Laia Jufresa - Umami

Once back in our hotel room with the girl, we opened the stroller we’d bought a few days earlier in London and discovered it didn’t fit in the room, so we tried to ask for a bigger one. We never got to the bottom of exactly what happened, but it was clear that the owners weren’t in the least amused by Maria because they ran us out of there without the slightest hint of that famous English gentility. Not really knowing what to do, we drove back to Melissa Marissa’s house to ask where we could find another hotel. At first she burst out laughing, then she cried a bit (on seeing Maria, who she thought she’d said goodbye to forever), then she insisted we stay the night in her house.

It was the most god-awful night of my life. The reborner inflated a blow-up bed on the floor of her studio. The mattress and bed linen were comfortable enough, but whichever way you turned there were bits of baby. The really terrible parts are the limbs and the heads, because the torsos and pelvises on reborns are made of an agreeable enough material, and look a bit more like a pincushion or a ragdoll, so aren’t so horrifying. In the room though there were arms and legs in pristine vinyl, not yet coated in the layers and layers of paint they give them. Others were already painted in complex tones, and I don’t know which were worse: the ghostly white ones, or the ones that looked like real skin. Not to mention the half-made dolls, which still hadn’t been assembled but looked totally lifelike. In order to sleep without feeling watched I had to lay a T-shirt incredibly carefully over a little table with three finished heads, which Marissa Melissa was clearly in the process of stitching, pore by pore, with fine baby hair.

Noelia and Marissa Melissa stayed up until the early hours of the morning drinking tea and nightcaps and playing with the dolls. God knows how much they must have drunk. All I know is that when I woke up a ) there were various reborns dressed in traditional Mexican attire and b ) Noelia had bought a second doll. I was too intent on getting out of there to argue, and the money was all hers, so I kept my mouth shut.

This was a girl, they explained to me tenderly, who somebody had adopted and then returned! Like a pair of shoes! Noelia called her Clara, at least at first, because she was blond and pale. If you looked closely, around her eyes some veins showed. For the life of me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that those veins — which I knew had been painted on — were in fact showing through her pale baby skin. In short, Clara was just as gut-wrenchingly disturbing to look at as Maria. You could stop breathing waiting for them to. But Clara didn’t have a brida , so you’d sit there expectantly and she wouldn’t move a muscle. It’s the same even today. Some days, the stillness of The Girls is the only thing that’ll convince me they aren’t alive.

*

Like all the other doctors I know, Noelia didn’t go to the doctor. It’s a specific bullheadedness of specialists who think that the smattering of general medicine they learned thirty years ago will keep them safe from all ills. Noelia self-assessed, self-diagnosed, self-medicated, and, at a glance, would assess, diagnose, and medicate me too. Her non-cardiological diagnoses often fell short of the mark. Of course, her own misdiagnosis proved to be much worse, but at least once she messed up pretty badly with me. It must have been around 1987. I remember we were in the middle of the construction work on the mews and The Girls weren’t around yet. One Friday I started to feel really, really unwell and Noelia had me on paracetamol and tea right up until the following Monday. By the time I woke up on Tuesday my eyes were yellow. I had a severe case of hepatitis, and only survived it because we ran that second to the hospital where they hooked me up and pumped me full of all sorts of drugs. She herself took far too long to go and check out her pains, which I’d guessed were her body’s way of protesting against her incurable addiction to work. But by the time she did have some tests, the cancer was already terminal.

*

Carefully placing Maria and Clara in their boxes first, we folded up the stroller, waved Marissa Melissa farewell, and drove to the airport. On the way there we listened to the album that had become a kind of soundtrack to the trip, because someone had left it in the rental car. Noelia loved that album, which was sickeningly schmaltzy. Or perhaps she just wanted The Girls to preserve some link to their past, because driving along she suddenly declared that they were no longer going to be called Maria and Clara, but rather Kenny and G. I asked if she understood that Kenny was the name of a boy, and she laughed.

‘Seriously,’ I told her, and when we stopped for gas I showed her the CD.

Noelia, who never wore her glasses on vacation, had seen the long hair and guessed that Kenny G was a female saxophonist. She moved the album right up close to her nose to make absolutely sure she wasn’t right, and then, after thinking about it for a second said, ‘Makes no difference, the names are staying.’

Once on the plane we flipped a coin to decide who was going to take which name. Kenny is Clara, the one who can’t breathe. G is the one with the brida. I change her batteries every three weeks, but ever since Agatha Christie branded me a polluter, they’ve been rechargeable, and during the time it takes for the light on the charger to go from yellow to green, G doesn’t breathe. But I sit her right up next to Kenny, who’s used to living like that, and she teaches her. I don’t expect anyone to believe this, but they’ve been good sisters to each other.

*

Noelia decided to have chemotherapy. Not because she thought it would work, but because she refused to sit around twiddling her thumbs. Luckily, she also agreed to take huge doses of antidepressants, which helped her live out her last months more or less in peace. They put me on the same ones. I still take them. When I’m about to run out I write a prescription on one of the pads still left in the study with her ID and details on. And I fake her signature, which is something I’ve known how to do since we got married and I was a junior researcher with no rental income to rely on, so all our groceries went on her credit card.

Lately I’ve doubled my dose, telling myself I take it for the both of us.

*

Like all daughters who are only a daughter, Noelia had an incomprehensible relationship with her mother. She always felt the urge to call her at the slightest problem, but whenever she was around, the mere tone of her voice, the rhythm of her breathing, or the volume of her chewing was enough to drive Noelia insane. I didn’t sit through a single meal with them in which they weren’t both putting the other down. Only in her rare lucid moments — generally led by a mixture of alcohol and guilt for some rude reaction on her part — would Noelia admit that the things that most irritated her about her mother were also behaviors she repeated without noticing. Like, for example, only ever buying cheap shoes that gave her blisters.

The one time I thought I’d point out how similar they were, my wife answered, ‘You can be a real iguana sometimes, Alfonso, you know that?’

*

I didn’t like the hepatitis story. And I especially disliked Noelia telling it in public. It showed me up as unmanly and impressionable. I thought it was proof of how she did whatever she liked with me and I just rolled over and let her, limp and compliant. I didn’t and still don’t negate my hen-pecked condition, which I’ve always acknowledged publicly and with my head held high. But I felt that the details of these sacrifices should stay between us. The story of my hepatitis seemed especially intimate to me, and I always felt affronted when I had to listen to it at a dinner party, as if Noelia were telling everyone the story of how, when we first met, I couldn’t sleep spooning but now I can’t sleep any other way. I also converted to the religion of hugs, sweatpants on Sundays, even frozen fish (despite knowing it’s drying up lake Victoria). She even convinced me to watch romantic comedies with her every now and then. Nowadays, to get to sleep I have to prop two pillows behind me. But the pillows don’t hug me or warm me up when I come back from the bathroom. Before going to bed I sing to Kenny and G, and tuck them in like Noelia did every night since the day we brought them to Mexico.