“Mushrooms? At a cemetery?”
“Sure. They’re all around.”
“As long as you don’t plan to make them into a salad,” she said.
“What would be wrong about that?”
“Only the thought of them growing over dead things!”
“But then mushrooms always grow over dead things in a way.”
“I can’t believe you are strolling around in this fog hunting for mushrooms growing on graves. It sounds grim, like you’re a body snatcher from a nineteenth-century dime novel.”
Catalina would have liked that. Perhaps she’d gone mushroom hunting in the cemetery too. Or else she simply stood in this same spot, smiling wistfully as the wind toyed with her hair. Books, moonlight, melodrama.
“Me?” he asked.
“Yes. I bet you have a skull in there. You’re a character out of Horacio Quiroga’s stories. Let me see.”
He had draped a red handkerchief over the basket, which he removed to allow her to inspect the mushrooms. They were a bright, fleshy orange with intricate folds, soft as velvet. She held a small one between her index finger and her thumb.
“Cantharellus cibarius. They’re quite delicious, and they were not growing in the cemetery, but farther away. I merely cut through here to get back home. Locals call them duraznillos. Smell them.”
Noemí leaned down closer to the basket. “They smell sweet.”
“They’re quite lovely too. There’s an important connection between certain cultures and mushrooms, you know? The Zapotec Indians of your country practiced dentistry by giving people a mushroom which would intoxicate them and serve as an anesthetic. And the Aztecs, they too found mushrooms interesting. They consumed them in order to experience visions.”
“Teonanácatl,” she said. “The flesh of the gods.”
He spoke eagerly. “You know about fungi, then?”
“No, not really: history. I was thinking of becoming a historian before I detoured and settled on anthropology. At least that is the plan now.”
“I see. Well, I’d love to find those little, dark mushrooms that the Aztecs ate.”
“Why, you don’t strike me as that type of boy,” Noemí said, handing him back the orange mushroom.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re supposed to make you feel drunk and induce a great lust. At least that’s what the Spaniard chroniclers said. Do you plan on snacking on them and going on a date?”
“No, well, I would not want them, not for that,” Francis quickly babbled.
Noemí liked to flirt and she was good at it, but she could tell by the renewed redness in Francis’s cheeks that he was a novice at this. Had he ever gone dancing? She couldn’t picture him heading to town for a festivity, nor could she see him sneaking kisses in a darkened cinema in Pachuca, though Pachuca was unlikely in the first place since he’d never traveled far. Who knew. Maybe she’d kiss him before the trip was over, and he would be utterly shocked by the gesture.
But then, she was discovering she actually enjoyed his company and didn’t wish to torture the young man.
“I’m joking. My grandmother was Mazatec, and the Mazatec ingest similar mushrooms during certain ceremonies. It’s not about lust, it’s communion. They say the mushroom speaks to you. I understand your interest in them.”
“Why, yes,” he said. “The world is filled with so many extraordinary wonders, isn’t it? You could spend a lifetime peering in forests and jungles and never see one tenth of nature’s secrets.”
He sounded so excited, it was a bit funny. She didn’t have a naturalist bone in her body, but rather than judging his passion ridiculous she was moved by his fervor. He had such life when he spoke like that.
“Do you like all plants, or are your botanical interests limited to mushrooms?”
“I like all plants and have pressed a large share of flowers, leaves, ferns, and such. But mushrooms are more interesting. I make spore prints and draw a little,” he said, looking pleased.
“What’s a spore print?”
