladder to become manager. She talks about the turtles and their little eggs, about the police bribes, and the insufferably ignorant tourists; she talks about a Colombian, an Irishman, the best sex of her life, the best weed of her life, high levels of THC. Or did she say OCD? Marina can’t concentrate with the food there in front of her. And because she doesn’t like how Chela interrupted her: she had more colors, tens of colors to tell her.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asks.

  ‘Thirty-nine. I told you in the kitchen.’

  ‘Right.’

  Marina pushes pieces of crepe around her plate. She ate almost half of it with relative ease, when it was still hot. But now that it’s gone cold and sticky she can’t face another morsel. And right there and then, as she tries to think up a way to clear the table without offending Chela, she decides whose side she’s on. Even if there are no sides here, she doesn’t care. She’s on Pina’s side. She’s on Linda’s side. She’s with Belldrop Mews. She stands with the people who face city life head on; who take the rough with the smooth. What is this beach-creature – this siren, this goldfish – doing in her house anyway?

  Chela is showing her photos of the hotel on her phone, but this only disenchants Marina further. From somewhere inside of her, her brother demands, ‘Is-this-what-you-left-your-daughter-for? For a tan and a nametag? For a joint and a hammock?’ As much as Marina wouldn’t mind having a go at all those sunny, jaunty, multicultural experiences herself, they just don’t seem appropriate for Chela. Not at her age! Her nametag reads Isabelle. Please! Marina is presented with the clearest picture of Chela’s particular brand of confusion – the kind that smells of Indian Sandalwood but is barely distinguishable from the scent of church incense –, and she feels nothing but disgust for it. At the same time, and quite unexpectedly, Marina welcomes a new, spontaneous admiration for her mother, who is very submissive, it’s true, but at least isn’t confused. Señora Mendoza distrusts all kinds of smoke. She never bought into either the hippies or the puritans, and she boils cloves and orange peel at the first whiff of a cigarette in the house.

  Right there and then, Marina knows what she has to do, and not just as an excuse to get away from the food on the table, but because what she’s about to say has to be said. She’s known since the kitchen and has just been putting it off. So now she gets up and carries her plate to the sink, and when she comes back she puts one foot up on a chair, props herself against her knee, lights a cigarette and says, ‘I have to tell you something, OK?’

  She’s doing it all wrong. She knows she’s doing it all wrong, but the hospital jargon has taken the reins.

  ‘Empowerment,’ she hears in her head. Power is a bucking bronco. You have to mount it. It’s a rabid bronco and you have to take a single running jump to get on. At least that’s what goes on in Marina’s head every time someone mentions empowerment.

  Chela has her eyebrows raised, amused but also attentive, open. She puts her phone down.

  ‘Luz. Linda and Víctor’s little girl?’

  ‘Yes…’

  Marina sits down. The bronco has bolted. She looks at the table, suddenly ashamed. She doesn’t want to be the one to say it. It’s not a happy thing, for starters, and moreover it has nothing to do with her. There’s a spot of caramel on the plastic tablecloth. Marina rubs it off with a serviette and the serviette gets all clogged up in the caramel, breaks apart and makes tiny paper tacos.

  ‘What about her?’ asks Chela.

  ‘She died. Two years ago.’

  All the air leaves Chela’s body. You can hear it – one long breath – and in its wake, a feeble whimper. She also raises her knuckles to her mouth, frowns, and bites her hand. A moment of transparent emotion which reminds Marina of their age gap, because she doesn’t remember ever having reacted to anything like that: with an exhalation of empathetic pain.

  A moment later, Chela gets up and goes to the sofa. She rolls a joint, and the whole time her eyes weep in that same disconnected way, as if they were simply raining. Under her breath, over and over again she says, ‘Fucking hell.’ Marina joins her on the sofa and they smoke in silence, each of them perched on one end, separated by a small lake of yellow vinyl and an ashtray with the words ‘The Mustard Mug’ on it. Neither woman’s feet touch the ground: Marina is hugging her knees and Chela has her legs crossed in lotus. On the radio, Nina Simone melts the words ‘daddy’, ‘sugar’, ‘bowl’.

  ‘I miss him,’ Marina thinks. ‘How sick am I?’

  She misses her daddy like one misses the light of a house where you no longer live. A subtle but unremitting absence: his sullenness, a phantom limb. Or not his sullenness, but certainly the tension he planted in the air. And the other thing: the subsequent release. The exhaustion the family collapsed into after he’d walked off slamming the door, like a kind of post-coital bliss, only post-violence. A silence so passive it felt like peace.

  Chela lets out a snotty giggle.

  ‘One time,’ she says, pointing with her chin to the portrait of Doctor Vargas, ‘Beto went to wake up Noelia in the middle of the night because I had a terrible pain. She came round in her nightgown, checked me over and diagnosed me with trapped wind. That’s what she said to me: “Don’t worry, Chelita, this is what we call ‘trapped wind’, and it’ll pass in no time.” She gave me a few Pepto-Bismols or something like it and sent me to bed. But the next day I went to the hospital and it turned out I had peritonitis.’

  ‘One time,’ Marina says, ‘my dad put on a show with soap bubbles just for me.’

  Someone had hired out the restaurant for a birthday party and Marina was in the kitchen when a clown went in to ask for a tray with some water. Up until that moment, she hadn’t minded being the girl in the kitchen. In fact, she liked it, because she felt superior to all the other kids who didn’t work. But the clown thing she did mind, Marina explained, because they weren’t allowed out of the kitchen, and she and her brother had to watch the show through the round windows in the swing doors, Marina propped on an upturned bucket which she had to move each time a waiter went in or out. But later that same night, among the remaining balloons and the chairs already turned upside down, her dad rehashed the show for her in a modest private function. He made her sit down at the table in the middle of the restaurant, then served her a Coca-Cola in a wine glass and all of the leftover cake – half the birthday girl’s name still legible in the icing. Whereas the clown had used two sticks and a rope to make his bubbles, her father filled a soup bowl with warm water and washing-up liquid. He wet his hand in the mixture and then slid the tip of his thumb outwards against his index fingertip, forming, once the two fingertips were touching, a small, thin film. He took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled into the film between his fingers, which inflated into a bubble filled with smoke. She wanted the bubbles to last longer. That’s what she remembers mos
t clearly: that they lasted a very short time, less than normal bubbles, because they never really managed to float. She asked her dad to stop doing it with the smoke, but he wanted to do them like that. It was one of the clown’s tricks. The bubbles came out a kind of green-gray, and when they popped a waft of smoke hung in the air for a moment before disappearing. Back then Marina didn’t have a smoker’s mentality, and wasn’t able to appreciate what she now points out to Chela:

  ‘What an ingenious guy, no? Great way to justify his ciggie in the middle of a kids’ party. You’d never get away with it today.’ And then, without a pause, Marina adds, ‘I wish my dad had walked out on us.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘I do. He was a dad to remember, not to keep; he still is.’

  ‘What are you trying to say to me?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Marina wants to talk about the shoes. About the witchy, leather shoes.

  ‘Where did you get those shoes?’

  But Chela ignores her. She crosses her arms, clutching a hand with each armpit, and leans forward. ‘Do you think,’ she asks very attentively, a lot like Marina’s therapist, ‘I should go knock for Pina tomorrow? For her, I mean, would it do her any good if I did?’

  But Mr. Therapist never asks her truly difficult things like this. Marina would rather go back to talking about herself than answer this, even if it means conjuring the unfamiliar first person: she’d rather be analyzed than handed the threads that tie other people to their children. She’d rather Chela ask her anything else: even about her weight.

  Marina blinks in an attempt to look confused; she wants to do a Chela and ignore the question, move onto something else. Weren’t they talking about her? Yes, about her and her dad, or about Doctora Vargas, but not about Chela, and certainly not about Pina. At the same time it flatters her in some way that Chela asks for her opinion. But it also – she realizes finally, and not without some surprise – makes her mad.

  It makes her mad. Really pisses her off. They drive her fucking crazy, these irresponsible parents, and she can feel the carbs pulsing in her legs: the rage and the energy. The crepes start to ferment in her bile, and the real intentions behind dessert become clear to her: a posteriori comfort: that goddamn fixation of parents with alleviating their guilt with sugary treats. Of making everything better by having kids. Procreation as a palliative. She too, by the way, has considered it: stopping her pill to see if at last Chihuahua will agree to move in with her, to share the bills: ‘Bat for the same team,’ she says. ‘As if putting up with you were a game!’ he says. The last time they fought, Marina asked him to ‘contain her’. Later on, with a helping nudge from Mr. Therapist of course, she saw the connection: she wants someone to contain her, and that’s why she flirts with the idea of becoming a container herself, of fabricating a living remedy in her tummy, something to entertain them, something that’ll renew them. (The game is: Russian Dolls.) And then? If it doesn’t work out you pack up and move to the tropics. Marina instantly throws the idea out again. She wants to take her pill right now in case Chihuahua calls, but Chela is still there in front of her, waiting attentively, doglike. Marina spots the bronco, takes a running jump and straddles it.

  ‘Truthfully?’ The nape of her neck shudders.

  Chela says yes, smiling to encourage her to go on. She has some wrinkles on her cheeks that Marina hadn’t noticed until now; two semicircles, which don’t make her any less beautiful, but simply exist there as evidence that life doesn’t turn out how you plan it.

  ‘Truthfully, I don’t think it’d do her any good,’ Marina says.

  She knows she’s doing it all wrong, but it feels right to do it wrong. She even moves her hands like her therapist does when he’s explaining things.

  ‘She must have grieved very hard for you. And if she’s already processed that, if she’s already gone through the different stages, you’re only going to come and whip the rug from under her feet. Some damage is irreversible, in my view.’

  Chela doesn’t stop nodding her head, very slowly, soaking in the wisdom that Marina – at least at this moment – really does believe she possesses. In the second before she continues her monologue, Marina asks herself what Linda will have to say about all this: will she see that Marina is doing Pina a favor because Chela is a mom to remember, not to keep? Or will she disapprove of Marina’s impromptu project? Anyway, it’s too late to go back now. Marina can feel a small vortex winding its way up her sternum; her jargon bulb lights up; she defines every one of the grieving stages; pontificates briefly on the Electra complex; she comes up with absurd artistic references for the loss of a mother: the Pietà, ‘but the other way round’. And all the while one part of her is saying, ‘keep-your-nose-out-little-girl’, and the other part sticks two fingers up at her inner brother and leads her on in her blundering revenge (for all the damaged kids out there!) while she takes Chela’s hands and tells her, ‘Don’t fuck her up any more than you already have, Chela.’

  And that’s when, very slowly, Chela stops nodding her head, unfolds her legs and bends over like a folding chair to do up her witch shoes. And she does all of this so slowly Marina can’t tell if she’s leaving or just feeling chilly. But then she gets up, goes toward the door, and by the time Marina understands that Chela is indeed listening to what she’s said, that Chela is leaving the mews without having knocked on her daughter’s door, her daughter who she hasn’t seen in three years, Marina understands the price of that invisible bronco, she understands that she’s spoken her last words; her final, malignant, and satisfying words. And before Chela has even opened the door, Marina is awash with a feeling of remorse, or perhaps just of abandonment. Everything is tinged with that Sunday feeling: the end of a play date (the game was: Afternoon Tea). Marina then makes what she deems to be an aesthetic effort to concentrate, appreciate, and mentally record these last Neptunian moments, as the beautiful, defeated beach-creature wraps her flimsy scarf around her neck, takes her old-fashioned jacket from the back of the chair and puts it on. Chela then opens the door, picks up the soaking trash bag, and wraps it around her head like a cape, or a hood, the most pathetic of armors. Chela is leaving, and Marina didn’t tell her – isn’t ever going to get the chance to tell her – that her first name is Dulce. And yet, before closing the door behind her, as if she somehow did know, and from inside the two parentheses that cup her mouth when she smiles, Chela promises her, ‘You’ll go to heaven, sweet Marina.’

  ‌

  ‌2002

  Reborn dolls are handmade. The people who make them are known as reborners. Once Noelia had made up her mind to buy herself a little doll, she did some research on the sketchy, dial-up nineties Internet and chose a reborner who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon: so that’s where we went. For the first time, tiny size-0 garments – all strictly folkloric – found their way into our cases. Noelia bought the clothes as a gift for the reborner, but we both knew that they were actually for Maria (as she’d already decided to name her doll).

  ‘Noelia,’ I said, ‘calling a doll dressed up in traditional Mexican outfits Maria is as ludicrous as calling a dog Pup, or a pub The Tavern, or a wine bar Bar à Vin.’

  To which she replied that Maria was going to be neither a pet animal nor a drinking establishment, and that she wasn’t best pleased about me calling her a doll, even though that’s precisely what she was, and even though Chris had told us that it was very important that we never forget that that’s precisely what she was. The way Noelia saw it, given that we didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of forgetting she was a doll, it was hardly necessary to keep reminding ourselves every five minutes, and so wasn’t it just better if we didn’t refer to the doll as a doll, because she didn’t like it, period. I was about to protest but she held up her index finger and said, categorically and when we were already on our flight to Heathrow, ‘Promise me you’re not going to call her that again, at least not between us.’

  I promised, but I also told her that
‘baby’ made me very uncomfortable. And so we agreed to call her ‘the girl’. The girl seemed more neutral to me. No, if I’m honest, it seemed more ironic. It gave me the hope (the false hope, as my wife would make sure) that I was going to be able to keep my distance from the whole thing. For me the girl was a thing. Then they became two things. And then, inevitably, they became The Girls. But that came later.

  Chris was an American lady Noelia exchanged emails with before she decided to adopt a reborn in Stratford-upon-Avon. Noelia read me out her emails, which recounted Chris’s deadly-boring life in microscopic detail. I can’t say I thought much of Chris, and then she started sending me separate emails urging me to understand my wife’s needs, after which I positively loathed her. Chris was a consummate collector, not to say sick in the head. Her fifty-plus collection of reborns had their own outhouse in the garden, and on top of names and surnames, they’d each been assigned their own hypothetical future.

  ‘So-and-so is going to be a doctor like you,’ she told Noelia when she went to meet Chris in person, taking advantage of a cardiology conference in the States.

  My wife returned from that trip explaining to me that a) Chris is a psycho killer with frills, you know the type? and b) she was going to buy herself a reborn, whether I liked it or not. Chris was also a reborner, but a lousy one. A large part of the decision to go to England was to avoid offending Chris who, according to Noelia, ‘would’ve sniffed us out the very second we ordered from any other reborner in the States.’ I’d never been to England, so I didn’t argue with the casual paranoid presenting herself to me.

  We spent three days in London and then drove all the way to Stratford on the wrong side of the road. To say we drove is a manner of speaking, of course, because I don’t even drive on the right-hand side, let alone the wrong one. I map-read. We settled into our hotel, then went to meet the reborner and put in our order. More than anything we wanted to make sure that there was a dark-skinned model in the reborner’s catalogue, and that she wasn’t going to lumber us with some totally inappropriate little blond dolly. Without having told me, Noelia had packed a bag with photos of us from childhood so that the reborner (what was her name? Marissa? Melissa? I don’t know, but I’m sure it had a double s in there because that was my prompt to be doubly condescending) could take inspiration from our younger faces. I spent the whole visit swinging between the giggles and pure disgust. I was pretty unbearable really. Noelia sent me to the car and ended up ordering Maria alone.