From 33#1: Lies – Written by Miguel Parra

Mother’s Rib Cage

‘It looks great mom, and the harvest is only going to get better in the following years,’ I tell mother who, a couple of thousand kilometres south from here, is struggling through the last years of her professional career until her retirement comes. After forty years of putting her back into someone else’s profit, she is finally eyeing the sweet promise of the passion she developed thirty years ago as a form of labour escapism: tropical gardening. It’s a rather eccentric and unsustainable endeavour, considering the exponential desertification of the territory we were both raised in. I will never tell her this though, I promised myself never to pierce this oasis of her own, even if it keeps me up at night. As we videocall, I insist on taking her watering schedules even further. Together – knowingly-unknowingly – we are constructing a breakwater to shelter her last decades from the eroding reality beyond her garden fence.

As we chat, we are both standing on extensively urbanised river deltas, environments of fertility that are starting to malfunction at very different paces. Our ancestral Mediterranean delta foreshadows what will (sooner, or later?) unfold in the Northern delta I migrated to in search of fruitfulness. Ours is a story about the collapse of weather patterns that had so faithfully orchestrated our earthly rhythms, and about coming to terms with a new, unpredictable reality. It’s a story mother and I, like everyone else, can clearly hear, yet we’d rather not listen to. So we continue our simulacrum, we keep drafting plans for new gardening arrangements. Everything has to be organised around the mother-plant, a massive monstera deliciosa – or Adam’s Rib, as we call it in our mother tongue – that grows grotesquely all over the back garden. This is the groundbreaking specimen which, some decades back, seeded the gardening fever that has slowly taken hold of my mother.

In its first years at the household – coincident with mine – the plant lived a somewhat unassuming existence inside a pot in our living room, showing no sign of a fruitful future. I never figured that anyone in the family expected great joy from a taxonomic genus that was then regarded as a generic decorative plant. However, mother’s instinct tuned to the plant’s begging, or the plant found a cure for my mother’s struggles. As if foretelling the arrival of, now common, torrid weather to the delta, she understood her calling was to repot the monstera from its indoor pot to a growing plot in her backyard. This allowed the Adam's rib to grow with cartoonish exuberance, experiencing a renewed sense of motherhood in return. In the last decades, the climate of this formerly temperate region became sufficiently subtropical to fool the plant into believing that it was actually growing in a tropical region. Decades of warming protect it from winter frosts – nowadays an unattainable childhood memory – that would have otherwise been lethal to the species. The illusion is sustained by abundant and frequent watering from June until the end of November, coinciding with the rainy season in the regions from which the monstera deliciosa originates. Two decades ahead of the monstera-mania of 2020, mother and the plant’s collectively upheld weather delusion came into force, turning our backyard into an amateur portrait of the avarice behind the region’s desertification.

About a decade after replanting the monstera in the garden, when I had already flown our drying delta, mother’s climatological divination bore its first fruit. A birth that mother and the plant kept from everyone else in their own more-than-human confidentiality. In the months following the artificial yearly monsoon that mother invokes through her garden hose, the first flowering of the plant came along with the time of year that, I suppose out of nostalgia, we insist on continuing to call winter. A single green tubular corolla began to make its way out, hidden among the ribbed leaves. It finally made itself noticed months later when the sheath proceeded to open, gradually revealing the spathe, a white, fleshy, petal-shaped foliaceous organ, similar to that of a calla lily but endowed with a subtly frightening hexagonal texture. The spathe protected the spadix, a yellowish structure resembling a small corn cob in which that hexagonal design was repeated. For months, the thick, white flower grew lustrous until the huge white petal began to weaken, falling off the stem. The loss of the petal passed the main role on to the trypophobic cob, which continued to grow with phallic shamelessness.

At that time, the species had not yet been chosen as an effigy of the obsessive domesticity of the 2020 lockdown periods, meaning popular knowledge about the plant was still scarce, certainly no tales of a fruit had been heard. Mother waited patiently and stealthily as the spadix continued to grow. She didn’t need to conduct an online search to figure out the ripening cycle of the fruit; an appetite growing inside guided her. As the hexagonal scales began to separate, revealing the fleshy interior, it was time for the plant and her to finalise their unspoken agreement. With a gentle flick of the wrist, the fruit fell away from the stem and came to be subjected to mother's greedy eyes. Sitting on one of the rickety garden chairs, face to face with the plant, she finished stripping the fruit of the green scales and devoured the faint yellow pulp with the voracity of a wild creature.

The monstera deliciosa, a decorative plant for the general public and a monstrosity, delicious only to mother. She relished its fruit in secrecy for almost a decade. The belated confession came in a flurry of chat texts and pictures describing the texture of a pineapple with the sweetness of a banana and the acidity of a mango. I envied the telluric relationship mother had forged with the plant. I knew I would eat the fruit as soon as she would offer it to me, sealing the pact to become a warder of her delusional Adam’s rib cage.
Ever since the news spread through the family chats and our neighbourhood, the plant has been offering mother its fruits towards the end of each year. It’s become a family event, competing for gastronomic traditions that used to come with cold autumns, such as roasted chestnuts from the lady in the roundabout, or freshly foraged chanterelles. But for how long? The heat will increase, which the plant will love, but water will become scarcer and scarcer. It is hard for me to imagine how my mother will cope with the likely watering ban, if she’ll experience it in her lifetime. I wonder if she is already secretly suffering about the plausibility of her gardening endeavour, if I should bring it up to her in order to start an early mourning process. In exchange, I could promise her to cultivate some of the drought-resistant species that are already autochthonous to our delta: arroyo fruits such as carob, fig, and prickly pear, perhaps even pomegranate or almond.

I’m torn; there’s a tug of war between our intimate reality and the impending climatological reality at the edge of mother’s garden. I can’t gather myself to bring the issue up, I need to facilitate the last chapters of her story, so it deserves after decades of miserable jobs, to keep the family afloat. As a result, I’m left compulsively indulging in revenge environmentalism. I start timing my already brief showers, I reuse my tableware for several days in a row, I flush the toilet once a day. Pathetic attempts at offsetting the guilt that I carry for the both of us.

But the pull to enlarge our spiralling deception is irrepressible. I can tell that we won’t give up, no one will get us away from the exhausting effects of her out-of-touch tropicalism. We made our bed, now we have two lies in it: Mother lies with the monstera and their geographically misplaced abundance of water, I lie with mother and the unbreakability of our gardening determination. We carry on with our plans to expand her monstera garden, mother’s rib cage, our delta’s death sentence.

Miguel Parra is a happily-not-anymore-architect, bored-of-being-designer and wannabe-writer whose artistic practice is made up by a growing archive of wrong moves, left turns and unrealized projects. Currently based in the Netherlands, originally from Southeast Spain.