Hunger · fiction
Does childhood hunger leave a mark forever?
Almost a prayer by a Colombian grandmother who, in 2040, cooks for her grandchildren and remembers the girl she was in the nineties, with an empty stomach.
A vision — a short story.
I cook too much.
My grandchildren laugh about it. They say that at my house the pot never runs out, that I cook for twenty when we're five. They're right. In 2040, in the house where I live, on a green hillside in Colombia, the refrigerator is always full and I never let anyone leave without a container in hand.
They don't know why. I've never told them.
Today, while the rice was cooking, my nine-year-old granddaughter asked whether I had ever gone hungry. Just like that, out of nowhere, the way children ask big things. I said yes. Her eyes went wide. She said she didn't believe it, that I was the person with the most food in the world.
So I'm going to tell it. Not to her, not yet. To whoever is listening.
I was eight in 1993. We lived in a neighborhood of unplastered brick houses, at the top of a hill in a big city. My father had left. My mother took in washing. We were four siblings. There were days when there was rice. There were days when there was sugar water. There were days when there was nothing, and my mother put us to bed early, saying that those who sleep don't feel hunger.
It isn't true. Those who sleep dream of food.
I dreamed of bread. A round loaf, golden, enormous, that I had never seen, but that in the dream had a smell.
I remember the shame. That's what no one talks about. Hunger hurts in the belly, but it hurts more in the shame. The shame of going to school without a snack and pretending you didn't want one. The shame of looking at the neighbor's plate. The shame of seeing your mother say she had already eaten, when she hadn't.
Today, stirring the rice, I had a vision.
I saw the girl I was, sitting in the doorway of the house, looking at the hill. I saw she was waiting for something. She didn't know what. And I saw, coming down the hill, me. The grandmother I am now, with a container of food in my hands.
I went up to the girl and sat beside her. She didn't recognize me. I gave her the container. She ate slowly, as if it might run away. And I told her, softly, the thing no one told her back then:
"It isn't your fault."
She stopped eating and looked at me. And I saw, in her eyes, my mother, and my mother's mother, and a line of women who had told their children they had already eaten.
When I came back to the kitchen, the rice was almost burning.
Yes, hunger leaves a mark. A mark forever. But I've learned the mark can become something else. In my house, it became a full pot. It became the container in the hand of whoever leaves. It became the food I take, every Thursday, to the neighborhood community kitchen, where there are girls sitting in doorways waiting for something.
I don't know how to pray well. But, if this is a prayer, let it be this: that no girl dream of bread she has never seen. And that, if she does, someone come down the hill.
Tomorrow I'll tell my granddaughter. I'll tell her while we cook together. I'll make bread.
Bairo often says the sun is for everyone, but the shade, in the heat, is for the few. He learned that in the years he had no ground beneath him. Read: Capoeira was the bridge.
The way forward
Hunger leaves a mark, and the mark can become care for others. Talk about it without shame: the shame never belonged to those who went hungry. If you have a little more, find out where the nearest community kitchen is and come down the hill.