Translated by Marvin Najarro
She comes out of the supermarket with a bag full of vegetables, she has bought a bunch of watercress to make soup, her friend Joaquín told her that for the cold days of the long American winter, watercress soup is the best. Maria used to eat watercress only in salads and in meat patties, to which she sometimes adds chard or watercress, but lately she has been mix them with tofu.
She takes a handful of grapes and eats them one by one; she enjoys this fruit only in December because it reminds her of her teenage years in his native Guatemala; she fears that if she eats grapes at any other time of the year, the magic will disappear and she will forget forever the smell of ponche, fresh banana leaves, freshly cooked tamales and the early morning dew dripping from the tin roof of the house. The same thing happens to her with the Washington apples, which are only sold in December at the market in his hometown of Camotán. Where he lives, the red apples are sold year-round, but she only buys them around Christmas.
That’s what the United States is, Maria feels that she lost the magic of eating fruits only in season, there are fruits all year round because they come from different parts of the world, when it’s winter in one place, it’s summer in another. There are always mangoes, papayas, watermelons, oranges, pineapples, but they never have the natural flavor because they are picked when they are unripe to withstand shipping; the same happens with vegetables. The food is tasteless but the shelves are always full, it is the abundance of the country. Huge pineapples, but tasteless. One thing for another she always says with a sigh
In the parking lot of the mall, she stops in front of the Christmas trees for sale, as she does every year, she is desperately looks for pine and cypress trees, but they are gone, in her life as a foreigner she has seen that the Christmas trees are made of spruce branches and in different sizes, and according to the costumer’s liking. Larger trees would not fit on her doorstep.
She lives in a three-room house with her three children and her husband, Ibrahim, who is a Muslim and for whom Catholicism, his wife’s religion, is completely different from his own and from Judaism, the religion of his employers. Sometimes they go to Catholic mass, sometimes to Muslim prayer. Her Ibrahim is a third-generation Bosnian whose understanding of Islam is more relaxed than that of his grandparents. He didn’t object to his children taking their mother’s last name, in that way Maria honors her maternal grandfather, who raised her after her father abandoned her pregnant mother.
Maria is very fortunate to have found a man who does not beat her, and who does not psychologically abuse her, as has unfortunately happened to most of the women in her family. He is also a responsible husband, and treats her with affection and the utmost respect. He is the kind of man that when he goes to Guatemala splits firewood, repairs the house and milks the cows. In December he goes with the men of the family to cut the guineo leaves for the tamales, and he is in charge of cooking the dough. Last year he made the paleta with a machete cuto.
When they go to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the country of Ibrahim’s grandparents, Maria enjoys the food there, where everyone has fallen in love with the air-dried adobe color of her skin. Their children are café con leche, while Ibrahim with blue-tinged green eyes that sometimes turn turquoise, is as white as freshly milked milk.
Tomorrow, Maria thinks as she looks at the spruce branches, I’ll bring everyone to choose the Christmas tree, then she goes home to prepare the watercress soup that she will teach the four men in the house to make, even though in her house everyone cooks, washes, irons and cleans. Gender roles in the family are a memory of past generations.
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Ilka Oliva-Corado @ilkaolivacorado