Buy Rum or Read Bakhtin

Ah, rum. Wonderful stimulant, able to trigger the maddest hilarity and craziest tragedies, best host in company, purveyor of night-time friendships, silent confidant and sugar cane's happiest child.

None of these virtues were on her mind, on that morning of June 10, 1992, when she walked into the study where he was preparing with ant-like tenacity his next lecture, for which he had to unravel chapter twelve of a book by Mikhail Bakhtin, a tricky author to negotiate.

"Rum," said Marta without raising her charming voice, as if wishing a neighbor good day.

"Rum?" his eyes didn't budge from the line he'd just read.

"It's just arrived. People say they've not brought enough for everybody."

Naturally, she was referring to the two—and only two—bottles they gave to every family per month in exchange for a ration coupon.

"And?" he replied as his eyes entered the last paragraph on the page, like a sailor arriving in a safe harbor. Meanwhile, his fingers clasped a pen and made words sail over a blank sheet of paper.

"Our neighbor says not many people are buying," she answered in a melancholy tone.

For the first time, he looked up from Bakhtin and slowly surveyed his wife's body from head to toe.

Marta has gotten much thinner over the last year, he thought, maybe by twenty pounds. Her full, sensual shape has become rectilinear and flat, although he's not lagged behind and the belt to his pants now registers two sizes less.

A big sigh expanded his chest.

And all because of a lack of meat, milk, rice . . .

The thought of food prompted the vision of a huge pan of Valencia-style paella, his favorite dish. Then saliva streamed exuberantly in his mouth and he ate slowly, relishing the texture of the loose, juicy rice, enjoying the strong tang of the shellfish and the tender flesh of the meat.

"If we don't go and buy the rum now, we'll lose our ration," her tone became urgent, mandatory.

Marta used the plural, but he knew that she was saying "if you don't go and buy it, we'll miss out." That was his task, and no one else's, never mind if he had to abandon his lesson preparation, his reading and writing. Marta's responsibility was the children, cooking and washing, even though her routine also included lesson preparation, reading and writing. They shared the cleaning.

"Our neighbor will swap the rum for two pounds of rice. We've finished ours. I can cook hers tonight with the piece of chicken left from last week." Marta almost smiled.

He sighed again and his fingers shut the book. It wouldn't be paella, but chicken rice, at least. His lecture had lost out for the moment, and Bakhtin (a tricky author to negotiate) was relegated to the back of his desk between last year's diary and a broken ashtray.

Under her pressing gaze, he started rummaging around the study until he found an old bag, as worn as an old lady's teeth, no doubt by the hundreds of bottles and potatoes it had carried in its wretched existence. Then Marta produced the only two empty bottles they had in the kitchen and he went off to the market.

Head down, eyes staring at the ground, as if he were counting his steps and every yard, he walked the nine blocks to the shop beneath a scorching sun, completely self-absorbed. He was reflecting on what he was going to say in his lecture tomorrow, on the pages of Bakhtin he still had to read, that had been unjustly deferred by two bottles of rum. He also thought about tonight's chicken rice and his ideas thus leapt from the status of a character within a narrative to a chicken leg, from a spoonful of rice to the carnivalizing of literature. He was so engrossed that when he crossed the street, he didn't see the young lad coming toward him at top...