Learning to Talk to Plants Read online

  “Eat, Paula.”

  I took a bite of the banana just so I wouldn’t have to hear her anymore.

  “You know that humans have about twenty thousand, five hundred genes and bananas around thirty-six thousand?”

  “What are you going on about?”

  “That a banana has about fifteen thousand more genes than a human being,” I explained to Lídia.

  “Great, fantastic.” She tried on a compassionate expression as she pushed my hair out of my face and put it behind my ear. I’d never felt pity from her before. “Everything’s going to be fine, sweetie. You’ll get past this.”

  Deep inside, in silence, I thought, no, I won’t.

  Soon the sweet, pasty texture of the banana that I was struggling to swallow took on the salty taste of my tears.

  “Guess who?” Hands cover my eyes, from behind. I didn’t see her coming. I turn and we hug. Lídia is a whirlwind of wild, blonde curls, and a rain of freckles decorates her whole face.

  At first we talk a blue streak, competing to get a word in edgewise. We catch up on the details of getting back to work after the summer, then I complain indignantly about the state of the renovations, which are very far along in the newer wing where she works as a paediatrician. I’m forced to work between constricting walls, in spaces that are too compartmentalized, with insufficient light and twisting passageways. All the facilities that the public doesn’t see have been left on the back burner, despite their need for an overhaul. Lídia sticks out her tongue at me, to stop my complaining. Our friendship has never been equal. She always imposes herself subtly, but I’ve accepted it since the very first day, just like I’ve always accepted that circumstances have moulded me inwards, into myself. Then she tells me about her disappointment with the hotels she stayed in during her trip to Scotland—that the carpets were gross and the food revolting, that they made a mistake with one of the reservations and ended up in a room that was so dirty they decided to sleep in the car, all four of them—and, as if we were still on her parents’ roof terrace studying for finals, we put our arms together to compare our tans.

  “You look great,” she announces with a smile. “These days have done you good.”

  And I let her believe her own conclusion because I don’t feel like talking about me or about the two weeks I spent in Selva de Mar, at my father’s house. The supposed tranquillity of life far from the rat race, the pleasure of simple things, the famous inner peace that everyone insisted would do me such good, none of it had worked.

  I hadn’t been back there since the accident, and with the opaque filter of time, my father’s town seemed different, the church bigger and the streets narrower, the church bells had never chimed so loudly nor the laughter of the summer people in the square been so brazen. I’d had it up to here with the calmness, my father’s melancholy piano playing, the birds that woke me up at dawn just when I’d managed to fall asleep; I was sick of the internet connection failing, of having to hang off a cliff just to get third-rate phone coverage, and of the games of chess after meals. No, the tranquillity had only set off all my alarms and amplified the questions I was supposedly avoiding during my first vacation without Mauro. So, to keep my conversation with Lídia from turning doleful, I make sure to keep lobbing out questions so she can’t question me. After all, a mother just back from a family trip around Europe is always going to have more stories to tell than a single woman whose brilliant summer plan was spending fifteen days in a tiny town whipped by the north wind, surrounded by her father’s friends, who are all pushing seventy.

  “And how are the girls?”

  “Oh man, the girls… you’ll see them soon enough. Daniela’s unbearable, a textbook teenager, and Martina’s following close on her heels: now, when one of them wants a pool day the other wants to go to the beach, and it’s like that with everything.” She sighs hard before continuing. “I swear, travelling with kids is a real trial. You can’t even imagine how many times I wanted to leave them with Toni, sneak off and join you in that small town, sunbathe in the buff all day long, and smoke and drink every night without having to hide.”

  Why didn’t you, I think. Why did you leave me alone for so many days? The adult inside me knows that Lídia is married, that she has daughters, responsibilities, a family to spend her holidays with. The adult bites her tongue and smiles, tells her it wasn’t all that, that she’s anxious to see the girls, that she bought them some T-shirts, that everything went well in her father’s town, same as ever, that her dad is strong as an ox, cooking all day long, and she must have gained at least three kilos.

  “And? You must have been popular…?” And then she fixes those blue eyes of hers on me, those eyes that always find you out when you’re trying to dodge something. I don’t think she was referring to men in particular with that question, just trying to suss out how I was doing.

  “With dozens of French tourists.” I wave a hand over my body from top to bottom, then extend my arms as if to say, have you seen me lately, do I look like I’m in a state where I could possibly get involved with another human being?

  “Well, that’s probably better. It’s all very recent. Let things settle, so you can think more clearly. Mauro’s… it’s too soon. I don’t know that it’s the right moment, Paula.”

  The right moment for what, I think. Is there some set period of time? In the instruction manual for those left behind does it say anything about how soon you can go out and play without being considered tawdry? But the adult in me just nods her head slightly, while lining up all the cherry tomatoes in the salad on one side of the plate.

  * * * * * *

  I’ve read that over the long term our brains employ reconstructions and abstractions to store memories, which is why we can even go to the extreme of producing false ones. I wonder how I can hold on to your memory, intact and in a fair way.

  It would be much easier if I could experience those memories in chronological order, but that’s not the case. They appear randomly, coming and going in miscellaneous bursts that don’t help to give shape to the collection of contrasts that was your life, or your life with me.

  You knew how to sew. You would sew on buttons, darn the occasional hole in a sock.

  When you couldn’t find something and you called out for me to come and help you look, you’d call me Pauli, and I didn’t like that but you never stopped doing it.

  You would sneeze three times in a row when you got out of bed in the morning. When you called your mother on the phone your tone of voice would change. When you said “Mama” with that childlike ring, I would grab my keys and go out for a walk because I knew you’d give in to whatever she demanded of you. You smelt clean. You didn’t wear any cologne, it was a pure scent of warm water and soap.

  When you were deep into reading the newspaper you would break biscuits with your tongue against the roof of your mouth. One after the other. At first I found it amusing, but over the years I would nag you about eating so much sugar.

  When we made love, just as we were getting started, if I touched you, an ever so slight shiver would run through you, like a tiny shock, like a bittersweet reaction of desire and aversion. It must not have always been that way, but I can’t remember how it was at the beginning.

  You liked to buy me shoes. I never told you but I usually wasn’t crazy about the ones you chose for me. I felt bad about it and would wear them to make you happy. They were shoes for a woman who didn’t have my feet, or my style that wasn’t really a style. They were shoes for a woman who wasn’t me.

  Before leaving the house you would kiss me on the fore-head, a sincere kiss, filled with tenderness. That’s how it always was. Always.

  * * * * * *

  3

  A jar of mayonnaise. Two beers. A vegetable reduced to a wilted stump covered in velvety mould. Two yogurts a week past their use-by date. I grab one. An almost
empty jar of bitter orange marmalade, and the electric hum of the refrigerator. That’s all. Welcome home.

  The red light on the answering machine is blinking. Just one message. For a moment, my heart leaps, but no, it can’t be Pep. I don’t think I ever gave him my home number. I want to think that he staunchly follows my battle orders, and when someone tells you “Get away from me because we’ll hurt each other” there isn’t much room for confusion. I’ll confess that sometimes I invoke him. Some nights I call out to him silently and beg him to phone me, show some sign of life. A message, an image, any proof he’s out there would be fine. Some nights I fall asleep with my phone in my hand, after hours of weighing whether I should tell him things or not, whether it’s true that we would be so bad for each other. There are certain moments when I curse his resolve, and others when I can scarcely believe that, at forty-two years old, I’ve emerged from the ashes looking so childish, so hesitant, so unruly. It’s like stumbling around all day long, and often I think that Pep probably doesn’t even remember my name anymore.

  So if there’s only one message, it’s definitely not from him. In fact, I can only imagine it’s from my father—he’s the sole reason I keep that dusty, anachronistic device in the house, sitting there impassive beside the television. My father not only leaves me voice messages; he even plays his piano compositions into it. I still have relics on there, several minutes long, and I could never bear to part with them in the technological shift. No matter what time I get home, it’s always blinking, letting me know there’s some music to listen to, or his voice curious to hear my take. It’s sometimes better to ring him back right away, otherwise he has a tendency to insist. There are some restless, insatiable personality types who should never be allowed to retire.

  I press the button and, as expected, his voice fills the room. As I listen between spoonfuls of yogurt, I raise the blinds on the back balcony to let in the light and air the place out a little.

  “You must have just arrived… I hope you didn’t hit a lot of traffic. I ran into Pepi and she says hi. She says if she’d known you were in town she would have loved to see you, give you a hug… Oh, Paula! You left that piece of cake that Maria brought you yesterday, here on the counter in the kitchen… I just wanted to wish you a good return to work. That’s all… And eat, you hear me? Love you.”

  I stop with my mouth half open, immediately repulsed. I throw out the yogurt. The image of the cake in the tupperware from Maria at Can Rubiés makes me retch. I saw it in the kitchen this morning before I left my father’s house. I had it in my hands, in fact, but I put it down on the marble counter because the container had the same musty smell as Maria’s breath.

  “We have to be strong, sweetie. You’re very young. You have to remake your life.”

  She just blurted it out last Tuesday afternoon, when my father and I went to see her and she offered us some coffee. I know my father has good intentions, visiting neighbours when they’re sick or have lost a family member. I think it has to do with his obsession with wanting to feel that he belongs in that town where he’s been spending more and more time; I’ve never seen him do it in Barcelona, except with close friends or family members, and despite everything his city ways show through in the details: he writes down the visits in a calendar and he even gets dressed up for them. On Tuesday morning, while we were having breakfast in the courtyard, an alarm went off on his phone. He wiped his lips with a napkin and, still chewing, informed me:

  “Maria, at noon. We have to hurry if we want to take a dip at Port de la Selva before we stop by to give her our condolences.”

  I stared at him, sceptical, and said there was no way I was going with him to Maria’s house, that paying my condolences to people I don’t know wasn’t in my summer plans.

  “But she knows you. If you come with me, I’ll make angler fish with clams tonight for dinner.”

  —

  No one in that town knows that Mauro left me a few hours before he died. Not even my father, although he was aware we were going through a really rough patch. It was autumn, but we were still in short sleeves. Mauro and I had had a big argument; I’d bought plane tickets for the long weekend in November and the dates weren’t good for him because of some work conflict. I’d told him that he couldn’t complain I never surprised him, and that led to shouting and slammed doors. He told me to go screw myself and I snapped that, with him, that was probably my best option. Half an hour later I met my father to go with him to the dermatologist. They had to remove some moles from his back and, being a wimp, he’d asked me to go home with him after the procedure, which was a very simple one. While we waited for the nurse to call him in, even though I knew he wouldn’t help me because he’d never known how to, I got carried away in the weakness of the moment and I let him know that Mauro and I weren’t getting along well, without going into details. My voice trembled and then he said that bit about the bad season. That was what he called it. A bad season, Paula, you’ll see how things will be good again in the springtime. It happens to all couples. And with that facile view of time’s healing powers and two pats on the shoulder he considered the problem solved. Inside my head I laughed at my own naivety and told them both to take a long walk off a short pier. Problems removed as easily as moles. The springtime.

  My father would have been terribly sorry to hear that we’d separated after all those years, so much so that I imagine he would’ve struggled to come up with an explanation to give his friends that would soften the blow of having an old maid for a daughter. He liked to say things like “My son-in-law is an editor” or “There’s an interview with my son-in-law in La Vanguardia today” or “My son-in-law got the Noisette rose bush on my eastern wall to flower”. They truly appreciated each other, and created their own communion around the legal family we never were, that I always stood in the way of. Calling him his “son-in-law” gave him slightly more possession. “Paula’s staying with me for a few days. My son-in-law had an accident. He’s dead.”

  The fact that Mrs Maria knew who I was when I didn’t know her could only mean that my father hadn’t hesitated to introduce me in his circle as Paula, poor thing, who lost her spouse in an accident. In a way, it’s easier to explain your daughter’s change in relationship status when there’s a death involved, rather than opening the door to discussions about couples today, with so much freedom and so little energy for fixing things when they aren’t perfect. Death fixes the irreparable; it’s unalterable and distorts everything. It changed Mauro and placed him in the realm of the saints and the innocent. Death is like springtime.

  My father and Maria spoke in phrases that trailed off, almost like something out of a phrasebook. There is a specific language for talking about the dead, an inventory of aphorisms using sounds that waver between respect and fear. I watched them from the doorway, avoiding a scent that floated in the air, a mix of bitter quince and freshly sliced, cured sausage, anxious for the coffee to be ready, hoping that the coffeepot would explode and we could run away and not have to sit down around that table covered in sticky oilcloth, where there must still have been prints from Mrs Maria’s dead husband’s plump fingers.

  It was 26 August and she was wearing a long-sleeved black cardigan, a skirt to her ankles and some winter house slippers, with no back and a slight heel. I wore flat sandals made of two scant strips of leather, clearly marking our differences. We aren’t the same woman and as such we don’t share the same pain, despite which we’ve both been recruited by grief, like an infectious agent with the ability to reproduce and be transmitted irrespective of the wishes of those left behind. My pain is mine and I don’t want her coming anywhere near it.

  Without knowing how, I was sitting next to her, forcing a smile and trying not to think about the edge of the oilcloth lightly brushing my thighs, when all of a sudden the bubbling of the coffeepot declared that there was no escape. Mrs Maria got up, serenely turned off the flame, and pull
ed three mugs that looked like toys from a faded Formica cabinet that released a gust of stale air into the room. That was when, in the midst of a silence broken only by the kitchen clock, she got very close to me, too close, so close she forced me to shut my eyes, and she said it.

  “We have to be strong, sweetie. You’re very young. You have to remake your life.”

  I don’t want Maria, or her halitosis, anywhere near me. I don’t want cake. I don’t want to hear more predictions about my future. I don’t want to share in her strength, much less for her to identify with me. My pain is mine and the only possible unit for measuring or calibrating it is the intimacy of everything that comprised the how. How I loved him, how he loved me. How we were, uniquely, no longer us and, therefore, how I could uniquely grieve him.

  It seemed my father realized how the scene had upset me, and that very night, as I was sitting on a deck chair under the fig tree, he came outside, turned off the porch light and asked me to prick up all my senses. At the house in Selva de Mar that he’d bought with much effort, saving and pride, the small garden’s low ivy-covered wall borders a forested area that marks the end of the town. When you sit there in silence there are soon a multitude of sounds: crickets, the buzzing of moths and mosquitoes, leaves cradled by the breeze, the murmur of the creek that runs right through the centre of town, the flapping of a bat’s wings and, every once in a long while, the majestic hooting of an owl. Over fifteen days I only heard it three times. My father told me that I wouldn’t see it, that since he’s been summering in that house, all those years, he’s only very sporadically glimpsed the owl flying away. He mentioned, off the cuff, that in ancient times, owls represented the union between three worlds: the underworld, the visible world and the heavens. According to what he said, for the ancient Egyptians, but also for the Celts and the Hindus, the owl was a totem that protected the souls of the dead. He lowered his head slightly and put his hands in the pockets of his shorts when he said “dead”. I warned him not to continue, that even though I was only a few months away from turning forty-three, Mauro’s death had me easily frightened and even the esoteric made me uncomfortable lately. He laughed, ran an arm over my shoulder, and pulled me towards him.