The Christening of the Fruit by Joseph Hernandez

This little story is packed with meaning, as juicy and fat as the fruit it meditates on. I love how the narrator’s fascination with the fruit his grandmother calls “Amarillas” evolves over the course of the story into an informed rejection of his grandmother’s secretive and exclusive ways, and a new vision for his own life, how he might grow his own Amarillas tree—“a grove of sweetsunfruit accessible to all.” There are overtones of Adam and Eve, of course—the tasting of the forbidden fruit, the threat of severe punishment. And the writer’s imagery is arresting: the grandmother’s blouses “the color of fading paint,” the “sounds that pass over your tongue and through your teeth like a weak breeze in the hottest month.” Some of the images—fruit and growth, chanclas and punishment, language and naming—become motifs deftly threaded through the story. It’s a delicious read.
—Amy Hassinger, author of After the Dam, on LAR Fall Short Fiction Award winner “The Christening of the Fruit” by Joseph Hernandez

In the garden in her backyard my grandmother has a tree that bears a fruit that grows fat and ripe like suns. She calls the fruit Amarillas, not by its name, but by its color. It is off-limits to everyone, my family and I know; no one but my grandmother can pluck it from where it hangs because, she says, she is the only one who can tell when it is ready for harvest. She doesn’t even let us help her pick it. So, because she cannot reach the lowest branches, she is left to spend hours stacking chairs, climbing the fence or swatting the tree with a rake, causing a rain of smashed fruit on the sidewalk that not even her dogs are allowed to lap up. When she has gathered enough basketsful, and there is no more yellow-orange on her tree, she takes them to the local farmers’ market to sell or trade for meats and spices.

Her christening of the fruit and its aversion to an English-sounding name had never surprised me, though her creation of a brand new word had. Though my grandmother could make a meal out of anything with a root or a stem and she was no stranger to chopping the heads off once-living chickens or fish, she was not an otherwise innovative woman. She often dressed in blouses the color of fading paint and she hadn’t missed a Sunday mass probably for as long as she’d lived. In naming the fruit she’d ensured that she’d avoided the soft T’s and flat R’s of the English language, those sounds that pass over your tongue and through your teeth like a weak breeze in the hottest month. She hated the taste of English words in her mouth, she’d always said. She only seemed to endure the language’s words on her tongue when she had to speak to me.

When I was younger she would bring me to church with her. I would sit there, understanding nothing that was being said, letting my eyes wander the cathedral, digesting the browns and whites of the pews and walls, the rainbows of stained glass. After the mass, my grandmother would take me to the front of the church and kneel down before a statue of a cloaked woman. She would put her head down and say nothing and I didn’t know if I was supposed to do the same. Afterward she’d buy us apples from a nearby vendor, always handing me the larger one. This was the only time in my life my grandmother would share her fruit with me. Then, one winter evening, she brought a small green stem home from a market-venture. She said she’d been looking for one of these for years now, said she hoped it would survive in the soil in her yard. When it did survive, she watered it every day as it began to sprout. And she stopped taking me to church with her.

§

If my grandmother had a choice between anything she owned and her Amarillas tree, there would be no contest. I might even believe she’d choose the tree over me if it came to it. Before the Amarillas grew into her life, she had a statue, a pale porcelain rendition of the Virgen de Guadalupe. One day I broke the statue. Knocked it over by accident. Caused a whole mess of Virgen-shards on the floor. When she came home she found that it was in pieces in the garbage.

“Do you want the belt or the chancla?” she yelled, then proceeded to spank me until I was too sore to cry. And now that I see how much of her time and energy she dedicates to the tree and fruit, I’d much rather not imagine what she’d hit me with if I meddled with that. If I even ate just one.

§

I have learned the true name of the Amarillas, though I’ve never told my grandmother. I was dating a girl who spoke the same language as my grandmother, would derive her words from the same roots. But this girl would not misname the fruit as my grandmother had. And I wouldn’t tell her I had known of its existence before her, either.

My girlfriend liked to sleep with nothing covering her body, and she always smelled like strawberries (the fresh-from-the-earth kind, not the artificial-candy kind). Her name was Lucinda, and she told me she had a jungle in her backyard. I thought this was a joke until she took me to her home, in a part of Los Angeles I had never been to with too many intersections and too little space in between the small houses. Her backyard was as large as the rest of her house, with a shaded canopy to cover the vibrant green of plants in dark orange ceramics. And in the center of the green, beyond the vines of rosemary and a wasp’s nest that hung near our heads, there was an Amarillas tree.

“What is this tree, I’ve never seen it before,” I asked. She told me that it had been planted since before she and her family moved here, that her father tended to it like one of his own children.

“He’s lucky,” she stated, “A tree like this is rare and he hasn’t been able to find another one since.”

Then she apologized to me, amid the buzzing of wasps and a rustle of leaves in the wind. She said she wanted me to try the fruit, but that it was not yet ready: small, pale bulbs had sprouted from the leaves and would not grow in full for several more months. She told me she’d bring me back when there was fruit, when there was more color in her yard.

As we walked away she sighed and said the word, a succulent delicacy in her accent:

“Persimos.”

§

I never asked Lucinda what more she knew. She had told me enough. I let the word drip into my lexicon, sticky like an orange in summer. I felt empowered now, knowing the true name. I felt I could go to markets and say the word, “Persimo,” could whisper it into the ears of market-goers. It would be our language, a secret more accessible than the Amarillas word. I wondered if Lucinda could connect with people who also knew this name, as I felt I now could?

After she said the name I looked differently at the tree in my grandmother’s backyard. I no longer understood her reverence of it. Here was a fruit with many names that even her own family was not good enough to taste. I asked her, the day after visiting Lucinda’s jungle, if I could take an Amarillas. “It’s just a fruit,” I told her, “more will grow.” She was at the kitchen sink slicing a cactus for dinner.

“They’re not ready to be eaten yet. And even when they are, I will need to bring all of them to the market. I will count them all. I get paid for each one,” she said without even looking at me.

“Well, couldn’t you get paid for one less?”

She stopped slicing. I thought back to the days of the chancla and how she’d never hesitated to hit me when I talked back. When she did nothing I backed out of the kitchen and before I was in the hallway I heard her resume chopping and slicing, preparing for a dinner I would not enjoy that night.

§

On the last day I ever saw Lucinda, she was eating one. She split it open with a knife, but didn’t offer me the other half. She slurped and sucked the fruit, and it was neither arousing nor obnoxious. She told me she would see me in a few months. She was going to Mexico with her family. I didn’t tell her to stop eating the fruit in front of me like that. I didn’t want her to leave me for that long amount of time. I wanted to shout at her, if you are from Mexico and my grandmother is from Mexico, why don’t you call fruits the same thing. Instead I said nothing and watched as she spit dark, flat seeds onto a paper plate.

§

I first tasted the sweetness of the Amarillas with my friend Julian. We were in his room. It was summer. We were working out a dream we both had, where the two of us would start a band and leave school. He had a guitar, and I had scribbled lyrics for songs on orange construction paper. Neither one of us could sing, but I always told him he could. I liked hearing him try and hoped that eventually his voice would grow on me.

He shouted to his mother that he was hungry. She told him she was making dinner, and to find something else in the meantime. He left the room and came back with a basket of mixed fruit. I recognized them immediately. Toward the top sat two of them, gleaming and golden. He asked which I wanted and I told him to surprise me. He threw it to me and I caught and held its cold weight, ran my finger along its creases.

“What,” he asked, “you don’t like these?”

“What are they?” I wanted to know what his name for them was.

“My mom likes them. I don’t know where she gets them.” He sat next to me then took a bite of his. “Try it.”

I watched some of the juice run down his neck and onto his shirt. It bled onto the collar, a light pink.

“Damn it,” he said. He stood up and placed the bitten fruit on his bed, then went to his closet and pulled off the stained shirt.

I took a bite of his fruit when his face was covered. It was sweet and cold. It was wet, too. I slurped the juice to avoid being dripped on. His skin was darker than mine and he had a scar near his bellybutton I didn’t ask about. His stomach muscles clenched as he pulled the new shirt over his head.

“Is the fruit good?” he asked me. He saw that I had taken a bite. He let me eat the rest of it.

We spent the afternoon writing lyrics about sweet fruit. We finished the whole basket. By the time his mother called us for dinner, we were no longer hungry, so we stayed and wrote more. I titled one of the songs “Amarillas”, and another “Hungry”. He didn’t show interest in either of these.

When I stole the fruit from my grandmother’s tree she was not home and I was not hungry. The Amarillas had been left to ripen and would not be picked for another week. I stepped outside, and when the pavement burned my feet, I slipped into a pair of old worn chanclas by the door used to swat flies during family barbecues.

Despite being immature, the fruit was larger than my hands. The branches shook as I tore one from its stem. It was bright and smooth, but it was not pale like Lucinda’s, or soft like Julian’s. I wondered how angry my grandmother would be with me if I ate them all, but when I bit into it, it was sour. It left a bad taste in my mouth. I chucked it at the fence and it exploded in a cascade of amarillo and pulp. I wondered what she’d do if I took the whole tree down, tore down every fiber of color that held it together. If I chucked them all at the fence, painting her backyard in the fruit’s flesh. Then I’d let her dogs clean it up.

I wanted the tree gone. No more farmers’ market. No more sour fruit. No more making up names for things that already have names.

But the tree would not go. It would continue to exist in her garden, continue to fill only her basket with yellow. I spit the seeds on the ground and went back inside the house.

I have imagined a reality where instead it is I who grows the Amarillas, a grove of sweetsunfruit accessible to all. Whoever wishes to take the fruit can do so without contest. I have dogs, too, and they feast on the fallen bulbs, too ripe and luscious to stay hanging on the branches. All of the men and women who visit me know the taste, know the true name.  Amarillas are always on their tongues.

Joseph Hernandez is a Southern California native whose fiction has explored the dynamics of families, fruit trees, and mermaids. He received his MFA from California State University, Long Beach and currently teaches Critical Thinking in Writing courses at the college level.