Translated by Marvin Najarro
The first time that Balvina saw a salmon was at a supermarket in the United States. She was amazed by the color of its flesh, which resembled the pulp of the melons grown in the fields at the foot of the Sierra de las Minas, in her native Teculután. Excited, she bought a pound of it, and the seafood clerk told her how to cook it. It was the first time she was going to use a stove oven. Thousands of kilometers away was her mother’s clay wood-fired oven. Unlike many migrants she knew who refused to eat food from other countries, Balvina tried every kind of food. It was through this exploration that she fell in love with literature, as she began reading to learn about the cultures that produced the food she enjoyed.
She discovered tofu and added it to her recipe for meat patties with watercress. Sometimes, though, she cooks it alone, browning it in a skillet with little sesame oil. When she discovered the sesame oil, she wanted to eat it straight, just with a warm tortilla. Seeing the bottles of olive oil, made her go crazy, and she spent the equivalent of a week’s salary on several bottles, which she sent to her mother so she could share them with her aunts and grandmothers. The only olive oil she had seen before was the kind sold in cans at the pharmacy, which her mother and aunts used twice a year to purge the cipotal (the kids) of amoebas.
The remedy consisted of five tablespoons of olive oil mixed with baking soda and lemon juice. The tendalada of children would lie down on the floor, and then their mothers began to spread olive oil with their hands over the panza (belly) of their children. Ten minutes at most, and everybody was in the bathroom. That’s why she was so amazed when she learned that the olive oil was good for cooking, too. But the day she really lost her mind was when she saw the packs of socks, each pack containing twelve pairs. Having grown up with just one pair of socks that she constantly mended, she felt like she had touched the sky when she was able to buy five packs and send them to her mother so she could share them with her aunts.
One day, she left work late and did not feel like cooking, so she bought a Polish cabbage pie at the supermarket, which she tried it and like it. She started reading about Poland and learned about the Holocaust and the fascination of Polish people with eating a fish called carp, which she had also seen in the United States. While eating a sandwich, she met a waitress from Moldova, a country whose name she had never heard before, nor the name Democratic Republic of the Congo.
She spent her life in Guatemala amidst fields of melons, watermelons and tobacco. She barely made it through sixth grade and never imagined that she would live in the United States as an adult. Working as a laborer never scared her, since she had done so in Guatemala. From a very young age she understood that it was almost impossible for someone who grew up in poverty to scape it, even if working like a mule. That’s how she learned to balance work and leisure. She cleaned houses from Monday through Friday, and she dedicated her weekends to learning through reading, and traveling through the pages of books.
One day, she had enough and left. There was no a clear motive that acted as the trigger, it was simply the weariness of tong days working in the fields from sunrise to sunset. Like most others, she left for the United States as a mojada and has been living there without papers for thirty years. She speaks English like a native and read books voraciously at the library, where she spends hours.
One day at the library, she picked up a book at random and came across Uzbekistan. Using one of the library’s computers, she searched for a world map online and was amazed to discover other countries with similar names. That’s how she learned about Islam. On another occasion she took out a book and suddenly came across Budism, learning about the Asian continent. It was all so fascinating that Balvina was momentarily distracted. She wondered what it would have been like to have had the chance to go to college. She snaped back right away, took a deep breath, pulled a thermos of fresco de semilla de melón from her bag, took a sip, and kept reading.
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Ilka Oliva-Corado.
