There’s a caballo in my fridge.
I tired to get away from it. I wasn’t even going to admit it to anyone, but it’s all I can hear, in the game, on the TV. Real Madrid is playing Girona. And the word is like a hammer on glass, a dripping faucet in the night. Ceballo. It is the only word that percolates through the speeding Spanish that streaks. And then there it is again, Ceballo, buried within the indecipherable rush, emotion as it peaks, tension as it builds and decays. The word seems for my ears alone despite its broadcast to millions, Ceballo, Ceballo, Ceballo. I push mute and walk away.
Dani Ceballo plays center mid for Real Madrid. I have been living in Spain since July. The word for horse in Spain is caballo. It was too close for coincidence, if such a thing as coincidence exists.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to have a caballo in my fridge. But it seems better than the alternative. I’m still not sure I made the right choice, last night, at the crossroads. We call it a choice point in a career two oceans away, an inflexion that divides one life by two futures, colors all that comes next. It was a choice not to unwrap the caballo from its packaging, a choice not to drop it in the skillet so hot.
It was a choice to keep it hidden like a secret. God knows I have my share. I imagine we all do. And some secrets, it seems, are best kept under wraps. Sealed in the thick white paper of butchers and slid into whatever dark recess stays hidden from the naked bulb and its light.
There are certain things lost in translation in this life lived in Spanish. There was no sign that read caballo next to the marbled flesh, no silhouette in the shape of a caballo next to the word CARNICERIA painted in white on red above the window. And I’m quite certain the name caballo never spilled from the slippery tongue of the butcher, the white of his teeth that matched his smock, his hands still sticky with murder’s blood.
But I could never be sure. There are some things that are said between even women and men that get lost in the gap that separates our souls. Even with shared languages and beds, communication is a fickle beast, a road riddled with too many potholes and cracks to count. And it seems we all tend to fill in the clefts with what we want to have heard.
It was the brain behind cold glass that exposed the butcher’s secret, next to the uniquely sized rib cage and the haunch and the rest. I’ve always been fascinated by that organ more than every other. I had my very own back in Marian Diamond’s neuroanatomy lab at Cal, the scent of formaldehyde mixed with cypress in the Bay’s September breeze. I remember dissecting the tracts that carried sight and sound along their spaghetti axons to the thalamus, the softness turned firm where deep structures like the amygdala coalesced. The amygdala is where such feelings as loneliness and regret take shape. Electrons and potassium channels as they birth emotion. The black magic of life, be it animal or man.
Transaction complete, I hesitated before taking the 2 Euro coin as change from the butcher’s wet hand. That’s when I spotted it, its macaroni cortex and its gelatinous slime. It was too small for the brain of a cow, too similar to human to have come from a pig. And so I asked. And so he answered.
I turned to leave, not sure any choices remained. I had watched him grind it, lifted up my 6-year old so she could see. I had waited as he folded it, like a Christmas present with no tree. I now held it swinging from a bag of plastic at my hip, the Spanish night and its sounds. A package of ground caballo, and nobody knew.
Soccer practice had been cancelled on account of the wind. I’m amazed at how fast routine settles in, even here along Iberia’s surf-rippled coast. But tonight was wide open. And I had thought ahead to buy cilantro and to boil a pot of black beans in its brine. Tonight was Dad’s turn to claim taco night. And such opportunities are the tiny nuggets of gold within this year without work.
I told my wife in the car. She thought it strange where I draw my lines.
I told my kids there would be no meat for taco night. They were as disappointed in me as she.
And so here I sit, all alone in this kitchen, the muted TV in the other room. Solitude is my reward for my morals and their shifting lines. I pull open the fridge. The caballo is still waiting. The light turns on. The light turns off.
And then I wonder. How much else in this life is lost in translation? Are we better off in our knowing or in our ignorance? And how often are the two interchanged? I agree to what I think I understand. She opposes what her mind interprets as my beliefs. Can one human ever know the raw truth of another from without?
Or are we all just passing ships in the night? And only the butcher knows the caballo from the cow from the pig from the rest. Would it have been better if I hadn’t asked? If I didn’t see the tiny brain? If I didn’t learned that night the Spanish word for pony? What if I hadn’t raised my shackles of defense as if 20 years of marriage was on the line? If the kids had meat with their cilantro and beans? If Dad’s taco night was a hit?
But the question remains. And I keep asking around. But nobody seems to want it.
And there’s a caballo in my fridge.