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.