Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Tita rubbed and rubbed the clothes as many times as she had rubbed Roberto’s diapers to remove the stains. What worked was to heat up a little urine, dip the stain in it for a minute, and wash it afterward in water. That is the one way to make stains fade away. But no matter how much she soaked the diaper in urine, she couldn’t get rid of the horrid black color. Then she realized it wasn’t Roberto’s diaper she was holding, but her mother’s clothes. They had been soaking in the pot where she had left them since morning, forgetting to wash them in the sink. Embarrassed, she set about correcting her error.
Settled in the kitchen, Tita resolved to pay more attention to what she was doing. She had to suppress the memories that tormented her or Mama Elena’s fury would erupt any moment.
Since she had left the sausage resting when she had gone to prepare Mama Elena’s bath, enough time had passed to go on to stuffing the casings.
The casings should be pork intestines, cleaned and cured. The sausages are filled using a funnel. Tie them off tightly, four fingers apart, and poke them with a needle so the air can escape, because air can spoil the sausage. It’s very important to squeeze the sausage firmly while filling it, so you don’t leave any spaces.
Hard as Tita tried to stem the memories that assaulted her and caused her to make more mistakes, holding a large sausage in her hands she couldn’t keep from remembering the summer night when they all slept outside on the patio. During the dog days, they hung giant hammocks on the patio, because of the unbearable heat. They set a large earthenware jar full of ice on a table and inside they placed a cut-up watermelon in case someone was hot and got up in the middle of the night wanting to eat a slice to cool down. Mama Elena was a specialist in cutting the watermelon: taking a sharp knife, she would drive the point in so it penetrated just to the end of the green part of the rind, without touching the heart of the watermelon.
She made her cuts through the rind with such mathematical precision that when she was done, she could pick up the watermelon and give it a single blow against a stone, in a particular spot, and like magic the watermelon rind would open like the petals of a flower, leaving the heart intact on the table. Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying, or dominating, Mama Elena was a pro. After she died, no one ever came close to accomplishing the same feats, with the watermelon.
From her hammock Tita heard someone get up for a chunk of watermelon. This awakened in her the urge to go to the bathroom. She had been drinking beer all day long, not to cool off, but to make more milk to nurse her nephew.
He was sleeping peacefully next to her sister. Getting up in the dark, she couldn’t see a thing—there wasn’t a glimmer of light. She was walking toward the bathroom, trying to remember where the hammocks were; she didn’t want to stumble into anybody.
Pedro, sitting in his hammock, was eating a slice of watermelon and thinking of Tita. Having her so near made him feel a tremendous excitement. He couldn’t sleep thinking of her there a few steps from him . . . and from Mama Elena, too, of course. He heard the sound of footsteps in the shadows and stopped breathing for a few moments. It had to be Tita, her distinctive fragrance wafted toward him on the breeze, a mixture of jasmine and cooking odors that was hers alone. For a moment he thought that Tita had gotten up to look for him. The sound of her approaching footsteps blended with the violent beating of his heart. But no, the steps were moving away from him, to the bathroom. Pedro got up as quiet as a cat and followed her.
Tita was surprised to feel someone pull her toward him and cover her mouth, but she realized who it was immediately and didn’t offer any resistance as the hand first slid down her neck to her breasts and then explored her entire body.
While she was receiving a kiss on the lips, Pedro took her hand in his and invited her to explore his body. Tita timidly touched the hard muscles on Pedro’s arms and chest; lower down, she felt a red-hot coal that throbbed through his clothes. She removed her hand, frightened not by her discovery but by a cry from Mama Elena.
“Tita, where are you?”
“Right here, Mami, I’m going to the bathroom.”
Fearful that her mother would suspect something, Tita hurried back to bed where she passed a tortured night, enduring her desire to urinate along with another urge. Her sacrifice didn’t do a bit of good: the following day, Mama Elena—who for a while seemed to have changed her mind about sending Pedro and Rosaura to Texas—speeded up her plans for their departure; three days later they had left the ranch.
Those memories were banished by Mama Elena’s entry into the kitchen. Tita let the sausage she was holding fall to the floor. She suspected that her mother was able to read her thoughts. Behind Mama Elena came Chencha, weeping unconsolably.
“Don’t cry, child. It annoys me to see you cry. What has happened?”
“Felipe has come back and he says he’s dead!”
“Who says? Who’s dead?”
“Well, the child!”
“What child?” Tita demanded.
“Well, what child do you think! Well, your nephew; whatever he ate, it didn’t agree with him and so, he died!”
Tita felt the household crashing down around her head. The blow, the sound of all the dishes breaking into a thousand pieces. She sprang to her feet.
“Sit down and get back to work. I don’t want any tears. Poor child, I hope the Good Lord has taken him in all his glory, but we can’t give in to sorrow; there’s work to do. First work, then do as you please, except crying, do you hear?”
Tita felt a violent agitation take possession of her being: still fingering the sausage, she calmly met her mother’s gaze and then, instead of obeying her order, she started to tear apart all the sausages she could reach, screaming wildly.
“Here’s what I do with your orders! I’m sick of them! I’m sick of obeying you!”
Mama Elena went to her, picked up a wooden spoon, and smashed her across the face with it.
“You did it, you killed Roberto!” screamed Tita, beside herself, and she ran from the room, wiping the blood that dripped from her nose. She took the pigeon and a pail full of worms and climbed up to the dovecote.
Mama Elena ordered them to remove the ladder and let her stay up there overnight. Mama Elena and Chencha finished filling the sausages in silence. Mama Elena was always such a perfectionist and so careful to get all the air out of the sausage, no one could explain it when they discovered a week later that all the sausages in the cellar were swarming with worms.
The next morning she ordered Chencha to get Tita down from the dovecote. Mama Elena couldn’t do it because her one fear in life was heights. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to climb up that ladder, twenty feet high, to get to the little door that would have to be opened in order to get in. She feigned a convenient pride, more than she actually had, and ordered someone else to bring Tita down, even though she felt a strong urge to go up there and personally drag Tita down by the hair.
Chencha found Tita holding the pigeon. She didn’t seem to realize it was dead. She was trying to feed it some more worms. The poor thing probably died of indigestion because Tita fed it too much. Tita looked up, her eyes vacant, and stared at Chencha as if she had never seen her before.
Chencha came down saying Tita was acting like a crazy person and refused to leave the dovecote.
“Fine, if she is acting crazy, then I’m going to put her in an asylum. There’s no place in this house for maniacs!”
And without a moment’s delay she sent Felipe for Dr. Brown to take Tita to an insane asylum. The doctor arrived, listened to Mama Elena’s version of the story, and set off up the ladder to the dovecote.
He found Tita naked, her nose broken, her whole body covered with pigeon droppings. A few feathers were clinging to her skin and hair. As soon as she saw the doctor, she ran to the corner and curled up in a fetal position.
No one knew how much she told Dr. Brown during the hours he spent there,
Chencha, weeping, was running alongside the carriage as they left and barely managed to toss onto Tita’s shoulders the enormous bedspread she had knit during her endless nights of insomnia. It was so large and heavy it didn’t fit inside the carriage. Tita grabbed it so tightly that there was no choice but to let it drag behind the carriage like the huge train of a wedding gown that stretched for a full kilometer. Tita used any yarn she happened to have in her bedspread, no matter what the color, and it revealed a kaleidoscopic combination of colors, textures, and forms that appeared and disappeared as if by magic in the gigantic cloud of dust that rose up behind it.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
Next month’s recipe:
A Recipe for Making Matches
CHAPTER SIX
June
A Recipe
for Making Matches
INGREDIENTS:
1 ounce powdered potassium nitrate
1/2 ounce minium
1/2 ounce powdered gum arabic
1 dram phosphorus
saffron
cardboard
PREPARATION:
The gum arabic is dissolved in enough hot water to form a paste that is not too thick; when the paste is ready, the phosphorus is added and dissolved into it, and the same is done with the potassium nitrate. Then enough minium is added to color the mixture.
Tita was watching in silence as Dr. Brown completed these procedures.
She was sitting by the window of the doctor’s little laboratory in back of the patio behind his house. The light that filtered in through the window struck her shoulders and provided a faint sensation of warmth, so slight it was almost imperceptible. A chronic chill kept her from feeling warm, in spite of being covered with her heavy woolen bedspread. One of her greatest interests was still working on the bedspread each night, with yarn John had bought for her.
Of the whole house, this was the place they both liked best. Tita had discovered it the week she arrived at Dr. Brown’s. John, ignoring Mama Elena’s order, had not put Tita in a madhouse but had taken her to live with him. Tita would never be able to thank him enough. In a madhouse she might have become truly insane. But here, with John’s warmth toward her in word and manner, she felt better each day. Her arrival there was like a dream. Among the blurry images, she remembered the terrible pain she felt when the doctor had set her broken nose.
Afterward, John’s large, loving hands, had taken off her clothes and bathed her and carefully removed the pigeon droppings from her body, leaving her clean and sweet-smelling. Finally, he gently brushed her hair and put her in a bed with starched sheets.
Those hands had rescued her from horror and she would never forget it.
Some day, when she felt like talking, she would tell John that; but now, she preferred silence. There were many things she needed to work out in her mind, and she could not find the words to express the feelings seething inside her since she left the ranch. She was badly shaken. The first few days she didn’t even want to leave her room; her food was brought to her there by Katy, a seventy-year-old North American woman, who besides being in charge of the kitchen also took care of Alex, the doctor’s little boy, whose mother had died when he was born. Tita heard Alex laughing and running in the patio, but she felt no desire to meet him.
Sometimes Tita didn’t even taste her food, which was bland and didn’t appeal to her. Instead of eating, she would stare at her hands for hours on end. She would regard them like a baby, marveling that they belonged to her. She could move them however she pleased, yet she didn’t know what to do with them, other than knitting. She had never taken time to stop and think about these things. At her mother’s, what she had to do with her hands was strictly determined, no questions asked. She had to get up, get dressed, get the fire going in the stove, fix breakfast, feed the animals, wash the dishes, make the beds, fix lunch, wash the dishes, iron the clothes, fix dinner, wash the dishes, day after day, year after year. Without pausing for a moment, without wondering if this was what she wanted. Now, seeing her hands no longer at her mother’s command, she didn’t know what to ask them to do, she had never decided for herself before. They could do anything or become anything. They could turn into birds and fly into the air! She would like them to carry her far away, as far as possible. Going to the window facing the patio, she raised her hands to heaven; she wanted to escape from herself, didn’t want to think about making a choice, didn’t want to talk again. She didn’t want her words to shriek her pain.
She yearned with all her soul to be borne off by her hands. She stood that way for a while, looking at the deep blue of the sky around her motionless hands. Tita thought the miracle was actually occurring when she saw her fingers turning into a thin cloud rising to the sky. She prepared to ascend drawn by a superior power, but nothing happened. Disappointed, she discovered that the smoke wasn’t hers.
It originated in a small room at the far end of the patio. Its chimney was emitting such a pleasant and familiar aroma that she opened the window to inhale it more deeply. Eyes closed, she saw herself beside Nacha on the kitchen floor making corn tortillas; she saw the pan where the most delicious casserole was cooking, and next to it, the beans just coming to a boil . . . not even hesitating, she decided to go see who was cooking. It couldn’t be Katy. The person who produced this kind of smell really knew how to cook. Never having laid eyes on her, Tita felt she knew this person, whoever she was.
She strode across the patio and opened the door; there she met a pleasant woman around eighty years old. She looked a lot like Nacha. A thick braid was wound around her head, and she was wiping the sweat from her brow with her apron. Her features were plainly Indian. She was making tea in an earthenware pan.
She looked up and smiled kindly, inviting Tita to sit down next to her. Tita did so. The woman immediately offered her a cup of the delicious tea.
Tita sipped it slowly, drawing maximum pleasure from the aroma of the herbs, familiar and mysterious. How welcome its warmth and flavor!
She stayed with the woman for a little while. The woman didn’t speak either, but it wasn’t necessary. From the first, they had established a communication that went far beyond words.
From then on, Tita had visited her there every day But gradually, Dr. Brown began to appear instead of the woman. The first time this happened it had surprised her —she wasn’t expecting to see him there, nor the changes he had made in the room’s furnishings.
Now the room contained many pieces of scientific equipment, test tubes, lamps, thermometers, and so on. . . . The little stove no longer occupied a central place; it had been relegated to a tiny spot in the corner of the room. Moving it was not right, she felt, but since she did not want her lips to emit a single sound, she saved that opinion for later as well as her question about the whereabouts and identity of the woman. Besides, she had to admit that she also enjoyed John’s company a good deal. There was just one difference: he did speak to her as he worked; but instead of cooking, he was testing theories scientifically.
He had inherited his fondness for experimentation from his grandmother, a Kikapu Indian who John’s grandfather had captured and brought back to live with him, far from her tribe. Despite this and the fact that he married her, she was never accepted as his legal wife by the grandfather’s proud, intensely Yankee family. So John’s grandfather had built this room for her at the back of the house, where she could spend most of the day doing what interested her most: studying the curative properties of plants.
The room also served as her refuge from the family’s attacks. One of their first was to give her the nickname “the Kikapu,” instead of calling her by her real name, thinking that this would really upset her. For the Browns, the word Kikapu summed up everything that was most disagreeable in the world, but this was not at all the case with Morning Light. To her it meant just the opposite and was an enormous source of pride.
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So John’s great-grandmother, Mary, started preparing some leeches for bleeding her husband. As she worked, she felt quite proud of herself for being up-to-date with the best scientific knowledge, which allowed her to protect her family’s health using an appropriate modern method—not like “the Kikapu” and her herbs!
The leeches are placed inside a glass containing a half a finger of water and left there for an hour. The part of the body to which they will be applied is washed with lukewarm sugar water. Meanwhile, the leeches are placed in a clean handkerchief, which is folded over them. Then they are turned out onto the part of the body where they are to be attached, held down firmly with the handkerchief, and pressed into the skin so they don’t pierce some other spot. To continue the bloodletting after the leeches have been removed, it helps to rub the skin with warm water. To control the bleeding and close the wounds, cover them with cloth or poplar bark and then apply a poultice of bread crumbs and milk, which is removed when the wounds have formed scabs.