Laia Jufresa - Umami

She sleeps for a while, and when she wakes up the sun is coming up. They’re parked up by the side of a tollgate. Pina sits up and looks out the window. Her mom is buying a cup of coffee and her dad must be in the bathroom because she can’t see him. She puts her mouth up against the window the way her mom hates. When she sees her, Chela points to her polystyrene cup, which is her sign for, ‘You want one?’ Pina shakes her head. Chela shrugs her shoulders twice, which is her sign for, ‘Your loss’. Pina counts the things around her. There are five people at the food stand: two of them are vendors and they’re wearing aprons and puffy, layered skirts. There are four cars at the tollgate: one of them is a truck and another has bicycles tied to the roof. There are three dogs loitering around the stand. There is one dad coming out of the bathroom. Chela points at her cup, now facing Beto, and he shakes his head. Chela gives another two shrugs. Pina thinks, ‘Coffee strike.’ There is one dad, one girl, and one camper waiting for one mom who’s chatting with the two vendors.

*

They set off again. It’s light now and they’re getting close to the dip in the road that Pina always dreads, but at the same time craves to see; from up there you can see the layer of scum you’re heading into. Mexico City sits waiting under the scum. Mexico City lives under the scum. Sometimes a few towers or roofs might poke out from beneath it, but in general, in the first hours of the morning, the scum is sealed: like something you could bounce up and down on. But it does let you in. The scum swallows you and makes sure you forget all about it. This is its chief characteristic: as soon as you enter the scum, you stop seeing it. Pina knows this, and yet she struggles to believe it every time she’s there on that slope, looking down on it; at how thick, how gray, and blue, and brown it is, and semi-solid, like a dirty meringue. She just can’t believe she’ll forget about it. And she tries to keep it in sight for as long as possible, but the scum always disappears eventually. Only once or twice, around mid-morning in the schoolyard, has she thought she could make it out above her, high, high above the school, blurring the outlines of the taller buildings. Pina greets it quietly: ‘Hello, scum.’ According to Theo, Mexico City kids have that scum in their lungs, and they pollute the places they visit just by exhaling.

About halfway down the slope, the camper pierces through the scum. It disappears in an instant. Pina is doing everything she can to keep the scum in sight — ‘see it, see it, see it’ — when her mom lets out a scream. The camper lurches, then carries on as if nothing had happened.

‘What the fuck?’ her dad says.

‘A bathtub! There was a bathtub!’ her mom answers, pointing to a spot that’s impossible to make out among the trees and going at that speed. At the first chance she gets, Chela comes off the highway and starts driving up and down side streets. Beto asks her to get back onto the highway. The sudden change of direction has riled him: he wants to make it to the office on time. Chela ignores him. Pina pinches herself. It starts to rain. Theo would say, ‘That’s the scum peeing on us.’

*

They spend a long time swerving puddles and stones, none of them saying a word, and with the music off. Despite herself, Pina starts to think her dad is right and that her mom just imagined the bathtub. But she doesn’t say anything because she’s on opinion strike. Her mom says she didn’t imagine it, that they should leave her alone, that she’s going to find it. And she does. They turn a corner and there it is, clear as day. All the houses in the street have either gas tanks or water tanks or plants on their roofs. Except for one, which has a bathtub on it: it’s filthy and old, and has gold feet.

‘It’s got lion feet!’ Chela says, as if this made up for the horrible hour they’ve just spent looking for it. And for a second Pina expects a burst of laughter; silently, she tries willing her dad to laugh like he did when Chela bought the camper, so that the three of them can all burst into an infectious, unifying fit of hysterics. But her dad just says, totally dry, ‘De-lux.’

Chela parks up behind a driverless taxi and gets out of the camper like she knows where she’s going, protecting herself from the rain with her flimsy cardigan. She looks a bit weird with her flowery dress in this place were the taxis live. Pina gives herself permission to talk again.

‘Why are the houses gray here?’ she asks.

‘They’re stained by the smog,’ answers her dad.

‘Is this where the scum lives?’

Beto says, ‘Yes.’ Then straight away, ‘No.’

Pina explains that she already knows what the smog is. Her school closed one time because of it and she was allowed to stay in her pajamas all day long for days on end.

‘You’re not going to make it to school today,’ her dad says.

‘That’s alright,’ Pina says, and she passes Beto his tie.

‘Thanks,’ he says, but doesn’t put it on.

The metal door her mom has just knocked on opens, and a fat man appears in the doorway. He’s not wearing a T-shirt, and he only lays his eyes on Chela for a second before closing the door again. Chela shrugs and Beto raises his eyebrows, which is the sign for, ‘I told you.’ But then the man comes out again, now wearing a T-shirt. A little girl peeps out from behind him, staring at Chela.

‘Maybe she has no mom,’ Pina thinks. ‘Maybe she wants mine.’

Chela talks to the man, points to the rooftop, puts her hands together, and eventually it looks like the man says something back to her. She walks back to the camper. Beto leans in toward the driver’s door and winds down the window.

‘How much have you got on you?’ she asks.

Beto opens his wallet.

‘Five hundred pesos.’

She takes all the cash, leans half her body through the window, rifles through her bottomless handbag, takes another couple of bills and, as a parting gesture, grabs the coins sitting in the camper ashtray. Beto is still holding his empty wallet, which is now gaping at the middle like a black fish freshly gutted by the monger. Chela is radiant with all that money in her hands and her hair sticking to her face in the rain. She blows Beto a kiss. Pina takes her money from her backpack and offers it to her: it’s a ten-peso coin, but Chela doesn’t accept it.

‘Save it for the bubbles,’ she says, and she blows another kiss, this time to Pina.

‘What bubbles?’ asks Pina, but Chela has already turned around. It’s her dad who answers.

‘She means bubble bath. To put in that thing.’

They watch as Chela hands the man the money, and he hands it back to her. She gives it to him again. He gives it back to her. This happens three or four times until at last the man pockets the money and lets Pina’s mom into the house. She closes the door behind her. This is when Beto, who up until then had been sitting with his head leaned back against his chair, sits up. He moves his nose in toward the windshield. Not long after, they see Chela appear on the rooftop accompanied by a lanky boy. Pina’s chest is beating so hard and fast that her admiration feels like fear.

‘That’s my mom!’ she wants to say.

Her mom is shouting something to her dad. They can’t hear her, but get the gist of what she’s saying from how she’s moving her hands. Beto lets out a sigh.

‘Don’t get out of the car,’ he tells Pina as he opens his door. Before he’s even closed it again he’s landed his feet in a puddle, soaking his socks. He slams the door, damning this and fucking that, and runs to the house, trying but failing to protect himself from the rain with his hands. His white shirt goes see-through. Before he’s even knocked, the same girl opens the door. She looks at Pina for a second, then closes the door behind Beto. ‘That’s it,’ thinks Pina. ‘The little girl has won: she’s going to keep my parents and I’ll end with the fat, shirtless man for a father.’ She shakes the thought from her head by turning her attention to her mom on the roof. Chela has broken into dance.