Umami Read online

  ‌

  ‌2003

  An evening in July. The crisp, seemingly clean mist left by the afternoon downpour – a daily occurrence throughout Mexico City’s fake summer – drifts along the central passageway of Belldrop Mews. The floor gleams. It smells of wet terracotta. The puddles reflect a peculiar, unseen light show. It’s coming from Bitter House, where Marina Mendoza lives. She always leaves the lights on, but tonight something strange is going on with them. They keep flickering, moving from very dim to very bright. Not rhythmically, like when the TV is on, but in bursts. First they even out, then they change again. There are no neighbors around to notice any of this, but nor would they be surprised if they were: it’s just Marina Mendoza, once again unhappy with the atmosphere.

  Bitter House is the first one on the right, and overlooks the road, but the front door and most of its windows face onto the connecting passageway. The six square meters in front of her house change more than any other corner of the mews. Marina shuffles plants around, finds things on the street, stacks them up outside her door. There is a giant, black acrylic M which she picked up when they dismantled the signboard of an old cinema a few blocks away; a string of burnt-out Christmas lights; a stool with one leg missing; a forty-centimeter-tall brontosaurus given to Marina by Olmo, the little boy from next door; a wooden mobile that hangs from the window railing; and an aloe vera plant sitting in fake bloom, some little red ribbons tied around its leaves. But tomorrow, who knows. Tomorrow the brontosaurus might be mounting the aloe vera, and the M positioned to guide the creeping ivy. Marina lets the dust build up for weeks and then, one day, in a burst of self-reinvention, she redecorates.

  Directly facing Bitter House is Sour House.

  On the right when you come out of Bitter is the bell that gives the mews its name, and which is surrounded by three other houses: Sweet, Salty and Umami.

  The main entrance to the mews is to the left of Bitter. It’s covered by a low, tiled roof that is all but useless against the rain, but which gives the place a certain rustic je ne sais quoi appreciated by all of its residents, especially in spring when the jacaranda tree on the street lays a carpet of flowers over the roof and sidewalk. The landlord meant to paint the central passageway – that is, all five houses’ facades – the color of the jacaranda flower. Instead, in the shop they came up with an insipid pale purple, which he didn’t have the heart to refuse. Marina detests the color. It reminds her of the bed sheets in the hospital where she was. She calls it asylilac.

  In fact, Marina hasn’t ever been in an asylum, it’s just she sometimes goes through periods of not eating, and every now and then she has to go to a hospital to get intravenous sodium, potassium, chlorine, bicarbonate, dextrose, calcium, phosphorous and magnesium, that’s all. Or that was all until the last time. Last time they made her stay a few extra days for a bit of brain-washing. And boy is her brain spotless now. Or at least that’s how she pictures it: swollen and pale, like a peeled, hard-boiled egg.

  With a view to getting rid of the asylilac, Marina founded a Neighborhood Association, with capital letters and everything. Well, everything apart from members. She does, on the other hand, like the color of the inside of her house. It’s white. In fact, it was precisely for the whiteness of Bitter’s walls that Marina wanted to rent Bitter. And for their smoothness. Because textured walls, especially the kind with big damp stains, vividly represented everything she wished to leave behind. It was the first time she’d left her parents’ home, where she’d lived all nineteen years of her life, in a city just far enough away from Belldrop Mews for Bitter to hold some promise.

  The day Marina first visited the house they had just painted it. It still smelled of thinner and the sun shone through the window, casting a bright rectangle on the back wall, which is where she saw her promised land, her this-must-be-the-place. The color, then – this sunlit white on the smooth wall, a hue that seemed to spell endless possibilities and promise – she named whomise.

  The owner of the mews, Doctor Alfonso Semitiel, showed her around that first day. He had a very particular manner about him, which reminded Marina of the mother of an ex boyfriend, a woman who would reel off her child’s virtues only to finish each round of compliments proclaiming, ‘I made him.’

  Alfonso crowed on about the mews, which apparently he built himself over the ruins of his grandparents’ mansion. He laid it on especially thick about the house names, which he had chosen in honor of the five tastes recognizable to the human tongue. Marina needed to make a good impression on Alfonso because, even though she had a copy of her parents’ deed, she wasn’t sure he would accept it as a guarantee, or if he’d insist on calling them to verify her identity. She didn’t want her family to know where she was, not yet, so she mustered all her charm and said she found the house names to be very original, which was true, only she omitted to say that they were also ridiculous, not to mention counterproductive, because who’d pay to live in a place called Bitter?

  Well, her. Bitter was the perfect house. Upstairs it had two rooms and a bathroom. Below, a good-sized living room, a kitchen, a small bathroom and a yard almost entirely taken up by an enormous water tank. Marina liked the impossibility of the yard. Any other outdoor space, anything more picturesque or less cluttered, would have reminded her of her parents’ house. For someone who up to that point had only ever desired impractical things, Marina felt a fiercely pragmatic desire: to have that house for herself. She immediately devised a plan to sleep in one of the upstairs rooms and use the other as a studio. She wanted to paint every day, cook perfect rice and actually eat it, learn how to use an airbrush and a pyrography machine and a drill and a dildo. No more transfusions or guilt or damp stains, never again would she go back to the dilapidated fake Athens that was Xalapa, Veracruz, her city of birth. She had left. She was going to start over again. Bitter would be her blank canvas. But for this, she was going to have to impress the landlord. She improvised, telling him she’d been an art teacher (withholding, of course, the minor detail that they fired her for fainting in front of the children). She did mention she’d graduated from high school, just not that she’d done it through home schooling because she’d worked simultaneously at her father’s restaurant. And she lied. She said she’d come to the capital to go to college. The real masterstroke was her use of the informal tú to address her new landlord. Wasn’t that how people in Mexico City spoke to each other? She then asked him coquettishly if he was married. He blushed; she even more so. He told her he was a widower, an only child, and an anthropologist. They had a coffee at a nearby bar and she stole her first object for Bitter: an ashtray. She placed it in the middle of the empty living room, then spent hours splayed across the floor, repositioning herself in line with the advancing sun, smoking and staring at the dust, rapt, convinced her life was about to start.

  It’s the color scheme of that first afternoon – that white panorama of full potential, that threshold white – that Marina understands as whomise. And that’s what she’s trying to recreate now, a year and a bit later, with a series of expensive light bulbs. ‘White Light’, the packaging promised. She fits them one by one throughout the house, and unbeknown to her, choreographs the slow dance of light-over-puddle in the passageway.

  *

  Marina did actually start college after she rented Bitter. She chose the degree herself, but not the timetable. Something about the word ‘design’ inspired a vague but firm hope in her – perhaps there she’d learn that most basic of things, the thing she saw in other people: an instinct for planning, for self-preservation. But the only thing she knows for certain up until now is that, as a direct result of attending morning classes, she’s never at home at the time of day when the sun paints the wall whomise. According to her theory, this is where it all went wrong, what set her off, what made her burn out again. A deficiency. Just as some people lack sunshine, she happened to lack this particular color. It got so bad that the usual serum shot wasn’t enough, and her mother had to be calle
d for. Señora Mendoza came flying to the rescue, then disappeared again. You can still make out her fleeting presence in the spotlessness of the grout between the tiles, somewhere it had never occurred to Marina to scrub. There are new habits since the mother’s visit, too. Marina is medicated now. Marina is in therapy.

  She left the standing lamp in the living room till last, and now it burns to the touch. She switches it off, slips her hand under her T-shirt and, using it like a glove, unscrews the bulb. So long, oppressive yellow light! (What’s that color called? Yellowoeful? Yelldown? Yepressing?) She screws in the new bulb and points the lamp at the wall. Instead of the desired whomise, a hard, futuristic light appears, as pristine as the pills she takes. This one, she decides, is called whozac. If whozac were a person it would have perfect teeth, wear a hospital gown, and roam the world preaching against hope: ‘There’s nowhere to run! There’s no way out! Filter your pain through our new Prozac-infused light!’

  A design idea. The first she’s had in months: anxiolytics should be packaged like breakfast cereal, with Sudokus on the box to pass the time during that first month you wait for them to kick in, until at last you forget you’re waiting, and the only sign they’re working is the muffled hum of anxiety, as if someone were pressing their foot on the mute pedal. Even so, Marina takes her pills. Almost every day.

  She unplugs the lamp and tests it on the other side of the room, but it doesn’t give the desired effect. Frustrated, she lashes out. Then, after a clunk and a flicker, the bulb casts a cone-shape of whozac over the rug. The light bulb just isn’t the sun. She might never recapture the whomise, and God, how frustrating the whole thing is. How ironic that every morning the very essence of wellbeing pours into her living room while she’s not at home; while she sits in a lecture hall doing her best not to think about anything at all.

  ‘What a waste,’ she says to herself, rolling the lamp across the rug with her foot. Marina despises waste. She sits upside down on the sofa and rests her feet against the wall where there’s no sunlight because it’s nearly ten.

  ‘I haven’t even eaten,’ she thinks.

  Her trousers slip down and she looks at her legs: much wider than her arms. Damn asymmetry. Why can’t everything be the same size? She lies there for a while. She’s so tired it’s almost like being calm. She wonders if she should just quit school, and she thinks about Chihuahua, too, the man she sleeps with from time to time, but who she hasn’t heard a peep from in weeks. The last time she saw him, he’d been getting dressed after sex while she lay stock-still staring at the ceiling, and just before walking out he said, ‘This is too much for me.’ As if their relationship were a carrier bag he was holding, with Marina inside it. As if the weight of that tiny waif were cutting into the poor guy’s fingers.

  *

  Marina is never home for the hours of whomise on the weekend either because she works looking after Linda Walker’s kids. They live on the other side of the passageway, which means the sun doesn’t hit their house in the same way. They don’t get any sun at all, in fact, except in their backyard. Their yard is three times the size of hers, and doesn’t have a giant water tank in the middle, but it’s so crammed full of stuff it puts you off going out there. And yet, go out Marina does, to smoke in the rare moments when the three siblings settle down together in front of the TV. She has to hide because the eldest – a chubby little twelve-year-old who talks as if she’s swallowed a dictionary – is on a permanent anti-smoking campaign.

  ‘When I was your age I was already out paying my way,’ Marina wants to say when she sees her poring over some 600-page tome.

  There used to be four siblings in the Pérez-Walker clan, but the youngest died a couple of years ago. Despite having never met her, Marina suspects that once upon a time the house did get some sunlight, but that the little girl took it with her to the other side, or to the grave, or to the bottom of that gringo lake where they say she drowned. They found her little body floating, caught up in the weeds. Olmo, now the youngest, told Marina all about it while he was busy with his crayons, drawing something else; a cow, or maybe a plane.

  Marina charges for her babysitting in English lessons. She studies with cool but genuine interest.

  ‘It’s a healthy drive,’ she told her therapist when he suggested that Marina was taking on too many activities. ‘They’re just English lessons,’ she reasoned, ‘so I can understand the lyrics of the songs I sing along to.’

  ‘And the work itself?’

  ‘I like the work,’ she’d told him. ‘The kids are fun.’

  But really it’s the kids’ mother Marina likes. Every Tuesday and Thursday, Linda comes to her house and they do two hours of English. Teaching materials exist in the form of CDs that Marina has in a standing bookcase. It’s a small but lovingly amassed collection, which began on a cobbled street in Xalapa, in Tavo’s Rock Shop (the sole line of communication with their era for many Xalapans in the nineties). Marina used the modest wage her father began to pay her at thirteen (after she plucked up the courage to suggest that her brother and she were poster children for child exploitation) to buy one CD, then another, and another. She liked the little shop because nobody she knew ever went there. They sold T-shirts with blood on them. American blood, silk-screen printed. Fake, of course, but sufficiently convincing to foster myths about the place: ‘Tavo’s Rock? They practice satanic rituals in there. They’re child abusers. Everything they sell’s come off the back of a truck.’

  Blood which, now that Chihuahua tells her so many things about the north, and now that she’s stopped thinking of her country as a simple yin and yang of Xalapa and Mexico City, doesn’t seem right to Marina. These days, if she sees someone on the street wearing an offensive shirt it gets her back up. Marina knows violence begets violence, and she opposes it in principle, but the problem is that, beyond taking offense, it doesn’t occur to her what to do about it. In spite of herself, she has always been more impressed by the military than militants. Marina sees a lot of het-up people at college, lots of banner waving, and she doesn’t know what’s more shameful: her absolute ignorance of the situation, or her absolute indifference. So she picks up her chin, pulls a face that says that she too suffers, makes as if she’s in a hurry and walks on by. She has coined the color redsentful.

  Linda Walker is wild about Marina’s album collection. She has a deep fascination – as passionate as it is patronizing – for popular Mexican music, but she hasn’t sat down to listen to American pop since she left the States twenty years ago.

  ‘But this isn’t pop,’ Marina insists. ‘This is alternative rock.’

  The truth is Marina doesn’t have a clue about music genres. Her criterion is strictly aesthetical: she picks CDs for their covers. She didn’t take any of hers when she left for Mexico City, but her mother brought them when she came to get her out of hospital. Or, in the words of Señora Mendoza, ‘out of that little pickle’.

  English has the same effect on Marina as meditation. Not that she meditates, but she’s been hypnotized before, and there’s this thing that happens to her when she’s been painting for hours and then stops: you only realize you’ve been somewhere else once you’re back. And English takes the edge off things, makes them feel less serious, a bit like scribbling mustaches on photos. For example, once translated, the names of her favorite groups changed from abstract poetry to random nouns: the cranberries, smashing pumpkins, blind melon, red hot chili peppers, fool’s garden. Translation simplifies, it schematizes: something that seemed potentially profound falls from grace and lands on its head, turning out to be nothing but a doodle. For Marina, this law of gravity dictating bilingualism confirms what she’s always suspected: that if gringos were drawings, they’d be drawn with markers.

  And confirming a suspicion provides you with a foothold, some solid ground to stand on, especially when that suspicion divides the world into segments, thereby neatly marking out the part that you yourself occupy. In other words, it takes the lid off and lowers expect
ations. It’s not that Marina believes the prejudices she confirms, but confirming them calms her down anyway.

  If she doesn’t entirely buy her own marker-pen theory, it’s because of Linda. Linda is a gringa drawn in pastels or coloring pencils: her lines are permeable, fluid. The more Marina knows her, the less defined she becomes. What’s more, Marina has started to make out the traces of past lines, from before Mexico, before Víctor, before the death of her daughter. Pentimento, they call it in drawing: those strokes the artist tried to erase but which are still faintly visible. Linda transforms according to her hairstyle and the time of day. When she’s in a playful, word-game kind of mood, she’s bright green; if she lets her hair down, she’s peach. Some nights Marina wonders: Is this love?

  It’s not attraction exactly, but you might call it an infatuation. Marina has placed her neighbor on a pedestal, and she can’t come up with another noun for the feeling. She spends all day comparing herself with Linda. She even makes herself eat porridge because Linda eats porridge. But it’s not for her place in the National Symphony Orchestra that Marina admires her, or for her rock-steady relationship with Víctor (no carrier bags there: it’s heavy-duty baggage all the way; matching, part of the same set). It’s not for the fact that she’s a mother of four children, or that she’s lost one. And nor does Marina’s admiration spring from Linda’s mystifying way of being both ugly and beautiful at once, or from how, every now and again, she seems drunk in the middle of the day. Marina doesn’t admire her for her long, long hair which she insists on piling up on the crown of her head like a nest; nor for the headscarf which she wraps around her bun and forehead as if dressing an invisible war wound. Or perhaps it is. Perhaps it’s the complex combination of all these things that Marina worships. But most of all, she respects Linda for having renounced the product mentality. For having said, ‘Enough is enough.’ Or at least that’s how Linda explained it: