‘Biomass?’ she asked.
‘Tears,’ I said.
All I’m saying with this project business is that Noelia undervalued my capacity for coming up with projects. She thought she had it in her as well. And while she had so many more talents than I did, I have to say that in this one thing I outdid her. She never had to work in that self-fueling, self-sustaining way, because she had one, ongoing assignment: a constant line of patients. And they were like the same patient repeated interminably. That’s why something in me protested when she’d use the word project. A silent protest, obviously, because Noelia would talk about the ‘life project’ with unflagging authority, oozing self-confidence as if she were explaining the circulatory system. Even her voice changed. She might say, for example, in that firm tone of hers, ‘Alfonso, you agree this whole reproduction business doesn’t have any place in our life project, right?’
And what would I say? I can’t even remember now. I smiled at her, I guess. Or said, ‘Right.’ And the truth is I did agree with her. Noelia and I always agreed. When we didn’t agree on something, we got over it straight away. We would shout at each other; she had a penchant for slamming doors, and I for grabbing my jacket and walking around the block. And that would be that. We’d be over it. But it’s different now. Now we really are in deadlock. Now I’d give anything for one of our fights.
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-full kind of guy.