Umami Page 4

  ‘Look at me,’ I tell them. ‘Sixty-four years old and my first time mopping the floor.’

  Noelia did like children, but from a safe distance. She’d never wanted her own, and then when she did finally want them it was too late. She wasn’t into drama. Or rather she was, but other people’s. She liked fried food but hardly ever let herself indulge. She liked the smell of spices – cumin, marjoram, lemongrass –, pressed clothes, and fresh flowers in the house. She paid one person to come and iron and another to bring the fresh flowers. She liked to pay well and tip on top. She liked earthenware, as long as it wasn’t fussy. She refused to keep the best china for special occasions.

  ‘Every chance I get to sit down to eat is a special occasion,’ she used to say. ‘At least till my beeper goes.’

  The arrival of the beeper was such a momentous event in our lives that not even its evolution into snazzier, more compact devices stopped us calling everything that interrupted our meals or siesta the beeper. Above all the siesta, because traditionally it was the time we would make love. I preferred the morning (when she was in a hurry), and she preferred nighttime (when I was tired), so the siesta was the middle point that always worked for us.

  Noelia smoked Raleighs until her younger brother had his first cardiac arrest and the family learned that even cardiologists can be touched by heart problems. I only ever smoked the odd cigar, but her smoking didn’t bother me, and when she gave up I felt like we’d both lost something. I never told her that, of course. Each year, or at least for the first decade of her abstention, we’d put on a party in celebration of another 365 days smoke-free. That we lost something is perhaps not the right way to put it. We left something behind, I mean. We turned a page, no looking back, as the boho poets from the Mustard Mug would say.

  *

  The Mustard Mug is the bar around the corner which I dip into when my body so demands. Nobody knew about these trips until one of my tenants, the gringa who lost her daughter, also started going. I used to call her gringa to her face but with hindsight it sounds a mite assy. The thing is, I never felt too kindly toward that family. They’re a noisy bunch and form a majority in the mews because they rent two houses: Sweet and Salty. They live in one of them and use the other as a studio, teaching piano and drums and God knows how many other instruments. Everyone in the family knows how to play at least two. The eldest daughter is the only one I get along with, perhaps because she’s notoriously tone deaf, or perhaps simply because she was born right in the middle of the brief period when Noelia regretted not having children and we found ourselves cooing like idiots over every baby that came our way. But it’s also true that I started to take a shine to Agatha Christie, or Ana, as she’s really called, as she got older, because she was a misfit, and because she liked me. While helping me out in the milpa in the evenings, she would explain – as if they were puzzles – the various dilemmas faced by Poirot and Miss Marple in the pages she devoured. I never solved a single one, by the way, and not for lack of trying. Sometimes I didn’t want to open the door to her, because I preferred to be alone, but the more time I spent with her at my side, the more I grew to like myself. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that my empathy toward Agatha Christie is a form of self-affection, because she is who I once was: a young kid left to her own devices in this exact same nook of a huge city. Seeing her reading huddled in corners made me mad at the parents, who went on making more babies instead of paying her the attention she deserved.

  Noelia, on the other hand, loved the whole family. She nicknamed the mother Lindis and forgave all the late rent on the basis that Lindis and her husband were artists and had many mouths to feed. When the mouths were very small, we used to do things together as a group: long discussions over drinks in the evening, barbeques. Linda used to toast my amaranth and sell it all over the block, and one time they organized a string-quartet concert on my milpa, a real sight to behold. But later on, the tenants started keeping themselves to themselves. Or maybe Noelia and I grew too old and frumpy for their liking so they stopped inviting us. It was around that time that I took to calling her the gringa. Only last year did she go back to being just Linda, one day when she turned up at Umami with a selection of scarves.

  ‘I’ve come to teach your wife how to make a turban,’ she said.

  The hair loss from the chemo had floored Noelia. What did I tell you before, Nina? Noe was a real coquette, and she couldn’t bear anyone seeing her bald head, so she insisted on covering it with beanie hats, caps and god-awful wigs that made her scalp itch like crazy. And her silly self-torture drove me crazy in turn. Agatha Christie must have related some of this private drama to her mom, and at first I didn’t know how to react to Linda’s unsolicited call. I worried that Noelia would take offense. But, as I’ve proved on countless other occasions in my life, I don’t possess a scrap of the female intuition that men these days are supposed to have, and Linda’s crash course turned out to be a hit. The rags, as Linda called them, were a real relief to Noe, and for a time, if the two turbaned women happened to cross paths in the passageway, the mews looked like some kind of spiritual retreat.

  Then, one day Linda turned up at the Mustard Mug and sat down at my table. From that day on we’ve held a tacit pact not to mention our meetings to anyone. She too had been signed off work. Apparently that’s the way that our cultural institutions deal with loss; perhaps it’s their way of debunking the stereotype that in Mexico we know how to live hand in hand with death.

  Linda orders vodka in the Mug, out of discretion. I drink tequila, since I no longer have anybody to smell it on me. Every now and then the barman pulls out all the stops and serves me my tequila shot with a chaser of delicious spicy sangrita, which Linda then eats with her finger, dunking then sucking it. I’ve tried hard to find something erotic in this gesture, but my best efforts are hampered by an overriding feeling of tenderness toward her. She’s also a tall lady, and I like my women compact: Noelia was as short as a toadstool.

  We never have more than a couple of drinks each. Me because I’ve always been a lousy drinker, and her because she has to go afterward to pick up the kids from school. Linda stays till one thirty at the latest, and the vodka always sets her off. She has deep-set green eyes, and when she cries they go puffy and pink. Some days we talk, and others we don’t even get beyond hello. Every now and then I well up too, in which case Linda will ask for some napkins and we’ll sit there blowing our noses. If we do talk it’s about old times: her gringo childhood, my Mexico City youth, our lives before our lives with our dead. Or we talk about operas we remember. Or food. I give her recipes for exotic sauces. She explains how to make fermented pickles.

  *

  Now that I think about it, marriage isn’t all that different from mid-morning TV. In the end, to be married is to see the same old movies – some more treasured than others – over and over again. The only things that ever change are the bits in between, the things tied to the present: news bulletins, commercials. And by this I don’t mean that it’s boring. On the contrary, it’s awful what I’ve lost: the cement that held the hours together, the comfort of Noelia’s familiar presence which filled everything, every room, whether she was at home or not, because I knew that unless she had a heart attack on her hands she’d be home to eat and have a siesta, then back again for dinner and to watch TV, finally falling asleep with her cold feet against my leg. The rest – all the world events, falling walls and stocks, personal and national disasters – was nothing. What you miss are the habits, the little actions you took for granted, only to realize that they were in fact the stuff of life. Except, in a way, they also turned out not to be, because the world goes on spinning without them. Much like amaranth when they banned it. What must the Aztecs have thought when the Spaniards burnt their sacred crop? ‘Sons of bitches,’ they must have thought. And also, ‘Impossible! Impossible to live without huautli.’ But they were wrong and so was I: Noelia died and life goes on. A miserable life if you like, but I stil
l eat, and I still shit.

  *

  ‘Those bugs,’ my wife would say.

  I never got my head around how anyone could see something ugly in a butterfly, especially someone from Michoacán, the land of monarchs.

  ‘They flap around you!’ she argued.

  Then she’d come out with far-fetched theories, tall tales from her childhood.

  ‘If moths hover close to your eyes their powder can blind you.’

  ‘What kind of scientist are you?’

  ‘A paranoid one. That’s very important, listen: you must always make sure your doctor’s a believer, or at least that he somehow fears the final judgment, because the rest of them are nothing but butchers.’

  *

  Here the top-ten nuptial movies reshown in this household over the last thirty years:

  Tough Day at the Clinic – Pour Me a Tequila

  A PhD Student Calls (I’m Not In)

  Procreation (The Prequel)

  Amaranth and Milpas

  The Tenants

  Belldrop Mews

  For Whom the Beeper Tolls

  Only a Daughter

  Umami

  The Girls

  *

  Noelia constructed an entire oral mysticology around the term ‘only a daughter’, which I’ll do my best to reproduce here, both from what I remember and with the help of Nina Simone. I’m a son too, only a son, and now an old son, but I never identified with all the things Noelia insisted were symptoms of our chosen condition as nobody’s parents.

  Noelia named this state of being only a daughter ‘offspringhood’. I told her that the concept was flawed because it was the same as the state of being ‘human’ or even of ‘being’: we’re all someone’s offspring.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

  Then I suggested that, seeing as we have maternity, paternity and fraternity, it might make more sense to call it ‘offspringity’. But she wasn’t having any of it.

  ‘Mysticology’ isn’t a word either, of course, but after three decades, one person’s bad habits stick on the other, so now it’s my turn to make up words at whim. When all’s said and done, no one’s going to pass judgment on Nina Simone. I won’t let an editor near her, nor would I dream of sending her into the rat hole that is the peer-review system.

  I was saying: while I myself didn’t identify with the characteristic features of ‘offspringhood’, Noelia diagnosed me with all of them. I strongly denied the accusations held against me, at least in my inner courthouse. Because the same defects she branded me with (and which I acknowledged, sometimes), I also noticed in my friends with children. Especially as we grew older. We could all be impatient, irritable, intolerant, inflexible, spoiled, ailing, and pig-headed. Very pig-headed in fact: Páez had three kids and became more and more pig-headed with every one. Noelia said that it was because I didn’t have kids that I was the way I was sometimes:

  ‘If you’d had kids, your concentration and memory would be better, and you’d be more tolerant and disciplined,’ she’d say to me.

  ‘What’s any of that got to do with children, woman?’

  ‘If you have children you have to go to school every day at the same time to pick them up, and if you forget it hurts real bad.’

  ‘Well, it does hurt me when I forget things.’

  ‘Nuh-uh, Alfonso. It can’t hurt real bad unless there’s someone to remind you that you forgot.’

  *

  It was Noelia Vargas Vargas’s job to let me know when someone was teasing me, because I didn’t ever catch on. We had a code for it. She would tilt her head forwards, and I’d proceed to defend myself. Once or twice I tried to work out exactly where the gibe had come from, but it never worked so I learned that it was better to wait for her signal, then object.

  ‘Guys, quit messing with me, will you?’ I’d say to everyone. Often the culprit was Noelia herself, and in such cases, once we’d left wherever it was we were, she would amuse herself spelling it out for me. She always thought me naive. She used to say – in a friendly way, as if it were just another of the quirky upshots of having married an anthropologist (if we were among doctors), or of having married a Mexico City chilango (if we were among her folk from Michoacán) – that I had three basic failings: I never learned how to mess with people, drive, or swim. If you ask me, the last one isn’t quite true because I can doggy-paddle just fine, thank you very much.

  The point is that Noelia certainly had it in her to be more bitch than beauty. Especially at the beginning, when she was often defensive (according to her because she worked solely among men, but who knows). The first time we fought badly she told me something I never forgave her for, despite all her efforts to make it up to me. Her words were succinct, and arguably valid: ‘You fuck like a rich kid.’

  *

  Now I feel like the inflatable duck. So let him be my alter ego. Why not? I’m going to sign everything I write here under Widow Ducky, Lord Amaranth. Let’s see if I remember how to save things. At what point, I wonder, are they going to change the symbol for saving files from a floppy disk?

  By the way, Ms. Simone, I should probably clarify that I’m not on a real sabbatical. On paper it might be a sabbatical, but let there be no mistake: in mind and in spirit I’ve retired. If I gave up work officially, on my measly pension I’d starve to death. Starve! Me! The world expert on sacred amaranth. The man who introduced the concept of umami into the national gastronomic dialog! Starve! And all because the old fool hasn’t tended his milpa since 2001: corn is hardy stuff, but it’s not invincible. Even corncobs need their little drops of water. Even a widowed duck needs love. Come on.

  What else?

  Laptop. Triceratops. Doo-wop. What’s the research topic for the new machine going to be?

  It’s going to be Noelia.

  ‌

  ‌2001

  I’m crawling around under the trees singing ‘camu-flash flash flash’. I want to find mushrooms. I do not want to find any slugs. I just learned the word ‘camuflash’. It means no one can see me. I’m like the mushrooms and the slugs, hidden under the leaves. The leaves fall off the trees. They’re brown like nuts. The green balls with little spikes that Grandma Emma says have nuts inside fall off too. They only fall off once, then they stay there on the ground until they go brown and rotten and camuflashed with the mud. A family of trees is called a grove. This grove is Grandma’s neighbor. Kind of. In Mexico our neighbors all live in the mews, but here neighbor is anyone who lives more or less near. Near you or near the lake. You have to go everywhere in the car here, and everything is camuflashed. For example, Granddad is camuflashed in the lake. Well, his ashes are. And Grandma chats to them when she goes walking along the shore, and she flicks her cigarette ash in the water, to keep him company. I don’t remember Granddad but my sister does. She says he had a really red nose and said our names like this: Ann, Tee-yo, Olmou, Loose.

  Before he was ashes, our Granddad was a pilot and that’s why we get free tickets and that’s why we fly a lot like birds, but without the feathers or the fun. Well, it’s a little fun because you can watch movies and they bring you these cheese triangles on your food tray. Mama says that when her dad the pilot died, Grandma cut up all his sweaters and sewed them back together again until she’d made sweaters for all of us. Olmo calls them our woolly dead pilot sweaters.

  Mama starts whistling and squeaking her boots together to make music. The song makes Grandma laugh. Mama has a basket hooked on one elbow and Grandma hooked on the other. And she has a white rag wrapped around her head. She calls them rags, those things she puts on her head. Mama’s basket is full but that’s because she collects everything she finds, which is cheating. Grandma doesn’t approve of Mama’s picking technique. Those are the words she said and that’s why she won’t let go of her arm, no matter how pretty her squeaky song is. Every time Mama collects a mushroom, Grandma says:

  ‘That one’s poisonous,’ or, ‘That one’s OK, but it tastes awful,’ or, ‘Don’t
even touch that one, please.’

  She doesn’t say anything to me because I’m not cheating. When we got to her house this time, Grandma called me Peanut.

  ‘Last summer you were just a peanut,’ she said.

  I liked that. But then Ana said, ‘She means you were still a baby.’

  I didn’t like that.

  ‘I’m almost six,’ I told Emma.

  ‘Five is a lucky number,’ she said.

  Today, the boys went camping and us girls stayed behind to pick mushrooms. Emma gave us baskets and plastic bags and told us which mushrooms we were looking out for: black trumpets. In Spanish they’re called las trompetas de la muerte, death trumpets, even though black and dead isn’t the same thing. You just can’t trust English: it translates stuff all wrong. And they’re not even really black; more like very dark brown. I know because Emma gave me a trumpet all of my own in a sandwich bag. I’ve been dragging it along behind me and the bag is so covered in mud already that you can’t see anything inside. My death trumpet is camuflashed. It’s happy, too, I can tell. Emma said that it’s my guide specimen. A specimen is something that’s like a mention of its species.

  The boys are my dad, Pina’s dad Beto, and my two brothers. They took the canoe and they’re going to sleep on an island in the middle of the lake. I wanted to go with them, but then I saw Theo putting a bunch of straws in his backpack and I thought best to go with the girls. Yesterday, Pina made us breathe through straws with our heads camuflashed under the water in the lake and it felt horrible. Only Theo lasted a long time, and now he thinks he’s king of the straws and he wants to play at straws all day long.