Since I read There is no one left, the first novel by the Galician writer Brais Lamela, I have never seen this corner in the same way. Among his pages was the question that a teacher asked his class, and that has always accompanied me since: “What is the most political part of the house?” The question catches his students by surprise, they look at each other without finding the answer that the teacher is expecting. Could it be the bedroom, the living room, the study—those houses that had them—the bathroom itself? No: for the teacher, the most political part of the house is the kitchen.
The protagonist finds substance to this statement in the plans of the houses that the Franco authorities designed for the colonization towns. In these invented places far from their roots, where many of those who arrived feared being the first to die because no one wanted to open the cemetery, cooking is reduced to a minimum, to a simple line on the list of pending things to accomplish. and cross out. From being the heart of the house, those large Galician kitchens were transformed—in places like the one discussed in this unique and valuable book, Terra Chá—into tiny kitchens, as if they were toys, designed to occupy the space — and of course also in charge of it—only one person: a woman. Lamela writes that this makes it impossible to have an after-dinner meal, to share, to have a conversation with neighbors and guests, and he launches his first thesis: this is the most political part of the house “because it is the one that opens to the outside”, which precisely “it destroys the artifice of the house existing as an island disconnected from the rest of the world.”
This is where I work, here I interrupt writing and work to prepare food, to look out at the universe from its windows, where I stain word and profession with layers of onion and tomato skins and take advantage of phone calls to feed this old woman with broom trunks. wood stove, where I realize how everything is intertwined. It will be difficult for me to forget the day I stepped on, for the first time, its worn and old wooden floor, somewhat blackened by the passage of years and life itself, while its owner pointed out the spaces – with names, nicknames and hobbies – that the villagers occupied in the kitchen. This is how a space was made, this is how the kitchen was thought of: a marble countertop that extends so that the fire can reach, some long wooden stools so that there was always room for everyone.
Last week, looking for a small bench in a big city to sit in the sun and warm up, I remembered her. Just at that moment, next to me, a bee also stopped and landed nearby, where my arm was resting. First was the astonishment and the question to myself: what is this body doing here, in the middle of large buildings, rushing and cars? Then, the return to the same existence, as if it invited me to think with other times, from other strata. Aren’t our lives and our kitchens full of bees? They are the ones in charge of pollination, with other insects, and on which more than 80% of the crops on earth depend. What would we be like if they suddenly disappeared? Its unexpected presence made me think about the spaces where we eat, where we prepare food or cook, where we share, chat, where recipes and affections are also made.
With the bee perhaps we can see the kitchen as a space of resistance, like the thread that unites us to the rest of the world. Think of the kitchen as a meeting place, as a window: perhaps this way we will notice everything that is behind each dish we eat.
