"Siege of Leningrad" by Julian Robles
It’s at hours like these that the cathedral in the center of Oaxaca glows brightest. The streetlight, amber and watery, seeps through the pores of the cathedral’s stonework to set its façade ablaze. The doorways of the surrounding bars radiate fluorescent green and red and muffled reggaeton. I exit one of the bars with B., who I met just two days ago. Thousands of miles away, in California, L.’s mother breathes her last breath. L.’s mother who lived through the war in Russia, the war—the one in which she learned that dinner wasn’t finished until she’d snapped open the bones and drained the marrow. Now she moans in a small bedroom in Orange County, starved by the tumor that has sealed her esophagus. She has refused treatment.
B. and I are seated on a church step talking about books. B. likes memoirs. I don’t tell her that most memoirs bore me to tears, but that I have always been drawn to biographies. I prefer the dry, academic kind written by otherwise unexceptional people. The drier the better. In my home I have a growing collection of biographies devoted to the lives of writers, books that I enjoy reading just as much as I enjoy the literary works of their subjects (or, in several cases, more than the works of those subjects). B. mentions the recent memoir of a poet who nearly died of cancer. We have both read the book, and for the next ten minutes we exchange ideas about it.
Tomorrow I will call L. while I wait in a long queue to see Zapotec ruins in Mitla, and I will learn that her mother died during the night. She dies of starvation. A prolonged three-month starvation, or a year-long starvation, or a two-year-long starvation—no one is sure when this cancer, the third or fourth distinct cancer developed in her lifetime, first began to diminish her, and neither am I sure when, if it all, starvation officially begins, if doctors have agreed on a fixed measurement, or if starvation isn’t fundamentally Zenonian: this minute you are a certain fraction starved, and the next minute you are one more fraction starved, and in one month you are several times more starved, until, all at once, in a leap across an infinitesimal chasm of time, you have truly starved. How close, I wonder, did L.’s mother come to starvation when the Germans surrounded her city? Or worded differently, how much greater was the distance to the point of absolute starvation during the war versus during her illness? Could you compare the two conditions as discrete values, like milestones on a fixed march toward death? Could you say that in 1942 she was only (only—a word swallowed like a stone) two-fifths starved, or at worst three-fifths starved, but that in 2021 she came to be three-fourths starved, and then seven-eighths starved, and then fifteen-sixteenths? I’ve seen too much writing lately that makes metaphors of hunger. It’s a trope I’ve never been able to stomach. Not when I can so clearly remember being sent to the corner grocery store and waiting for the cards to be declined. Back when buying food was a game of Russian roulette.
While B. and I exchange thoughts on the book we have both read, we are approached by a little girl selling crepe-shaped wafers called pepitorias. She compliments B.’s earrings and asks the meaning of the words written on them, but B. cannot remember how to pronounce the words (let alone interpret their meaning). B. never learned Mandarin, she explains to me, because as an infant she was adopted by a white American couple in California. The vendor girl, who can’t be more than ten, tells us that she has learned a few words of Japanese from a 25-year-old friend in the city. She does not call the woman a tourist. She uses that word: friend. The little girl thinks B. is Japanese, too, despite my persistent corrections. After we pay, the girl tries her best to learn to say thank you in Mandarin, but gives up and says arigatō before skipping down the street. When we are alone again B. tells me about the American couple—her parents—from California and muses about their good intentions and what she calls the accident of birth. We both know what she means with that phrase, although neither of us says that she could have been like the vendor girl, or that she could have starved, because an entire world is swallowed in could have, meanwhile the truly starved remain hungry; instead we comment on the cathedral from whose stonework a fiery light seems to spill, and we talk about the bars that surround the cathedral, and I remember that at hours like these, under light like this, I always regret expecting so much of Mexico.
We see the vendor girl get in a white SUV that has been idling on the street corner, and only then do we arrive at the point of it all: B. and I muse about the uselessness of our own good intentions, whose limits are our very arrangement of this brilliant tableau of light and Oaxacan children, the perfect mise-en-scène to move us. Tonight we have moved ourselves to buy fifteen pepitorias from the vendor—all the cash I have in my wallet. I won’t eat them. Neither of us will eat them. Not now, at least. I’ll leave them on the church steps and maybe they will still be there when we are looking for a drunk snack in four hours, or maybe by then some person or animal will have made dinner of them, and, in any case, the vendor girl has her money, so the church can keep burning in a story by whose end only one person will have starved.
Julian Robles is a Mexican (-American) writer. He is currently a Fulbright Research Fellow and lives in Mexico City.
