Tag: adriana paramo

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Excerpt from Adriana Páramo’s My Mother’s Funeral

EXCERPT FROM ADRIANA PARAMO’S MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL

Cows’ brains. That’s what Mom cooked the day my brother left. Whenever she was in a foul mood, we all paid. She cooked angry food, which is to say, we ate angry food in tense silence. The brains kept slipping off Mom’s fingers as she tried to wash them in the sink. They looked like a conglomerate of cauliflower heads covered by a thin membrane that made them appear wet. Red blood vessels traversed the yellowish matter.

After the veins and the membrane were removed, Mom dropped the brains into boiling water. She added bouillon cubes if she was splurging or plain salt if she wasn’t. The day my brother left, she used salt. As the brains cooked and their surface became tender and malleable, their smell also changed. It went from gamey to homey; it morphed from alien and backwards to something familiar, something that made our bellies twitch.

On the kitchen counter Mom chopped garlic, onions, and tomatoes, although it looked as if she were doing much more than just chopping. She was murdering the white bulbs of the onions and, with them, she was killing something else. She swung the hollow green ends into the garbage like she was trying to fling them out of the kitchen. What a wild chef Mom was that day.

“My biology teacher says that the green end is the most flavorful part of the onion,” my oldest sister Dalila said, looking at the scallions in the can.

Mom shot her a narrow-eyed, watch-it look. “Who’s cooking, me or the biology teacher?”

We knew better than to take the issue any further and watched in silence as Mom sautéed the onions and the tomatoes in reheated pork lard. When the mixture was ready, she jumbled it up with the garlic bits, the cows’ brains, and three eggs. She beat the concoction with fury. The fork’s prongs rose and fell, breaking the gelatinous texture of the brains, the viscosity of the eggs, and in a moment she had created something very similar to scrambled eggs, filled with protein and maybe unsuspected diseases.

“I have a project for my biology class,” my oldest sister said. She was the only one talking. My other three sisters and I knew that Mom was not in a talking mood. We didn’t scrape or clatter our cutlery against the plates. It was a quiet meal.

“I could get an A+ and extra points if I complete the whole thing,” Dalila said. I looked at her and couldn’t help noticing how perfectly shaped her nose was, how much lighter her skin was than mine, how, when she smiled, her teeth shone even and white like marble sculptures.

“About time you bring home good grades,” Mom said. “What is it you have to do?”

“An anatomy project,” my sister said. “We need to assemble a skeleton.”

My mother, who had never been known as squeamish, had no qualms about this. If her daughter needed a skeleton to do well in her class, a skeleton she would get. Or two, as it turned out.

Back then, graves in Colombia were not final resting places. They were a liminal phase of the disposal of human remains. The bodies were buried in graves leased for five years. At the end of the term the remains were disinterred and the surviving relatives given two options: to increase the term of the lease or to rebury the body in perpetuity. In either case the caskets—if still in good form—were reused and the graves leased again. Disturbing the dead used to be a good business. When the bodies went unclaimed, they were placed in plastic bags and thrown into common graves, which were later incinerated or buried for good, depending on the resources of the cemetery—the final touch of social stratification. Yet accidental disinterment sometimes happened. Twenty years later, my grandfather’s grave would be mistaken for somebody else’s whose lease had expired, and his remains would be disinterred. Mom would go to the cemetery in Mariquita to leave flowers on his grave and find the place desecrated. She would spot his remains in a burlap bag among the undertaker’s tools, other burlap bags containing unclaimed bones, and an army of worms creeping out of a skull. She would cry, humiliated and indignant, lamenting that this would not have happened had her family been upper class.

This excerpt appeared in Adriana Páramo’s memoir, My Mother’s Funeral, available from CavanKerry Press!  Purchase yours today!

Adriana Páramo is a Colombian anthropologist winner of the Social Justice and Equality Award in creative nonfiction with her book Looking for Esperanza. Her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Consequence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Carolina Quarterly Review, Magnolia Journal, So To Speak, Compass Rose, and Phati’tude, among others. Páramo has volunteered her time as a transcriber forVoice of Witness, a book series which empowers those affected by social injustice.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.

Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Excerpt from Adriana Páramo’s My Mother’s Funeral

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EXCERPT FROM ADRIANA PARAMO’S MY MOTHERS FUNERAL

My earliest memory of Mom involves a mango. I’m bent over the kitchen sink, kneeling on a wooden bench. Mom is next to me washing two mangos, one for me and one for her. They are yellow and orange with reddish stripes that become brighter at the stem. Mom handles them with extreme care, like they are precious relics made out of thin crystal, pats them dry with a corner of her apron, and puts one under my nose.

“Smell this,” she says.

I giggle. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because my sisters are gone for the day and right here, right now, Mom is mine, and she is offering me a mango.

“Now this is what you do,” Mom instructs me. “Roll your sleeves up, like this.” She turns the right sleeve of my sweater, fold upon fold, until the wool is all bunched up in my armpit. I roll the left sleeve and wait for instructions.

“Now, take a bite. Despacito,” Mom says. “Deje el afán. Don’t chew and don’t swallow anything yet. Let the juice fill your mouth first.”

She bites into her mango and I into mine. A police car zooms by. Its siren meddles in my ears with the sound of the fruity juice gushing to the back of my throat. Mom lets out a loud mmm, eyes shut, her lips closed like a smile. I also say mmm, until the juice starts to run down my arm and makes a blob at the elbow. Mom has strict rules about hygiene. I reach out for the tap but she stops me.

“We’ll clean up in a second, Niña.” She wipes my arm with her apron. “You don’t just eat a mango from Mariquita. You experience it.”

I’m five years old. I don’t know the difference between eating and experiencing anything, let alone a mango, but I understand.

“This is what you do,” she says and smiles. This is an important grin. I store it in my heart as the first smile I ever see across my mother’s face.

Then she proceeds to lick the length of her arm, from her fingers, still holding the mango, all the way to her elbow. Or at least that’s the idea because no matter how far we stretch our tongues out neither of us can reach the elbow.

 

This excerpt appeared in Adriana Páramo’s memoir, My Mother’s Funeral, available from CavanKerry Press!  Purchase yours today! 

Adriana Páramo is a Colombian anthropologist winner of the Social Justice and Equality Award in creative nonfiction with her book Looking for Esperanza. Her writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, Consequence Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Carolina Quarterly Review, Magnolia Journal, So To Speak, Compass Rose, and Phati’tude, among others. Páramo has volunteered her time as a transcriber forVoice of Witness, a book series which empowers those affected by social injustice.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected Nicole Oquendo. Nicole Oquendo is an Assistant Editor for Sundress Publications, and the Nonfiction Editor of Best of the Net. Her most recently published essays and poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, Storm Cellar, and Truck.