Umami (13 page)

Here's my final say on her misusage of the term. If what we shared had indeed been a life project, we would have wrapped it up together. I thought about it at the time, but knew that she wouldn't have any of it, just as I wouldn't have been able to go through with it. So our life together wasn't a project, then; it was the other kind of commitment: the ongoing-assignment kind. Which would also explain why the longer she's gone, the more I seem to need her.

*

The world is full of iotas, iguanas, indents, ignoramuses, indoctrinators, imposers, ifs and illusions. If you ask me, we're nothing but a bunch of idiots.

*

I'm in a rotten mood after reading an article in today's paper in which, once again, they propagate the myth that it was only corn that was grown on the manmade
chinampa
islands of Lake Xochimilco. Please! How many more studies do we have to publish before the schools will teach the truth: that they planted
huautli
, sacred amaranth,
there. It was all over the place, and the Mexica ate the stem, leaves, and seeds, which they milled to make flour. The flour constituted a foodstuff of course, but it was also used for offerings. The Mexica built figurines of gods, piercing them with small thorns which they'd already stuck into their own flesh to catch a drop of blood. The Spanish were no fools banning amaranth: having one less source of energy was fine by them as long as it meant fewer local rituals to write off. They razed kilometers of plantations, and came up with severe punishments for whoever planted it. And with that,
huautli
was wiped from the face of their land and erased from memory, with the kind of decisive success that only the most heavily armed militaries can pull off. They masterminded a new history, – ‘There's only ever been corn here!' – and we swallowed it. In Mexico we became obsessed with
milpas
; some of us still are, two decades and several books later. And yes, yes,
milpas
are fascinating, as are the pyramids. But there's something beyond the monumental; something just as beautiful yet much simpler, that takes place in the private lives of others: holiness on a familial scale, where food and ritual are one and the same.

But none of those little things – amaranth, or the daily miracles of faith and routine – are of any interest to pop scientists or documentary makers, who have a tendency to confuse greatness, grandeur, and grandiloquence. Either that, or they simply don't want to see it. Exactly the same as the tour guides who refuse to explain that the two windows in the famous Tulum pyramid are actually a form of lighthouse. They've done tests. People from the institute used candles to project light through the opening as the Mayans did to guide their small boats along the sole canal that spared them from having to run aground on the rocky peninsula. The Mesoamerican reef is the second largest in the world: it starts in Yucatán and ends in Honduras. It's fascinating to see how they navigated the area, but the hoteliers on the coast don't seem to think so.

‘A lighthouse!' they say. ‘Boring! Better to cross that out and write in the official texts “A temple”.' As if it were better to be fanatical than resourceful!

It winds me up, even now, that so many of our discoveries are systematically ignored at the hands of the
ignoramus machistus pharaonicus.
Sometimes I honestly think that we're only working in the institute for the benefit of gringo academics: we're their manufacturers of juicy details. The things we discover through our research in this country will only see the light of day years later, over there. And by there I mean, at a safe distance from the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education. It'll go like this: one day some overeducated little gringo who hasn't eaten a single crumb of amaranth in his life is going to write a book call
Amaranthus
, and in that book he'll include all the stuff I've been saying for years. Or maybe he'll use the Náhuatl
word, to give it an autochthonous edge:
Huautli for Dummies
, on sale in all good retailers and airports. They'll offer the gringo tenure in Berkeley, and then the Chinese, who already plant more amaranth than anyone, will have themselves a whole new market: middle-class America (so lost in questions of diet, so lacking in tradition, so at the mercy of the latest food-group elimination fad). Tell Me What To Eat could be a description in five words of the average, educated gringo. They'll put that processed Chinese amaranth in shiny packaging, advertise it on TV and export it like plastic toys. In Mexico we'll buy it at crazy prices, and if you dare try and tell a kid it's no more than an
alegría,
those seed bars we've always eaten in Mexico, he'll knock you out with his fortified fist. I can only hope I'm dead by then.

*

Every now and then I take a trip to the little corner store, for beer or something, but Beto does my big shops, for which I'm very grateful. And I'm not just saying that in case I drop dead at my laptop. I've been thinking about this ever since Noelia died: Which of the neighbors is going to let people know if I kick the bucket? And who would they tell? The institute? And my colleagues, what would they do? Put me in a box with the institute's initials on it? Bury me among some ruins like a national heritage piece? I doubt it. Whoever finds me will have to do no more than dump me, unceremoniously, out with the trash. Maybe I'll start to smell. Me, who always scrubbed up so well! My guess is that Beto will be the first to get a whiff of me, when he brings the groceries. Hence why, even though I didn't tell him it was for this reason, I gave him a set of keys. Whenever I hear him come in I go downstairs and offer him a beer – just because; because we're alive –, and he almost always accepts. We sit out on the terrace overlooking the dead MM, where once upon a time the deep pink of the amaranth flowers swayed in the wind, and we make fruitless plans to pull up the dead plants and put in a barbecue or a small swimming pool. We chat about anything and everything until it's time for him to collect his daughter from ballet, or whatever it is. Beto talks to me and asks me questions; he's generous and takes an interest. Now that I think about it, Beto is one of very few men I've met in my life who I feel I can trust. Maybe because his wife left him. Or maybe that's why she left. Deep down, I think I'm one of those types, too. But maybe it's just my ego talking, and really I'm a person who inspires pure indifference. Better indifference than repugnance, of course, but it's not as honorable as trust. Not a callous indifference, not at all, but rather the natural product of years spent trying to go by unnoticed. Add chronic shyness to a good marriage and a series of solitary habits and you've got a perfect recipe for disappearance. You turn into a kind of Casper the Ghost: friendly but one hundred percent dispensable. As a boy, if anyone asked me which magic power I'd choose, I always went for time travel. I wanted to see without being seen. And really I think that this is what defines all anthropologists: a natural tendency to observe and a healthy dose of curiosity for all things human, but without ever reaching the levels of sensibility of the artist, the solemnity of the philosopher, or the opportunism of the lawyer. Our healthy curiosity isn't quite the systematic, slightly obsessive rigor of the spy or the scientist, and we're far from boasting the deductive inventiveness of the sociologist, or the novelist's discipline. But I guess you could say we have a little of all these things, if you're a glass-half-f kind of guy.

*

After a few days of rigorous observation I can confirm that
a
) people still dodge me on the street (they don't look at me, but they do still step out of my way, which means, physically speaking at least, I'm still perceptible), and
b
) for the first time this year I'm not thinking about dying soon, not now I can feel a project coming on (albeit one within the limits imposed by permanent grief). I have no intention of dying, not now that I've teamed up with Nina Simone, AKA Brown Sugar, and, for the first time in forty years, I'm daring to write without footnotes.

*

This is my new life on sabbatical: I don't set a morning alarm, and my eyes open automatically sometime between eight and nine. Considering the horror stories I was told as a boy, it seems I'm one of the lucky ones. Or maybe it's not that all old folk get insomnia, just that they like to exaggerate. If I had a kid to guilt-trip about how early I rise, believe me I would.

Once up, I shower, get dressed, and make myself a coffee. I've gone back to drinking it how I did when I was a pretentious student and believed that the devil was in the detail, as long as that detail was European: from an Italian stovetop espresso maker, straight. Noelia liked coffee from the machine, and since it didn't taste of anything, we consumed it in quantities wholly inappropriate for people our age.

After that I eat a banana or an egg, depending on supplies. I dress The Girls, and all three of us sit in the study, me in front of Nina Simone. Then I spend the morning writing intensively, making sure not to consult any sources other than my heart and my head. I take a break at midday to have a drink in the Mustard Mug, and raise a toast with Linda. Then I grab something to eat from one of the three stands along my block (because I've realized cooking for one is about as much fun as poking yourself in the eye with a stick). I've been plodding along like this for three weeks. I write intensively but also delete a lot because I want to do it properly: if I can't tell everything in order, I want at least to get out the important stuff.

A couple of days ago I gave the document a title page. In big letters, in the middle of the page, I wrote,
Noelia.
Then I added her surnames, and then I deleted them again. Her name isn't big enough for her. I wrote,
Umami
. It's a bit of a daft title because I've already written a book with that name, one that contains purely food-anthropological theory. But for now I think I'll leave it like that, because, at the same time,
Umami
is the perfect title. Trying to explain who my wife was is just as necessary and impossible as explaining umami: that flavor that floods your taste buds without you being able to quite put your finger on it. Complex and at the same time clean and round, just like Noelia was: as distinguishable as she was unpredictable.
Umami
is the perfect title because nobody would understand it, just as I never fully understood Noelia Vargas Vargas. Maybe that's why I never got bored of her. Maybe that's all love is. Maybe that's all writing is: an attempt to put someone in words, even when you know full well that that person is a kaleidoscope: their thousand reflections in the eye of a fly.

From time to time I read some of my passages out loud. They tend to be as rhetorical and inadequate as the one I've just written, and on the whole I delete them. You might think that if I'm reading parts out loud it's for The Girls' benefit, but I've not entirely lost the plot. Not yet. I'm quite aware that if I die it won't be The Girls who raise the alarm.

By the way, in case I do die, I'd like to leave something in writing:

To whoever finds me and has to go to the trouble of throwing me out with the trash:

THANKS, buddy!

And also: I hereby hand you custody of The Girls.

They are to be cleaned with a damp cloth.

Do not, under any circumstances, submerge them in water.

Cheers!

*

An anecdote came to mind when I wrote ‘AKA' a few pages back. Back in the eighties, I was invited by the Complutense de Madrid (which wasn't as bad then as it is now, but worse) to give a course on pre-Hispanic diets, creole gastronomic fusion,
milpas
: all those things I can teach with my eyes closed. I slipped a selection of dry, multicolor corncobs through customs to spark the students' interest and stayed in Madrid for one complete semester, during which, for the first and last time in our lives together, Noelia and I wrote each other letters. Noelia kept all of mine, and one day last year, when she was already very ill, she asked me to read them to her. At some point I read out a passage where I'd used the word ‘knockout'
.

‘What?' said Noelia.

‘Knockout,' I said slowly, trying to improve my lousy English pronunciation.

‘Yes, I heard you, but I don't know what that is. Like in boxing?'

‘Exactly.'

‘Let's see, bring it here.'

I pointed to the sentence in the letter, and she immediately burst into a fit of giggles; so intense that I caught them too. We laughed until we cried. We hadn't laughed like that since before we found out about her cancer, perhaps even earlier. When at last we got a hold of ourselves, I asked her what it had all been about. It turned out that throughout our entire marriage, every time I had used the acronym KO, she had read OK.

‘I remember this, it was hilarious.'

‘But couldn't you see it was exactly the reverse of OK?'

‘I thought it was your dyslexia.'

‘What dyslexia?'

‘I don't know, yours. I always thought it was your own very particular brand of dyslexia.'

‘You never brought it up!'

‘Well, that makes us even.'

‘Even how?'

‘Even because you never mentioned that my miserable morning stars cheered you up!'

*

I gave Marina the Joaquín Sorolla book today. I think it would have made Noelia happy. Or maybe not, because it was her favorite, but she definitely would have agreed that if having it around depresses me, better to pass it on to the aspiring painter.

While I was teaching in Madrid, Noelia came and spent two weeks with me and became obsessed with the Sorolla Museum, mainly because it was right next to the house and had a cool yard where you could sit and read under a tree. It didn't have a café, which meant there weren't any waiters: Noelia didn't rub along with Madrid's waiters. Some afternoons we'd go together to see the Sorollas. Art wasn't her thing on the whole, but after a few glasses of wine and some tapas, boy, did she get into her painting. On the weekends, which is to say, on the days when we would head out for an aperitif, Noelia would refuse to wear her glasses; a vain habit which also meant she only saw blurry versions of Sorolla's oils. Where others would stand back and appreciate a vast landscape from afar, she'd have to get right up close, and saw nothing but brushstrokes. The clumsy chaos of oil paint smudged on canvas with a spatula; the distorted, screwball delight that were Sorolla's dabs up close convinced Noelia that she was admiring an abstract painter. Before we went back to Mexico I got her the exhibition catalog. She flicked through it with her surgical glasses on and was utterly taken aback, a little disappointed even. But later she grew fond of Sorolla, and the catalogue was always lying around somewhere in the living room.