Laia Jufresa - Umami

‘A wholesome woman. A whole lotta woman. The whole shebang,’ Marina thinks.

And Chela, as if intuiting some of what’s passing through Marina’s head, says, ‘I turn forty this year.’

What’s that supposed to mean? Is forty old? Marina does the math. This woman, so much more of a woman than she is, is closer to her mom’s age than to her own.

‘How old is Pina?’

‘She turns twelve tomorrow,’ Chela says. ‘That’s why…’

She doesn’t finish her sentence and Marina doesn’t probe any further. Tiny volcanoes erupt on the surface of the crepe. Chela flips it. There’s something planetary about the side now facing up: a pattern of concentric circles that vary in color where one part took a millisecond more or less to cook. Marina decides to change the tone of the conversation; the last thing she needs is to take on Chela’s drama.

‘It looks like the growth rings on a tree,’ she says.

‘I haven’t seen her since she was nine,’ Chela says, and she slides the crepe onto a plate. The side facing up now is whitish like a pasty baby, and doesn’t have growth rings or indeed anything that speaks of the universe on it, apart from some disconcerting craters where the volcanoes erupted. Chela starts a new crepe.

‘Pina?’ Marina asks, stupidly.

Chela nods, keeping her eyes on the pan. Every time the edge of the batter mixture goes solid, she presses it down with the spatula and the liquid rushes in to replace it, until it too sets. She didn’t apply this level of neurotic vigilance to the previous one.

‘Do you know why I called her that?’ Chela asks. ‘After Pina Bausch. Do you know who Pina Bausch is? She’s a seriously important choreographer, a genius, a…’

Her sentence deflates. Chela focuses on her spatula like a child in front of a videogame; her eyes detect setting edges in an instant, and without blinking, so the tears that start to fall from them don’t seem to have any relation to her, or to what she’s saying. Marina once went to a water park in the port of Veracruz with a wave machine where jets of water would shoot out. That’s what Chela’s face reminds her of. She flips the crepe and it’s ruined, its rings disturbed too soon by the spatula.

‘I haven’t seen my dad for a year and a half,’ Marina says.

She’s not sure why she said it, maybe to distract Chela, or maybe because she’d like to be able to talk like her: to cry without making a big song and dance about it; to say through tears and laughter, ‘My dad could make you a perfect club sandwich, blow gigantic soap bubbles, and then drink too much and answer everyone with his fists. Well, everyone except me. Not every night, but like the club sandwich: from time to time. And sometimes he’d break things: my mother’s teeth, my brother’s ribs.’ And Marina would like to add, ‘And I, like an idiot, could never get mad at him.’ But all she says is, ‘A ballet choreographer?’

‘Bausch? Contempo. Contemporary dance, you know what that is?’

‘More or less. You’re a dancer too, right?’

‘Not anymore.’

‘What, one day you just said enough is enough?’

‘No. I couldn’t find any contempo in Mazunte.’

Back in 1982, while I recovered from the bike accident, Noelia took up the habit of calling me as soon as she got to work. Since we had nothing to say to each other, having only just eaten breakfast together, she would give me a report of the traffic she’d encountered on the way from our house to the hospital, putting on a voice that she thought made her sound like a sports commentator, but in fact only made her seem like a tattletale.

‘He overtook me on the right!’ she’d say. Or, ‘I saw a man hit by a car right outside a church. There are no morals anymore!’

When, almost twenty years later, she began chemo, I took it upon myself to give her a report of the traffic I saw from the bus window on my way back and forth from the institute or the market. But it was invariably so lame, so half-hearted and obviously half made-up that Noe eventually ruled that I didn’t have a driver’s sensibility and was better off telling her about my fellow passengers on the bus. That was much more fun. I like to think that never learning to drive saved me a lot of ball ache. I would have let everyone overtake me, left, right, and center. Boy, it would have driven my wife nuts, me calmly waving on my aggressor.

Back to 1982. Once Noe had finished her traffic update, we would hang up and I would draw in bed. The rest-and-recuperation instruction manual they’d given me in the hospital was too boring to actually read, so I’d asked my night nurse, AKA my wife, and she gave me the gist of it: Forbidden to work . And that is how I came to spend my recovery period drawing, a hobby I’d loved as a child, and something I’d spent almost my entire adult life putting off. I soon realized that every time I had a pencil in my hand I’d draw houses. Design them, if you like. All those months spent cooped up in the house of my childhood, adolescence, and adult life (more or less on the spot where I’m writing this now) convinced me I should have been an architect. Architects have the sensibility of an artist, a pinch of philosophical coherence, a healthy dose of opportunism and even their share of scientific rigor on a basic, structural level (the level that stops houses falling down on top of them). But more than all this — and in radical contrast to anthropologists — the work of architects actually serves a purpose.

*

Umami starts in the mouth, in the middle of the tongue, activating salivation. Your molars wake up and feel the urge to bite, beg to move. Not that different in fact, albeit less powerful, from the instinct that drives your hips to move almost of their own accord during sex. In that moment, you only know how to obey your body. The body knows what needs to be done. Chomping is a pleasure, and umami is so darn chompable. Chompable isn’t a word, but I don’t like chewable. Chewable is what they call those vitamin C tablets. Chompable seems more ad hoc to me, more of a treat, more sinful. Or, as Agatha Christie would say, ‘delish’.

In cookbooks they use the word ‘rich’ to describe umami. I like ‘rich’ but it doesn’t translate well into Spanish, because in English it connotes something complex, filling, satisfying, while rico just means tasty.

If we delve back to the beginning, perhaps umami doesn’t start in the mouth at all, but rather as a craving, at first sight.

*

I dug out a letter I wrote to Noelia from Madrid on July 21 1983.

All I can say, my love, is: Bravo to me! I’ve made a friend! He’s a philosopher. He was leaving the library the other day at the same time as me. Next thing I knew he’d crossed to my side of the street, and we went on like that for twenty minutes, until we reached the same block, both of us suspecting the other of following him. Later we laughed about it, of course: it turns out we’re neighbors. He’s Spanish and he’s called Juan (aren’t they all?). Best part is he’s just as lonesome as I am because he recently came back from a long exile in Mexico. We’ve got into the habit of going for a drink — or four — when the city heats up. Yesterday I asked him where I should go to buy some bathing trunks, because I’m thinking of making the most of the dead hours (so many hours without you!) to learn how to swim. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? If I do learn, when I get back, we’ll go to Acapulco. We’ll go even if I don’t learn. I’m craving the sea like never before. It’s Madrid’s heat (dry as dry can be). It leaves me KO. Anyway, the point is, my Noe, that Juan answered my bathing-trunk query like this: ‘In Madrid they’ve hit upon the ultimate ontological proof, and it goes like this: “If it exists, you’ll find it in the Corte Inglés.”’