& other mistranslations

In a townhouse in west London the three of us – my aunt, my cousin, and I – sat around the round kitchen table staring down a wizened green coconut that had been shipped across the Atlantic from a place where it was summer, and was three weeks past its purported expiry date. I say ‘purported’ because in Rio, a green coconut that had spent weeks tumbling in crates in the basement of a cargo ship would not have the dignity of being sold at all. The coconut was immobile, obviously, but for all of the ferocity with which we were examining it, one would think it would at least twitch a little. Leo suggested that we crack it open despite the wrinkled patch of brown spreading from its underbelly; his mother dismissed the proposition and said it should be tossed immediately into the rubbish. On her way to the bin, she slowed, turned, and stopped: cocking her head and looking at the floor, she then said that there would be no harm in opening it, just for curiosity’s sake. She began rummaging in the pantry for a corkscrew, but emerged with a hammer: even better. Giving Leo and I orders to hold things, pass things, or move over, a formation somewhat resembling a football huddle began to take shape: Heather crouched down over the coconut, remarkably nimbly considering her age and arthritic knees, holding it firmly in place with her palms cupping the sides, above the mossy brown bit; Leo hovered above his mother’s left arm, looking back and forth between the hammer he was holding above his head and the coconut on the floor, considering the best angle of attack; and I was kneeling by my aunt’s right side with a bowl at the ready to catch the promised juice of the fruit – whether it be the sweet milky juice of a perfectly ripe green coconut, or the acrid powdery water of a rotten one. As Leo gave a countdown, raising the hammer higher and focused on his target, I got the giggles. The contagious, explosive, middle-school-girl giggles that spread quickly to Heather before Leo had a chance to stop his muscles from going through with their premeditated motion. The coconut slipped from her hands as she leant back, uninhibited, tossing her head back and allowing the giggles to turn to laughter – I had never seen her like that before, and as I watched her my own laughter slowed. The hammer came swinging down of its own accord, already victim to the pull of gravity, and caught the edge of the coconut as it rolled, lumbered, along the hardwood. Despite its thick shell, the coconut cracked open quickly at the tap of the hammer; it must have found a soft spot on the hard fruit. The juice that escaped was sticky, sweet, and subtly fragrant of palm leaves in the sun. Quickly, instinctively, six pairs of hands fumbled for the white pieces of flesh and the half of the coconut that was still intact and from which was spilling milky sap. We sucked the coconut dry, thinking of nothing but extracting every last drop. When all that remained was the husky, hairy shell, we looked up and around at each other and burst into laughter again. If someone were to look in the kitchen window at this point, they would not look twice.

The only evidence of this unusual occurrence is a small dent in the wooden floor that Heather swears was not there before.

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Well, life is rather exciting right now.