Ibrahim in the Kitchen

The kitchen is alive. Pots and pans clang to life as if just awakened from a deep slumber after years of hiding away in cabinets. The house sits on top of a hill covered beneath the shade of leaved tress and mending branches that make a sort of shelter over the roof of this home. Ayana stands near the counter that sits adjacent to an old and decrepit refrigerator that rumbles and grumbles like a man connected to the vine of life on an oxygen tank. The apron she wears around her neck that snugly laces round her hips says “requires constant supervision.” A TV fades in and out in the background, as she stands with one hip connected to a corner of the counter, her hands gripping a tattered piece of paper that holds her mother’s recipe for pan suave. A treat she always enjoyed eating, but never enjoyed watching her mother make from scratch.

Bowls of all sizes line the tops of the counters sitting dangerously close to a warming oven that heats nothing but makes the room she stands in uncomfortably hot. Sweat prickles at the nape of her neck, and she begins to fan the tattered slip of paper from her brow to her chin accomplishing nothing against the heat of the disturbed kitchen. Surveying the room around her, she sees torn packages of flour, spilled sugar in disconcerting piles, and broken eggs strewn from one countertop to the other. The recipe has failed her, and she has failed her mother. During her third attempt, the bowl had fallen out of her hands from vigorously stirring, because she wouldn’t use an electric mixer when her mother always used a wooden spoon.

Her mother had always stirred with the fervency of a woman on her knees praying for forgiveness. One hand would wrap tightly around the large white bowl as wide as her hips and her other hand would grip the large wooden spoon and turn and turn until the batter would be as smooth as the skin on her cheeks. With her hair in a bun atop her lightly golden face she would turn the mix onto a board floured lightly as a fresh snow fall. Her small fingers would meld into the dough softly the way a new mother rubs the head of her newborn baby. She would dance her way across the kitchen from one counter to next, her feet moving in time to the sounds of Ibrahim Ferrer. “Melodia Del Rio” would start her off as she pulled ingredients from a refrigerator, that back then, breathed sonorously. Each item she grabbed was like the hand of a lover she would pull onto her dance floor and enchant with the sway of her hips, her feet lightly tapping left and then right, her hips moving in the same direction. The next song, “Apuntame una, Mi Social”, would jump out from the tiny radio and the dance would intensify. The oven heating up the kitchen like a room full of dancing bodies taken over by the rhythm of horns and drums in a room lit by dim lights shadowing women in patterned dresses of deep reds and ivory whites. Except when her mother danced, she danced underneath the light of yellow glowing fluorescents, her dance floor diamond-shaped tiles with ruby-red flowers in the center. Ibrahim her dance partner and her kitchen the audience.

Ayana’s dance is much more chaotic. Instead of moving seamlessly with the rhythm her mother was so accustomed to, she tramples upon the feet of her dance partners, Ibrahim only a spectator to the catastrophe of broken eggshells and the wasted dough that her fingers can’t seem to meld properly. She stands in the kitchen, her mom’s sanctuary, the place where her mother danced away all her worries and notices the room does not seem as buoyant without her tiny feet pacing time to clave and bata drums.

Ayana heaves a sigh and begins cleaning up the dough that sits in a misshapen lump on the floor. On her hands and knees, she scoops the batter back into the bowl and sits down with her back leaning against the reddish-brown cabinets, her head making a thud as it makes contact with the wood behind her. Her mother’s recipe for pan suave has fallen onto the tiled floor beside her, the ingredients written in her mom’s delicate penmanship.

Grabbing the slip of paper up off the floor she pulls herself up. On the tips of her toes she reaches into the cabinet for her mother’s old radio and gingerly places it on the counter near the sighing refrigerator just as her mom used to do. She carefully removes an Ibrahim Ferrer CD from her mother’s drawer of music and pops it into the CD slot and presses play. “Coma la Piel de Canela” begins to come through the holes of the speakers and she smiles to herself. She may not have watched her mother make her favorite treat all those years, but she remembers the way the music used to fill her mother’s body, each movement smooth and soft, airy and light, just like her pan suave. So, as Ayana cleans, she lets the music lift her and dances, turning and swaying her hips the way she saw her mother do in her childhood.