Laia Jufresa - Umami

‘If you’d had kids, your concentration and memory would be better, and you’d be more tolerant and disciplined,’ she’d say to me.

‘What’s any of that got to do with children, woman?’

‘If you have children you have to go to school every day at the same time to pick them up, and if you forget it hurts real bad.’

‘Well, it does hurt me when I forget things.’

‘Nuh-uh, Alfonso. It can’t hurt real bad unless there’s someone to remind you that you forgot.’

*

It was Noelia Vargas Vargas’s job to let me know when someone was teasing me, because I didn’t ever catch on. We had a code for it. She would tilt her head forwards, and I’d proceed to defend myself. Once or twice I tried to work out exactly where the gibe had come from, but it never worked so I learned that it was better to wait for her signal, then object.

‘Guys, quit messing with me, will you?’ I’d say to everyone. Often the culprit was Noelia herself, and in such cases, once we’d left wherever it was we were, she would amuse herself spelling it out for me. She always thought me naive. She used to say — in a friendly way, as if it were just another of the quirky upshots of having married an anthropologist (if we were among doctors), or of having married a Mexico City chilango (if we were among her folk from Michoacán) — that I had three basic failings: I never learned how to mess with people, drive, or swim. If you ask me, the last one isn’t quite true because I can doggy-paddle just fine, thank you very much.

The point is that Noelia certainly had it in her to be more bitch than beauty. Especially at the beginning, when she was often defensive (according to her because she worked solely among men, but who knows). The first time we fought badly she told me something I never forgave her for, despite all her efforts to make it up to me. Her words were succinct, and arguably valid: ‘You fuck like a rich kid.’

*

Now I feel like the inflatable duck. So let him be my alter ego. Why not? I’m going to sign everything I write here under Widow Ducky, Lord Amaranth. Let’s see if I remember how to save things. At what point, I wonder, are they going to change the symbol for saving files from a floppy disk?

By the way, Ms. Simone, I should probably clarify that I’m not on a real sabbatical. On paper it might be a sabbatical, but let there be no mistake: in mind and in spirit I’ve retired. If I gave up work officially, on my measly pension I’d starve to death. Starve! Me! The world expert on sacred amaranth. The man who introduced the concept of umami into the national gastronomic dialog! Starve! And all because the old fool hasn’t tended his milpa since 2001: corn is hardy stuff, but it’s not invincible. Even corncobs need their little drops of water. Even a widowed duck needs love. Come on.

What else?

Laptop. Triceratops. Doo-wop. What’s the research topic for the new machine going to be?

It’s going to be Noelia.

I’m crawling around under the trees singing ‘camu-flash flash flash’. I want to find mushrooms. I do not want to find any slugs. I just learned the word ‘camuflash’. It means no one can see me. I’m like the mushrooms and the slugs, hidden under the leaves. The leaves fall off the trees. They’re brown like nuts. The green balls with little spikes that Grandma Emma says have nuts inside fall off too. They only fall off once, then they stay there on the ground until they go brown and rotten and camuflashed with the mud. A family of trees is called a grove. This grove is Grandma’s neighbor. Kind of. In Mexico our neighbors all live in the mews, but here neighbor is anyone who lives more or less near. Near you or near the lake. You have to go everywhere in the car here, and everything is camuflashed. For example, Granddad is camuflashed in the lake. Well, his ashes are. And Grandma chats to them when she goes walking along the shore, and she flicks her cigarette ash in the water, to keep him company. I don’t remember Granddad but my sister does. She says he had a really red nose and said our names like this: Ann, Tee-yo, Olmou, Loose.

Before he was ashes, our Granddad was a pilot and that’s why we get free tickets and that’s why we fly a lot like birds, but without the feathers or the fun. Well, it’s a little fun because you can watch movies and they bring you these cheese triangles on your food tray. Mama says that when her dad the pilot died, Grandma cut up all his sweaters and sewed them back together again until she’d made sweaters for all of us. Olmo calls them our woolly dead pilot sweaters.

Mama starts whistling and squeaking her boots together to make music. The song makes Grandma laugh. Mama has a basket hooked on one elbow and Grandma hooked on the other. And she has a white rag wrapped around her head. She calls them rags, those things she puts on her head. Mama’s basket is full but that’s because she collects everything she finds, which is cheating. Grandma doesn’t approve of Mama’s picking technique. Those are the words she said and that’s why she won’t let go of her arm, no matter how pretty her squeaky song is. Every time Mama collects a mushroom, Grandma says:

‘That one’s poisonous,’ or, ‘That one’s OK, but it tastes awful,’ or, ‘Don’t even touch that one, please.’

She doesn’t say anything to me because I’m not cheating. When we got to her house this time, Grandma called me Peanut.

‘Last summer you were just a peanut,’ she said.

I liked that. But then Ana said, ‘She means you were still a baby.’

I didn’t like that.

‘I’m almost six,’ I told Emma.

‘Five is a lucky number,’ she said.

Today, the boys went camping and us girls stayed behind to pick mushrooms. Emma gave us baskets and plastic bags and told us which mushrooms we were looking out for: black trumpets. In Spanish they’re called las trompetas de la muerte , death trumpets, even though black and dead isn’t the same thing. You just can’t trust English: it translates stuff all wrong. And they’re not even really black; more like very dark brown. I know because Emma gave me a trumpet all of my own in a sandwich bag. I’ve been dragging it along behind me and the bag is so covered in mud already that you can’t see anything inside. My death trumpet is camuflashed. It’s happy, too, I can tell. Emma said that it’s my guide specimen. A specimen is something that’s like a mention of its species.

The boys are my dad, Pina’s dad Beto, and my two brothers. They took the canoe and they’re going to sleep on an island in the middle of the lake. I wanted to go with them, but then I saw Theo putting a bunch of straws in his backpack and I thought best to go with the girls. Yesterday, Pina made us breathe through straws with our heads camuflashed under the water in the lake and it felt horrible. Only Theo lasted a long time, and now he thinks he’s king of the straws and he wants to play at straws all day long.

The grown-up girls are my mom and Emma. The little girls are me, my sister Ana, and her friend Pina who has a woolly dead pilot sweater that doesn’t belong to her tied around her waist. She doesn’t have her own one because she’s not part of the family. We call her Pi, and when she annoys us we call her Pee-Pee and Ana gets real mad. Pi is sad because her mom left her a letter. If my mom left me a letter I’d be happy, but when I said as much to Ana she said, ‘That’s because you’re dumb.’

Ana is ten and she thinks she’s the queen of the forest.

When my mom lent Pina the sweater I instantly wanted mine. Mama said that I could only put it on if I took everything else off. That’s why under my sweater I’m only wearing my swimsuit, and that’s why the mud feels scratchy against my knees as I crawl along. And that’s why I try to stick to the mushy parts, where I can slide along and nothing hurts.