Umami by Laia Jufresa Read Free Book Online Page A

oral mysticology around the term ‘only a daughter’, which I’ll do my best to reproduce here, both from what I remember and with the help of Nina Simone. I’m a son too, only a son, and now an old son, but I never identified with all the things Noelia insisted were symptoms of our chosen condition as nobody’s parents.
    Noelia named this state of being only a daughter ‘offspringhood’. I told her that the concept was flawed because it was the same as the state of being ‘human’ or even of ‘being’: we’re all someone’s offspring.
    â€˜I don’t care,’ she said.
    Then I suggested that, seeing as we have maternity, paternity and fraternity, it might make more sense to call it ‘offspringity’. But she wasn’t having any of it.
    â€˜Mysticology’ isn’t a word either, of course, but after three decades, one person’s bad habits stick on the other, so now it’s my turn to make up words at whim. When all’s said and done, no one’s going to pass judgment on Nina Simone. I won’t let an editor near her, nor would I dream of sending her into the rat hole that is the peer-review system.
    I was saying: while I myself didn’t identify with the characteristic features of ‘offspringhood’, Noelia diagnosed me with all of them. I strongly denied the accusations held against me, at least in my inner courthouse. Because the same defects she branded me with (and which I acknowledged, sometimes), I also noticed in my friends with children. Especially as we grew older. We could all be impatient, irritable, intolerant, inflexible, spoiled, ailing, and pig-headed. Very pig-headed in fact: Páez had three kids and became more and more pig-headed with every one. Noelia said that it was because I didn’t have kids that I was the way I was sometimes:
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What’s any of that got to do with children, woman?’
    â€˜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 . ’
    â€˜Well, it does hurt me when I forget things.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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