Translated by Marvin Najarro
News about the aproaching winter storm prompted people to rush to the supermarkets to stock up on essentials. Lupita was no exception. She bought the usual staples: vegetables for her salads, rice and two pounds of beef ribs, as soup is a must on stormy days. She also bought bread because she could no drink coffee without it. The other day she made lentil soup with spinach, as well as tortitas de carne (meat patties) with watercress. She does not like the way chard looks, dull and with wilted leaves, and she does not feel like to cook it like that. For her, the memory of the chard leaves is associated with the freshness of the fertile land of the village of El Calvario, where she grew up.
She has already everything in her basket: a pineapple that she will peel and cut into slices, and then she’ll boil the peels with cinnamon to make tea, which she will drink during the snowfall. During the last winter storm, she set about to bake bread. She made some beautiful bread, like the kind they make in her village for Semana Santa. Of course, a stove oven will never be the same as the wood-fired oven in the courtyard of her childhood house. She is alone her sisters are not there, neither her mother and grandmother, nor her aunts. She has no one to ask how much salt to use, whether the dough is ready, or if the oven needs more firewood. But by baking bread she is keeping alive the memories of those light-filled afternoons, which she hopes her children will someday know about, she does not have any children yet, but she wants four.
She looks for the frozen tamalitos de elote from El Salvador. She eats them with milk, just as she did in her childhood. Sometimes she eats them with cream and fresh cheese. When she cooks atol de elote she adds a little corn flour or maicena (corn starch) to prevent curdling, especially when the elotes are too young and it is difficult to get them a little more mature. She likes to let the atol thicken and then add milk the next day, just as her grandmother taught her.
She opens the freezer and grabs a bag of six tamales because if she bought the bag of twenty-four, there will not be enough room for them. Opposite her is a freezer full of fruit, leaves and food from all over Latinoamérica. She often finds bags of jocote rojo de febrero, whicn cost un ojo de la cara (an arm and a leg); un ojo de la cara for a bag of just twelve jocotes. It’s acrime, she always argues with herself, and the same goes for the price of the tamales de elote. If she told her grandmother how much a bundle of banana leaves cost, she would tell her to come back immediately and ask her what was she doing in a faraway land looking for something she hadn’t lost.
Lupita’s story is like that of many adolescents who believe they are madly in love and who in the heat of the moment leave everything behind for the love of the man who would later ruin their lives. She was sixteen, and as such, incapable of foreseeing it, she only thought that she and her boyfriend could live together away from everyone because no one approved of her relationship with a forty-six-years-old man, who was separated and had six children. Now that she is twenty-five and after living with a violent alcoholic who beat her every day, understands why her family opposed that relationship. She ran away with him, which allowed him to avoid arrest and imprisonment for child abuse.
She has just left him and is now renting a studio apartment with a balcony overlooking the back wall of a 50-unit apartment building. She knows that she will rebuild her life and be able to stand up and move forward, learning, experiencing and giving herself the chance to breathe calmly and peacefully. She is gradually learning, what self-love is, what it means enjoying her own company, her inner self, the magnitude of her dreams and to take care of herself, just as she did when taking care of the flowers in the garden of her childhood home. Because it is like a chrysanthemum, she always says to herself when she looks herself in the mirror. The double chrysanthemums she used to plant on her parents’ plot which she tended with dedication and love.
Next to the jocote bags, she finds bags of recently arrived pito flowers, chipilín leaves and loroco flowers; all Guatemalan products. Her soul is on edge and she can’t relax, she feels her heart racing, she can barely breathe. She used to gather the loroco flowers at her paternal grandparents’ house in eastern Guatemala. It was there that she discovered the lemon groves, the mango trees, which were as enormous as the ceiba trees. The manzana rosa (rose apple), the quesadillas (a sweet, cheese-filled bread or cake, made of rice), the dry cheese, and the red prickly pears among the dry grasses of the desert at the foot of the Sierra de Las Minas.
She quickly grabbed four bags of loroco flowers, took harina de maíz salpor (white corn flour), a bunch of tuzas (husks) and hurried home to cook the tamalitos de loroco. While the tamalitos were boiling, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat on the balcony to watch the snow fall. Suddenly, her dwelling smells of vegetation; of unriped mangoes, chicozapote, paternas and of ripen pomelos at the foot of the jocote marañon (cashew) trees.
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Ilka Oliva-Corado.
