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The Santiago spring might be mostly made of Platano Orientale, but the city has more than a few golden poppies as well.
There’s a lovely story about how the copa de oro poppy came to Chile:
When news of the California Gold Rush arrived in Chile in 1849, thousands of Chileans went north to try their luck on the gold fields. The sailors that carried them deserted their ships and left their captains stranded in San Francisco, scrabbling for sailors to take them home.
These ships, returning empty to Chile, brought poppy seeds with them, mixed up with the stones they used for ballast in their empty holds. Unusually considerate for an invasive species, the poppy hadn’t much interest in virgin Chilean wilderness. It preferred earth already broken by humans, and spreading inland from the coast, made its way across cultivated fields and along road and railway lines, right across the central valley, all the way up into the foothills of the Andes. It was Chile’s first shipment of California Gold.
The truth is far more prosaic. The California poppy came to Chile all across the second half of the 19th century mixed up in Shipments of Alfalfa. Christened Copa de Oro (cup of gold), the golden poppy found a dry Mediterranean climate extraordinarily similar to its native California, and burst out everywhere all at once. Ironically, in some lights, the climate of Central Chile seems far more suited to the Copa de Oro than California. The plants spread further, grow larger and when they get going in spring, bloom bigger - pervasive to the point that to the point that many Chileans today presume that it’s a native. In spring, the short green plants bust out in flowers, drifts of gold and electric-orange blossoms carpeting the valleys and ridges and hills of Central Chile, turning their faces up to follow the sun.
A plant like the Copa de Oro deserves rather better than an ignominious origin in a sack of alfalfa. Let’s go with Californian gold.
Santiago does an awfully pretty spring. We’ve got jacaranda trees that bloom purple on every block, dropping pools of purple color on the streets beneath them and casting pools of purple shadow all around them on the sidewalks. We’ve got Ceibo – the original burning bush, with its small spring leaves blotted out by scarlet pods like clouds of hanging red flame. We’ve got wisteria hanging over walls, heavy and honey scented. We’ve got bright golden Californian poppies, spreading thick across the verges and the hills -
But most of all we’ve got the Platano Orientale.
A plátano is, in direct translation to the Spanish, a banana, but the Platano Orientale has nothing tropical or edible about it. It is the Eastern or Oriental Plane Tree - once beloved of Hippocrates, and today equally beloved of Santiago’s municipal councils. Tall and spreading, with a leaf rather like that of a maple, it grows like a weed, spreading up and out to make shady green tunnels of our hot summer city roads. And twice in every spring and early summer, it sprouts a crop of fluffy brown pods, which launch themselves on the summer breezes and inundate Santiago. The air fills up like a glass bowl full of dandelion clocks. Walking down the street is like walking through a storm of ash, thick and furry. On windy days, sheets of platano seeds come drifting across the sidewalks, piling up in gutters, and snagging in trees and bricks and paving stones.
Platano seeds get everywhere. They filter under window -frames and blow through keyholes . They catch in your zippers and your pockets and you trouser cuffs, and they catch in your eyes – which weep, and in your nose, which itches, and in your throat, where it lands on your tonsils with a shock like a live electrical wire. And then you cough – a terrible, barking electric cough. You cough and you cough and you cough you cough – bent double, helpless and weeping -
My first spring here, I spent three days in the hospital after that terrible electric cough met my outgrown childhood asthma and brought it all back in full liquid-lung terror. There’s an awful lot of asthma in Santiago. It’s not just the pollution – and Chile produces smog like it’s the mainstay of the GDP. It’s the way the spring belongs to the Platano Orientale.
Mr Tabubil, who has never known an allergy in his life, succumbed within weeks of arriving, and passes the spring red-rimmed and hacking. My Dad, equally hardy, visited us last spring, and half-way across a traffic intersection, he stopped dead in the road and doubled over with that terrible electric cough, locked in an attack that required every instrument in my mobile asthma arsenal to bring under control.
And I have quite the arsenal. Since being released from the hospital, spring comes pre-loaded with an arsenal of sprays and drops and inhalers that would make a hardened hypochondriac blush. Our municipalities might love the Platano Orientale, but every doctor I’ve met would, given half an opportunity and an illicit batch of Agent Orange, defoliate the whole city in one fell swoop if it would get rid of That Tree. Medical committees, armed with infographics and statistics, make eloquent claims on the public interest and the public health. They bring in experts on horticulture and respiratory medicine. They drag in respiratory patients for dramatic personal narratives. But the platano grows like a weed in poor soil, and when have sense and logic ever prevailed against a budget-minded municipality anywhere?
And doctors talk darkly, in surgeries and over cocktails, of axes in the dark.
This is Mr Tabubil on the subject of Valentine's Day:
"Did you know that price of flowers goes up by seven hundred and thirty percent on February 14th? The florists know you're coming. Flowers and chocolates mean nothing except that you are a sheep following a ringleader that’s baa-ing just as loudly as you are. All of the romance - if there ever was any - is lost in an expensive wash of cheap sentimentality - and sheep. Roses, particularly, are a meaningless gesture in a mercenary sea of overpriced artifice and scripted spontaneity and I think everybody should pull their quilts over their heads and stay there until the whole horrible thing is over. Gnnnrrrrggghhhh."
"Can't you just appreciate the spirit of the day and take the occasion as an opportunity to express love and joy toward the people you care about?"
"Since I already feel as if I’m being sucked into the hungry maw of the
ugly capitalistic advertising machine, I don't think people should even kiss on Febuary 14th because if they do, Madison Avenue will get the
wrong idea and start charging hearts and sparkles to my Visa card."
"Does that mean I don't get flowers, then?"
Which just shows that you can help anybody reach their breaking point if you do it right.
But I'm not really a bad person. In fact, I felt for the poor fellow. It's true that February 14th is undoubtedly over-commercialized, and last year I thought I'd empathize a little - I'd embrace his horror of the season and do things his way.
I was thinking polyester. Polyester granny panties, a box of chocolates with a bite out of every single one, my oldest, saggiest bra, and a dinner of liver 'n onions.
Vive l'horreur.
It certainly helped that he'd gotten home the morning of the 14th from a trip overseas and was jet-lagged to a point only a shade this side of lucid. I may not be a bad person, but I'm not always very nice.
"Oh Tabubil!" The man wailed. "I didn't get you anything and here you are making dinner all for me-e! I don't deserve a wife like you!"
"No kidding." I thought, and bent over the frying pan, holding my breath. I set the table and proudly uncovered -
"Calf liver?" Mr Tabubil breathed, turning green. "Have I never mentioned to you that I don't… um.. er..."
"No." I lied firmly. "You never." I took up a knife and sliced. He covered his mouth and made a choking sound.
"I'm sorry" he mumbled through his hand "but the smell..."
And then the jet-lag kicked him in the back of the skull and he came over all remorseful.
"And you cooked it all for me-e! Even knowing how I feel about the 14th. Well, I feel awful. I should be grateful - I should be loving this. I'm a bad bad baaaaad bad husband!"
Fortunately for both of us, there were leftovers in the fridge that he could eat while I choked down a slice of the liver.
"Tabubilgirl, your face looks sort of, well - "
"Not at all!" I gasped. "S' lovely! Not quite what I was expecting, but it's the first time I've made it, and - mmm-mmm! Yummy! And special - all made just for you!"
And that went straight down the black hole of remorse as well. He knew things weren't quite right, but was too strung out on time-zones to do anything but swallow the flashy neon malarkey I was peddling wholesale. He felt so terrible he ate half of what was left on my plate.
Liver disposed of, "Valentine's Day presents!" I cried, bouncing up out of my chair to grab the chocolates.
"Sweeetie..."Mr Tabubil moaned, and when I handed him the big heart shaped box his face took on an expression intended to convey love and gratitude, and guilt, and deep deep remorse for not repaying me in kind.
"I don't deserve you." His eyes said, damply, to my own. "You dear dear sweet sweet darling."
And then he opened the box, and his features turned- in rapid succession- to shock, distaste, disgust and at last, a deep, dawning suspicion.
Swallowing a deep breath, he stalked in high dudgeon to our bedroom, where he shut the door firmly in my face and proceeded to laugh his head off.
Eventually he calmed down enough to let me in and we went back to the kitchen for proper dessert - a big squashy chocolate cake. He made me take the first bite. Which hurt, because I'd selflessly resisted the urge to bake our leftover Halloween spiders into the middle layer. And if he really loved me like he said, he'd never even have dreamed of thinking it. I'm not all bad.
Things were perfectly amicable until we went to bed, and then he saw the granny panties and I had to make a run for it.
O divine granny panties - $5.03(less tax) of slippery nylon knit, oily plastic sheen and the ambiguously pink color of an undercooked ham. They creeped up past my belly button and drooped down past my thighs, and capped the dimples above my knee-bones with embroidered nosegays all done up in ecru plastic lace.
Don't ask how long I spent looking for drawers that looks like that. It was an odyssey of many parts and many stories, of triumphs, tragedies, great leaps of faith and heroism past the bounds of woman and of man -
O raise your voice for vinalon and acetate - for britches that ride up past the ribs and briefs that wallow underslung - for running hosiery and slipped knits - for bobble knit, for ladder stitch, for gossamer translucency,elastic bands that clamp your thighs with purple grip -
Stripped to my dreadful nylon drawers, I stood, chin raised, and proudly stared my husband down. He looked at me and looked at me and sat very very still. His mouth opened, and he said "Take those off."
And then he turned his head to the wall and very firmly went to sleep.
Happy Valentines Day!
A few night ago, Mr Tabubil had a skype call with his sister. I heard her asking “how Tabubilgirl was doing? How’s the blog? I haven’t heard much from her for the last few months-”
And poor Mr Tabubil got an earful from my direction while he winced and said very carefully into the microphone that "No-o, Tabubilgirl has had to put her life rather on hold for the last six months or so. She's acting pretty cabin-feverish, these days, as well-"
And then he had to dodge a pillow that had been mysteriously flung out of nowhere right at his head. And another one that was mysteriously aimed right at his computer.
"You can't hit her." He yelped, his arms wrapped around the monitor. "She's in Washington. How cabin-feverish are you? We’ve reached some sort of delirium state now?"
Hello. I’m back. It’s been a while. I descended into the dark underbelly of the kitchen design industry, and then I clawed my way up and out of the other side, and I no longer come home at night to howl and shred pillows in the privacy of my room.
Bawling after the fact, in privacy, being less legally
compromising than threatening kitchen designers with defenestration as a
motivational technique.
The last time I talked about the renovations, we were having an extremely dynamic day. Among other interesting events, I was on the phone with the head office of a kitchen design company, trying to find out why a delivery of kitchen cabinets wasn’t happening. The call wasn’t going very well.
When the
cabinets did finally arrive at the flat – only three weeks after they
were completed in the factory, they didn’t actually fit.
The dimensions of the cabinets didn’t match the dimensions of the kitchen or the dimensions on the architect’s plans, neither of which corresponded with each other in some rather significant respects.
I called the head office to complain, and got a martyred sigh in reply. They’d worked so hard, the Architect said, on those cabinets. They really had. Cutting, gluing, screwing, sanding – her voice got a whole lot crisper and a whole lot harder. Whether or not they actually fitted was now immaterial. They were there. If we wanted new ones we’d have to pay up front for a whole new kitchen. And if we had a problem with that, we could smoke it.
Eighty decibels of heated opinion later, I had a new set of cabinets on order, with no idea that this was going to be the high water mark of our relationship. In retrospect, I should have dropped the issue and found a new kitchen to go with the cabinets instead.
Along the way to our finished kitchen, we learned all sorts of things - for example, right about the moment when our building’s residents at the point of defenestrating us, we discovered that our kitchen designers had a whole department of painters and plasterers and general odd-job cleaners and construction specialists on standby – devoted exclusively to the repair of apartments that didn’t actually belong to their clients. In all fairness, they did get the all the apartments on floors two through four of our building completely cleaned up on only two hours notice, but it gave us some serious pause for thought.
Meanwhile, Rodrigo, our general contractor, was getting curious. And the kitchen countertops had arrived. They were the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong material and only five weeks late, but at this point, that was about par for the course.
“I’ve got a friend who does kitchens.” Rodrigo said one afternoon. I was sitting in the half-painted hallway outside the kitchen with my head in my hands. Inside the kitchen, a pair of young apprentices- their very first week on the job- were sealing the joins in the stone countertops with a silicone almost exactly opposite on the color wheel, and refusing to call a supervisor on the basis that any discrepancy in color was due to vision problems. Mine.
But I was fighting back. By this point in the game, I had the Head Executive of the kitchen company on speed-dial.
“He’s an independent contractor, this friend of mine,” Rodrigo said. “He’s pretty busy at the moment. Has all the work he can handle – and more.”
He waited politely while I dialed the CEO’s number and yelled at an answering machine for a while.
“They’re not picking up?” He said.
“That’s the fifth time I’ve called. I think they’re screening my number. Can I borrow your phone?”
He handed me his cell phone. I dialed and got the answering machine again, so I yelled at it from his phone for a while.
Rodrigo scratched the back of his head reflectively. “I’ve been asking around,” he said. “Everyone in Santiago who does kitchens is pretty busy right now. Turns out your kitchen company has been kicked off of half their projects in the last six months. You said you got the recommendation from a friend?”
“Two friends.” I sighed. “Their kitchens were amazing. They couldn’t say enough about these guys. They were swift, professional, timely, good at what they did -”
From the kitchen came the sound of stone grinding on stone. We both grimaced.
“They might have been all right when your friends did their kitchens," Rodrigo said. "What was that,two years ago? But they’re a different outfit now. Too many clients, too many workshops, a new manager-”
“Who doesn’t return phone calls?”
He sighed.
I sighed.
In the kitchen, something heavy fell on the tile floor. Someone swore. I put my head back in my hands. “I’ll get Mr Tabubil to call from his office,” I said. “His office switches up the numbers on outgoing calls. The kitchen company can’t keep up.”
At the end of the day it took some serious legal lawyering to get the apprentices out and the kitchen anywhere near finished. Outside the kitchen, the general contracting was also going swimmingly, on account of how the same day the apprentices arrived with the countertops, our plumber hooked up the new pipes in the laundry, and sealed and painted the wall up behind him – without stopping to leak-test the new seals. Our downstairs neighbors had a bathtub’s worth of things to say about that.
So did the elderly lady four floors below, who was complaining of a great big waterfall coming through her kitchen ceiling. It was definitely there. It just vanished when other people came around. Why was the floor
dry? It was dry because the puddles drained away through the floor
while we were ringing the doorbell. The only cure was going to be a
brand new kitchen of her own – we had some rather nice designers we
could pay to do one for her, didn’t we?
Mr Tabubil and I rang in the new year in style. When the countdowns and party hooters began in the street below us, we climbed out of bed and went to the window to watch the fireworks above the city skyline, then went back to sleep!
On New Years Day, we went to the park and lay under a tree on a picnic blanket. We watched small children playing soccer, and small dogs who wanted desperately to be part of the game, but ran like hell whenever the ball came near them. Above us, parrots shrieked in the ceibo, showering the grass with little feathery fragments of seed pods, and beaning pigeons with whole ones when the pigeons strutted past.
Under a tree was a woman with an accordion and a man with a guitar. They played German polkas and Violetta Parra and Gloria Gaynor. In the sun, we closed our eyes and fell asleep.
In the evening we made a splendid year-end supper - light and summery and rich.
We did it like this:
We heated up some olive oil in a frying pan and tossed in 3 - 4 cloves worth of pressed garlic.
We sautee'd the garlic over low heat until it was fragrant and soft, but not caramelized.
Then we tossed in whole packet of prawns - (previously peeled by moi) and added lots of fresh-ground salt and pepper.
We tossed the prawns in the pan, so they'd cook evenly without scorching, and added the juice of a lemon. I decided that the flavor wasn't lemon-y enough and added the juice of a second lemon.
The lemon reacted with the oil to form a nice thick emulsion. We threw in a handful of finely diced fresh flat-leaf parsley and basil leaves. (previously diced by Mr Tabubil)
And we stirred and tossed until the prawns were tender but not yet rubbery, and served it up with jasmine rice!
I sent the recipe to my mother, who was so excited that she made it herself, and declared it fantastic. And it is. Give it a try!
Happy New Year!
Here it is hot as hot, which is
just how a Christmas should be. Mr Tabubil is is languishing and
complains that he can't take the season seriously, but my earliest
Christmas memories are of Dad taking my sister and I swimming in a
jungle creek while Mum got Christmas dinner sorted without two
overexcited children underfoot.
And what Christmas dinners! Christmas
was a hot and stodgy English dinner (roast chicken, creamed potatoes,
doughy puddings and dense fruit cake)
eaten on a hot and sticky verandah, with ceiling fans pushing the heat
around and driving rich smells into your face, and afterwards,
afternoons spent on the cool grass of the lawn, and children running
around with sparklers in the long summer twilight.
Over the years we replaced the hot English food with a menu less colonial and more suited to the southern climate, but we
embraced all of the other northern Christmas trimmings as a matter of course.
Our Christmas cards showed snowfalls and lantern-light, glittering with
sugar frost. Our dads Ho-Ho-Ho’d in full Santa fig – sweltering under
polyester beards and sofa cushion bellies. Our heads and ears dripped
and clinked with tinkling jingle-bells – we, who had never seen a
sleigh. We cut Eucalyptus trees and planted them in plastic buckets,
raised trees of plastic tinsel, and sniffed the eucalyptus and plastic
scents, and satisfied, called them firs. When I moved north, a
northern Christmas was easy for me. I’d been mentally living one all my
life.
Mr Tabubil never had the
pop-culture guides to tell him what to do with seafood BBQs and carols
that, like Australia and Chile, are upside down –
“The North Wind is tossing the leaves
The red dust is over the town
The sparrows are under the eaves –“
“Red dust?” He shouts. “Red dust? It’s blizzards! Blizzards and wooly sweaters and ice-skating and hot chocolate and fir-cones and fireplaces-”
I try for something colder.
“The tree-ferns in green gullies sway
The cool stream flows silently by
The joy bells are greeting the day
And the chimes are adrift in the sky-”
Mr Tabubil stamps off into the kitchen to stuff his head into the freezer. And sighs.
Merry Christmas, you-all.
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