Umami (3 page)

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 expectations. 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:

‘One day I just said enough is enough to the product mentality, you know? It's not that I'm giving up playing, I just don't need to package it. I devote myself to the music now, not the orchestra. I'm all about the process now.'

‘And the orchestra lets you?' Marina had asked, for the sake of saying something.

‘They gave me unpaid leave,' Linda said. ‘And you know what? For not one of my pregnancies did I get that. Musicians don't believe in babies, but in mourning, sure. I blame Wagner.'

Amaranth, the plant to which I've dedicated the best part of my forty years as a researcher, has a ludicrous name. One that, now I'm a widower, makes me seethe.

Amaranthus
, the generic name, comes from the Greek
amaranthos
, which means ‘flower that never fades'.

*

I've been a widower since last Mexican Day of the Dead: November 2 2001. That morning my wife lay admiring the customary altar I'd set up in the room. It was a bit makeshift: three vases of dandelions and Mexican marigolds, and not much else, because neither of us was in the mood for the traditional sugar skulls. Noelia adjusted her turban (she hated me seeing her bald) and pointed to the altar.

‘Nah, nah, nah-nah-nah,' she sang.

‘Nah, nah, nah-nah-nah, what?' I asked.

‘I beat them.'

‘Beat who?'

‘The dead,' she said. ‘They came and they went, and they didn't take me.'

But that afternoon, when I took her up her Nescafé with milk, Noelia had gone with them. Sometimes I think that what hurts most is that she went without me there. With me downstairs, standing like a muppet by the stove, waiting for the water to boil. The damn, chalky, chlorinated Mexico City water, at its damn 2,260 meters above sea level, taking its own sweet time to make the kettle whistle.

*

Noelia's surname was Vargas Vargas. Her parents were both from Michoacán, but one was from the city of Morelia and the other Uruapan, and at any given opportunity they'd publicly avow that they were not cousins. They had five children, and ate lunch together every day. He was a cardiologist and had a clinic just around the corner. She was a homemaker and her sole peccadillo was playing bridge three times a week, where she'd fritter away a healthy slice of the grocery budget. But they never wanted for anything. Apart from grandchildren. On our part at least, we left them wanting.

By way of explanation, or consolation perhaps, my mother-in-law used to remind me in apologetic tones that, ‘Ever since she was a little girl, Noelia wanted to be a daughter and nothing else.' According to her version of events, while Noelia's little friends played at being Mommy with their dolls, she preferred to be her friends' daughter, or the doll's friend, or even the doll's daughter; a move that was generally deemed unacceptable by her playmates, who would ask, with that particular harsh cruelty of little girls, ‘When have you ever seen a Mommy that pretty?'

Bizarrely, my wife, who blamed so many of her issues on being a childless child, would never get into this topic with me. She refused to discuss the fact that it was her mother who first used the term ‘only a daughter' in reference to her. And it occurs to me now, darling Noelia, that your obsession may well spring from there; that it wasn't something you chose exactly, but rather that your own mother drummed into you.

‘Don't be an Inuit, Alfonso,' says my wife, who, every time she feels the need to say ‘idiot', substitutes the word with another random noun beginning with i.

Substituted it, she substituted it. I have to relearn how to conjugate now that she's not around. But the thing is, when I wrote it down just now, ‘Don't be an Inuit, Alfonso', it was as if it wasn't me who'd written it. It was as if she were saying it herself.

Perhaps that's what the new black machine is for. Yes, that's why they brought it to me: so Noelia will talk to me again.

*

I have a colleague at the institute who, aged fifty-two, married a woman of twenty-seven. But any sense of shame only hit them when she turned thirty and he fifty-five, because all of a sudden it no longer required any mathematical effort to work out the age gap: the quarter of a century between them was laid bare for all to see. Something more or less like this happened to us in the mews. Numbers confounded us when, in the same year my wife died, aged fifty-five, so did the five-year-old daughter of my tenants. Noelia's death seemed almost reasonable compared to Luz's, which was so incomprehensible, so unfair. But death is never fair, nor is fifty-five old.

I'll also make use of my new machine to moan, if I so choose, about having been left a widower before my time, and about the fact that nobody paid me the slightest attention. The person who showed the most concern was our friend Páez. But Páez was more caught up in his own sorrow than mine. He would call me up late at night, drunk, consumed by the discovery that not even his generation was immortal.

‘I can't sleep thinking about you alone in that house, my friend. Promise me you won't stop showering,' he would say.

And then the inconsiderate ass went and died too. Noelia always used to say that bad things happen in threes.

They couldn't have cared less at work, either.

‘Take a year's sabbatical,' they told me. ‘Languish in life. Rot away in your damned urban
milpa
, which we never had any faith in anyway. Go and wilt among your amaranths.'

And I, ever compliant, said, ‘Where do I sign?'

A first-class howler, because now I'm losing my mind all day in the house. I don't even have Internet. I'm sure the black machine should hook up to Wi-Fi but so far I haven't made any attempt to understand how that works. I prefer the television. At least I know how to turn it on. These last weeks I've got into the mid-morning programming. It is tremendous.

I hadn't heard anything from the institute since the start of my year's sabbatical. Then, two weeks ago, they came and left a machine. I'm told it's my 2001 research bonus, even though that god-awful year finished six months ago and was the least productive of my academic life. Unless ‘Living With Your Wife's Pancreatic Cancer' and then ‘First Baby-Steps as a Widower' can be considered research topics. I imagine they were sent an extra machine by mistake and that they can't send it back because then, of course, they would be charged. All the bureaucratic details of the institute are counterintuitive, but the people who run it act as if it were perfectly coherent. For example, they tell me that I have to use the machine for my research, presumably to get to grips with online resources and move into the twenty-first century, but then they send a delivery boy to pass on the message. That's right, along with the laptop, the delivery boy brought a hard-copy agreement. Because nothing can happen in the institute unless it's written in an agreement and printed on an official letterhead with the Director's signature at the bottom.

The kid pulled out a cardboard box from his Tsuru, not so different from a pizza box, and handed it to me.

‘It's a laptop, sir. In the office they told me to say you gotta use it for your research.'

‘And my sabbatical?' I said.

‘Hey, listen, man, they ain't told me nothing more than to make the drop and go.'

‘So “make the drop” and go,' I told him.

He put it down and I left it in there on the doorstep in its box. That was two weeks ago.