Pitaya

I lament that the season of the piña is coming to an end.

Big fat grenades piled in pickups on the side of the highway, 15 pesos a pop, grab them by their bristly fronds and lop them open with a machete. First cosechas from Veracruz the sweetest of them all, juice running everywhere, down your arms as you bite into a wheel, down your legs, sticky between your toes.

But gracias a dios, the temporada of the pitaya has just arrived.

Round and red as rubber balls, these desert fruits perch atop their long-necked organ pipes waiting to be plucked, daring you. Some, already splayed open, reveal their scarlet guts: the birds got to them first, and now the bees nestle deep inside their flesh drawing out the sugar.

Javier reaches toward the blue morning sky with his gancho and lodges the V snugly beneath the fruit. Then with a flick of the wrist he loosens it from the thorny neck and it falls to the ground with a thump, decapitated. I dive for it like it’s a candy that just spilled out of a piñata. Cuidate, Javier tells me. It’s spikey and pricks my finger. But Don Javier knows how to handle it: from the tiny incision he peels away the papery skin like a flower revealing the magenta flesh inside. He offers it to me, bloody juice pouring into his palm. I take it gingerly, from the bottom, and bite into the ball of fruit, nature’s snow cone, wet and watery, sweet and sultry, it awakens my mouth, and I yearn for more. 

One is not enough, Rita tells me. She could eat them faster than she could pick them. It requires patience and delicacy; and she was always too eager, stabbing her pray with the tines of her gancho, leaving an entire cactus bush full of wounded fruit – and only a few on the ground at her feet to take home in a bucket to her mom.

Eight hours, her mother chastised, and only eight pitayas? Summarily, her mom dumped them into the sink and marched out the door with the empty bucket. She was back in an hour with a brimming bucket, gloating. You father never taught you anything.

But that wasn’t true because Rita says she’s an expert at eating them. Before her father died he brought buckets and buckets of pitayas home to her. He taught her how to peel them without pricking her fingers; and he watched in delight as she gorged on them, red juice running down her chin, and her tongue dyed purple with his love.