Free Umami by Laia Jufresa Page A

have their music school, and we would spend whole afternoons drawing and painting. It was boring as hell, but from the window we could spy on the cortège of women processing through the mews to visit Mom. Slowly and deliberately, they’d file along the corridor, which was purplish back then, a shade Marina used to call ‘asylilac’. And that’s what they looked like, the women; a line of loony asylum runaways, always on edge, in a rush, fresh out of a traffic jam or just stopping by between errands. Some would spot us through the window and pop into the school to deliver death-grip hugs. Then they made their way over to our house, and if they were lucky Mom would drink wine and tea with them, in which case they’d leave all serene, my sister’s death like a pill that put their own mini-dramas into perspective. Other days, she wouldn’t even open the door to them, so the deeply distressed cortège would come back to Sweet House, and we’d have to make excuses for Mom.
    â€˜She’s at a rehearsal,’ we’d say. And sometimes she really was.
    â€˜What about your dad?’ the women would insist.
    And I’d tell them the truth, which amounted to the same thing: ‘Rehearsal. He has a concert coming up.’
    Sometimes it feels like they spent that entire first year locked away in a permanent rehearsal while we sat among the untouched instruments in their silent music school, the hallway piling up with gift baskets. Something I understood then is that the Mexican gift industry may be well and truly gringofied at Christmas, but when it comes to death, our own comfort foods trump everything. I’ve never received so many bags of Mexican sweet treats – pepitorias , palanquetas , jamoncillos – as I did when my sister died. I found it dumb and pretty insulting, them bringing us candies. Not that that stopped me eating them. My mom and Marina also used to meet up for wine or tea, until last year when they stopped talking to each other. I never found out why. When I ask Mom she says Marina’s a traitor, or that she sided with the enemy or something along those lines. But the last time I tried to get her to dish the dirt she stood there thinking for a while and then said, ‘Because I’m like Corleone, you better don’t mess with my people, or…’
    â€˜Or…?’ I asked, but she just stuck out her tongue at me.
    I don’t dare ask Marina what went on, but once she let it slip that she thinks Mom is ‘rancorous’. She also said it’s ‘pathological’ that she’s still mourning, and that she lives ‘shut out from the world’. But she doesn’t, really. Mom still rehearses and she’s gone back to teaching in Sweet, and if we put on a play or show at school she always comes. She doesn’t play in concerts anymore, though.
    â€˜So why rehearse?’ people ask her.
    â€˜Because it keeps my head above water,’ she answers, as if the lifeline music throws her were material and evident: a big, fat buoy at the base of the cello, keeping her from slipping under. As if we weren’t all wading in the river of shit that Luz’s death left in our home. Except that it’s not even quite a river, our sadness: it’s stagnant water. Since Luz drowned, there’s always something drowning at home. Not everyday. Some days you think that we’re all alive again, the five remaining members of the family: I get a zit; some girl calls Theo; Olmo plays his first concert; Dad comes back from tour; Mom decides to bake a pie. But later you go into the kitchen, and there’s the pie, still raw on the wooden countertop, half of it pricked and the other half untouched, with Mom hovering over it, clutching the fork in midair. And then you know that we too, as a family, will always be ‘almost six’.
    *
    Marina greets me like she greets everyone: by grabbing you by the back of your head