Umami (10 page)

‘Marina, your body
knows
,' he tells her.

But what Marina thinks is that Mr. Therapist doesn't
know
shit. She suspects that he would have liked to be a surgeon but could never tell his blood cells from his blood clots. She suspects he had to throw in the towel, the kudos, and all the other more pressing issues they take care of elsewhere in the hospital. She suspects he had to resign himself to Floor 8, Psychiatry: Sudokus for the soul.

*

A few raindrops fall on the water tank. The wet black gleams: weckbleam. When she first rented Bitter last summer, it rained every afternoon, even inside the house, and she dashed around here and there catching the drips in pans and thinking to herself cheerfully, ‘Wasn't Mexico City supposed to be dry? Wasn't Mexico City really, really dry?' Back then she had no more to her name than her nineteen years and some waitressing savings. The money she gets now – the fat, guilt-ridden check her father sends her – didn't exist during those first months. She stored her things in a makeshift closet built out of bricks and boards, which she painted gold in a burst of enthusiasm. (Goldasm.) She drank out of yogurt pots. She bought a mattress and a single pillow. These days she looks at the house and feels suffocated by all the stuff she's collected. She sees the money from the restaurant in everything – the restaurant and the cooks' sweat; how they'd pick their teeth with their index fingers and then, without a second thought, work the meat with their hands, blood and fat on their apron pockets. On the street the relentless Xalapan drizzle, and in the kitchen the tiled floor growing steadily more filthy as the day went on, making the soles of their shoes squeak against the accumulated footprints that marked the senselessness of it all. And that senselessness played out from one day to the next, but – she'd often felt this in the kitchen – merely repeating itself. In her growing collection of stylish pillows she sees the thousand layers of mascara on the provincial middle-class women who would flock to the restaurant desperate for a ‘girls' night out', which always seemed to Marina too hysterical, too high-pitched to signal any kind of real friendship. They called each other ‘girl', because youth was their holy grail. The rejuvenation cult never fails to disconcert Marina who, no matter what age she turns, always wishes she were older.

The women would call her over, ‘Pst! Hey! Señorita! Miss, another pitcher of sangria.' Perfect teeth, too much perfume, never a morsel left on their plates. Some of them would shamelessly click their fingers at her, then slip her an extra tip because she knew their daughters.

‘An Italian restaurant!' Marina explained to her therapist, with a floating exclamation mark. But he doesn't get the irony. He is incapable of visualizing the Italy of the Mexican provinces: Venice – its eternally vanilla sky – depicted in shoddy frescoes on the walls, and the pasta routinely, even purposely overcooked. Mr. Therapist is too worldly to even begin to imagine the stale cosmopolitanism of those who hop over the border for some retail therapy in McAllen, Texas, but don't dare venture to Mexico City. And he is far too optimistic to see how everything she owns is linked to the restaurant, to her father's temper, to the damp walls, and a social class she can despise all she wants, but which still pays her bills.

Although, in truth, this revulsion she feels toward her belongings has only developed over the last few months, since she left the hospital.

‘If there are two million cushions, and a rug, and a sofa,' she asks in her session, ‘how am I ever going to get out of here?'

‘Where would you like to go?' Mr. Therapist asks.

But she doesn't want to go anywhere. Quite the opposite, she'd like to spend more time in her house. She wants to be home when the whomise lights up her wall. She's twenty years old, is that so much to ask? She opens the fridge. Beer, pickles, two tomatoes, mustard. A couple of yogurts, a collection of jellies and jams that Chihuahua buys and then dishes out sparingly as if they contained gold dust. There isn't any blue cheese in the fridge. There is, however, an egg. Also a set of Tupperware containers that have been there for ages and which she doesn't dare open. There's a bottle of ketchup with so much dried sauce around the hole that the top won't close, like those people who talk so much a thin layer of crust grows in the corner of their mouth. Some carrots she bought weeks ago fester in the tray at the bottom. She used one to masturbate with, then threw it away. The rest are still there. She never worked up the energy to peel them. Fuck, she'd bought them in curative mode. Linda always has a Tupperware full of crudités. Whenever Marina is over there she takes one every time she passes the fridge. Why can't she be more like Linda: seemingly laidback, but an impeccable master of juliennes?

‘Popcorn. That's it. Yes,' she thinks.

It's a tiny sign, no saliva or taste-pore activation or anything, but she finds some popcorn in the sideboard and quickly pops the bag in the microwave. While it cooks, she takes the carrots out of the fridge to peel one, but instantly changes her mind. They're soggy. And that's not all. A few of them have what looks like hair on them, gray-green hair: penicillin, maybe. Disgusted, she throws them back in the vegetable tray, takes out a beer, and closes the fridge. The popcorn goes pop, pop, pop.

‘You should eat, Marina love.'

I know.

She puts the popcorn in a bowl, takes it over to the sofa and turns on the TV. Chihuahua turned up the other day with a TV and now it lives on the living-room floor.

‘Can I hook it up to my computer to watch movies?' Marina asked him.

But Chihuahua had other ideas: he said he'd found something in the closet that looked to him like a ‘Cable cable'.

‘Huh?' said Marina.

She was also going to ask, ‘What were you doing rummaging around in my closet?' But Chihuahua was already dragging over the cable; a great long thing rolled up in a neurotic figure of eight which could only be his doing. They moved the TV to where the cable reached, plugged it in and NBC news blinked onto the screen. The presenter was a blond in a pantsuit, the day's dramas racing across her chest on a rotating sash, like a Miss Tragic Universe 2003.

So the cable was hooked up to cable TV. Marina couldn't believe her eyes. Chihuahua had never mentioned it. But then, so what if he had? She wouldn't have given it a second thought. She certainly wouldn't have gone out and bought a TV just to test the thing. Who could have known that all this time, lying in her closet, there was a portal to another dimension, to the day-to-day lives of the rich, of grown ups, of people who watch US TV when they get back from work to shake Mexico off, as if following a twenty-first century version of Manuel Carreño's
Manual of Urbanity and Good Manners
– ‘Be sure to dismount from Mexico before entering the dining room'? Chihuahua was who. Chihuahua knew because he's a big-city boy. It was him who explained to her that the shoes hanging by their laces in the street mark drug-dealing spots; he also showed her who in the neighborhood steals the phone cables to peel them and sell the copper. What annoys Marina is that Chihuahua isn't even from the capital: he's from Ciudad Juárez. She once asked him, ‘How much less provincial could your border town be than Xalapa?' To which he replied, ‘Oh, Juárez is provincial, all right. But it's two countries' provinces at once.'

Chihuahua pronounces English the same way Linda does: seamlessly. Marina tries to copy him but he gets annoyed when she obsesses over his accent.

‘You lot are the ones who are wrong with your litter-a-tour!' he snaps. ‘It's called literature.'

For Chihuahua, ‘you lot' means anyone from the green states. And that's anything south of the deserts. Marina likes arguing with him about this. It makes her feel more defined in her identity, like she belongs to something; in this case, to the South of Mexico. Chihuahua pointed out to her that all Southerners eat quesadillas without
queso
and sort of sing their sentences. She ticks both these boxes. Well, apart from the fact she wouldn't get a whole quesadilla down her these days, cheese or no cheese
.

One piece of popcorn for every commercial. That's the deal she's made with her herself. And she's more or less sticking to it when the doorbell rings. Finally! She freezes on the spot. She knows Chihuahua can see her through the window, because many a night, before entering the mews, she watches the neighbors from across the street through their sheer curtains, which are just like hers. Unobserved, Marina studies the motionless figures, which look like cardboard cutouts offset by the blue light of the television, and she confirms another of her suspicions: that routine kills love.

After the doorbell, Marina eats four pieces of popcorn in a row. That makes twenty-three, or maybe twenty-five. The movie's soundtrack is the rain against the water tank: she likes watching the TV, not listening to it. Then, three bangs on the window facing out onto the street. Typical. She doesn't move. Chihuahua goes on banging. He must be soaked. Marina wants to know if he's drunk, so she stands up and opens the curtains with the most neutral face she can muster. But it's not Chihuahua. It's a woman. A stranger holding a black plastic bag above her head: a sorely ineffectual substitute for an umbrella. Her hand is resting on the window she's just pounded on for a fourth time. It's a small hand, and something about the way she rests it on the wet glass fills Marina with tenderness. It's as if she were holding it there waiting for Marina to do the same. Marina points at herself with her index finger.

‘Me?'

The woman nods.

‘Don't talk to strangers,' was one of the pearls of wisdom her brother gave her when she finally called home to confess she'd moved to Mexico City.

‘Don't open car windows either: not to street vendors, not to the police.'

‘I don't have a car,' Marina told him.

‘Well, in case you happen to go in one,' he'd said. And she remembers this had pissed her off. Why didn't he say, ‘Well, when you do have one'?

To open the main door to the mews Marina has to leave her house and run to the entryway. Oh, what the hell. She slips on her flip-flops, opens the door and makes a run for it. She hadn't taken into account the hail: now the floor drains are clogged and the central passageway is a river, out of which only the very tip of the bell pokes out. Marina opens the main door and the woman steps inside.

Belldrop Mews is so called because, when my grandparents' house partially collapsed in the 1985 earthquake, a huge bronze bell set inside a niche on the facade fell and buried itself in what was the house's yard and is now the open passageway connecting all the houses in the mews. Almost all of us who live here have to skip over the tip of the bell (a chunk of metal protruding from the floor) to enter or exit our houses.

*

Agatha Christie dropped by with her friend, Beto's daughter, what's her name? Pina. What a god-awful name: the only thing that makes up for a name like that is that she's going to be an absolute knockout.

‘Does your wife have a grave?' they asked me.

I told them she does and they gave me some flowers. Agatha Christie explained she bought them for her sister because today is the 353-day anniversary of Luz's death, and that this is a palindrome, so they went to buy her flowers from the garden center, but now there's no one to take them to the cemetery. I asked them if they learned the word palindrome
in school and for some reason they burst into hysterics.

‘Ana is my school,' Pina said.

Something I didn't tell them, but which comes to mind now that they've gone and I'm thinking about the flowers and the yellow sweater, is that perhaps what the Pérez-Walkers need to find solace is a machine like my Nina Simone PC: a direct line to the dead.

Noelia loved Nina Simone.

‘Why did the gods make me big-bootied but not black?' she'd complain when we listened to her.

If you'd asked Noelia what she would have changed about herself, she would have answered that she'd like to be able to sing. Not that I ever asked her. There was no need. Noelia reminded you of these things, never let you forget her defects, as if to stop you from loving her too much.

‘Come on, it was you who had a thing for the black girls, Alfonso.'

‘That's true.'

‘Did you put those flowers in water?'

‘Of course, my brown sugar.'

‘And count the days?'

‘No chance. In my mind, you always died yesterday.'

*

‘You know the type?' was something Noelia would say a lot, above all when she wanted to make sure that whoever she was talking to had understood whatever generalization she'd just come out with. For example, she might say about a nurse, ‘She's one of those women who thinks she's really broken the mold, you know the type?' And about some anesthetist or another, ‘That guy would bite his tongue till it bleeds, you know the type?' Or, about the owner of the garden center next door: ‘He's the kind of man that crashes at the first sign of a curve, you know the type?'

I have to confess, I practically never knew the type she was on about, either because Noelia's definitions belonged to a vernacular I wasn't familiar with, or, more often than not, because she made them up off the top of her head. But after the first few years of extreme frustration (frustration for Noelia because I simply couldn't keep up with her), I ended up adopting a habit, one of many. Anything to keep the peace.

The truth is, – and I'm not saying this because I've worked out that Noelia, wherever she is, is reading what I write – I was fond of her generalizations. They were always original, or at least they seemed as much to me, someone who spent most of his life with his head in the clouds. Unlike me, my wife was in touch with the world: awake, aware of everything around her, including the mundane things that were lost on me and which it was my genuine pleasure to be made aware of. Like watching a good movie or reading a good book. At first they embarrassed me, but as time went on I came to respect the categories my wife invented. There was something almost Kantian about them: a will to develop a system. You-know-the-type was Noelia's way of organizing the people who came into our lives, and it has to be said that she was really quite good at it. She had a witch's intuition. One day an intern started working at the institute, and Noe, having only seen her one lunchtime, said to me, ‘That one will climb the ladder faster than ivy, and good for her.'