Recense (figured out)

I have just figured out what the Disney 100 Years of Wonder bodywash in this Airbnb smells like. Took me two showers to get here, and today I’d already washed once with another brand before the curiosity returned and I just had to solve the mystery, so I lathered up again (and got really clean). Finally, in the middle of that second wash, it hit me: It smells like cough medicine, NyQuil specifically, with that sharpsweet angle of a taste, that suggestion that there’s something unpleasant hidden under the mix and the only way they could mask it was with this odd mixture. 

What a paltry palette of smell words we have to work with! If you’d never taken NyQuil, my description would get you nowhere near the taste (we accept that these two senses are intimately related but perhaps no more so than smell and sight, or smell and touch, even smell and hearing). IYKYK, as the kids say, but even so, NyQuil does the work, not sharpsweet or angle or the judgment about hiding unpleasant medicine flavors. 

Like root beer, according to Karina and every other Uruguayan I’ve met. She can’t stand it. Which makes me really want to try the medicine she had as a kid. Instead, I got Hermano Damiano, who’d visited the United States and took great pride in sharing with me and my missionary companion some syrup that, he swore, tasted just like “your root beer” when mixed with sparkling water. Elder Howell was smart enough to ask for “just a sip, thank you, brother,” but I, in my naive enthusiasm, took a whole glass. 

Blech. I mean, it was bad. Baaaaad, even. But what am I telling you beyond my judgment? One kind-of-onomatopoetic evocation of disgust followed by the blandest, simplest dead-end of a word, pronounced with an elongated risefall to really convince you that I didn’t like it. 

But somebody must like it, or they’d never be able to sell the stuff. Like the salmon-flavored gelato I sampled one late winter night on the streets of Valencia between giant diorama burnings. I’d describe the taste as “very accurate.” It struck my tongue as authentically salmony. But my brain couldn’t fit the flavor to the feel, so I gagged. Ice creams should be sweet, my mind protested. Get this out of here! 

What’s this about “diorama burnings,” Pat? This is simply the phrase I’ve landed on to convey efficiently the whole Fallas extravaganza. But “efficiently” is a fool’s errand, which is a phrase I’ve borrowed from the great store of metaphors that our language has produced but that I’ve never looked up until just now, when I’ve discovered its origin in pranking or hazing behaviors, like sending an ingenue on a “snipe hunt,” as we sometimes did on Boy Scout campouts. In any case, when speaking to other English speakers who’ve experienced the event, or who’ve read about it and seen pictures, I use the Spanish (or perhaps Valencian, to be more exact) word. Generally, fallas means “failures” or “mistakes.” But in the context of March 19, feast day of St. Joseph, the carpenter (and earthly father of Jesus), in the context of Valencian festivals and outsized oddities you could not even imagine unless you heard about them, fallas means the whole process of designing and building hundreds of colorful, cartoonish, several-story, fill-a-street-intersection depictions of societal discrepancies or defects, displaying them for a month to attract the tourists, then loading them up with fireworks, waiting for the fire department, and burning them spectacularly all in one night. 

Here’s a matador surrounded by swooning señoritas and scowling señoronas, next to a warrior fighting a sea serpent and mermaid. There’s a giant marble Venus tagged with competing graffiti shouting insipid messages in bright colors: Hello! Fire! Gold! Writing! Around the corner there are world leaders dressed in drag reading stories. Everywhere you turn, you find caricature and ridicule pricking egos and piquing admiration, sometimes obviously, sometimes softly, suggestively, so you can forget your need to pinpoint meaning and simply enjoy the spectacle. But hurry. Everything goes up in flames tonight. 

Even this, all this alliterative description, does so little to get you there. Heck, even spending the day in Valencia, as I’ve done, touring the streets of the old city and surroundings, marveling at the looming three-dimensional commentaries on our societal foibles and failures, nudging and being nudged in the amoebic crowds, feeling the heat, the sting of sparked ash, the flash of gunpowder, all this does not provide more than the passingest sense of the whole contained in that untranslatable metaphorical word fallas. Even breathing through a bandanna, your lungs fill with acrid smoke that you understand, even as a first experience, to be the chemical remnants of Styrofoam and flame, which you’re sure are ticking up the probabilities of cancer in some future day, and the sharpsweet angle of the glorious celebratory tradition can’t quite do enough to hide this fact: that you are viewing, and inhaling, our doom. 

Patrick Madden’s brand-new essay collection, Recenses/Recencies, includes this and one other Short Reads essay, plus over two dozen more, all beginning “I have just,” all leaving their orbits as they chase the strange beauty of language to unexpected associations, all bringing joy and delight and relief from the workaday world. You can escape with him over on Facebook.