The Tomato Meditations

FLORA LEASK ARIZPE

The tomato in half looks like a baby bird’s heart. I eat it with my hands and get red tomato juice everywhere.

I live alone. I eat the baby bird’s heart and my hands become wet. The heart tastes mildly citric. Sometimes I adorn the heart with a pinch of salt, the crystals reflecting red like precious jewels, before putting the next morsel in my mouth. The olive oil binds it all together.

Sometimes I take a pinch of salt and put it directly into my mouth. No one can tell me not to – like I said, I live alone.

I count how many red things there are in this room – because that’s really all of my living space: one room, divided into two. The scarf that I got with my cousin is red; my school-bag is red; the nochebuena plant by the latticed window is red; the chopping board is red; the half-heart in my hands is red.

One time, a while ago, I wrote a poem about the colour red. It’s an addictive colour.

…

and your shirt is

red and my nails are

red and this blanket is

red and your music is

red and my cheeks are

red and flushed

then my pleasure’s red

and the space behind

my eyes becomes

a slow dreamy shade

of some other colour

slowing back down

to pale

…

One time, a longer while ago, my mother brought back from work a picture book for blind children for me and my sister to look at. It was completely black, the illustrations being, instead of coloured, raised slightly from the page. It was nice to run your fingers over the braille. The whole thing looked like it had been dipped in ink.

The book described red as being the colour of cutting your knee when you fall. Red as the colour of graze.

I try to imagine what kind of baby bird the heart would belong to. Shaped like a pigeon, but slightly bigger. It wouldn’t have lost its downy feathers yet. It would be more blue than grey, like an illustration of a bird. It would be in one of those ‘still life’ paintings, maybe in the Museo de Bellas Artes nearby, and it would be lying near some grapes, belly open and glistening, exposed to the viewer. It would have been a show of mastery by the artist. The downy blue feathers would not have a drop of blood on them, but the belly would be red, pink, and shining.

I went to the Museo de Bellas Artes alone, wearing my red scarf. I looked out for the painting with the blue baby bird but it wasn’t there. Shame, I really had imagined it was possible. It had seemed so real in my imagination that it was almost my future.

The Maori say that we face the past – I heard it on a podcast on my way to school. It makes sense, because the past is what we can see, and so you could say it is in front of us, it is there, whereas the future is behind us, in the sense that we can’t see it, it isn’t there.

When I got to school my nose was red, but not as red as a heart or my scarf.

I made the students in fifth meditate for two minutes, then one of them got a nosebleed. We all opened our eyes and his face was covered in red. The glistening reminded me of the baby bird for a minute. I told him to go to the bathroom, and quickly. He had red all over his hands.

He wasn’t fast enough, and drops of blood followed him out of the classroom, scaring the other students.

Blood sticks like olive oil.

When I was teaching about the circulatory system in sixth, I learned a lot of things about red. For example, not all animals’ blood is red.

Octopuses have blue blood. The Antarctic blackfin icefish has blood ‘as clear as water and bones so thin, you can see its brain through its skull.’ I read that in the New York Times.

In its way the circulatory system looks backwards to the future and forwards to the past. Or rather, past and future are, undifferentiated, the same thing and therefore nothing: that blood has done and what it will do is move in circles. Unless a child gets a nosebleed.

The gel-like part of the tomato is tinged faintly red. It doesn’t look at all like blood when the juice runs down my arms. I wonder if the blood of the Antarctic blackfin icefish is salty.

The other half of the tomato remains on the plate. I take a pinch of salt and begin again.