*
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 sabbaticaclass="underline" 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.