When a Robot Decides to Die and Other Stories by Francisco García González

Author:Francisco García González
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART 2

Uchronias

The Year of the Pig

A significant portion of the pleasure we derive from the food we need depends, no doubt, on the form in which it is presented and the ambiance that surrounds it.

NITZA VILLAPOL, The One-Minute Kitchen

TO BID ADIEU to the thirty-first of December without the ceremony of the roasted macho, it would be as if the year had refused to leave and remained stuck to the walls.

Drying out the plants, cracking everything.

Spreading its smell to old and used things.

And it’s not so much the banquet itself, but the ceremony.

The ceremony of the macho.

A liturgy without instructions. Filled with meanings that entrap the family and bring out the best in each and every one of its members. The ritual of the meal around the fire in its most pure essence. These are things I know and feel, but I do not tell or mention them.

First came the stomp through the vegetables. From market to market. And when we had collected everything we needed, we went to Oriente to buy the macho. If you want a real macho, you should go to Oriente, whatever they sell you around here is apocryphal: District of Cuba, Victoria de las Tunas, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción de Baracoa, San Salvador de Bayamo. It’s all the same.

Final destination, Cayo Mambí in the interior. Fifteen or twenty kilometers, I don’t really know. Someone gave us the address of a farm run by a man from La Habana. It’s a good living for habaneros who’ve been handed fallow land in Oriente.

We arrived at La Celia and the habanero came out to greet us in person. He must have known that my father-in-law was an important figure. Because he invited us in for a drink made from guanábana and, under the afternoon breeze, we worked out the details of the transaction. Fair and square, no sleights of hand. Transparent. We finished the afternoon snack and the host invited us to take a look at the corrals. Impeccable. It was no accident that La Celia had been selected and certified as the regional reference center for the FAO. It was there that journalists and Party officials and the Ministry of Culture so often showed up.

Back behind the guava fields were the nursing pens. A sickly-sweet odor emanated from the blossoming vegetable beds. We entered through the wide corridor that divided the string of corrals from one of the barns. Some of the machos slumbered next to the troughs. Others ate straight from these with a gluttony fitting for what they were. No hint of alarm. They barely noticed we were there. Once in a while one would snort, move his head, or shoo the flies away as we passed.

For me choosing presents a dilemma and in La Celia it was doubly so. The habanero talked incessantly, reciting facts on nutrition, markers of breeding quality and lines, market cycles and treatments for parasites. My father-in-law wanted to know about this last matter in particular. A few months ago,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.