Umami

by Laia Jufresa

  It was all very weird, but also harmless. When people gave us funny looks I would become defensive, sort of animalistic, sort of ready to go for the jugular of normal people and things. Did I think the whole reborn thing odd? Of course I did. But it didn’t hurt anyone, and it made her feel better. The way I saw it from my privileged view in the royal box, the symptoms of uterus mancanza had hit Noelia too late in life; just a pity, perhaps. But it knocked her for six, and the fact that she found ways to alleviate the distress she felt, well, that’s the opposite of odd, isn’t it? That’s garden-variety maternal impulses: by taking care of The Girls she was looking after herself. She took the reins, identified what it was that hurt her and found the best palliative out there. Isn’t that taking responsibility for yourself? Moving beyond your childless condition to a state of maturity (that supposedly unachievable state for people who are only a child)? And yet, if I ever tried to congratulate her on any of these things, Noelia would answer, ‘Doctors, eh? Only ever treating the symptom!’

  *

  I’m writing with news: today I took The Girls to the Mustard Mug. It was a real palaver. First of all they didn’t want to let me in with my ‘granddaughters’. I explained that they were dolls and they didn’t believe me. The entire kitchen staff (of two) had to come out and confirm that they weren’t babies before the barman would believe me. And then he became all aggro thinking I was there to sell them. In the end I had to resort to emotional blackmail, reminding him of my extremely loyal custom to the Mug. Between taunts and apologies, eventually they let me in, and the adrenaline only stopped pumping through me when I was back at my usual table. My bones ached. I was hot and bothered and red in the face. I drank too quickly, with each sip seeing more and more clearly what the others had spotted the moment I walked in with the stroller: that I am a ridiculous old man.

  But then Linda showed up, and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I picked up one girl and she picked up the other. We held them in our arms as we spoke. And then I was seized by a new, let’s say triumphant, happiness.

  ‘It’s my right,’ I wanted to say. ‘It’s my right as an old widower to have something to love. Something that isn’t a someone. Something that can’t die on me.’

  But now the happiness and the triumphant feeling have passed. Now I’m hungover in my study at four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun is too bright; it’s showing up all the dust on the furniture. I go around in obsessive circles thinking a) it’s time to grab the mop and get on with my house chores, time to seek the semi-peace they afford me; and b) that I didn’t get to choose a damn thing.

  I would have liked to have children. Lots. Tons of them. Or at least a few. At least one. Half. A piece.

  It’s not the first time I’ve thought this, but it is the first time I don’t want to delete it.

  *

  Amaranth, the plant I lost my head over, has a bland flavor. Not only is it Umami No, it’s also Tasty No. There’s no doubting the tremendous power of self-deception. I’ve always had a fine palate. How can I have only just seen what was right under my nose? Maybe you have to get to my age to see the wood for the trees; to spot the little ironies in the things that preoccupied you and into which you poured all your energies. And then you have to measure it all up: length by width by depths of absurdity. But in the end you have to laugh. You have to laugh at everything in this life.

  ‘That’s my chicken, god damn it!’

  ‘Noelia, I’m so glad you came. I was missing you. There’s something important I want to tell you.’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘The Girls and I are going to do some work in the yard today. Since the whole milpa went to pot, and it turns out amaranth doesn’t taste of anything anyway, and the climate’s all wrong for papayas, I’m going to put in the jacuzzi you always wanted.’

  ‘Ooh, Alfonso, you have no idea how jealous I am!’

  ‘Don’t you have jacuzzis in the hereafter?’

  ‘We don’t. But you’ll be pleased to hear we all go around butt naked.’

  ‌

  ‌2001

  ‘Do you turn into a fish, too?’ I ask Grandma as she helps me into my pajamas.

  ‘No, that’s a gene from Granddad. I don’t have it.’

  ‘Is that why you threw his ashes in the lake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does Ana know?’

  ‘No,’ Grandma says. ‘Nor do your brothers. Just you.’

  She lets me stroke the soft side of one of her hands. With the other she wraps my curls around her fingers, then lets go, because she likes seeing how they spring back. She explains everything in English but I understand her anyway. She says when Mama was a little girl and used to turn into a fish in the middle of the week she would let her off school. Now my mom walks into the room with her nighty on. She’s dry again, apart from her hair, which is two different colors when it’s wet: yellow where there are knots, brown where it’s straight. Mama points at my pajamas.

  ‘Mushroom!’ she says.

  It’s one of Theo’s T-shirts, from when he couldn’t think about anything other than Mario Brothers.

  ‘Why aren’t there any like that in your backyard?’ I ask Grandma.

  ‘Amanita muscaria,’ she tells me. ‘Pretty, but lethal.’

  ‘And they speak through their noses!’ Mama says.

  ‘They don’t speak through their noses,’ Grandma says, and she gets up from the bed and pushes my mom out of the room. They blow me air kisses and I catch them, though not all of them: some fall on the quilt. Before drawing the curtain door, Grandma asks if I want the light on and I say no.

  ‘What a brave little girl you’re going to be,’ she says, and turns off the light. They walk away and I hear them giggling until I can’t hear them anymore.

  I lie there wondering, ‘When?’ then sing myself a song to be brave right now.

  ‘Amanita,’ it goes, ‘Amanito musico, amanita Mario manitomario…’ But it doesn’t work. Maybe I’ll be brave when I last a hundred long seconds under the water with the straw. Either I’m going to get brave, or turn into a fish. Or both: I’ll be a brave fish and I’ll swim down to the bottom of the lake to where the Emperor Umami lives. I wonder if his castle is pretty like the ones in books.

  *

  I don’t know when Mom came to bed but I open my eyes and it’s day and there’s a sticky arm on top of mine. I talk to her but she doesn’t take any notice. I try tickling her but she groans at me and then I don’t even want her to wake up anymore. I get down off the bed and the floor creaks. Pina is asleep on the sofa in the living room. I don’t know where Ana is. I find Grandma in the kitchen. She’s frying bacon and making everything smell like Sunday.

  ‘Hey, kiddo,’ she says. ‘How did you sleep?’

  I tell her pretty good, but it’s a lie. The truth is I had nightmares I can’t remember anymore, and I was hot and I sweated in my mushroom T-shirt, and now that the cool air on the porch is hitting me I feel all cold in it.

  ‘Where are my clothes?’ I ask her.

  ‘They must be in the bathroom. You want hot cakes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can do you a hot cake in the shape of something? What shape do you want?’

  Hm, I think about it. I want to ask her for something difficult but not too difficult.

  ‘Can you do a tree with its children but the children aren’t leaves like on a normal tree but more like mushrooms?’

  ‘A tree with little leaves that are actually mushrooms.’

  ‘Uh-huh, but not poisonous ones.’

  ‘Got it. Bacon?’

  ‘OK, but first I’m going to get dressed,’ I tell her, and walk off to the bathroom.

  Sitting on the toilet, it occurs to me that maybe if I do a poop and then flush and run out to the yard, just maybe I’ll be able to see it passing through the pond system: one filter, then another, then another, and the water going from black to clean. I stay there for a while trying very hard but n
othing comes out apart from a few wee-wees. Ana opens the door and says, ‘Your hot cakes are ready.’ I tell her she can have them because I’m not ready. She goes off all happy. Then my mom comes in. She takes her clothes off and gets in the shower with her ring around her neck because she never ever takes that off.

  I ask her how come she’s grumpy if it’s Sunday and she says, ‘Because of the strident, stupendous, strificant, whatever they’re called mushrooms.’

  I get mad at her for eating them without telling me, and she says the same thing Grandma said, ‘They’re just for grown-ups.’

  I ask her if she got sleepy and laughed and saw things. She says she saw Chela and that she’s OK and that she says hi, but she asks me not to tell Pina. I can’t tell if she’s crying because she’s camuflashed by the steam and the shower curtain, but lately everyone’s been crying over Chela, or they get mad, or put their head between their hands. I don’t know what that letter she wrote said. Ana says that even Pina doesn’t know, but I don’t believe her. And I don’t dare ask Pina.

  ‘What did Chela’s letter say?’ I ask.

  ‘That she’s gone,’ says Mama.

  ‘She’s always going,’ I say.

  ‘It looks like this time she’s not coming back.’

  ‘Is that allowed? I didn’t know.’

  ‘You’re my Luz, my shining star, do you know that?’

  I tell her I do, more or less. Then she asks me what I’m doing still on the toilet: am I sick? I explain my idea about the poop passing through the ponds and she says I can give it a try.

  ‘But I don’t have any poop,’ I tell her. ‘Nothing.’

  She tells me to try again after breakfast. So I wipe myself and flush the chain and wash my hands standing on tiptoes and dry them too. And while I do all of that I explain to Mama about how I’m going to turn into a fish and go down to the middle of the lake to visit the Emperor Umami and make a wish for him to make me braver.

  Mama goes quiet for a while. She must be thinking about my plan. But when she pokes her head around the curtain all she says is, ‘Did I wash my hair already?’