Laia Jufresa - Umami

‘I don’t ask my students to do that.’

‘Oh.’

‘But it’s interesting. Where did you learn that?’

‘College. I take Art History. It’s the only subject I like.’

Chela raises her torso to a forty-five degree angle, puts her elbows back on the rug and rests her chin in her hands. Then she covers her face with her hands and says, ‘I never finished high school.’ Next she opens her mouth wide and slides her fingers down her face, pushing hard to drag her cheeks down like in Munch’s The Scream . Marina laughs.

Chela asks, ‘Won’t you teach an uneducated girl more of that neat stuff?’

‘Symeon the Stylite, ever heard of him?’

‘Never.’

‘He was a fifth-century Assyrian monk who only ate once a day and spent twenty hours on his feet, genuflecting on top of an eighteen-meter-high stone pillar.’

‘What for?’ asks Chela, sitting up.

‘According to my teacher, this guy’s the true father of performance.’

‘I have a friend who does performance. She’s really famous because after 9/11 she spent days at a metro station in New York whispering through a megaphone: Please do not despair .’

‘I’m taking English classes, did I say?’

Chela gets up. She wraps one knee around the other and puts her hands together as if in prayer. She does three squats on one leg. Marina laughs. Chela hobbles toward her in the same position until she reaches the sofa and crashes onto it.

‘I’m hungry,’ she says.

The Symeon story makes Marina think that her own problems with food — her sick tendency to waste it — is not such a big deal after all. But she doesn’t say this to Chela, or what she’s thinking: ‘And you, Marina? Are you hungry? No idea. What have I eaten today? Oats — Yakult — twenty-five — pieces — of — popcorn — beer.’

Chela picks up the popcorn bowl. She polished off the last pieces hours ago with her tea. She picks out the remaining husks and gnaws them one by one, like a poised mouse. Her back still perfectly straight, she collects the husks in the palm of her other hand.

‘Do you have any other children?’ Marina asks.

Chela says no and drops the husks (clink, clink, clink, they cascade into the bowl).

‘Did you eat dinner already, before I showed up?’ she asks.

‘You don’t look like Pina,’ Marina says.

Chela lets out a huff.

‘Pina looks Asian,’ Marina goes on.

‘It’s from Beto. Isn’t that kinda obvious?’

‘Yeah, they both look Asian. Why?’

‘Beto’s mom was Japanese. That’s essentially why he’s so square. Can we eat something, please, please, please? I’ll make it. I’m an amazing cook.’

‘I don’t have anything in.’

‘Impossible.’

They go to the kitchen in their socks. Chela roots through the store cupboard and fridge and then announces she’s going to make some crepes.

‘You, sit,’ she says, and Marina sits at the breakfast bar where she tends to slump while Chihuahua cooks up fights. Well, he cooks meals that end up as a fight when Marina can’t manage to eat them.

Marina feels like she’s sitting in front of a movie, the way she likes them: with the sound off. She watches Chela braid her hair, rub her hands together and make herself at home in the space, getting out sugar, flour, and milk (all those raw materials Marina buys then leaves untouched, like someone who collects perfumes for the bottles). Then, out of nowhere, she brings up the question she’s been meaning to ask: does Chela know Linda?

‘Of course,’ Chela says. ‘Linda and her husband knew my husband before we all moved here, from the orchestra.’

This surprises Marina.

‘Is he a musician too?’

Chela frowns.

‘No, Beto’s a bureaucrat.’

Marina doesn’t say as much, but that’s exactly what she’d imagined. Nor does she mention she finds Beto rather attractive, with that particular appeal of sad men.

‘Cultural bureaucrat,’ Chela continues, ‘there’s a whole breed of them in this country. You’ll hear him playing guitar in his free time, but he’s got a banker’s soul. He’s a good dad; I’ll give him that. But he was a tyrannical husband. Not violent. Quite the opposite: a complete walkover. I’m the only woman I know who got a divorce because of a crisis of boredom. In fact, we never did get a divorce. At least not as far as I know. Do you know anything about that?’

Marina laughs.

‘Why didn’t you knock on Linda’s door?’ she asks.

Chela looks at her as if she hasn’t heard, which isn’t physically possible. Marina makes a mental note to try this in the future: when someone asks her something she doesn’t want to answer, she’ll just stare at them, as if waiting for them to talk.

Chela passes the flour through a sieve, making a mound in the salad bowl, and with her finger she carves a crater at the peak. She breaks the egg over the mini volcano then throws in some sugar. With a fork, she whisks it all together. Next, she puts some butter to melt in the microwave, announcing, in the process, that by French standards this would be ‘cheating’. She whisks and whisks and then covers the mixture in the bowl with a dish towel.

‘You have to let it rest a couple of minutes,’ Chela says, opening the fridge. Without the slightest fuss, and in one swift move, she takes the moldy carrots from the tray and throws them in the trash. She refills the plastic cups and stands by the screen door looking out onto the water tank. Marina is still at the breakfast bar.

‘I couldn’t bare to. I think Linda might hate me. Víctor won’t. But she might. She’s so opinionated, so spirited. Plus, she copes with four children when I couldn’t even handle one. I don’t think she’d even let me in the mews, actually.’

Chela looks at Marina through the reflection in the door, raises her glass and says, ‘Thanks for letting me in.’

Then she turns around and lights the stove.

Now Marina thinks about it, Pina is also absurdly beautiful. A kind of oneiric beauty, with those Buddha-like almond eyes and that perfect, slim nose. It’s a wonder she can even breathe. She shouldn’t think like this, she tells herself, when it wasn’t all that long ago that that little girl drowned. Marina is never pleased when Pina turns up unannounced, because the Pérez-Walkers pay per hour, not per kid. Plus, her presence changes the order of things, so that Ana and Theo, who on the whole leave each other in peace, are suddenly overcome with a feverish urge to rip each other apart in front of their guest. When Linda hired Marina, she told her she was the first nanny the kids had had in their lives. With four kids! Marina doesn’t get how she can look after them all and play the flute, or the cello, or whatever it is she plays, the one-woman band. Suddenly, the pedestal she’s put Linda on seems out of reach. Obsolete. Would Linda really not open the door to Chela? Marina thinks she would, then that she wouldn’t: she doesn’t know what to think. Would Linda be pissed if she knew that Marina had let her in? She takes a certain pleasure in the idea of going against the woman she so obsessively compares herself to. In their next class she’ll tell Linda that she got stoned with her old friend Chela. Let’s see how she likes that.

‘The first one always turns out badly,’ say Chela, as she rolls a perfect circle of whitish batter around the pan.

‘How come you know how to make crepes?’

‘I picked it up in a hotel in Belize. Crazy life, eh? That’s what people around here must say about me, right? Lost, irresponsible, a terrible mother.’

Marina wants to tell her the truth — that they’ve never once brought her up — but she doesn’t know how to break it to her so that it sounds less offensive. She gets to her feet and opens the door to the yard. The smell of butter is making her feel woozy. Linda spreads the mixture with a silicon spatula that Marina bought on offer and has never used. Marina watches, trying not to show her utter fascination. She cups her beer with two hands as if it were hot chocolate, and takes comparative notes. Could she be like this woman? A lover of men and food and freedom? Will she ever feel at ease cooking? Or fucking?