Umami

  I remember lots of painted wood and a little yard at the back of the hotel in Stratford where we lived while we waited for Maria’s rebirth. Hidden among the flower pots was a life-sized stone statue of a pig. I remember the stairs with their Persian carpets, and how they perplexed me. I still can’t figure it out. Are they made to measure, or are they existing carpets molded and nailed down to each step? But my clearest memories are of the breakfasts. Served on porcelain dishes with domed metal covers, the whole thing was incredibly imperial, and totally unbefitting a modest, four-bedroomed guesthouse. Each night, on a little list, you had to mark a series of crosses against whichever food you wanted to appear on your porcelain dish the following day. Noelia and I ticked the same boxes every night: sausages, roasted tomatoes, and baked beans (with bucket loads of added sugar), which gave rise to a fleeting but intense obsession. I remember that when we got back to Mexico I tried to make them with black Cuban beans and brown sugar: an all round disaster. That’s one thing I’ve learned about food through pure empirical research: food is a patriot. Under no circumstances will it be replicated outside of its mother country.

  One morning during that week, Noelia announced that she could contain her curiosity no longer, and called the reborner to ask permission to come and see Maria-in-the-making. It was a big mistake. Seeing her in the oven was far from pleasant. She was deformed.

  ‘She’s not deformed,’ Noelia corrected me. ‘She’s just still in parts.’ Noelia, who was never politically correct, suddenly got all high and mighty, precisely when we were in the company of a woman who couldn’t understand our Spanish anyway. Melissa, or Marissa, didn’t speak anything other than incomprehensible English. But she was a smiley, strapping woman who laughed so heartily it was infectious: even I – amid my waves of serious grumpiness throughout the trip – cracked up when she got going. I put my moods down to the fact that I was constantly questioning my wife’s sanity, and with it my own, because, as I’ve explained to Nina Simone a thousand times, we were two people and one person at once. We were a compendium. A compilation. An unequivocal unified compartment. Something like that.

  That thing about us not understanding a word the reborner said is pretty much true. For example, she pronounced ‘breather’ ‘brida’, and had to write it down before either of us understood what in God’s name she was on about. The brida, as we called it from then on, is a simple mechanism you insert inside the doll’s ribcage and which, once activated, makes her chest rise and fall rhythmically. In other words, it sort of makes her breathe. Battery-operated breathing. At first we said we didn’t need it, but later, when we were sitting alone together by a pub fire, Noelia admitted she was drawn to the idea.

  ‘Why not? If we’re already spending a fortune on this girl, why not have the most high-tech, ultra-snazzy, extra-plus model possible?’

  She was so enthused that I even called the reborner myself, from the pub’s telephone. With some scotch in me for courage, I told her that we did want the brida after all: we wanted the girl to ‘breathe’. The only problem being that you can’t do scare quotes over the phone, and perhaps that’s when my irony started to fade.

  We didn’t go back to see Marissa Melissa until adoption day. In the meantime, we visited gardens and castles, and saw a ton of very green grass and two Shakespeare plays. They call it adoption in the reborn world; the moment you first come face to face with your new baby. Isn’t it more like the moment of birth, that first meeting between parents and child? Why do they call it rebirth? As far as I’ve understood it, the idea is that the doll is born in the moment of assemblage, when the adoptive parents aren’t present, just the creator. The reborner. Melissa. Or Marissa. And then it’s reborn (it’s reborn as a baby is the idea, like when Pinocchio becomes a boy) in the moment of adoption.

  Noelia and I were in the local pub when Maria was born. In the pub, downing pint after pint of beer so heavy it was like drinking umami, and laughing at ourselves to the point of tears. But on the day of the adoption we were serious. I was overcome with that feeling of liberation you only feel when you’re miles from home, and decided I was going to be understanding and try to enjoy it all, if only to make Noelia happy. Melissa Marissa presented us with Maria in a box with a clear plastic lid.

  No amount of Shakespeare or art galleries really prepares you for such hyperrealism. That’s why some people hate hyperrealism and don’t consider it art at all: to them it’s a righteous, full-of-itself style that constantly puts your sanity and senses to the test. We could have referred to her as the girl, or doll, or whatever we’d wanted, but Maria looks as much like a newborn baby as I look like a withered old man. We opened the box, oohing and aahing, then cracked open the bottle of lukewarm champagne we’d brought for the reborner, and took turns carrying Maria. We learned how to dress her, how to wash her, and how to change her batteries.

  Once back in our hotel room with the girl, we opened the stroller we’d bought a few days earlier in London and discovered it didn’t fit in the room, so we tried to ask for a bigger one. We never got to the bottom of exactly what happened, but it was clear that the owners weren’t in the least amused by Maria because they ran us out of there without the slightest hint of that famous English gentility. Not really knowing what to do, we drove back to Melissa Marissa’s house to ask where we could find another hotel. At first she burst out laughing, then she cried a bit (on seeing Maria, who she thought she’d said goodbye to forever), then she insisted we stay the night in her house.

  It was the most god-awful night of my life. The reborner inflated a blow-up bed on the floor of her studio. The mattress and bed linen were comfortable enough, but whichever way you turned there were bits of baby. The really terrible parts are the limbs and the heads, because the torsos and pelvises on reborns are made of an agreeable enough material, and look a bit more like a pincushion or a ragdoll, so aren’t so horrifying. In the room though there were arms and legs in pristine vinyl, not yet coated in the layers and layers of paint they give them. Others were already painted in complex tones, and I don’t know which were worse: the ghostly white ones, or the ones that looked like real skin. Not to mention the half-made dolls, which still hadn’t been assembled but looked totally lifelike. In order to sleep without feeling watched I had to lay a T-shirt incredibly carefully over a little table with three finished heads, which Marissa Melissa was clearly in the process of stitching, pore by pore, with fine baby hair.

  Noelia and Marissa Melissa stayed up until the early hours of the morning drinking tea and nightcaps and playing with the dolls. God knows how much they must have drunk. All I know is that when I woke up a) there were various reborns dressed in traditional Mexican attire and b) Noelia had bought a second doll. I was too intent on getting out of there to argue, and the money was all hers, so I kept my mouth shut.

  This was a girl, they explained to me tenderly, who somebody had adopted and then returned! Like a pair of shoes! Noelia called her Clara, at least at first, because she was blond and pale. If you looked closely, around her eyes some veins showed. For the life of me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that those veins – which I knew had been painted on – were in fact showing through her pale baby skin. In short, Clara was just as gut-wrenchingly disturbing to look at as Maria. You could stop breathing waiting for them to. But Clara didn’t have a brida, so you’d sit there expectantly and she wouldn’t move a muscle. It’s the same even today. Some days, the stillness of The Girls is the only thing that’ll convince me they aren’t alive.

  *

  Like all the other doctors I know, Noelia didn’t go to the doctor. It’s a specific bullheadedness of specialists who think that the smattering of general medicine they learned thirty years ago will keep them safe from all ills. Noelia self-assessed, self-diagnosed, self-medicated, and, at a glance, would assess, diagnose, and medicate me too. Her non-cardiological diagnoses often fell short of the mark. Of course, her own misdiagnosis proved to be much worse, but at least once she messed up prett
y badly with me. It must have been around 1987. I remember we were in the middle of the construction work on the mews and The Girls weren’t around yet. One Friday I started to feel really, really unwell and Noelia had me on paracetamol and tea right up until the following Monday. By the time I woke up on Tuesday my eyes were yellow. I had a severe case of hepatitis, and only survived it because we ran that second to the hospital where they hooked me up and pumped me full of all sorts of drugs. She herself took far too long to go and check out her pains, which I’d guessed were her body’s way of protesting against her incurable addiction to work. But by the time she did have some tests, the cancer was already terminal.

  *

  Carefully placing Maria and Clara in their boxes first, we folded up the stroller, waved Marissa Melissa farewell, and drove to the airport. On the way there we listened to the album that had become a kind of soundtrack to the trip, because someone had left it in the rental car. Noelia loved that album, which was sickeningly schmaltzy. Or perhaps she just wanted The Girls to preserve some link to their past, because driving along she suddenly declared that they were no longer going to be called Maria and Clara, but rather Kenny and G. I asked if she understood that Kenny was the name of a boy, and she laughed.

  ‘Seriously,’ I told her, and when we stopped for gas I showed her the CD.

  Noelia, who never wore her glasses on vacation, had seen the long hair and guessed that Kenny G was a female saxophonist. She moved the album right up close to her nose to make absolutely sure she wasn’t right, and then, after thinking about it for a second said, ‘Makes no difference, the names are staying.’

  Once on the plane we flipped a coin to decide who was going to take which name. Kenny is Clara, the one who can’t breathe. G is the one with the brida. I change her batteries every three weeks, but ever since Agatha Christie branded me a polluter, they’ve been rechargeable, and during the time it takes for the light on the charger to go from yellow to green, G doesn’t breathe. But I sit her right up next to Kenny, who’s used to living like that, and she teaches her. I don’t expect anyone to believe this, but they’ve been good sisters to each other.

  *

  Noelia decided to have chemotherapy. Not because she thought it would work, but because she refused to sit around twiddling her thumbs. Luckily, she also agreed to take huge doses of antidepressants, which helped her live out her last months more or less in peace. They put me on the same ones. I still take them. When I’m about to run out I write a prescription on one of the pads still left in the study with her ID and details on. And I fake her signature, which is something I’ve known how to do since we got married and I was a junior researcher with no rental income to rely on, so all our groceries went on her credit card.

  Lately I’ve doubled my dose, telling myself I take it for the both of us.

  *

  Like all daughters who are only a daughter, Noelia had an incomprehensible relationship with her mother. She always felt the urge to call her at the slightest problem, but whenever she was around, the mere tone of her voice, the rhythm of her breathing, or the volume of her chewing was enough to drive Noelia insane. I didn’t sit through a single meal with them in which they weren’t both putting the other down. Only in her rare lucid moments – generally led by a mixture of alcohol and guilt for some rude reaction on her part – would Noelia admit that the things that most irritated her about her mother were also behaviors she repeated without noticing. Like, for example, only ever buying cheap shoes that gave her blisters.

  The one time I thought I’d point out how similar they were, my wife answered, ‘You can be a real iguana sometimes, Alfonso, you know that?’

  *

  I didn’t like the hepatitis story. And I especially disliked Noelia telling it in public. It showed me up as unmanly and impressionable. I thought it was proof of how she did whatever she liked with me and I just rolled over and let her, limp and compliant. I didn’t and still don’t negate my hen-pecked condition, which I’ve always acknowledged publicly and with my head held high. But I felt that the details of these sacrifices should stay between us. The story of my hepatitis seemed especially intimate to me, and I always felt affronted when I had to listen to it at a dinner party, as if Noelia were telling everyone the story of how, when we first met, I couldn’t sleep spooning but now I can’t sleep any other way. I also converted to the religion of hugs, sweatpants on Sundays, even frozen fish (despite knowing it’s drying up lake Victoria). She even convinced me to watch romantic comedies with her every now and then. Nowadays, to get to sleep I have to prop two pillows behind me. But the pillows don’t hug me or warm me up when I come back from the bathroom. Before going to bed I sing to Kenny and G, and tuck them in like Noelia did every night since the day we brought them to Mexico.

  One thing Noelia never spoke about at dinner parties was The Girls. And I was grateful to her for that, but now I regret it. Or rather, I don’t regret it, but I’ve changed since then. Before, if Noelia took The Girls out on the street, I was so uncomfortable I’d run around in circles making sure the neighbors didn’t see us passing by with the stroller. Now I couldn’t care less. I don’t care if I’m the crazy old man on the block. Some months ago now, I started to show them off around the mews and explain to anyone interested that they are indeed dolls, but special dolls. Turns out the real girls adore my girls. In the evenings I put them in the stroller and take them for a turn, whistling. I still don’t dare take them beyond the mews and onto the street, but I’m contemplating it.

  ‘You’d look hot walking them! Like a sexy granddad.’

  ‘What a generous liar you are, love, thanks.’

  ‘Take them out, it’ll do you good.’

  ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  *

  About her friends with children, which was all of them, Noelia would say, ‘Their lives shrink.’ But when it came to other women like her, the only-a-daughters, she would scoff, ‘Career women!’ from the very height of her own hypocrisy.

  ‘Well, that’s the pot calling the kettle black! If there’s anyone who’s devoted their life to their career it’s you,’ I’d point out.

  ‘I don’t consider cardiology a career.’

  ‘Oh no? What would you call it then?’

  ‘A vocation,’ she’d say, and then, a second later, roar with laughter.

  Her friends assured her that it wasn’t true; quite the contrary: when kids fell into the mix, life proliferated, grew big, enormous even. You lived for two, three, six. It wasn’t true that you never got to go to the theater anymore, and in any case watching the person you gave birth to grow up was better than any damn play, how could she think of comparing the two things!

  ‘Oh, the arrogance!’ Noelia said to me. ‘How dare she compare her little brat with the arts?’ But she took it back in an instant, ‘I’m sorry, it’s a classic only-a-daughter symptom to confuse maternal love with arrogance.’

  But the truth is Noelia didn’t fully understand those mothers. It wasn’t within her powers to, just like it wasn’t within mine to understand her relationship with The Girls. I became agitated every time she invited me into the pink room. Nothing in that space went right for me, and you could tell I was an intruder, like one of those people who visit Saudi Arabia and dress up in local garb to sneak into the mosques, but get found out because everything about their demeanor screams tourist. Oh, wait, that’s me too.

  Our childless life was neither big nor small. I don’t know exactly what size you’d call it: regular. And having The Girls opened up a space that we hadn’t had before. The bedroom is full of saccharine knickknacks that my normal self would detest, but the truth is that lately I feel good in there among all the frills and lace. Sort of understood. Or maybe just seen. Only Noelia Vargas Vargas knew how to see me in this life. And now I have no way of knowing how much of me existed only by virtue of her gaze.

  *

  It took Noelia’s cancer for me to stop seeing the dolls as mere dolls and to start s
eeing them as The Girls. I supported Noelia in her whims for years, but inside I always kept my distance; a kind of protective irony. When Noelia wanted the room upstairs for them, I accepted. When she wanted to line the walls with imported pale-pink and bone-white striped wallpaper, I asked myself who was I to put up a fight if she was footing the bill? When she bought the booster seats and started to take The Girls with us in the back of the car, I told myself that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And, looking back, the emotional rollercoaster that The Girls brought with them acted like a shot of youthfulness in a marriage where we took most things for granted. Sometimes I was embarrassed by Noelia, and at other times proud of her. Some days her little game seemed funny, and others it broke my heart to see her there in the house carting around a baby who wasn’t a baby. And who wasn’t mine.

  One time, a police officer smashed in one of our car windows because Noelia had left The Girls in the backseat while she popped into the bank. The police officer thought he’d played the hero, and afterward, Noelia had to slip him a bribe to mitigate his resentment at having ‘saved the lives’ of two inanimate beings. I always understood my wonderful wife’s care as one of her little eccentricities. Or a hormonal process, maybe. A secondary symptom of the uniquely named pain she felt in her uterus. Because, of course, Doctor Vargas Vargas coined an illness – half-Italian, half-Latin – to explain the pain that an only-a-daughter felt when mothers and their children went past: uterus mancanza.