Laia Jufresa - Umami

I find a river of mud and follow it, even though it leads me off the track, even though there isn’t really a track because the trees in the grove are planted in rows, and if you look at them from the right spot they hide behind each other, and between the rows everything that’s not a chestnut tree is empty space, and everything that’s empty space is track.

My woolly dead pilot sweater is yellow and tickly, but the sleeves are too long for me and I have to fold them up to my shoulders like an accordion. This morning Theo said that there’s such a thing as a giant slug, and they’re yellow and black and called banana slugs. He said I look like one in my sweater. I liked that. But Olmo said if anything I look like a rotten banana. I told him he has the face of a porcupine and Theo said, ‘Luz está right.’

They all start talking weird when we come to the lake. And that’s why I’m not going to speak English. I’m never ever going to speak English. English makes you weird.

I sit down at the end of the sort of river and rub mud in my face, because everybody knows mud-masks make you pretty. Mud-masks and also drinking tomato juice, but tomato juice is trick juice because it isn’t sweet at all. Then, just next to my foot, I spot something, and that something is a black trumpet. I don’t move. Apart from my eyes. I spot another one, three, four, seven, all together. I take out my guide specimen to check and yep, they’re like twins. According to Grandma, when you find one you’ve found a ton. I turn around, get on all fours again and start singing to them even faster so that more appear.

‘Flashy flashy flashy flash.’

And it works.

Where before there were none, suddenly I can see millions of them. It’s like the Magic Eye pictures in Olmo’s book where if you just stare at the page you don’t see anything, but if you make yourself go cross-eyed you see a dinosaur.

‘Trumpets! Truuumpettts!’

I shout until my mom appears, springing out from between the trees.

‘Where?’ she says.

‘Kneel down,’ I say. But she only crouches down. I point and it doesn’t take long before she spots them too. They’re all over the place, the same color as the dirt. Black trumpets are the real queens of camuflash.

Pina and Ana turn up to pick my trumpets, and I want them to go away but I don’t say anything because they are saying how good I am at this and how excellent my mask looks on me. Emma picks a few and smells them. She says we’re going to do spaghetti with black trumpets, garlic and white wine and, ‘didn’t I tell you five was a lucky number?’

‘I’m a lucky peanut,’ I say.

‘You’re my little truffle hog, that’s what you are,’ says Mama, and she rolls my sleeves back up.

I don’t know what a truffle hog is, but I guess it’s a pig made out of fancy chocolate. I get up and my legs are totally brown, just like my hands and my face, and I guess that’s why she said it. I’m a chocolate-covered peanut.

‘Wanna go shower?’ Grandma asks.

‘Not now,’ I tell her.

‘Okey dokey,’ she says.

Ana and Pi take the trumpets to the house because in the end we’ve collected a ginormous paper bag of them. The rest of us go on walking because now Grandma wants us to find another mushroom, a chanterelle, which is yellow, but it’s not like any of the yellows that Mama has in her basket, or like my sweater, or even like the yellow of the banana slugs which she says only exist on the other coast.

‘Of the lake?’ I ask.

‘Of the country,’ Grandma says.

I want to find the chanterelle. I’m going to find it. We walk. I’ve got so much mud on my knees it’s like there are two cow patties sitting on them. I like them. I like walking with the adults because they talk without whispering secrets to each other and don’t make you do anything with straws. One time, Pina and Ana tried to put a straw up my front bottom because they said that all of us women have a little hole there to make children. But they couldn’t find it, so they told me I don’t have one and that I’m never going to have children, which is fine by me because children can be so dumb and nasty with their little sisters, even when the little sisters are really nice and pretty.

My mom picks a mushroom for her already very full basket.

‘That’s a magic mushroom,’ Emma tells her.

‘Really?’ I ask.

‘She just means it makes you sleepy,’ says Mama.

‘And giggly,’ Grandma says.

‘And it makes you see things,’ says Mama.

I say it doesn’t sound so bad, but it doesn’t sound that magic either.

‘Which one is it?’ I ask, and they point to one in Emma’s hand, but they won’t let me touch it. Emma collects chestnuts and I see her putting them in her sweater pockets which are now all big and bulgy like the stockings she hangs by the chimney at Christmas when we come to see her, and which she fills with trick presents for us, like fruit and pencil sharpeners.

‘Are you going to eat them?’ I ask her.

‘I’m going to paint them,’ she says.

‘What color?’ I ask.

‘I’m not going to paint on top of them. I’m going to paint them in a still life.’

‘Emma’s Pickings: A Still Life ,’ my mom says.

‘A minimalist still life, this year,’ Grandma says, and they both laugh, and I laugh too so they think I get what they’re talking about, but also because it’s like a choir and if you don’t laugh it’s like you aren’t singing, and it you don’t sing it’s like there’s a lake in front of you and you’ve got your swimsuit on but you won’t dive in. Like Ana, who never wants to swim. She says the mud is gross. But really she’s embarrassed to be seen in her swimsuit, and I miss before, when she wasn’t embarrassed by every little thing and she wasn’t so mean.

Emma makes us hold her chestnuts while she looks for a lighter in her giant pockets. I drop a few, but she doesn’t mind. She’s got a long neck like a giraffe and she always seems sad until something makes her laugh out loud and she throws her neck back. She’s got yellow teeth and red hair, apart from the hair that’s closest to her scalp, which is white. She has an old truck filled with so many blankets you could live in there, and she keeps hot things in colorful flasks: milk, tea, soup, coffee. She always has a cigarette in her right hand, with her left hand holding the right elbow, which reminds me of the music stand where my mom and dad rest their music when they practice. When I grow up I want to be like Grandma but in Mexican. But my mom says that’s genetically impossible: Emma is only my grandma because she got married to my mom’s daddy. Genetically is when you generally look like someone else. Mama doesn’t look like Emma, but she calls her Mom anyway. Emma is only ten years older than her but she calls Mama Kiddo. She calls us all Kiddo. My dad, too. But she calls Beto Beddo.

‘I wasn’t ever married to your father,’ says Emma. ‘Not technically.’

‘ Arrejuntada ,’ my mom says in Spanish. ‘Shacked up with him, whatever.’

Emma tries to say the word arrejuntada but the r comes out all floppy.

‘When I grow up I want to shack up with a pilot, too,’ I tell them, and then I get back on all fours and leave. I’m a banana slug on stilts.

Pina’s mom told her how babies are made. Now Pina is trying to explain it to her friend, but she keeps getting muddled. Ana assures her that she doesn’t have any hole for any penis. Pina is going to show her that she does; that her mom isn’t a liar. Ana pulls down her pants and knickers. It’s Ana who says knickers, because that’s what they call them in England where Agatha Christie comes from. Pina calls them panties.