Umami (25 page)

Reborn dolls are handmade. The people who make them are known as reborners. Once Noelia had made up her mind to buy herself a little doll, she did some research on the sketchy, dial-up nineties Internet and chose a reborner who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon: so that's where we went. For the first time, tiny size-0 garments – all strictly folkloric – found their way into our cases. Noelia bought the clothes as a gift for the reborner, but we both knew that they were actually for Maria (as she'd already decided to name her doll).

‘Noelia,' I said, ‘calling a doll dressed up in traditional Mexican outfits Maria is as ludicrous as calling a dog Pup, or a pub The Tavern, or a wine bar Bar à Vin.'

To which she replied that Maria was going to be neither a pet animal nor a drinking establishment, and that she wasn't best pleased about me calling her a doll, even though that's precisely what she was, and even though Chris had told us that it was very important that we never forget that that's precisely what she was. The way Noelia saw it, given that we didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of forgetting she was a doll, it was hardly necessary to keep reminding ourselves every five minutes, and so wasn't it just better if we didn't refer to the doll as a doll, because she didn't like it, period. I was about to protest but she held up her index finger and said, categorically and when we were already on our flight to Heathrow, ‘Promise me you're not going to call her that again, at least not between us.'

I promised, but I also told her that ‘baby' made me very uncomfortable. And so we agreed to call her ‘the girl'. The girl seemed more neutral to me. No, if I'm honest, it seemed more ironic. It gave me the hope (the false hope, as my wife would make sure) that I was going to be able to keep my distance from the whole thing. For me the girl was a thing. Then they became two things. And then, inevitably, they became The Girls. But that came later.

Chris was an American lady Noelia exchanged emails with before she decided to adopt a reborn in Stratford-upon-Avon. Noelia read me out her emails, which recounted Chris's deadly-boring life in microscopic detail. I can't say I thought much of Chris, and then she started sending me separate emails urging me to understand my wife's needs, after which I positively loathed her. Chris was a consummate collector, not to say sick in the head. Her fifty-plus collection of reborns had their own outhouse in the garden, and on top of names and surnames, they'd each been assigned their own hypothetical future.

‘So-and-so is going to be a doctor like you,' she told Noelia when she went to meet Chris in person, taking advantage of a cardiology conference in the States.

My wife returned from that trip explaining to me that
a
) Chris is a psycho killer with frills, you know the type? and
b
) she was going to buy herself a reborn, whether I liked it or not. Chris was also a reborner, but a lousy one. A large part of the decision to go to England was to avoid offending Chris who, according to Noelia, ‘would've sniffed us out the very second we ordered from
any
other reborner in the States.' I'd never been to England, so I didn't argue with the casual paranoid presenting herself to me.

We spent three days in London and then drove all the way to Stratford on the wrong side of the road. To say
we
drove is a manner of speaking, of course, because I don't even drive on the right-hand side, let alone the wrong one. I map-read. We settled into our hotel, then went to meet the reborner and put in our order. More than anything we wanted to make sure that there was a dark-skinned model in the reborner's catalogue, and that she wasn't going to lumber us with some totally inappropriate little blond dolly. Without having told me, Noelia had packed a bag with photos of us from childhood so that the reborner (what was her name? Marissa? Melissa? I don't know, but I'm sure it had a double s in there because that was my prompt to be doubly condescending) could take inspiration from our younger faces. I spent the whole visit swinging between the giggles and pure disgust. I was pretty unbearable really. Noelia sent me to the car and ended up ordering Maria alone.

I remember lots of painted wood and a little yard at the back of the hotel in Stratford where we lived while we waited for Maria's rebirth. Hidden among the flower pots was a life-sized stone statue of a pig. I remember the stairs with their Persian carpets, and how they perplexed me. I still can't figure it out. Are they made to measure, or are they existing carpets molded and nailed down to each step? But my clearest memories are of the breakfasts. Served on porcelain dishes with domed metal covers, the whole thing was incredibly imperial, and totally unbefitting a modest, four-bedroomed guesthouse. Each night, on a little list, you had to mark a series of crosses against whichever food you wanted to appear on your porcelain dish the following day. Noelia and I ticked the same boxes every night: sausages, roasted tomatoes, and baked beans (with bucket loads of added sugar), which gave rise to a fleeting but intense obsession. I remember that when we got back to Mexico I tried to make them with black Cuban beans and brown sugar: an all round disaster. That's one thing I've learned about food through pure empirical research: food is a patriot. Under no circumstances will it be replicated outside of its mother country.

One morning during that week, Noelia announced that she could contain her curiosity no longer, and called the reborner to ask permission to come and see Maria-in-the-making. It was a big mistake. Seeing her in the oven was far from pleasant. She was deformed.

‘She's not deformed,' Noelia corrected me. ‘She's just still in parts.' Noelia, who was never politically correct, suddenly got all high and mighty, precisely when we were in the company of a woman who couldn't understand our Spanish anyway. Melissa, or Marissa, didn't speak anything other than incomprehensible English. But she was a smiley, strapping woman who laughed so heartily it was infectious: even I – amid my waves of serious grumpiness throughout the trip – cracked up when she got going. I put my moods down to the fact that I was constantly questioning my wife's sanity, and with it my own, because, as I've explained to Nina Simone a thousand times, we were two people and one person at once. We were a compendium. A compilation. An unequivocal unified compartment. Something like that.

That thing about us not understanding a word the reborner said is pretty much true. For example, she pronounced ‘breather' ‘brida', and had to write it down before either of us understood what in God's name she was on about. The brida, as we called it from then on, is a simple mechanism you insert inside the doll's ribcage and which, once activated, makes her chest rise and fall rhythmically. In other words, it sort of makes her breathe. Battery-operated breathing. At first we said we didn't need it, but later, when we were sitting alone together by a pub fire, Noelia admitted she was drawn to the idea.

‘Why not? If we're already spending a fortune on this girl, why not have the most high-tech, ultra-snazzy, extra-plus model possible?'

She was so enthused that I even called the reborner myself, from the pub's telephone. With some scotch in me for courage, I told her that we did want the brida after all: we wanted the girl to ‘breathe'. The only problem being that you can't do scare quotes over the phone, and perhaps that's when my irony started to fade.

We didn't go back to see Marissa Melissa until adoption day. In the meantime, we visited gardens and castles, and saw a ton of very green grass and two Shakespeare plays. They call it adoption in the reborn world; the moment you first come face to face with your new baby. Isn't it more like the moment of birth, that first meeting between parents and child? Why do they call it rebirth? As far as I've understood it, the idea is that the doll is born in the moment of assemblage, when the adoptive parents aren't present, just the creator. The reborner. Melissa. Or Marissa. And then it's
re
born (it's reborn as a baby is the idea, like when Pinocchio becomes a boy) in the moment of adoption.

Noelia and I were in the local pub when Maria was born. In the pub, downing pint after pint of beer so heavy it was like drinking umami, and laughing at ourselves to the point of tears. But on the day of the adoption we were serious. I was overcome with that feeling of liberation you only feel when you're miles from home, and decided I was going to be understanding and try to enjoy it all, if only to make Noelia happy. Melissa Marissa presented us with Maria in a box with a clear plastic lid.

No amount of Shakespeare or art galleries really prepares you for such hyperrealism. That's why some people hate hyperrealism and don't consider it art at all: to them it's a righteous, full-of-itself style that constantly puts your sanity and senses to the test. We could have referred to her as the girl, or doll, or whatever we'd wanted, but Maria looks as much like a newborn baby as I look like a withered old man. We opened the box, oohing and aahing, then cracked open the bottle of lukewarm champagne we'd brought for the reborner, and took turns carrying Maria. We learned how to dress her, how to wash her, and how to change her batteries.

Once back in our hotel room with the girl, we opened the stroller we'd bought a few days earlier in London and discovered it didn't fit in the room, so we tried to ask for a bigger one. We never got to the bottom of exactly what happened, but it was clear that the owners weren't in the least amused by Maria because they ran us out of there without the slightest hint of that famous English gentility. Not really knowing what to do, we drove back to Melissa Marissa's house to ask where we could find another hotel. At first she burst out laughing, then she cried a bit (on seeing Maria, who she thought she'd said goodbye to forever), then she insisted we stay the night in her house.

It was the most god-awful night of my life. The reborner inflated a blow-up bed on the floor of her studio. The mattress and bed linen were comfortable enough, but whichever way you turned there were bits of baby. The really terrible parts are the limbs and the heads, because the torsos and pelvises on reborns are made of an agreeable enough material, and look a bit more like a pincushion or a ragdoll, so aren't so horrifying. In the room though there were arms and legs in pristine vinyl, not yet coated in the layers and layers of paint they give them. Others were already painted in complex tones, and I don't know which were worse: the ghostly white ones, or the ones that looked like real skin. Not to mention the half-made dolls, which still hadn't been assembled but looked totally lifelike. In order to sleep without feeling watched I had to lay a T-shirt incredibly carefully over a little table with three finished heads, which Marissa Melissa was clearly in the process of stitching, pore by pore, with fine baby hair.

Noelia and Marissa Melissa stayed up until the early hours of the morning drinking tea and nightcaps and playing with the dolls. God knows how much they must have drunk. All I know is that when I woke up
a
) there were various reborns dressed in traditional Mexican attire and
b
) Noelia had bought a second doll. I was too intent on getting out of there to argue, and the money was all hers, so I kept my mouth shut.

This was a girl, they explained to me tenderly, who somebody had adopted and then returned! Like a pair of shoes! Noelia called her Clara, at least at first, because she was blond and pale. If you looked closely, around her eyes some veins showed. For the life of me, I couldn't shake the feeling that those veins – which I knew had been painted on – were in fact showing through her pale baby skin. In short, Clara was just as gut-wrenchingly disturbing to look at as Maria. You could stop breathing waiting for them to. But Clara didn't have a
brida
, so you'd sit there expectantly and she wouldn't move a muscle. It's the same even today. Some days, the stillness of The Girls is the only thing that'll convince me they aren't alive.

*

Like all the other doctors I know, Noelia didn't go to the doctor. It's a specific bullheadedness of specialists who think that the smattering of general medicine they learned thirty years ago will keep them safe from all ills. Noelia self-assessed, self-diagnosed, self-medicated, and, at a glance, would assess, diagnose, and medicate me too. Her non-cardiological diagnoses often fell short of the mark. Of course, her own misdiagnosis proved to be much worse, but at least once she messed up pretty badly with me. It must have been around 1987. I remember we were in the middle of the construction work on the mews and The Girls weren't around yet. One Friday I started to feel really, really unwell and Noelia had me on paracetamol and tea right up until the following Monday. By the time I woke up on Tuesday my eyes were yellow. I had a severe case of hepatitis, and only survived it because we ran that second to the hospital where they hooked me up and pumped me full of all sorts of drugs. She herself took far too long to go and check out her pains, which I'd guessed were her body's way of protesting against her incurable addiction to work. But by the time she did have some tests, the cancer was already terminal.

*

Carefully placing Maria and Clara in their boxes first, we folded up the stroller, waved Marissa Melissa farewell, and drove to the airport. On the way there we listened to the album that had become a kind of soundtrack to the trip, because someone had left it in the rental car. Noelia loved that album, which was sickeningly schmaltzy. Or perhaps she just wanted The Girls to preserve some link to their past, because driving along she suddenly declared that they were no longer going to be called Maria and Clara, but rather Kenny and G. I asked if she understood that Kenny was the name of a boy, and she laughed.

‘Seriously,' I told her, and when we stopped for gas I showed her the CD.

Noelia, who never wore her glasses on vacation, had seen the long hair and guessed that Kenny G was a female saxophonist. She moved the album right up close to her nose to make absolutely sure she wasn't right, and then, after thinking about it for a second said, ‘Makes no difference, the names are staying.'