La Première Mangue

Entry: March 2. Time: approx. 15h45. I am sitting on the crest of the road traversing the bowal between K____ and D_____. Light to moderate easterly gusting. Sun diffused but not completely blocked by clouds. Ambient noise: birdsong, rustling fire-dried leaves. Temp.: perhaps 28°C. Of the eight mangos in my pack, chose the one appearing least likely to survive the especially bumpy remainder of the ride home. This mango is green, with yellow, ochre, orange, and red, especially towards where the stem connected, where the most sunlight fell each day, until today. It is not small, though certainly not a large mango. Perhaps 10 cm in its largest dimension. It is dense, but not consistently solid. The skin is thick and leathery, but pliable; as if the fruit had, for some reason, desiccated slightly on the tree.

Rinsed it briefly with water. Fairly certain my hands are dirtier that it is, washing thus futile. Using the blade of my pocket knife, made an angular cut, a chord, through the bottom tip of the fruit (while holding it upside down). No juice or sap drips out, or even wells up. The skin does not yield easily to the blade, dull as it is. Fibrous flesh beneath lacks enough structure for the knife to make a clean cut, but it is readily pulled apart by hand. The majority of the pulpy, stringy, and cheddar-cheese orange flesh remains attached to the central seed, a large oblong pit. Ate the morsel so removed.

O delightful flavor! Perfumed, complex, like a papaya, but with none of the wateriness that characterizes the latter. Something of carrot, citrus, and flowers, but smoother, a gestalt, creation of that master crasftsman, le mangier. The taste needs no guile, demands nor even suggests alteration or augmentation (again papaya comes to mind, viz. lime). The flesh clings to the fibers that extend from the pit in all directions. They are hard to cut and harder to remove from between one’s teeth. Find that it’s best to approach the seed as one might an artichoke leaf, scraping with the incisors to remove the maximum of flesh. Cut the rest of the skin away and chewed it like a cheese rind. Chewed it until it was gone. The pit, now scraped clean via the aforementioned technique, suggests some sort of melonheaded barbiedoll in the midst of a makeover. Pale yellow and white, flat and hairy.

Tossed the pit to the ground, licked my knife clean. Smelled the breeze, took in the hills.

More to come.