8. Pomelo #5
From the wall of glass, she watched in the darkness as the taillights of all the cars and trucks made their way down the long drive and turned, this way and that, onto the main road, getting smaller and smaller.
And, for the first time really, Pilar understood that down the empty driveway there were lives being lived in houses far shabbier than her father’s glass castle, working jobs far harder than her father probably ever had to work, but that these people had far better lives.
For the first time in her short existence, she felt in herself a sense of longing to be a part of that.
It was nearly three in the morning and the last of the trucks was long gone when Pilar returned to the courtyard.
All was still and, save a forgotten champagne flute stained with lipstick, it was as if the whole thing had never happened.
Beneath the grapefruit tree was the depression of the hole she had dug all those years before, hoping to find where her mother had gone.
It fit her body perfectly now, and with everyone else in the house asleep, she sat in it.
She often felt her mother was here and now, desperate to talk to her, to ask her why she felt so lonely, how she could have a life of her own, that she found herself—stripped of traditional speech—humming.
Humming a tune to a song she had never heard before.
One that came from her sorrow, she felt.
Still in her party gown, lying on the ground, she was about to lull herself to sleep when she heard someone else humming along with her. In harmony with her voice.
She sat erect, but did not stop humming.
She quietly sang a phrase of an old church song and, from above, heard the melody repeated back to her.
She hummed a new tune, a sad one she’d heard on the radio, and, from above, heard it reflected back to her.
Frantically, she began looking for the source of the sound, humming and singing as softly as possible to not wake her father or anyone else in the house.
She inspected the grounds near the tree, searching for a drunk guest who might have found sleep wherever the night took them, but found none.
She began to look up to the boughs. The hum was coming from there.
The life. She climbed up into the tree in a way she hadn’t since she was a girl, since before her mother slipped, like water, through her grasp.
And there, as she hummed and sang, she realized the sound was coming from the fruit.
Not just the fruits, but one grapefruit in particular.
She was able to spot it because it vibrated when the humming came not only from it, but from her.
She plucked it from the tree.
The next morning, knowing her father would be hungover from the party, she woke early.
She took the fruit into the kitchen, made coffee for Alma, and waited until the woman, now stooped with age, shuffled into the kitchen.
When she did, Pilar laid the grapefruit on the counter and began to sing “Itotiani” to the citrus.
“Mija, that isn’t a sad song,” Alma noted.
Pilar shrugged. It depends, I think, she wrote on a piece of paper.
Pilar sang to the grapefruit, and Alma watched, astonished, as the flesh of the rind slowly rippled beneath the surface, undulating in time with the music.
Alma let out a shriek, but Pilar put her finger to the old woman’s lips and moved into the chorus of the song as she leaned in closer to the pomelo.
“Uiuiuiui Uiuiuiu,” Pilar sang softly, cooing to the fruit.
“Uiuiuiui Uiuiuiu,” the fruit replied.
Alma grabbed Pilar’s wrist, stunned for a moment into silence as Pilar and the grapefruit harmonized with each other.
“Pilar!” she whispered. “What is it?”
Pilar again shrugged. I think we need to peel it and see, she wrote.
“No!” Alma exclaimed. “What if we hurt it?”
But the grapefruit, sitting now on the counter, began to roll itself toward Pilar, and both women took it as a sign.
The fruit was large in Pilar’s delicate hands.
It vibrated in anticipation as she, as gently as possible, dug the edge of her thumbnail into the smooth, yellow skin, cracking the oil sacks and sending the sharp fragrance into the air.
When she could feel the thick albedo firmly under her nail, she quickly inserted her thumb between the pulp and the rind, and the fruit moaned softly.
Alma let out a cry and crossed herself, but Pilar shot her a look and went back to her midwifing.
She ran her thumb now in a strong motion away from her, and as she tore the rind from the flesh of the fruit, the pomelo cried out in a true yawp of pain.
Pilar moved quickly, no need to drag it out, ribbons of yellow rind dropping to the brown tile floor.
The fruit now cried continuously; Alma had to look away from the pained thing, but Pilar continued with her work, undistracted, until the fruit was naked but for its thick white albedo.
Its crying ceased, but it shuddered as Pilar went on with the delicate task of peeling back the layers of fibers, cleaning away the last of the fruit’s encasement, until both she and Alma could clearly see what they had each come to suspect.
That inside was no fruit at all. In her hands, curled up in the pinkish-veined sac of a grapefruit, was a man.
Pilar looked at Alma, bewildered at what to do next.
“Well, finish it!” Alma said. “You have to let him out!”
Tears welled in Pilar’s round amber eyes. She was afraid to hurt him.
“Pilar,” Alma said softly, “all birth hurts.”
Pilar nodded, lifted the fruit to her mouth, and punctured the wall of the sac with her teeth.
The juice—the most flavorful, delicious grapefruit juice she had ever tasted—came dribbling down her chin, soaking the front of her dress.
But what didn’t spill, Pilar drank up, sucking the papery thin sac dry until it was nothing more than a translucent blanket covering the man’s naked body.
Pilar set him down on the counter and peeled the blanket away.
The women stood in awed silence, which quickly turned to anxious worry for now, after all that commotion, he did not move at all.
“I killed him,” Pilar whispered, shocked at the sound of her own voice aloud. A voice neither woman had heard in over seven years.
“Mija!” Alma said, wide-eyed in the presence of so many miracles, unsure which to focus on first. She looked at the small man as his light brown body covered with tiny bits of grapefruit pulp shivered slightly in the cool of the morning.
His tiny chest moved up and down gently with breath.
She would celebrate the return of Pilar’s voice later. “Mija, he just needs a little help.”
Alma cradled the curled-up man in the palms of her hands and carried him over to the sink, where she washed him clean with warm water, just as she had done with Pilar fifteen years before.
She took her pinky and cleaned out the man’s mouth, noting it full already with teeth, and cleared his airway of grapefruit pulp.
With her index finger, she gave his buttocks a swack and, in an instant, he began to wail like the newborn that he was.
She swaddled him in a dishtowel and curled his tiny self over the nape of her neck to calm him.
“You should sing to him,” Alma commanded.
But Pilar was too stunned to sing. At least in that moment.
She reached out for him, to hold him. He was smaller than a newborn, but fully formed as a man.
She rested him in the crook of her arm, close to her body for warmth, and a feeling of pure love and affection washed over the entirety of herself.
She gazed on his face, which was that of a young man of maybe nineteen or twenty.
His skin, a terra-cotta color shades darker than hers, but the turned-up corners of his mouth the same.
His nose, perfectly straight, noble in fact, mirrored her own.
His round eyes, which opened only slowly, the same amber color as hers and her mother, before her.
“He looks like me,” she said, and Alma confirmed that indeed he did.
“What should we call him?” Pilar asked.
“Well, I suspect when he is able to, he will tell us what to call him. But for now, let’s call him Pomelo.”
Because the man never went in there, and it was the one room obfuscated from view of the rest of the house, the women raised Pomelo in the kitchen.
In the beginning, unsure of how to care for a baby who was a man who was born from a tree, there was much confusion, but eventually they settled into a pattern.
There was the matter of what to feed Pomelo, as Pilar felt certain he was a vegetarian since he came from vegetation, but Alma didn’t believe in vegetarianism and so they settled on a diet of chicken broth and atole, which they fed him with an eyedropper.
At night he slept in Alma’s room just off the kitchen in a fruit crate, nestled between grapefruits, which Alma thought would help him feel like he was back in the womb.
Because he had the proportions of a man, but was smaller than even a newborn, the matter of clothing him was a challenge.
Pilar remembered some old toys that had been stored away, and they dressed Pomelo in the wardrobe of her abandoned Ken dolls.
But Pomelo did not like clothes and constantly took them off.
Besides, he was maturing so rapidly, he quickly outgrew whatever Pilar or Alma managed to find for him.
Within a month he was up to Pilar’s waist. After two months he was walking around, independently mobile and able to help Alma out in the kitchen, preparing meals for the house. But still, he did not talk.
“Do you think I stole his voice when I drank the juice?” Pilar asked one night in Alma’s room while the two women watched Pomelo sleep.