Umami (26 page)

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 seeing 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
.

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.'

‘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.