Umami (17 page)

‘I'm Pina's mom, and I didn't dare knock on the door.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I haven't seen her in three years.'

‘You mean, they're in?' Marina asks, lowering her voice as if they might hear her from the other side of the passageway.

‘They might be.'

‘Isabel! Why don't you go over right now?'

‘Right now I'm stoned. And please, call me Chela. My mom was Isabel.'

‘Why didn't you knock?'

Chela gets up, takes a few steps, sits on the floor and opens her legs. They're short and strong-looking. She rests her elbows on the triangle that has formed between her thighs, lowers her forearms and pushes her open palms against the floor, her fingers stretched wide, bits of carpet poking out between them.

‘I don't know,' she says. ‘I chickened out.'

Marina wants to interrogate her. Is she scared of Beto? Does he have custody? Is her being here illegal? But she'd rather just raise her eyebrows. She'd rather go on talking about Chihuahua. Chela took her shoes off a while ago and now Marina studies her bony feet, perhaps the only imperfect part of her anatomy. She'd still be up for seeing them without the socks, though: to see if they're as brown as her arms, to see if she paints her toenails or not.

‘What's with all the little boxes?' Chela asks.

‘Light bulbs.'

‘Why so many?'

‘Because I changed them all today.'

‘Why?'

‘It's a long story.'

Chela drops it. She takes both her big toes with each hand and lowers her chest to the floor. Her legs are just as wide open as before, but now her whole torso is level with the rug. She turns her head to the side and rests her cheek on the floor. Is she going to fall asleep like that? Marina looks at the boxes scattered around on the floor. She looks at the whozac on the wall and remembers all her good intentions. She looks at the time on her cell; it's not raining anymore and she considers telling her guest that it's getting late, that she needs to go because it just so happens that tomorrow is the beginning of Marina's new life: a healthy routine, a life devoted to her art and wellbeing, and so she really must get an early start. But on the other hand, she doesn't want her guest to leave. Now that she has her cell in her hands, Marina knows that the moment Chela goes she'll call Chihuahua; she doesn't want to go to bed alone. Better if Chela doesn't leave. It's his turn to call.

‘You're so flexible. Do you do yoga?' she asks.

‘I teach Pilates at my beach, al fresco.'

Marina sits thinking for a moment, then asks, ‘Do you know about the Iconoclastic Controversy?'

Chela, her cheek still resting against the rug, purses her lips, as if weighing up the question.

‘The what controversy?' she asks eventually.

‘Iconoclastic.' Marina explains, ‘The iconodules were in favor of having images in churches, while the iconoclasts were against it. There was a big fight. In the end the iconodules won, obviously. That's why there are so many crucifixes all over the place. Anyway, my point is that the other day I saw a Pilates video and an idea came to me: if you know what your Pilates teacher means when she asks for “praying hands”, that's thanks to the iconodules.'

‘I don't ask my students to do that.'

‘Oh.'

‘But it's interesting. Where did you learn that?'

‘College. I take Art History. It's the only subject I like.'

Chela raises her torso to a forty-five degree angle, puts her elbows back on the rug and rests her chin in her hands. Then she covers her face with her hands and says, ‘I never finished high school.' Next she opens her mouth wide and slides her fingers down her face, pushing hard to drag her cheeks down like in Munch's
The Scream
. Marina laughs.

Chela asks, ‘Won't you teach an uneducated girl more of that neat stuff?'

‘Symeon the Stylite, ever heard of him?'

‘Never.'

‘He was a fifth-century Assyrian monk who only ate once a day and spent twenty hours on his feet, genuflecting on top of an eighteen-meter-high stone pillar.'

‘What for?' asks Chela, sitting up.

‘According to my teacher, this guy's the true father of performance.'

‘I have a friend who does performance. She's really famous because after 9/11 she spent days at a metro station in New York whispering through a megaphone:
Please do not despair
.'

‘I'm taking English classes, did I say?'

Chela gets up. She wraps one knee around the other and puts her hands together as if in prayer. She does three squats on one leg. Marina laughs. Chela hobbles toward her in the same position until she reaches the sofa and crashes onto it.

‘I'm hungry,' she says.

The Symeon story makes Marina think that her own problems with food – her sick tendency to waste it – is not such a big deal after all. But she doesn't say this to Chela, or what she's thinking: ‘And you, Marina? Are you hungry? No idea. What have I eaten today? Oats–Yakult–twenty-five–pieces–of–popcorn–beer.'

Chela picks up the popcorn bowl. She polished off the last pieces hours ago with her tea. She picks out the remaining husks and gnaws them one by one, like a poised mouse. Her back still perfectly straight, she collects the husks in the palm of her other hand.

‘Do you have any other children?' Marina asks.

Chela says no and drops the husks (clink, clink, clink, they cascade into the bowl).

‘Did you eat dinner already, before I showed up?' she asks.

‘You don't look like Pina,' Marina says.

Chela lets out a huff.

‘Pina looks Asian,' Marina goes on.

‘It's from Beto. Isn't that kinda obvious?'

‘Yeah, they both look Asian. Why?'

‘Beto's mom was Japanese. That's essentially why he's so square. Can we eat something, please, please, please? I'll make it. I'm an amazing cook.'

‘I don't have anything in.'

‘Impossible.'

They go to the kitchen in their socks. Chela roots through the store cupboard and fridge and then announces she's going to make some crepes.

‘You, sit,' she says, and Marina sits at the breakfast bar where she tends to slump while Chihuahua cooks up fights. Well, he cooks meals that end up as a fight when Marina can't manage to eat them.

Marina feels like she's sitting in front of a movie, the way she likes them: with the sound off. She watches Chela braid her hair, rub her hands together and make herself at home in the space, getting out sugar, flour, and milk (all those raw materials Marina buys then leaves untouched, like someone who collects perfumes for the bottles). Then, out of nowhere, she brings up the question she's been meaning to ask: does Chela know Linda?

‘Of course,' Chela says. ‘Linda and her husband knew my husband before we all moved here, from the orchestra.'

This surprises Marina.

‘Is he a musician too?'

Chela frowns.

‘No, Beto's a bureaucrat.'

Marina doesn't say as much, but that's exactly what she'd imagined. Nor does she mention she finds Beto rather attractive, with that particular appeal of sad men.

‘Cultural bureaucrat,' Chela continues, ‘there's a whole breed of them in this country. You'll hear him playing guitar in his free time, but he's got a banker's soul. He's a good dad; I'll give him that. But he was a tyrannical husband. Not violent. Quite the opposite: a complete walkover. I'm the only woman I know who got a divorce because of a crisis of boredom. In fact, we never did get a divorce. At least not as far as I know. Do you know anything about that?'

Marina laughs.

‘Why didn't you knock on Linda's door?' she asks.

Chela looks at her as if she hasn't heard, which isn't physically possible. Marina makes a mental note to try this in the future: when someone asks her something she doesn't want to answer, she'll just stare at them, as if waiting for them to talk.

Chela passes the flour through a sieve, making a mound in the salad bowl, and with her finger she carves a crater at the peak. She breaks the egg over the mini volcano then throws in some sugar. With a fork, she whisks it all together. Next, she puts some butter to melt in the microwave, announcing, in the process, that by French standards this would be ‘cheating'. She whisks and whisks and then covers the mixture in the bowl with a dish towel.

‘You have to let it rest a couple of minutes,' Chela says, opening the fridge. Without the slightest fuss, and in one swift move, she takes the moldy carrots from the tray and throws them in the trash. She refills the plastic cups and stands by the screen door looking out onto the water tank. Marina is still at the breakfast bar.

‘I couldn't bare to. I think Linda might hate me. Víctor won't. But she might. She's so opinionated, so spirited. Plus, she copes with four children when I couldn't even handle one. I don't think she'd even let me in the mews, actually.'

Chela looks at Marina through the reflection in the door, raises her glass and says, ‘Thanks for letting me in.'

Then she turns around and lights the stove.

Now Marina thinks about it, Pina is also absurdly beautiful. A kind of oneiric beauty, with those Buddha-like almond eyes and that perfect, slim nose. It's a wonder she can even breathe. She shouldn't think like this, she tells herself, when it wasn't all that long ago that that little girl drowned. Marina is never pleased when Pina turns up unannounced, because the Pérez-Walkers pay per hour, not per kid. Plus, her presence changes the order of things, so that Ana and Theo, who on the whole leave each other in peace, are suddenly overcome with a feverish urge to rip each other apart in front of their guest. When Linda hired Marina, she told her she was the first nanny the kids had had in their lives. With four kids! Marina doesn't get how she can look after them all and play the flute, or the cello, or whatever it is she plays, the one-woman band. Suddenly, the pedestal she's put Linda on seems out of reach. Obsolete. Would Linda really not open the door to Chela? Marina thinks she would, then that she wouldn't: she doesn't know what to think. Would Linda be pissed if she knew that Marina had let her in? She takes a certain pleasure in the idea of going against the woman she so obsessively compares herself to. In their next class she'll tell Linda that she got stoned with her old friend Chela. Let's see how she likes that.

‘The first one always turns out badly,' say Chela, as she rolls a perfect circle of whitish batter around the pan.

‘How come you know how to make crepes?'

‘I picked it up in a hotel in Belize. Crazy life, eh? That's what people around here must say about me, right? Lost, irresponsible, a terrible mother.'

Marina wants to tell her the truth – that they've never once brought her up – but she doesn't know how to break it to her so that it sounds less offensive. She gets to her feet and opens the door to the yard. The smell of butter is making her feel woozy. Linda spreads the mixture with a silicon spatula that Marina bought on offer and has never used. Marina watches, trying not to show her utter fascination. She cups her beer with two hands as if it were hot chocolate, and takes comparative notes. Could she be like this woman? A lover of men and food and freedom? Will she ever feel at ease cooking? Or fucking?

‘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?'