Laia Jufresa - Umami

‘That,’ remarks Noelia, ‘is your offspringhood speaking.’

And that may be. But when later I asked Páez his thoughts on the matter he just answered, ‘Diapers? Never heard of him…’

*

‘Am I going senile?’ is what I wish I could ask Páez.

*

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think about how much I took the name Noelia Vargas Vargas for granted. My legs fill up with a kind of black energy and I want to kick something. But the most I ever do is punch the bedspread; more like a child throwing a tantrum than a fully grown, raging man. I should have used her name so much more. I should have taken it in vain. I threw away thousands, millions of chances to savor it in my mouth. When I spoke about her I would say ‘my wife’. When I called her I said ‘love’. When I messaged her I wouldn’t even greet her. I wrote pithily, as if we were immortal:

‘You home for lunch?’

*

Noelia liked the word ‘project’. It made her feel organized. She used to say that we shared a ‘life project’. But, with all due respect and not even caring if she reads this, I think she never fully understood what the term entails. A project is a thing you start up, get excited about, get stuck on, lock horns with, and later, if you’re proud and bold and humble and arrogant and very stubborn, you tackle all the loose ends and finish it. What usually follows is a postnatal bewildered phase, and then finally a feeling of serenity comes over you, and with that the sad realization that nothing has changed, and that in all likelihood nobody really cares about your work. Then comes a kind of peace, and after that, God knows how, the seed of curiosity for a new project sprouts in you. You set about replowing the soil and start all over again. That’s how I’ve worked my entire life. That’s how I’ve done everything I’ve ever done: the mews, the Modern Milpa , every single publication. Only now I can’t seem to formulate a plan of attack. The plants are dying around me. I bathe The Girls grudgingly and half-heartedly. I just drink and write short paragraphs that don’t really follow on from one another and that I bet not even Nina Simone is that fussed about. I’m not even a good drinker. By the third tequila I have to have a lie down, and if I sit down to write, everything comes out jumbled. And with things as they are — with no beginning, no end, no bonus points for publishing these pages — I’ve got neither a project nor any chance of getting over this lackluster routine. I’ll probably go on like this for the rest of my days. Linda asked me the other afternoon if we might not be turning into alcoholics. I told her we weren’t, that we’re C4 plants like amaranth: more efficient in our use of liquids, and capable of producing the same amount of biomass with a smaller amount of water.

‘Biomass?’ she asked.

‘Tears,’ I said.

All I’m saying with this project business is that Noelia undervalued my capacity for coming up with projects. She thought she had it in her as well. And while she had so many more talents than I did, I have to say that in this one thing I outdid her. She never had to work in that self-fueling, self-sustaining way, because she had one, ongoing assignment: a constant line of patients. And they were like the same patient repeated interminably. That’s why something in me protested when she’d use the word project. A silent protest, obviously, because Noelia would talk about the ‘life project’ with unflagging authority, oozing self-confidence as if she were explaining the circulatory system. Even her voice changed. She might say, for example, in that firm tone of hers, ‘Alfonso, you agree this whole reproduction business doesn’t have any place in our life project, right?’

And what would I say? I can’t even remember now. I smiled at her, I guess. Or said, ‘Right.’ And the truth is I did agree with her. Noelia and I always agreed. When we didn’t agree on something, we got over it straight away. We would shout at each other; she had a penchant for slamming doors, and I for grabbing my jacket and walking around the block. And that would be that. We’d be over it. But it’s different now. Now we really are in deadlock. Now I’d give anything for one of our fights.

Here’s my final say on her misusage of the term. If what we shared had indeed been a life project, we would have wrapped it up together. I thought about it at the time, but knew that she wouldn’t have any of it, just as I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it. So our life together wasn’t a project, then; it was the other kind of commitment: the ongoing-assignment kind. Which would also explain why the longer she’s gone, the more I seem to need her.

*

The world is full of iotas, iguanas, indents, ignoramuses, indoctrinators, imposers, ifs and illusions. If you ask me, we’re nothing but a bunch of idiots.

*

I’m in a rotten mood after reading an article in today’s paper in which, once again, they propagate the myth that it was only corn that was grown on the manmade chinampa islands of Lake Xochimilco. Please! How many more studies do we have to publish before the schools will teach the truth: that they planted huautli , sacred amaranth, there. It was all over the place, and the Mexica ate the stem, leaves, and seeds, which they milled to make flour. The flour constituted a foodstuff of course, but it was also used for offerings. The Mexica built figurines of gods, piercing them with small thorns which they’d already stuck into their own flesh to catch a drop of blood. The Spanish were no fools banning amaranth: having one less source of energy was fine by them as long as it meant fewer local rituals to write off. They razed kilometers of plantations, and came up with severe punishments for whoever planted it. And with that, huautli was wiped from the face of their land and erased from memory, with the kind of decisive success that only the most heavily armed militaries can pull off. They masterminded a new history, — ‘There’s only ever been corn here!’ — and we swallowed it. In Mexico we became obsessed with milpas ; some of us still are, two decades and several books later. And yes, yes, milpas are fascinating, as are the pyramids. But there’s something beyond the monumental; something just as beautiful yet much simpler, that takes place in the private lives of others: holiness on a familial scale, where food and ritual are one and the same.

But none of those little things — amaranth, or the daily miracles of faith and routine — are of any interest to pop scientists or documentary makers, who have a tendency to confuse greatness, grandeur, and grandiloquence. Either that, or they simply don’t want to see it. Exactly the same as the tour guides who refuse to explain that the two windows in the famous Tulum pyramid are actually a form of lighthouse. They’ve done tests. People from the institute used candles to project light through the opening as the Mayans did to guide their small boats along the sole canal that spared them from having to run aground on the rocky peninsula. The Mesoamerican reef is the second largest in the world: it starts in Yucatán and ends in Honduras. It’s fascinating to see how they navigated the area, but the hoteliers on the coast don’t seem to think so.

‘A lighthouse!’ they say. ‘Boring! Better to cross that out and write in the official texts “A temple”.’ As if it were better to be fanatical than resourceful!

It winds me up, even now, that so many of our discoveries are systematically ignored at the hands of the ignoramus machistus pharaonicus. Sometimes I honestly think that we’re only working in the institute for the benefit of gringo academics: we’re their manufacturers of juicy details. The things we discover through our research in this country will only see the light of day years later, over there. And by there I mean, at a safe distance from the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education. It’ll go like this: one day some overeducated little gringo who hasn’t eaten a single crumb of amaranth in his life is going to write a book call Amaranthus , and in that book he’ll include all the stuff I’ve been saying for years. Or maybe he’ll use the Náhuatl word, to give it an autochthonous edge: Huautli for Dummies , on sale in all good retailers and airports. They’ll offer the gringo tenure in Berkeley, and then the Chinese, who already plant more amaranth than anyone, will have themselves a whole new market: middle-class America (so lost in questions of diet, so lacking in tradition, so at the mercy of the latest food-group elimination fad). Tell Me What To Eat could be a description in five words of the average, educated gringo. They’ll put that processed Chinese amaranth in shiny packaging, advertise it on TV and export it like plastic toys. In Mexico we’ll buy it at crazy prices, and if you dare try and tell a kid it’s no more than an alegría, those seed bars we’ve always eaten in Mexico, he’ll knock you out with his fortified fist. I can only hope I’m dead by then.