Hunger in the Year of Pica
Translated from the Spanish by Nina Perrotta
And here I go again talking about what I eat and don’t eat and how I eat the things I eat. About how what happened to my body failed to disturb the precise balance of my mind, even though it was, in fact, obvious: I had pica, and to this day I don’t know how it took hold of me, how I could think the cravings that literally brought me to my knees were normal, commonplace, and insignificant.
On a regular day (let’s say it was a Wednesday), I walked by the washing machine while it was doing its thing. It’s a front loader with a clear plastic window where you can see what’s happening inside. And what was happening that Wednesday was suds, a lot of thick white suds. Almost unconsciously and without planning it, I sat on the floor to contemplate them, my mouth watering. I left my spot in front of the machine only to get a sweater and the box of detergent. As the foam churned, I buried my nose in the carton of multicolored powder, filling my lungs and taste buds with its sweet, pungent, toxic perfume.
Before you could say what in the world I’d moved on to licking bars of zote laundry soap. I didn’t like the taste, so afterward I’d chug something to wash it away (usually one of the stronger flavors of Electrolit, which I kept on hand); nonetheless, I went on licking them. At the supermarket I came across a bar of black laundry soap. It was French and seemed far too expensive until I brought it to my nose—the scent1 prompted me to buy a dozen, and the only reason I didn’t start sucking on them right there in those crowded aisles was that I thought of my mother and what she would say if she saw me.
I graduated from soap to clay almost automatically, and only then did I start to wonder if something might be wrong with me. But because I tend to jump from one self-diagnosis to another, I decided to ignore my cruel urges. On my knees, I raked my nails gently across the red surface of the flowerpots outside my home office. The baked clay, when moist, exuded the most irresistible scent in the world: luscious, sensual, and necessary. I often ran my tongue along a pot that housed a peach tree, along the mineral deposits that streaked the terra-cotta. I did it in secret, knowing that my cravings would be neither accepted nor understood. When the rains began, I sank my hands into the damp soil. I restrained myself for a moment, then brought a crumb of dark earth to my mouth. Its taste had nothing to do with the voracity I felt, with the longing its aroma and texture stirred in me. Even so, I chewed it slowly and with such delight that I had to tell my husband, G: Hey, I did this. And then came the initial jolt, because soil, G said, might have worms in it and they could grow in my intestines and God only knew how many other pests might make their home in my guts too. Is that what you want? G asked. You already have dietary restrictions, why give yourself more, why poison yourself with deworming meds?
The earth, then, was forbidden territory, barred by an imagination that filled it with worms. And so I bought an unglazed clay jug with a big belly and a matching cup. My tongue found its way to that clay all the time. I poured water not so much to drink it as to inhale the smell of the earth. Instead of listening to music or watching movie trailers on YouTube, I watched videos of people throwing pottery or kneading clay or tilling the earth, carefully breaking up large clods to plant a tree or some Swiss chard, or I obsessed over videos of foam. And everything seemed normal—unsettling if I analyzed it as a group of events, but normal. These tendencies ate up a lot of my time without my really noticing, until I started to lick the walls.
The doctor studied me, intrigued. I started to list my general symptoms: I was tired all the time, I struggled with physical activity, my heart was always racing, and I had palpitations for no apparent reason. He took my blood pressure, looked into my eyes, nose, and ears, gently palpated my abdomen … examined me, in other words. After he’d checked my whole body, I told him I had strange cravings. Strange in what way? Strange: for earth, soap, mud, chalk, the plaster under the wall paint, unfired pottery, salt crystals. He redid the whole exam, jotted down notes. Tests, he said, we have to do tests. This, he continued, is called pica. Children get it, some pregnant women, and people who are severely malnourished. It’s funny that you have it—let’s figure
out why.
Pica: the word has a light, pleasant ring to it, like little birds stopping by a garden to peck at breadcrumbs. I guess it is funny that a full-grown adult, by all appearances healthy, could have the same pica as someone ravaged by malnutrition. People with anorexia and bulimia sometimes get pica. Their bodies are nearing collapse and lack the minerals they need to survive; the same is true of those who experience profound hunger as a result of poverty and neglect. I had seven vials of blood drawn, and while I waited for the results, I thought that what was happening to me was probably incurable and I’d have to learn to adapt to my cravings. But some smells woke in me a desire I could barely contain.
The rains returned and brought me to my knees again. I’m not proud of this, and at the time it felt like a defeat. Crouching there with my hands sunk in wet earth, with my tongue flat against a flowerpot, with a fragment of wall growing moist against my gum, a finger stuck in the cement they were using to fix the sidewalk, or chewing ice despite the pain in my teeth—it made me feel subhuman. The rains came back without warning, and the soil, roads, and planters released odors that shook me, even when I was in meetings with clients, for example. I won’t go any deeper into how I felt then, because I have few tools to describe it, and it’s disturbing even for me.
The results came back. I had anemia, a severe case. I’d learn the causes later, but that’s a story for another day. With my hemoglobin in the basement and my iron practically nonexistent, an instinctive switch had flipped in my body, driving me to seek out substitutes for the lost nutrients. It’s a physiological trap, because putting lumps of dirt in your mouth and gnawing on plant pots doesn’t restore healthy levels of anything. I’d have to take iron, folic acid, vitamin B complex plus vitamins A, C, and D, eat red meat, bone broth, lentils … the diet and the supplements wouldn’t take immediate effect, but what I did need to do immediately, if I wanted to get better, was stop ingesting soap flakes.
A chunk of red meat, a piece of beef on a cutting board, was what did the trick. I could tell by the taste of metal in my mouth, at the back of my lower jaw. The meat sat there, salted, dripping blood. Soon it would be placed on the grill and become a “cut,” and I was supposed to wait patiently until it was golden around the edges and pink in the middle. But it was impossible: not even my qualms about eating animals saved me this time. I made sure there was no one nearby and licked at the blood. It didn’t taste good, but nothing that wasn’t very sweet or very fatty or very salty tasted good to me in those days. Despite my initial repugnance—which I overcame just as I’d overcome my fear of trying laundry soap—an intense pleasure suffused my nostrils, and I felt content.
I dreamed of things like these: blood, glaciers, wet earth in which to bury my tongue. A primal self inhabited my desires while I had to read, write, edit, coordinate, and review Excel sheets. My concentration was shot; I was in a constant stupor, yearning for the moment when I’d fill my mouth with something that would snap me out of it.
The treatment dragged on. The doses were wrong or they didn’t take. The first time they gave me intramuscular injections, the only result was a pair of bruises on my buttocks: two purple discs that turned black, tattoo-like, from the iron buildup in the tissue. Those marks have only now begun to fade. They decided to give me intravenous iron, in huge doses. My neolithic diet was just a consolation, a drop in the bucket. I ate semi-raw meat every day, chewing slowly, meditatively, to keep the protein in my mouth as long as I could; I shook salt directly onto my tongue; I blended fistfuls of raw spinach with the odd piece of fruit so that every mouthful was redolent of metal and earth; I scraped a pen cap along the flowerpots on the terrace to taste a bit of their clay, even though I wasn’t allowed.
The cravings that had been a staple of my repertoire for decades no longer appeared in my daydreams. Chocolate éclairs and cream-filled profiteroles, risotto alla Milanese, pasta carbonara, Oaxacan mole, squash blossom quesadillas, duck breast, pulled chicken tostadas, ceviche, and tangy guacamole were no longer the protagonists of my table or my fantasies. Some of these things I’d had to renounce earlier because I suffer from the same acid reflux that took Ivan Ilyich and Saturnino Herrán. I can’t eat chilaquiles, but I can want them. In the year of pica, however, I thought of the boxes of chalk from my childhood, of those cubes that gymnasts use so they don’t slip on the parallel bars, of mud, of blue billiard chalk … and I drooled.
Little by little, the red blood cells reconstituted themselves in my veins, put themselves in order and grew in quantity and size. And then one day blood tasted like blood and I didn’t like it. Almost without noticing, I stopped stroking the black soap, ogling the swirls of foam, feeling in my body the supreme urge to immerse myself in clay, mud, ice. I thought again—my body thought again—about the food others ate daily and on special occasions (food that I ate, too, prior to my medical issues): crêpes forestières, bocoles from Veracruz and tlayudas with lard, barbecue with salsa borracha, and Spanish croquettes like my grandmother used to make. I thought, for the first time in many months, of those special occasions as possible celebrations of life: I would raise a glass of Mariatinto, prepare a foamy Oaxacan hot chocolate, sip a beer, or salute the sun with some chilled Tío Pepe. The year of pica was over.
1. Black soap is made with potassium—which everyone needs, but especially those who are malnourished—and, in this case, with olive oil.
