Linda Walker is wild about Marina’s album collection. She has a deep fascination — as passionate as it is patronizing — for popular Mexican music, but she hasn’t sat down to listen to American pop since she left the States twenty years ago.
‘But this isn’t pop,’ Marina insists. ‘This is alternative rock.’
The truth is Marina doesn’t have a clue about music genres. Her criterion is strictly aestheticaclass="underline" she picks CDs for their covers. She didn’t take any of hers when she left for Mexico City, but her mother brought them when she came to get her out of hospital. Or, in the words of Señora Mendoza, ‘out of that little pickle’.
English has the same effect on Marina as meditation. Not that she meditates, but she’s been hypnotized before, and there’s this thing that happens to her when she’s been painting for hours and then stops: you only realize you’ve been somewhere else once you’re back. And English takes the edge off things, makes them feel less serious, a bit like scribbling mustaches on photos. For example, once translated, the names of her favorite groups changed from abstract poetry to random nouns: the cranberries, smashing pumpkins, blind melon, red hot chili peppers, fool’s garden. Translation simplifies, it schematizes: something that seemed potentially profound falls from grace and lands on its head, turning out to be nothing but a doodle. For Marina, this law of gravity dictating bilingualism confirms what she’s always suspected: that if gringos were drawings, they’d be drawn with markers.
And confirming a suspicion provides you with a foothold, some solid ground to stand on, especially when that suspicion divides the world into segments, thereby neatly marking out the part that you yourself occupy. In other words, it takes the lid off and lowers expectations. It’s not that Marina believes the prejudices she confirms, but confirming them calms her down anyway.
If she doesn’t entirely buy her own marker-pen theory, it’s because of Linda. Linda is a gringa drawn in pastels or coloring pencils: her lines are permeable, fluid. The more Marina knows her, the less defined she becomes. What’s more, Marina has started to make out the traces of past lines, from before Mexico, before Víctor, before the death of her daughter. Pentimento, they call it in drawing: those strokes the artist tried to erase but which are still faintly visible. Linda transforms according to her hairstyle and the time of day. When she’s in a playful, word-game kind of mood, she’s bright green; if she lets her hair down, she’s peach. Some nights Marina wonders: Is this love?
It’s not attraction exactly, but you might call it an infatuation. Marina has placed her neighbor on a pedestal, and she can’t come up with another noun for the feeling. She spends all day comparing herself with Linda. She even makes herself eat porridge because Linda eats porridge. But it’s not for her place in the National Symphony Orchestra that Marina admires her, or for her rock-steady relationship with Víctor (no carrier bags there: it’s heavy-duty baggage all the way; matching, part of the same set). It’s not for the fact that she’s a mother of four children, or that she’s lost one. And nor does Marina’s admiration spring from Linda’s mystifying way of being both ugly and beautiful at once, or from how, every now and again, she seems drunk in the middle of the day. Marina doesn’t admire her for her long, long hair which she insists on piling up on the crown of her head like a nest; nor for the headscarf which she wraps around her bun and forehead as if dressing an invisible war wound. Or perhaps it is. Perhaps it’s the complex combination of all these things that Marina worships. But most of all, she respects Linda for having renounced the product mentality. For having said, ‘Enough is enough.’ Or at least that’s how Linda explained it:
‘One day I just said enough is enough to the product mentality, you know? It’s not that I’m giving up playing, I just don’t need to package it. I devote myself to the music now, not the orchestra. I’m all about the process now.’
‘And the orchestra lets you?’ Marina had asked, for the sake of saying something.
‘They gave me unpaid leave,’ Linda said. ‘And you know what? For not one of my pregnancies did I get that. Musicians don’t believe in babies, but in mourning, sure. I blame Wagner.’
2002
Amaranth, the plant to which I’ve dedicated the best part of my forty years as a researcher, has a ludicrous name. One that, now I’m a widower, makes me seethe.
Amaranthus, the generic name, comes from the Greek amaranthos, which means ‘flower that never fades’.
*
I’ve been a widower since last Mexican Day of the Dead: November 2 2001. That morning my wife lay admiring the customary altar I’d set up in the room. It was a bit makeshift: three vases of dandelions and Mexican marigolds, and not much else, because neither of us was in the mood for the traditional sugar skulls. Noelia adjusted her turban (she hated me seeing her bald) and pointed to the altar.
‘Nah, nah, nah-nah-nah,’ she sang.
‘Nah, nah, nah-nah-nah, what?’ I asked.
‘I beat them.’
‘Beat who?’
‘The dead,’ she said. ‘They came and they went, and they didn’t take me.’
But that afternoon, when I took her up her Nescafé with milk, Noelia had gone with them. Sometimes I think that what hurts most is that she went without me there. With me downstairs, standing like a muppet by the stove, waiting for the water to boil. The damn, chalky, chlorinated Mexico City water, at its damn 2,260 meters above sea level, taking its own sweet time to make the kettle whistle.
*
Noelia’s surname was Vargas Vargas. Her parents were both from Michoacán, but one was from the city of Morelia and the other Uruapan, and at any given opportunity they’d publicly avow that they were not cousins. They had five children, and ate lunch together every day. He was a cardiologist and had a clinic just around the corner. She was a homemaker and her sole peccadillo was playing bridge three times a week, where she’d fritter away a healthy slice of the grocery budget. But they never wanted for anything. Apart from grandchildren. On our part at least, we left them wanting.
By way of explanation, or consolation perhaps, my mother-in-law used to remind me in apologetic tones that, ‘Ever since she was a little girl, Noelia wanted to be a daughter and nothing else.’ According to her version of events, while Noelia’s little friends played at being Mommy with their dolls, she preferred to be her friends’ daughter, or the doll’s friend, or even the doll’s daughter; a move that was generally deemed unacceptable by her playmates, who would ask, with that particular harsh cruelty of little girls, ‘When have you ever seen a Mommy that pretty?’
Bizarrely, my wife, who blamed so many of her issues on being a childless child, would never get into this topic with me. She refused to discuss the fact that it was her mother who first used the term ‘only a daughter’ in reference to her. And it occurs to me now, darling Noelia, that your obsession may well spring from there; that it wasn’t something you chose exactly, but rather that your own mother drummed into you.
‘Don’t be an Inuit, Alfonso,’ says my wife, who, every time she feels the need to say ‘idiot’, substitutes the word with another random noun beginning with i.
Substituted it, she substituted it. I have to relearn how to conjugate now that she’s not around. But the thing is, when I wrote it down just now, ‘Don’t be an Inuit, Alfonso’, it was as if it wasn’t me who’d written it. It was as if she were saying it herself.