Gazpacho

Deanna comes over from next door with a loaf of fresh bread. There are boxes all over the place and it's clear how little I've unpacked during the two weeks since I moved into this townhouse. I'm a bit embarrassed to let her in, but she has bread—how can I say no? I accept the loaf, apologizing for the mess. "Don't worry about it... Monica, right?" she says as we sit down, "I like your place! It's small of course, but it's... quaint. Cute, you know? Sorry about the other day, I wanted to introduce you to my family but Lindsey had a volleyball tournament and Thomas is so busy with clarinet..." I tell her not to worry, that family comes first, that clearly I am just as much of a mess as she is. "Oh I'm sure you're nowhere close." She continues, "So tell me a little bit about yourself—what do you do for a living? Where'd you grow up? How'd you end up here?"

Here we go. "I just moved here from Boston," I tell her, "I'm a marine biologist doing research on the San Francisco Bay."

"You grew up there?"

"No," I hesitate. "I grew up in Córdoba." And in Córdoba, it would be considered very rude to ask so many prying questions.

"Sorry, where?"

"Córdoba? It's in Southern Spain, sort of near Seville..."

"Oh, in Andalucia? We went there for our honeymoon! Did you grow up in one of those little towns by the water? I thought those were just the sweetest things."

No, and it's almost a hundred miles from the sea. "Something like that..." I make an uncomfortable attempt to change the subject. "How long have you been in San Francisco?" I've never been good at talking for the sake of talking, but my new neighbor seems to be an expert on the subject so I could be in for a lesson or two.

Deanna leaves an hour later, insisting on leaving me the entire loaf. I set it aside and start to unpack boxes, then close them up and push them back by the wall. It's easy to stay clean when everything's packed up. Quaint? I think. Cute? This house isn't that small is it? It's a townhouse in Palo Alto, about a fifteen minute walk from the Bay. It has a bedroom, a kitchen and small dining room, an office, and a foyer area that doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose. What would Mamá say if she saw this house? “Too big,” she’d tell me in her perfect Castilian Spanish. “You are a biologist, Monica, why do you need an office?” And I would never be able to defend the useless foyer. “If your house is so big, why is your kitchen so small?” she would ask. I have no excuse for this. Americans are busy, I guess. Too busy for cooking. I used to promise myself I’d always make good food a priority, but I spent the last few years eating at a college cafeteria and I don’t know that I'll be cooking too much anymore. “Qué vergüenza,” Mamá would tell me. What a shame.

Why is this woman giving me fresh bread? Shouldn’t she bring something American like a tray of cookies? Bread is for dipping in sauces or making sandwiches, but not for eating plain, and by the time I’m halfway through the loaf it’ll be stale.

♦

"Save your stale bread for gazpacho," I remember Mamá telling me when I was too young to understand what stale bread was. At that age, I found gazpacho miraculous.  Mamá would take me to the mercado once a week and we'd buy the freshest, richest, brightest vegetables we could find. Onions! Cucumbers! Carrots! Avocados! She'd let me pick my favorite kind of pepper, which changed from week to week depending on which color looked most appetizing from behind the vendors' counters—Lord knows I didn't actually like peppers. I adored the colorful mangos and even though we didn’t have much use for them, Mamá would let me choose just one and bring it home. The merchants would smile at me and try to offer me samples of their more mundane vegetables, but I was in far too much of a rush to allow for that. I’d hurry home, tugging at Mamá’s smooth right hand with my left.

At home she would peel the last week's tomatoes—gazpacho tomatoes had to be overripe and just soft enough that you thought they'd explode if you pressed them too hard. I remember watching her slice the cucumbers and chop the carrots into tiny bits, the eclectic array of scents and colors coming together into a brilliant salsa. Mamá was a painter and she cooked the way she painted, with the same careful focus and intense enjoyment as if nothing else could possibly take precedence over the task at hand. I used to sit on that high kitchen stool, watching her peel onions and then cut them into teeny tiny pieces. She'd core the avocados and strain the seeds out of the tomatoes and peppers so that not a bit of juice was left behind and not a single seed made it through to the mixture. Then she'd mix them all together and add thinly sliced parsley, the stale bread, a dash of salt, and some mysterious clear fluid that she only used in gazpacho, and stir until it became a peach colored juice. We let it chill in our tiny refrigerator until my father came home and then I couldn't get enough of it.

The magic in gazpacho, though, wasn't in the kaleidoscope of colors that came together in that bowl. It was not in some deep mother-daughter bonding that took place as Mamá peeled bell peppers and minced garlic. What left me baffled was that gazpacho was made of ingredients that I didn't actually like. I was just as picky an eater as any small child, and garlic and onions disgusted me. I wouldn't touch bell pepper when Mamá offered me slices as she cut, and raw tomatoes hurt my stomach. The stale bread might have neutralized the other yucky flavors but it wasn't as if stale bread was much good on its own. As a child I thought the clear fluid was the magical ingredient, some sort of liquid fairy dust that took the best flavors from each vegetable and discarded the rest. I used to beg Mamá for just a sip, plead with her for a tiny spoon of the substance that turned the revolting mixture into a delicious soup. "No lo quieres, Monica," she'd tell me. You don't want it. Of course I wanted it! Who was she to know what I did and didn't want? I remember how just once when I was almost eight, Mamá put the gazpacho in to chill and instructed me to come over to where she was standing. As I walked over, she poured a tiny portion of the vinegar onto a baby spoon and handed it to me. Of course, vinegar is the most bitter, pungent flavor in the mix and I couldn't even convince myself to swallow it. Mamá didn't have to say anything; my idea of gazpacho had been turned upside down. There is no magical ingredient that makes it all better, no delightful flavor that neutralizes all the bad. Gazpacho is a food that takes the ingredients that nobody would eat alone—the stale bread, the raw tomato, the tear-inducing onion, and most importantly the sour vinegar—and simply in mixing them together turns them into something delicious.  This combination of the worst to create the best left me completely mystified.    

♦

My supervisor, Annette, has planned a work party and insists that I come. It is a holiday potluck and there is a general suggestion that people bring foods that they associate with winter. I consider bringing some Moroccan Christmas cookies that I used to make as a child, but I realize I am probably forgetting some essential step in the recipe so I opt for a fruitcake from Safeway. This is the American thing to do, I've learned. I show up at the party and my coworkers begin to ask all the questions they never ask at work. Where did you go to school? Why’d you move here? Are you single? Are you looking? Where’d you get that shirt? Does anyone actually like fruitcake? So is this your first real job? Boston University, I tell them, I’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco (this was a bit of a stretch), yes, no, H&M, fruitcake makes me think of Christmas (this, a blatant lie), does grad school count as a job? I go to the restroom just to get out of the crowd, and come back to see that the group has divided into tables, a slightly less overwhelming way of conversing. I sit by Annette at her insisting and soon realize I'm not likely to feign Americanism much longer.

“So where’d you live before Boston?” she asks.

“Córdoba, Spain. It’s near—”

“Oh, in the South! There’s a famous mosque there, isn’t there?”

La Mezquita de Córdoba. I smile. “Yeah, it’s pretty well known.”

“Is it really as nice as they say?”

“I guess.” To be honest I don’t know what they say, and I’ve come across pretty few people on this side of the world who know where Córdoba is. “I grew up there so it doesn’t really inspire me anymore.” Anymore? I haven’t been there in ten years, how do I know what effect it would have on me now?

Annette takes a piece of fruitcake, and I wonder if she really likes it or if she feels bad leaving the plate full. I remind myself to bring sugar cookies next time. “Why'd you leave?” Part of me wants her to stop asking questions, to understand that I don’t want to talk about it, but I like Annette and it is considerate of her to care.

“More opportunities,” I tell her, “better education. They say your twenties are the best time to travel the world, right? I wanted to try something new.” In truth these are excuses I thought up after I moved away. In my first few weeks of college, I kept a list of reasons I’d heard from other people—that BU is such a good school, that I loved travelling, that I had some intense interest in American culture or politics, even frivolous reasons like music or clothing. I didn’t think about the actual reasons, leaving my mother in her time of need, seeing the US as a fresh start, but kept trying to justify the move, to myself just as much as anyone else.

It turns out Annette loves travelling, though she goes to visit a new land rather than to escape the old. She double majored in marine biology and cultural anthropology, and spent a semester in Switzerland in college. "I visited France and Italy," she tells me, "but I never quite made it to Spain. What's it like there?" This would be like me asking Annette what it's like in the United States.

"What do you want to know?" I ask.

"Hmmm..." Annette pauses as I grab a peppermint stick. "Tell me about Christmas in Spain."

♦

I recall the Christmas when I was eleven, one that was in many ways indistinguishable from those that preceded or followed it. My father had celebrated with us for la Nochebuena, Christmas Eve, but he was gone on Christmas. He probably said he had to work, but by then even I knew better than to believe his excuses. I remember Mamá making arroz con leche, rice pudding, and adding a tiny bit of vanilla that our neighbor Lourdes had given to her. The rice pudding sat all day, softening as it simmered, and Mamá began the Moroccan alfajor cookies. She took out the honey, the flour, and a mixture of hazelnut and almond pieces, and mixed them together with a big wooden spoon. I asked to help but she said no, that the honey would get all over my hands, that it was hard to stir when there was no water, that the sliced nuts would not spread evenly in the mixture. "Go downstairs, Monica" she commanded.

"Mamá, can I at least watch?"

"No, mi niña, go downstairs and open the drawer of my bedside table.”

All Mamá ever kept in that table was a Bible, and I wondered if she intended on reteaching me the Christmas Story to keep me from trying to cook. Instead, I opened the drawer to see a small canvas with a painting of a yellow lily, Mamá's favorite flower, with a small note attached that read Para mi hija querida, “For my dearest daughter.” I ran upstairs and hugged her, nearly knocking over the bowl of rice pudding. Mamá was always painting, but she had to sell her work to afford her hobby. She'd finish a painting one afternoon and sell it the next morning, using her small profit to buy more painting supplies. My father didn't approve of her wasting her time like that and I knew all too well what a sacrifice it was for her to give this painting to me. It was, and still is, a masterpiece in my eyes.

♦

Deanna’s daughter Lindsey is taking culinary classes and asks me to teach her to cook “something truly Spanish,” she says. Truly Spanish? What is that? Wine? Garbanzo beans? Garlic? Pork? Americans who’ve visited Spain tell me they can’t find ham here that compares to what they ate in Spain, but I am from Andalucía and I don’t remember eating pork at all. Half of the butchers are Muslim immigrants from Morocco and they won’t touch pig. I visited Madrid on occasion but I don’t remember what I ate, and I wouldn’t begin to know what people eat in the far Northern provinces like Galicia and Cataluña. I spend some time researching Spanish foods, trying to see if anything I ate was a national dish, but with little success. I’ve never tried fideuá or morcilla and I was as surprised as anyone to discover the apparent popularity of conejo, rabbit, in various regions of the country.

Eventually I decide to make an Andalucian puchero. I don’t know if Barcelonans or Madrilenians eat it or not, but puchero is Spanish to me and it will surely seem Spanish to Deanna and Lindsey. It occurs to me that Lindsey probably doesn’t have a ton of culinary experience and this relatively simple stew could take us all day. I start the bread and set the garbanzo beans out to soak on Saturday morning, then wait for Lindsey to come over on Saturday afternoon before straining them out. “When do you usually eat dinner?” I ask her.

“Oh, whenever is fine.”

This is not an answer. “I usually eat around ten,” I explain. “When do you usually eat?”

Lindsey gapes. “Ten? I usually sleep around ten. Well... six? Oh that’s early for you. Seven? Eight is alright I guess, I can call my mom and ask.”

Six. Right. “We’ll aim for six,” I tell her, but you can’t hurry a puchero and I make no attempt to do so. “Puchero is essentially a stew,” I say. I take a cut of veal shank, two chicken legs, and a beef soup bone out of the refrigerator and put them in a pot on the stove.

“You’re not going to cut them up?” she asks.

“No, this is for the broth.”

“So... how exactly do you eat it?”

“We’ll add the rest of the ingredients later,” I say, “and then eat it with noodles. We’ll use the meat separately after the broth cooks.”

Some sort of an understanding comes over Lindsey’s face. “Oh! Monica, that’s called a soup. A stew is where...”

I am well aware of the difference between a soup and a stew, and puchero is certainly not just a soup. “No, the broth isn’t the whole meal,” I say. “We’ll add everything else in a moment.” I pour water over the meat and start to cook it. “Do you know how to sauté an onion?” I ask.

“Of course,” she says. Lindsey takes the onion from the counter and starts to cut it, just like that. Soon tears come to her eyes and she leaves the room. “You alright?” I ask.

“Yeah, don’t you cry when you cut onions?” Yes, but never this much. Has nobody taught her how to cut it?

“Quita el corazón,” Mamá used to tell me. “Cut out the core, the heart of the onion. Only the heart can make you cry.” I do this and cut the rest of the onion in the time it takes Lindsey to recover from cutting a quarter.

“I’ve always heard you’re supposed to chew gum while you do it,” Lindsey says. Gum? ¿Por qué diablos? Bread, maybe, but not chewing gum.

I heat a pan and pour in a tiny bit of oil, letting it spread evenly across the pan. I add the onions and let Lindsey sauté them for 5 minutes, then turn the stove off.

“Five minutes?” she asks.

“It’s a stew, they’ll cook for another few hours.”

“Hours?” She asks. Is she really surprised? How long does an American stew cook? Is there even such a thing?

“Just two or three,” I say. Lindsey helps me chop up the other vegetables—carrots, leeks, celery, squash, turnips, cabbage—and we put them in the pot with the meat. I add some egg yolk because puchero is a dish that forgets no part of the chicken, and then I put the lid on the pot and let it sit.

“Now what?” Lindsey asks.

“Now we wait a couple hours for them to cook.”

“Really? You just wait? What do you do in the meantime?”

I don’t know, I think. What do you do when dinner’s cooking? “Go shopping? Clean house? Sometimes I go to the lab.”

“You really don’t do anything?”

No, I really don’t. “We’ll knead the bread but after that, no.” Deanna has taught Lindsey to knead, but after that we can only set it aside and wait. We sit in the dining room and talk and I hear all about Lindsey’s younger brother and her volleyball tournaments and the culinary classes she’s taking. Two hours later we put the bread in the oven and add the potatoes to the pot, and boil water for the noodles. Deanna comes over and the three of us talk for another half hour before the meal is ready.

“What was your mother like?” Deanna asks. I can never find an acceptable answer for that. She cooked, she painted, she took me out, she sewed, she kept with all those domestic pleasures that American women scorn so readily. "All women are like that over there, right?" Like what? I wonder. Domestic? Boring? My mother was no loud feminist, but she certainly wasn’t submissive and domestic either. My mother was a woman with ganas, a concept that doesn’t exist in English. Want? Desire? Urge, hunger, craving, but never in the literal sense. When I first moved here I searched for a translation, for that and for other Spanish concepts, but eventually I learned to accept the world I had moved into—a world with want but not with strong desire. A world that demands but never needs. Americans do not have a word for ganas because they have no need for such a word.  How can I explain this to Deanna and Lindsey? I don’t even try.

We take the bread out of the oven and the meat out of the stew, and I show Lindsey how to turn the peeling remains of the chicken and veal into pringá. A meal that makes its own side dish, she admires. Deanna leaves to bring over her husband and son while Lindsey and I cook the noodles. We put the puchero into bowls and top them with mint leaves, hierbabuena. Their family enjoys it but I am sure I have done something wrong, left out some sort of ingredient. Acelga, how do you say that in English? I don’t have a clue. They leave soon enough—in America dinner is just a meal, a daily necessity and sometimes not even that—and I put away the food. Looks like I'll have puchero left over until next Sunday.

♦

Sunday had always been paella day. This was no small family tradition; it is a truth for all people in Mediterranean Spain. Before she got sick, Mamá would get up at six in the morning every single Sunday to start softening the rice and chopping the carne.

She'd throw together a mixture of spices that I still haven't quite figured out and add peas, chili peppers, parsley, green beans... The combination never made sense to me. She added the beef for balance and the seafood for culture- shrimp, mussels, and even caracol—snail. I would wake up to see Mamá mixing the rice, meats, and vegetables all together in a warm pan and then adding the tiniest bit of saffron to the dish and ¡vaya! The entire mixture would turn gold. A pinch of that one ingredient changed it from a rice dish with random foods thrown in into one of the most artistic and distinctively Spanish dishes. Mamá would let the paella sit, simmering in its own flavors, for hours on end. As a little girl I once asked why it had to sit there for so long, taunting us from the kitchen as we ate a mundane breakfast of fruits or simple rolls. "If I wanted meat and rice and vegetables separately, Monica, I'd make them separately and put them on a plate for lunch with saffron sprinkled on top. Nobody wants saffron sprinkled on top, people want the flavors to melt into each other. The rice gets some flavor from the shrimp, the beef starts to taste like chili peppers, the peas get some snail."

"Like a soup!" I suggested, excited.

"No, mija, like a paella. In a soup, all the ingredients turn into the same thing, by the time it is cooked you cannot tell the chicken from the carrot. Nobody eats paella and wonders if they are eating green beans or shrimp, but the two rub off on each other. Paella is Sunday's meal, soup is Tuesday's leftovers."

Mamá and I would walk to church at noon, leaving the paella simmering for the whole two hour mass. Sunday is the father's day, for our Lord in heaven and for my biological father—it was the one day we could count on either of them to be around. My father's friends would come over to watch fútbol, exclaiming to my mother as they walked in about how fantastic the paella smelled or what a wonderful host she was. My father would walk right past them and turn on the TV, and my mother only smiled graciously while was directly in their sight. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate their compliments, only that she didn't need them. She knew she was a good cook, and my father's friends meant nothing to her.  Mamá would go into the kitchen, calling me to help, and spoon plates of the delicious mixture for the men, then for the two of us. It was always delicious but I didn't dare compliment her, knowing I'd simply repeat the praise of my father's friends. Mamá could not stand to think she was cooking to impress them or anyone else, but I think now that perhaps I should have found something to say, some tidbit to create conversation or intriguing question to ask my mother, instead of eating in my self-absorbed silence.

In Palo Alto they sell boxed paella. "Made with real saffron!" the box says. I cannot even imagine—boxed paella? Cook for 10 minutes? That is not a soup or paella; it is a random assortment of pseudo-Spanish foods thrown together. Might as well put the ingredients on the plate separately, I think, and sprinkle saffron on top.

♦

My little townhouse in East Palo Alto is in need of some decoration, and Deanna insists that she is the perfect person to do it. "So where's your mom now, Monica?" she asks.

In my mind I scan through the information I've gotten from Spain; postcards from acquaintances, long letters from close friends and neighbors, birthday gifts from Mamá when she remembers, birthday gifts from my old neighbor Lourdes when Mamá doesn't. "I think she's living with my neighbor," I say. The most recent letter from Lourdes said that Mamá had moved in, but that was a while ago and I'm not sure what’s happened since. "We aren't really in touch anymore."

"With your own mother? What'd she do to you?" Deanna pulls out the painting of a lily that Mamá gave me on Christmas and looks around for a good place to put it.

Nothing she could have helped. "We get along alright," I say, "but she's so far away and her world is so different and she won't understand half the things I tell her about the US anyway. She doesn't even have a computer, you know?"

Unfortunately, Deanna has kids and she empathizes with my mother much more than with me. "If it were my mother, I'd write to her snail mail, at least every week. Moms don't care if they actually understand what you're talking about," she says, "they want to know that you're doing alright, that your life is working out, that you're achieving what you want to achieve."

“No, she really wouldn't understand. My mom's getting old and my neighbor says she's pretty absent minded these days." My mother is not yet fifty, but I've only known Deanna for a month or so and this is a much easier reason to explain.

Deanna makes a pained look, as if suddenly her 12-year-old Lindsey has grown to be 27 and finds her mother so old she is not worth talking to. "Monica,” she looks me in the eye, “every woman who hasn’t gone completely senile deserves to hear from her children."

It’s funny how these Americans can hit a nerve without ever meaning to. Senile. Mamá still isn’t old, but since my mid-teens she’s been senile in the most literal sense of the word. Senile, like they teach you in English class. Si-na-il. Accent on the “ah” sound. A condition, not sick but a bad condition, losing memory, losing thinking. No, it never comes back. I do not tell Deanna about this, I do not want to hear a sudden and heartfelt apology for her casual comment.

There is an uncomfortable silence as we continue going through the small box of home décor items and figuring out where to put them. We take out a throw pillow that I bought for my first dorm room, a poster from the Baltimore Aquarium, and a vibrant painting that Deanna finds at the bottom of the box.

"What's this?" she asks.

To me, it is a still life. It was painted when I was seventeen, one day when I took Mamá out to buy gazpacho ingredients and she created a painting of them at home before she cooked. It has all the colors I have always loved about gazpacho, and they almost seem to mix together. To Deanna, it is an abstract painting. Mamá painted it two years after she was diagnosed with Huntington's Disease, which had probably progressed to complete dementia by then. I watched her paint it and I saw the strokes she intended to make, the focus she attempted as she filled in a cucumber on one side of the painting and a bell pepper on the other. However, I also saw the brush go outside of the lines, I saw her incorrectly draw the proportions of the avocado, a vegetable she'd been slicing for at least twenty years. I remember Mamá attempting to sell it the way she'd sold so many paintings just two or three years earlier, and the painful experience as Lourdes convinced a stranger to pretend to buy the painting so that Mamá would feel valued. I remember going through Mamá's unsold paintings at Lourdes' house the week before I left, picking this one out because it was how I saw gazpacho.

"I don't know too much about abstract work, but I like the color in this one,” Deanna says. “Is abstract painting popular in Spain, with Picasso and all? He was Spanish, right?"

I am sure there are more abstract painters in the US than in Spain, though to be fair she is correct. But my mother is not Picasso. My mother was not challenging any cultural or artistic norm. She saw this painting as a masterpiece, and not an abstract one either. "Yeah, I like the color too," I say. I insist on hanging this painting in the kitchen, and the one of the lily in my bedroom. The rest of the colors can work around those.

We organize and reorganize the few pieces of furniture and decorations I own, and soon enough Deanna has to go pick Lindsey up from a practice. "I really like your paintings," she tells me as she leaves. I wonder if I should believe her.

♦

Lourdes started cooking for us when I was sixteen. Initially I insisted that I could cook for myself, that it wasn’t her fault my mother got sick and it wasn’t her job to help me get along without her. “Whose job is it then?” she had asked. Lourdes was an Andalucian through and through, and she wasn’t about to let me deal with this on my own. Eventually I stopped protesting and learned to appreciate her company in my kitchen.

One Saturday Mamá spent the entire day at church, repenting for her sins, pleading to God to rid her of that terrible disease. Lourdes came over with some eggs and potatoes and informed me that we were going to make tortilla. This is not the Mexican tortilla that Americans buy at Taco Bell, stuffed with all you can eat inside a flavorless flat bread. Spanish tortilla is like an omelet; a mixture of potatoes and eggs and sometimes onion cooked into a sort of a cake, and for Lourdes this was as good as it got.

Lourdes set out the ingredients and cracked an egg into one of our little bowls. Pieces of eggshell got into the bowl and she picked each one out. “I bet your mother never lets that happen,” she said. She was right. Lourdes liked cooking but she’d never been much good at it, and she usually wasn’t willing to put in the time to make the intricate foods my mother made.

“What are you going to do when you graduate?” she asked me, cracking another egg. This time no shell got into the bowl, but a little bit of egg white dripped onto the counter.

“I’ll get a job,” I told her, getting a cloth to clean up the egg. “Mamá needs someone to pay for a doctor, and my father won’t—”

“Don’t you dare,” she told me. “You are too smart to spend your life earning money for someone else.”

“But she needs me,” insisted. “Who else will take care of her?”

Lourdes looked at me incredulously. “I will take care of her, mi niña. She can move into my house, your father will barely even notice. You go to college. Learn something exciting.” Lourdes took a potato out of her colorful cloth bag of ingredients and started rinsing it off to peel. “Contéstame, Monica. What did you want to do with your life before all of this started?”

“I don’t know. I was a kid, I didn’t know what I wanted.”

“I remember...” she sliced the peel off very slowly and in my head I saw my mother peeling potatoes, peeling them quickly and efficiently but never once cutting herself or missing a part. “Didn’t you tell me you wanted to study the ocean? We went to the beach in Estepona one time, remember? Everyone else was so excited by the chiringuitos and the tourists lying in the sun, but you loved the water. You looked at all the shells and—oh! You were so linda!—You’d come running up to me asking me ‘Lourdes, what’s this one called? What does it do?’  And Dios mio I didn’t know what they were, but you were so ready to learn...”

Yes, I had liked marine biology, but I didn’t live near the coast and I didn’t have much of an interest in doing so. Spanish coasts are for rich British tourists, not poor Spanish scientists. “There aren’t many biology programs around here,” I started.

“Who says you have to stay around here? Ay, preciosa, you could move to Antarctica if you wanted. You’d be pretty cold but if that’s what you want to do, who’s stopping you?” We both knew the answer to this question but Lourdes didn’t seem to mind. She sliced the potatoes, accidentally cutting her finger in the process. “If you could live anywhere in the world, anywhere, where would it be? Not for your career, not for your mother, not for me or some handsome young man, but for you. Where would you go? India? Russia? Guatemala?”

Getting a bandage for her finger, I wondered how Lourdes got to be so carefree, how she could just ignore all the financial and cultural obstacles in her scenario. I thought about this for a moment, she made it sound so easy to go, so easy even to decide. Eventually I said, “New York.”

“Qué rico,” she said, starting to slice another potato. I stopped her and took over cooking. “What universities are out there?” I had no idea. “Well why haven’t you looked?”

“Lourdes, I belong here. I have to take care of mamá, I'm her daughter and she needs me. I don’t speak English that well and I’ve never even thought of actually moving there. Besides, we can’t afford an American university. I can’t just ignore everything that’s happening and think for myself,” I told her.

“Sometimes that’s all you can do,” she said.

♦

I start to set up my office and come across the most recent letter from Lourdes. April 22^nd, it is dated. Eight months ago. I reread it as I have a hundred times, learning about Mamá’s most recent treatments and adoring Lourdes’ distinctive script. I decide to reply to the both of them. It doesn’t matter if Mamá forgets the entire letter ten minutes after Lourdes reads it to her, she raised me and she deserves to hear how I am doing. I avoided writing for so long, as if communicating with my mother would keep me from becoming a true American. ¡Qué ridículo! I could not become an American in a month or even a decade. Moving across an ocean couldn't separate me from the land where I grew up because it was still in my heart, it was all I'd ever known. I was a little rice kernel in a big paella dish, and I'd simmered in the pot for eighteen years. With that much background, you can't just leave the past behind. You will never get the saffron flavor out of the rice, surely I should have known that much.

I keep the gazpacho painting in the kitchen. Sometime I'll tell Deanna about my mother’s condition and she’ll accept the sentimental value of the painting, but for now I'll leave it there with stubborn Spanish insistence. It isn’t a painting of an aesthetically pleasing landscape or a perfectly proportioned mountain scene; it’s a messy painting of a messy food. The tomatoes are colored out of the lines, as if they’re dripping before they’re even cut, which is exactly the way gazpacho tomatoes are meant to be. In the gazpacho of my life, I am not such a picky eater. Mamá is the tomato, the essential ingredient, without which the gazpacho would be an entirely different dish. There are certainly bell peppers and cucumbers, though, foods that I have only ever accepted when mixed into a dish like gazpacho. Poverty is no good raw, and dementia is dreadful all on its own. The stale bread of traditionalism must have started out as a good idea, but when it translates into my parents’ marriage or my mother’s insistence on natural remedies instead of seeking professional medical attention, it is unbearable. Judgmental friends back home would say that my father is the vinegar, but he is not so significant. He is perhaps an onion, or a clove of garlic, who just adds a little flavor into the mix. It’s not that my father did anything wrong, he just failed to do anything right. No, amigo, the vinegar was my own doing—not my moving away physically, but my readiness to distance myself from the past. My willingness to leave my diseased mother and the community I grew up in without ever turning back, concealing my heritage. This was the acrid vinegar, and it’s taken a lot of dicing and mixing and chilling to get the ingredients to work together. I’ve got plenty to go, though—some versions of gazpacho have mushrooms, ham, and even those brilliant mangos I used to bring home from the mercado.