The cauliflower

"You turn your body and imagination over to keep sadness away. But who told you it´s not allowed to be sad? The truth is that, many times, there´s nothing more sensible than being sad; every day things happen, to others, to us, and you can´t help it, or maybe you can, with that ancient and unique cure of feeling sad.

Don´t let the others give you prescriptions of joy, as those who prescribe a period of antibiotics or spoons of seawater with an empty stomach. If you let them treat your sadness as if it was a perversion or, at best, an illness, you´re lost: apart from sad, you´ll feel guilty. And you´re not guilty for being sad. Isn´t it normal to feel pain when you cut yourself? Doesn´t the flesh burn when you´re whipped?

So, in the same way, the world, the vague succession of facts that occur (or those that do not occur) create a fund of melancholy. The poet Leopardi said: “Just like the air fills the spaces between objects, melancholy fills the intervals between one pleasure and the next”. Live your sadness, touch it, defoliate it in your eyes, wet it with tears; wrap it in screams or silence, copy it in notebooks, write it down on your body, write it down on your skin´s pores. Because only if you don´t defend yourself it will run away, momentarily, to another place, different from the centre of your intimate pain.

And so that you can taste your sadness, I´ll also recommend a melancholic dish: cauliflower in the mist. Boil that white, sad and consistent flower in steam. Slowly, with that smell of breath the mouth gives off in lamentations, it will boil until it gets soft. And wrapped in mist, in its evaporating steam, add to it oil and garlic and some pepper, and salt it with your own tears. Then taste it slowly, biting it from the fork, and cry more, cry still, and that flower will end up sucking your melancholy without leaving you dry, without leaving you calm, without stealing the only thing that is yours at that moment, the only thing that nobody can take from you amymore, your sadness; but with the feeling of having shared with that unfading flower, with that absurd, prehistoric flower, with that flower the betrothed never ask the florist for, with that cabbage flower that nobody puts in the vases, with that anomaly, with that flourished sadness, your own sadness of cauliflower, of the sad and melancholic plant."

Once again from Cookbook for Sad Women, by Héctor Abad Faciolince. It´s not an illness. It´s just a cauliflower. And it´s OK to taste it.