Umami (11 page)

Within a year, ‘that one', with her measly Master's degree, had a position almost equivalent to mine, even though I, the fool that I am, hold not one but two PhDs.

The point is that I found a way to deal with you-know-the-type so that even in my social ignorance I could follow the conversation, and Noelia could build upon her catalogue of types at her leisure, convinced that I was following her to a T. I've always been proud of this excellent little solution, but in fact I ripped it off from Beto's wife.

Before her sudden disappearance from the mews, I noticed that Chela, when she didn't understand what we were talking about at the table after dinner – which was basically every time we talked about politics, which was basically every time we stayed up talking at the table after dinner – pulled a very specific face: one that made her seem interested, reflective, ever so slightly dissenting, and which masked her absolute ignorance. The face was simple: she pursed her lips. Obviously, this had a far more satisfactory effect on her, who's a peach, than on a face like mine, which has more of an overripe-papaya look about it. But I copied her anyway, adding to it from my own cache a simultaneous, slow nod. And unbelievably, it worked. So when, for example, Noelia said to me, ‘Blond but with her roots grown out, you know the type?', I would purse my lips and nod slowly, and she, satisfied she'd made it perfectly clear what kind of creature we were talking about, would happily babble on without having to stop for another round of frustrating elucidations.

Deep down, I think my Noe wasn't just blunt. She had a sharper psychological instinct than those women who think they know it all, who think they're wise owls: the humanitees, Noelia called my colleagues at the institute, with a double ee. The humanitees thought – like almost all the humanities graduates, including me – that they were better than everyone else. ‘Just that little bit more sensitive, that little bit more humane than the rest of humanity,' is how my wife put it. The humanitees turned their noses up at Noelia because she spoke openly about how much TV she watched in her – rare – free moments. But really they were deeply envious of her career, which was solid as a rock and way – but really way – better remunerated. They pitied her for not having children, but deep down envied her independence; the same independence they'd been so quick to boast about in their youths before trading it in for little Timmy, Tommy and Tammy, and a jealous husband. You can't ask a humanitee if she likes cooking, because she'll accuse you of protracting the phallocentric patriarchy. On the other hand, if she finds out that the man in a couple takes care of the cooking – as is, or was, the case in our house – she'll only ever see him as a hen-pecked husband.

The humanitees have very clear codes when they want to flatter one another, and are the undisputed champions of the backhanded compliment. If she doesn't think much of someone, a humanitee will say, ‘She's a real fighter.' But a woman she admires is ‘the boss of herself'. Noe once whispered in my ear, ‘Of course she is, because a humanitee could boss her way out of a paper bag.'

‘The humanitees wear indigenous Mexican outfits, but designer, you know the type?' And yes, I knew the type, or I didn't but Noelia taught me to see them that way. She could smell the male intellectual's thinly disguised machismo a mile off, while the humanitees were blind to it. I – who was known to be happily married, am ugly, and know how to pretend I'm listening – almost always caught wind of who was all over who from the secretaries, and tried to retain the information, at least until dinner time, so I could pass it on to Noelia, because she loved that kind of thing: it was like steak to her scandalmonger's soul.

‘Poor thing,' she'd say of the humanitee-lover in question, ‘this is going to end in tears.'

‘What makes you say that?' I'd ask, genuinely clueless.

‘Oh, Alfonso, because he's clearly one of those men who buys his woman roses only to prick her with the thorns.'

And I'd nod, and purse my lips.

Was it dishonesty, all this pretending I knew the type? Of course, but of the generous, unselfish kind: the kind that makes marriages last.

‘He's one of those people who nods to make it look like he's following the conversation, you know the type?'

I know it well. And, Noe, now that you're around here somewhere, let me tell you that yesterday in a bookstore café I saw a book called
Oh Lord, Won't You Make Me a Widow
,
and it gave me a profound feeling of pity, the kind I haven't felt for such a long time, other than toward myself. I'd rather have my clean pain than the dirty pain of wishing for pain.

‘What's it about?'

‘I don't know. I didn't buy it.'

‘And what's all that crap about clean pain?'

‘It's something Agatha Christie told me. When you and Luz died she decided to borrow every book on death and grief she could find in the library, then she'd come over to give me a weekly round-up of her findings. One Sunday she brought a Zen manual and explained to me that our grief, hers for her sister and mine for you, constituted clean pain. But if, for example, we'd been hurting because a boy we liked wasn't into us, well that was dirty pain, because it was no more than an invention, a pain made up in our heads, because in fact we didn't know, nor could we ever really know if the boy in question was into us or not.'

‘Oh, that's so cute.'

‘I know, right? And I asked her if she liked the boy in question but she went all skittish and started reading koans out loud. I might buy that book. Not the Zen manual, the one about the widow, to tell you about it.'

‘Go for it, love, but don't eat in that café anymore; you know those cheap wholegrain muffins are full of trans fats.'

‘You're right, I'm better off making a little soup.'

‘Attaboy. And give The Girls a bath, will you? They're losing the glow in their cheeks.'

*

‘There are two basic human conditions,' Noelia liked to explain during her most conflictive decade around the issue, and usually on her second tequila. ‘Being a child and being a procreator.'

I'd nod. She'd go on.

‘I choose to experience just one of the two conditions. Does that mean that in some way I'm choosing to be only half? It's a complicated equation, socially speaking. If you participate in both conditions, it's like you're two people: you're a daughter and a mother. I choose to be no more than one, no more than one person. There's a fair amount of coherence in that, isn't there? Well, not for other people. For other people, being no more than one person is like being less than one. Though not if you're a man, of course. No, that goes without saying. I'll put it in female terms: if you're no more than one, one woman, they assume you're fulfilling half of your human condition, or female condition, if you like. The point is – don't walk away, Alfonso –, if you're one, you're half. Now tell me where's the logic in that.'

‘I didn't make the rules,' I'd say.

‘But you are an anthropologist.'

‘Yes, but I study pre-Hispanic diets.'

*

The sweater.

A few days ago, Linda walked into the bar carrying something yellow in her hands. When they brought her her vodka, we made a toast and she spread it out on the table. It was a small sweater. Next she pulled out a sewing kit from her bag, and from the sewing kit a needle, some scissors, and half a dozen spools of thick thread. While we sipped our drinks she embroidered diamonds, squares, circles and semicircles onto the sweater at random. At a certain point she passed it to me. I pulled back my chair and lay the sweater out on my lap. It was bigger than the clothes I usually buy for The Girls, but sat snug over my knees. It was dirty. I ran a finger over the newly sewn shapes; the taut stitching felt soft compared to the sweater itself, which was itchy. It looked like something from another era, like the knee-length socks and the micro shorts we used to wear in my day. Nobody knits itchy sweaters anymore, especially not for children. I pulled off my ring and passed it to Linda. She ran her finger around it, but didn't put it on. Then she read the inscription inside and asked, ‘Umami?'

‘Umami is one of the five basic flavors our taste buds can identify. The others, the ones we all know, are sweet, salty, bitter and sour. Then there's umami, more or less new to us in the West. We're talking a century or so. It's a Japanese word. It means delicious.'

I stopped to draw breath and the two of us laughed because I'd blurted all of this out in one go, like one of those machines in Italian churches you feed money to illuminate the altarpiece for a minute. Linda gave me back the ring. I gave her back the sweater, and she threaded the needle with purple cotton. Linda lives in the mews; I must have explained umami to her a hundred times, and in a far less robotic manner. In any case, ever generous, she rested the needle in the sweater and calmly asked, ‘What does it taste of?'

‘That's the thing,' I told her. ‘Since we don't recognize the taste, the best way for me to describe it is as something to get your chops around, something satisfying. In English they say
seivori.

‘Savory?' she pronounced in perfect English.

‘That's right, or sometimes they'll just say meaty.'

‘I'm afraid I've never been able to get my head around it, Alf.'

‘The easiest way to understand it is this: think about pasta. Imagine a portion of spaghetti. It's nothing; doesn't taste of anything. Carbohydrates, plain and simple. But if you add umami, if you throw in a bit of Parmesan or tomato or eggplant, then bingo! You've got yourself a meal.'

She nodded for a long time, and that was it. When she went (we never leave the Mustard Mug together), I was left in a state of confusion. I'd had an almost identical conversation once before; with a woman I barely knew and whom I ended up marrying.

*

For Noelia, the fact that her theories about offspringhood proved to be simplistic or naive only served to strengthen her main argument that you never fully mature if you don't move on to the second human condition; to the other side; to not being only a child, but also a progenitor (prolongation of the species, genetic dissemination, all those things). In other words, Noelia wanted her mysticology of offspringhood to be self-evident, above all in the areas relating to immaturity. For example, in a
modus noellendo noellens
:

If you're only a daughter, something in you hasn't fully matured.

As such, your arguments will necessarily be puerile.

And the more puerile your arguments, the more proof there is for the general theory that offspringhood is an irredeemably immature state.

And it wasn't like my profession made me particularly pedantic in terms of scientific proofs, which meant that, as far as I recall, I never had any issue going along with Noelia's theories, which might, say, allow us to have sorbet and tequila for breakfast some Sundays, or buy a plane ticket every now and again and set off to random destinations, just because.

*

My wife was a perfect blend of civilized and primitive. She had a pure, savage mind: Levi-Strauss would have drooled all over her. Hand in hand with her medical finesse, Noelia Vargas Vargas also had a thing for pagan rituals. Despite knowing full well that nicotine upsets the gut, for years she sustained the idea that she couldn't go to the bathroom without the helping nudge of a Raleigh. On top of that, she consulted her horoscope every day as soon as she woke up. Without a hint of irony. She checked it like most people check the weather forecast. If her horoscope revealed something negative, she would sulk; if it was positive, she'd be happy as Larry. This habit of hers irritated me during the first years of our marriage. I couldn't understand how an intelligent woman could decide the mood of her day based on something that – as she herself would admit – didn't have the least logical founding. In practice, however, her rational, sharp side, – masterfully employed in most other areas of her life – was disconnected from her moods. She used her horoscope like a guide, despite knowing perfectly well that they were no more than words written by a harried astrologer, or, as she herself suspected, by the harried astrologer's minions. It's not that Noelia believed in her stars: she believed in her horoscope. She needed it to start the day. Just like some people can't leave the house without making the sign of the cross, or without a coffee inside them. Among the many components of my wife's emotional machinery, the damn horoscope was the switch: one paragraph that determined in which mood she'd shift from sleep to wakefulness. Luckily, the effect would wear off over the course of the morning. It was a terrible ritual, but short-lived.

Right up until she died, Noelia received a weekly magazine called
Astros
, written by a certain
Madame
Elisabeta. For the last five years she had it sent to her email, but before that, for what felt like a million years, she had it delivered. And before that, when I first met her, Noelia read her horoscope in the newspaper. Every morning, she would pop out of her bachelorette apartment in her slippers to buy it. So rigorous was she in her routine that the vendor billed her weekly. I was horrified by her horoscope habit, but loved having the newspaper first thing in the morning: it was one of those wonders a relationship only knows in its early phase, like doing it in the kitchen.

Astros
magazine gave you a seven-day horoscope personalized to your sign, ascendance, and even your name, which someone typed directly onto your typed copy (you could tell from how the letters of
Noelia
formed a zigzag, with those dainty typographical dances produced by typewriters). As you can imagine, it wasn't a cheap publication.

One day, Noelia welcomed into her consultation room none other than Madame
Elisabeta. She turned out to be a pale, obese fifty-something with her heart in a terrible state. She was friendly and foulmouthed. The a at the end of her name, Noelia soon learned, had been her mother's idea, and wasn't just some half-baked pseudonym. At first, Noelia didn't say anything about the magazine, because in her role as a cardiologist she tended to keep her superstitions to herself. She fitted Madame's pacemaker and that was that. Except, it being December, the patient – saved in the nick of time and eternally grateful – invited us to her magazine's Christmas party. I was happy to go along, both out of anthropological curiosity and also because I was convinced that, on witnessing the commercial inner workings of Elisabeta's magazine, Noelia would finally recognize her ongoing error. But the event turned out to be nothing like what either of us expected. For starters, it was in Elisabeta's house: a big, shabby apartment where she lived with a parrot and a much younger woman who served as both lover and nurse, as well as helping out with the magazine, the cleaning, and the astral cards. Everyone referred to her as Pisces. I remember Pisces as being permanently positioned on Elisabeta's lap. There were others at the party: some astrologers, musicians, and a couple of intellectuals who could actually see beyond the shadow of their egos, which is unusual. Dinner consisted of rum (with a dash of punch), and a mountain of takeaway pizzas. As soon as we arrived, Pisces made us mark our preferred toppings on a list, and at some point she must have called to order them because not long after they turned up at the door. Fat old Elisabeta was poor as a church mouse and esoteric in the extreme, but she understood, long before Google did, the value of a seemingly personalized service.