What can go wrong? By inviting them to ours, I have cut out the likelihood of being forced to eat a lot of offal, and by six o’clock, which is the time they insist they will turn up, everything is ready and set.
Seven o’clock comes and goes, and no-one arrives. Paul attempts to ring the family to see if they are coming – no reply. Finally, at twenty past seven, half of them turn up in a cab. Eneas and Julio (his son-in-law) are nowhere to be seen.
Mari is bearing an ominous covered dish – which I try and take without grimacing. Seems like I’ve not escaped from her cooking after all. She explains that it is chicken in chipotle sauce, but it is definitely bits of chicken that we don’t eat at home, particularly an awful lot of feet. Yummy.
I put it on the stove for later. Eight o’clock comes, and still Julio and Eneas do not appear, despite the family insisting that they will turn up on foot. Jeremias, 5, is getting tetchy, so we decide to serve up.
It emerges over dinner that Julio and Eneas have gone to the equivalent of a PCC meeting, which has clearly overrun. By the time I serve up it is a bit late to eat, anyway, which isn’t helped by the fact that nobody likes the food.
Mari’s sons are bemused that there are no tortillas to have with dinner, and I haltingly try to explain about carbohydrates. “Ah, “exclaims Mari’s son Jose, who is fortunately an English teacher, “the potatoes are the tortillas”. The family looks glum.
Mari shakes salsa over her dinner and insists that it is “very nice, but she is full” in much the same way that I do at her house. She insists I try her chicken, and I gingerly take what might be a bit of neck (can’t face the feet, they are just so… feety). She is fascinated by the pepper grinder, and keeps grinding pepper over her hands.
Luis, Mari’s other son, only eats the potatoes. Jeremias, who is nearly falling asleep in his mother’s arms, only eats the broccoli.
He cheers up at the mention of pudding, but the crumble doesn’t meet with his approval, and I’m forced to provide a chocolate bar instead. The kitchen piles up with uneaten dishes, including an entire chicken, and Paul’s fire smokes out the entire apartment.
Jeremias falls asleep on the sofa while we unwrap the presents they have bought for Daisy. It is hard to seem as delighted by Mari’s present – a bright pink nylon dress with matching knickers that says “Grandma’s house” on it (both grandmothers will be so delighted by that), as I am by her daughter Lore’s – a beautiful handmade traditional indigenous children’s dress made by a craftswoman from local village Chenalho. Sometimes I wonder how Lore can belong to the same family as the rest of them.
As they file off into the night just before midnight (Eneas and Julio have still not turned up), I can almost hear them discussing our weird cooking as they leave. “No tortillas? No chile? No mole?”. No doubt we’ve given them enough to discuss for a week. Mari kindly leaves us her chicken dish. “Que lo comen!” (“You should eat it”) is her parting shot. But I’m afraid it goes straight in the bin.
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