Umami by Laia Jufresa Read Free Book Online

institutions deal with loss; perhaps it’s their way of debunking the stereotype that in Mexico we know how to live hand in hand with death.
    Linda orders vodka in the Mug, out of discretion. I drink tequila, since I no longer have anybody to smell it on me. Every now and then the barman pulls out all the stops and serves me my tequila shot with a chaser of delicious spicy sangrita , which Linda then eats with her finger, dunking then sucking it. I’ve tried hard to find something erotic in this gesture, but my best efforts are hampered by an overriding feeling of tenderness toward her. She’s also a tall lady, and I like my women compact: Noelia was as short as a toadstool.
    We never have more than a couple of drinks each. Me because I’ve always been a lousy drinker, and her because she has to go afterward to pick up the kids from school. Linda stays till one thirty at the latest, and the vodka always sets her off. She has deep-set green eyes, and when she cries they go puffy and pink. Some days we talk, and others we don’t even get beyond hello. Every now and then I well up too, in which case Linda will ask for some napkins and we’ll sit there blowing our noses. If we do talk it’s about old times: her gringo childhood, my Mexico City youth, our lives before our lives with our dead. Or we talk about operas we remember. Or food. I give her recipes for exotic sauces. She explains how to make fermented pickles.
    *
    Now that I think about it, marriage isn’t all that different from mid-morning TV. In the end, to be married is to see the same old movies – some more treasured than others – over and over again. The only things that ever change are the bits in between, the things tied to the present: news bulletins, commercials. And by this I don’t mean that it’s boring. On the contrary, it’s awful what I’ve lost: the cement that held the hours together, the comfort of Noelia’s familiar presence which filled everything, every room, whether she was at home or not, because I knew that unless she had a heart attack on her hands she’d be home to eat and have a siesta, then back again for dinner and to watch TV, finally falling asleep with her cold feet against my leg. The rest – all the world events, falling walls and stocks, personal and national disasters – was nothing. What you miss are the habits, the little actions you took for granted, only to realize that they were in fact the stuff of life. Except, in a way, they also turned out not to be, because the world goes on spinning without them. Much like amaranth when they banned it. What must the Aztecs have thought when the Spaniards burnt their sacred crop? ‘Sons of bitches,’ they must have thought. And also, ‘Impossible! Impossible to live without huautli .’But they were wrong and so was I: Noelia died and life goes on. A miserable life if you like, but I still eat, and I still shit.
    *
    â€˜Those bugs,’ my wife would say.
    I never got my head around how anyone could see something ugly in a butterfly, especially someone from Michoacán, the land of monarchs.
    â€˜They flap around you!’ she argued.
    Then she’d come out with far-fetched theories, tall tales from her childhood.
    â€˜If moths hover close to your eyes their powder can blind you.’
    â€˜What kind of scientist are you?’
    â€˜A paranoid one. That’s very important, listen: you must always make sure your doctor’s a believer, or at least that he somehow fears the final judgment, because the rest of them are nothing but butchers.’
    *
    Here the top-ten nuptial movies reshown in this household over the last thirty years:
Tough Day at the Clinic – Pour Me a Tequila
    A PhD Student Calls (I’m Not In)
    Procreation (The Prequel)
    Amaranth and Milpas
    The Tenants
    Belldrop Mews
    For Whom the Beeper Tolls
    Only a Daughter
    Umami
    The Girls
    *
    Noelia constructed an entire