The quail must be dry-plucked because putting them in boiling water affects their flavor. That is just one of many cooking secrets that can only be learned through practice. Ever since she had burned her hands on the griddle, Rosaura wanted nothing to do with any kind of culinary activity, so she was ignorant of that and many other gastronomical secrets. But whether she did it to impress her husband Pedro or to compete with Tita in her own territory—who can say?—there was one day when Rosaura did attempt to cook. When Tita tried nicely to give her some advice, Rosaura became irritated and asked Tita to leave her alone in the kitchen.
The rice was obviously scorched, the meat dried out, the dessert burnt. But no one at the table dared display the tiniest hint of displeasure, not after Mama Elena had pointedly remarked:
“As the first meal that Rosaura has cooked it isn’t bad. Don’t you agree, Pedro?”
Making a real effort not to insult his wife, Pedro replied:
“No, for her first time, it’s not too bad.”
Of course, that afternoon the entire family felt sick to their stomachs.
That had been a tragedy, but nothing like the one that shook the ranch this time. Tita’s blood and the roses from Pedro proved quite an explosive combination.
Everyone was a little tense as they sat down at the table, but that’s as far as it went until the quail were served. It wasn’t enough he’d made his wife jealous earlier, for when Pedro tasted his first mouthful, he couldn’t help closing his eyes in voluptuous delight and exclaiming:
“It is a dish for the gods!”
Mama Elena knew that the quail was exquisite; nonetheless, Pedro’s remark did not sit well with her, and she replied:
“It’s too salty.”
Rosaura, saying she was feeling sick and getting nauseous, barely took three bites. But something strange was happening to Gertrudis.
On her the food seemed to act as an aphrodisiac; she began to feel an intense heat pulsing through her limbs. An itch in the center of her body kept her from sitting properly in her chair. She began to sweat, imagining herself on horseback with her arms clasped around one of Pancho Villa’s men: the one she had seen in the village plaza the week before, smelling of sweat and mud, of dawns that brought uncertainty and danger, smelling of life and of death. She was on her way to market in Piedras Negras with Chencha, the servant, when she saw him coming down the main street, riding in front of the others, obviously the captain of the troop. Their eyes met and what she saw in his made her tremble. She saw all the nights he’d spent staring into the fire and longing to have a woman beside him, a woman he could kiss, a woman he could hold in his arms, a woman like her. She got out her handkerchief and tried to wipe these sinful thoughts from her mind as she wiped away the sweat.
But it was no use, something strange had happened to her. She turned to Tita for help, but Tita wasn’t there, even though her body was sitting up quite properly in her chair; there wasn’t the slightest sign of life in her eyes. It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal’s aromas. That was the way she entered Pedro’s body, hot, voluptuous, perfumed, totally sensuous.
With that meal it seemed they had discovered a new system of communication, in which Tita was the transmitter, Pedro the receiver, and poor Gertrudis the medium, the conducting body through which the singular sexual message was passed.
Pedro didn’t offer any resistance. He let Tita penetrate to the farthest corners of his being, and all the while they couldn’t take their eyes off each other. He said:
“Thank you, I have never had anything so exquisite.”
It truly is a delicious dish. The roses give it an extremely delicate flavor.
After the petals are removed from the roses, they are ground with the anise in a mortar. Separately, brown the chestnuts in a pan, remove the peels, and cook them in water. Then, puree them. Mince the garlic and brown slightly in butter; when it is transparent, add it to the chestnut puree, along with the honey, the ground pitaya, and the rose petals, and salt to taste. To thicken the sauce slightly, you may add two teaspoons of cornstarch. Last, strain through a fine sieve and add no more than two drops of attar of roses, since otherwise it might have too strong a flavor and smell. As soon as the seasoning has been added, remove the sauce from the heat. The quail should be immersed in this sauce for ten minutes to infuse them with the flavor, and then removed.
The smell of attar of roses is so penetrating that the mortar used to grind the petals will smell like roses for several days.
The job of washing that and all the other kitchen utensils fell to Gertrudis. She washed them after each meal, out on the patio, so she could throw the scraps left in the pans to the animals. Since some of the utensils were large, it was also easier to wash them in the wash basin. But the day they had the quail, she asked Tita to do the washing up for her. Gertrudis was really stricken; her whole body was dripping with sweat. Her sweat was pink, and it smelled like roses, a lovely strong smell. In desperate need of a shower, she ran to get it ready.
Behind the patio by the stable and the corn crib, Mama Elena had had a primitive shower rigged up. It was a small room made of planks nailed together, except that between one board and the next, there were such big cracks that it was easy to see the person who was taking the shower. Still, it was the first shower of any kind that had ever been seen in the village. A cousin of Mama Elena’s who lived in San Antonio, Texas, had invented it. It had a thirty-gallon tank that was six feet high: first, you filled the tank with water, then you got a shower using gravity. It was hard work carrying buckets of water up the wooden ladder, but it was delightful afterward just to open the tap and feel the water run over your whole body in a steady stream, not doled out the way it was if you bathed using gourds full of water. Years later some gringos got this invention from Mama Elena’s cousin for a song and made a few improvements. They made thousands of showers that used pipes, so you didn’t have to do all that damn filling.
If Gertrudis had only known! The poor thing climbed up and down ten times, carrying buckets of water. It was brutal exercise, which made the heat that burned her body grow more and more intense, until she nearly fainted.
The only thing that kept her going was the image of the refreshing shower ahead of her, but unfortunately she was never able to enjoy it, because the drops that fell from the shower never made it to her body: they evaporated before they reached her. Her body was giving off so much heat that the wooden walls began to split and burst into flame. Terrified, she thought she would be burnt to death, and she ran out of the little enclosure just as she was, completely naked.
By then the scent of roses given off by her body had traveled a long, long way. All the way to town, where the rebel forces and the federal troops were engaged in a fierce battle. One man stood head and shoulders above the others for his valor; it was the rebel who Gertrudis had seen in the plaza in Piedras Negras the week before.
A pink cloud floated toward him, wrapped itself around him, and made him set out at a gallop toward Mama Elena’s ranch. Juan—for that was the soldier’s name—abandoned the field of battle, leaving an enemy soldier not quite dead, without knowing why he did so. A higher power was controlling his actions. He was moved by a powerful urge to arrive as quickly as possible at a meeting with someone unknown in some undetermined place. But it wasn’t hard to find. The aroma from Gertrudis’ body guided him. He got there just in time to find her racing through the field. Then he knew why he’d been drawn there. This woman desperately needed a man to quench the red-hot fire that was raging inside her.
A man equal to loving someone who needed love as much as she did, a man like him.
Gertrudis stopped running when she saw him riding toward her. Naked as she was, with her loosened hair falling to her waist, luminous, glowing with energy, she might have been an angel and devil in one woman. The delicacy of her face, the perfectio
n of her pure virginal body contrasted with the passion, the lust, that leapt from her eyes, from her every pore. These things, and the sexual desire Juan had contained for so long while he was fighting in the mountains, made for a spectacular encounter.
Without slowing his gallop, so as not to waste a moment, he leaned over, put his arm around her waist, and lifted her onto the horse in front of him, face to face, and carried her away. The horse, which seemed to be obeying higher orders too, kept galloping as if it already knew their ultimate destination, even though Juan had thrown the reins aside and was passionately kissing and embracing Gertrudis. The movement of the horse combined with the movement of their bodies as they made love for the first time, at a gallop and with a great deal of difficulty.
They were going so fast that the escort following Juan never caught up with him. Liars tell half-truths and he told everyone that during the battle the captain had suddenly gone crazy and deserted the army.
That is the way history gets written, distorted by eyewitness accounts that don’t really match the reality. Tita saw the incident from a completely different perspective than the rebel soldiers. She watched the whole thing from the patio as she was washing the dishes. She didn’t miss a thing in spite of the rosy clouds of steam and the flames shooting out of the bathroom, which made it hard for her to see. Pedro, too, was lucky enough to witness the spectacle, since he was just leaving the patio on his bicycle to go for a ride.
Like silent spectators to a movie, Pedro and Tita began to cry watching the stars act out the love that was denied to them. There was a moment, one brief instant, when Pedro could have changed the course of their story. Taking Tita’s hand in his, he began to talk to her: —Tita . . . But that was all. There was no time to finish. He was forced back to grim reality. He had heard Mama Elena’s shout, asking what was going on out on the patio. If Pedro had asked Tita to run away with him, she wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment, but he didn’t; instead, he quickly hopped onto his bicycle and furiously pedaled away. He couldn’t get the image of Gertrudis out of his mind, Gertrudis running through the field—completely naked. He must have been hypnotized by her ample breasts swinging from side to side. He’d never seen a naked woman before. During his relations with Rosaura, he’d never had any desire to see her body or caress it. They always used the nuptial sheet, which revealed only the necessary parts of his wife’s body. When he was done, he would leave the bedroom before she became uncovered. But it was different with Tita, and he longed to gaze at her that way, without any clothes on.
He wanted to study, examine, investigate every last inch of skin on her lovely, monumental body. Surely, she’d look like Gertrudis; they weren’t sisters for nothing.
The only part of Tita’s body that he knew very well, other than her face and hands, was the little round bit of leg he’d once managed to glimpse. The memory of it tortured him each night. How he longed to place his hand over that little patch of skin, and then all over her, as he had seen the man who took Gertrudis do: madly, passionately, lustfully!
Tita, for her part, was trying to shout to Pedro to wait for her, to take her away with him, far away where they’d be allowed to love each other, where there were no rules to keep them apart, where there was no Mama —but not a single sound came out of her mouth. The words formed a lump in her throat and were choked one after another as they tried to escape.
She felt so lost and lonely. One last chile in walnut sauce left on the platter after a fancy dinner couldn’t feel any worse than she did. How many times had she eaten one of those treats, standing by herself in the kitchen, rather than let it be thrown away. When nobody eats the last chile on the plate, it’s usually because none of them wants to look like a glutton, so even though they’d really like to devour it, they don’t have the nerve to take it. It was as if they were rejecting that stuffed pepper, which contains every imaginable flavor; sweet as candied citron, juicy as a pomegranate, with the bit of pepper and the subtlety of walnuts, that marvelous chile in walnut sauce. Within it lies the secret of love, but it will never be penetrated, and all because it wouldn’t be proper.
Damn good manners! Damn Carreno’s etiquette manual! He should be punished, his body made to fade away a bit at a time, forever. Damn Pedro, so decent, so proper, so manly, so . . . wonderful.
Had Tita known how soon she would taste physical love, she wouldn’t have felt quite so hopeless.
Mama Elena’s second shout shook her out of her brooding and forced her to come up with an answer fast. She didn’t know what to tell her mama first, if she should tell her that the far end of the patio was on fire, or that Gertrudis had run off with one of Villa’s men, on horseback . . . naked.
She settled on a version in which the Federal troops, which Tita hated, had swooped down on the ranch, set fire to the bathroom, and kidnapped Gertrudis. Mama Elena swallowed the whole thing; she was so sad it made her sick—but what nearly killed her was when she got the story from Father Ignacio, the parish priest—and who knew how he found out about it—that the next week Gertrudis was working in a brothel on the border. Mama Elena burned Gertrudis’ birth certificate and all of her pictures and said she didn’t want to hear her name mentioned ever again.
Neither the fire nor the passage of time has been able to eliminate a strong smell of roses that lingers in the spot where the shower stood, which now is a parking lot for an apartment building. Nor could they efface the images that lingered in Pedro and Tita’s minds, marking them forever. Ever after, quail in rose sauce became a silent reminder of this fascinating experience.
Each year Tita prepared it in tribute to her sister’s liberation and she always took special care in arranging the garnish.
The quail are placed on a platter, the sauce is poured over them, and they are garnished with a single perfect rose in the center and rose petals scattered around the outside; or the quail can be served individually, on separate plates instead of a platter. That’s how Tita liked to do it, because then there was no chance of the garnish sliding off-center when it was served, and that’s what she specified in the cookbook she started writing that night, after crocheting a big section of bedspread, as she did every night. As she worked, images of Gertrudis went around and around in her head: Gertrudis running through the field, and what she imagined had happened later, after her sister had disappeared from sight. Needless to say, her imagination was limited there by her lack of experience.
She wondered if Gertrudis had any clothes on now, or if she was still . . . naked! She worried that Gertrudis was cold, as cold as she was, but then she decided, no, she wasn’t. Most likely she was near a fire, in the arms of her man, and that would surely warm her.
All of a sudden she had a thought that made her run outside to look at the stars. Having felt it with her own body, she knew a look could start a fire.
Even to set the sun itself ablaze. What then would happen if Gertrudis looked up at a star? Surely the heat from her body, which was inflamed by love, would travel with that gaze across an infinite distance, with no loss of energy, until it landed on the star she was watching. Those huge stars have lasted for millions of years by taking care never to absorb any of the fiery rays lovers all over the world send up at them night after night. To avoid that, the star generates so much heat inside itself that it shatters the rays into a thousand pieces. Any look it receives is immediately repulsed, reflected back onto the earth, like a trick done with mirrors. That is the reason the stars shine so brightly at night. Tita therefore began to hope that if she could find the one star—among all the stars in the sky—that her sister was watching right this minute, it might reflect a little leftover heat onto her.
That was her dream, but the longer she scanned the stars in the sky, one by one, the less she felt the tiniest bit of warmth—just the opposite happened. Shivering, she went back to bed, convinced that Gertrudis was sound asleep, her eyes shut tight and that’s why the experiment hadn’t worked. So, pulling up the bedspread, which by then had
to be folded in thirds, she looked over the recipe she had written to see if she had forgotten anything. And added: “Today while we were eating this dish, Gertrudis ran away. . . .”
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
Next month’s recipe:
Turkey Mole with Almonds and Sesame Seeds
CHAPTER FOUR
April
Turkey Mole
with Almonds and
Sesame Seeds
INGREDIENTS:
1/4 chile mulato
3 chiles pasillas
3 chiles anchos
a handful of almonds
a handful of sesame seeds
turkey stock
a hard roll (1/3 concha loaf)
peanuts
1/2 onion
wine
2 squares of chocolate
anise
lard
cloves
cinnamon
pepper
sugar
seeds from the chiles
5 cloves garlic
PREPARATION:
Two days after killing the turkey, clean it and cook with salt. Turkey meat can be delicious, even exquisite, if the turkey has been fattened up properly. This can be accomplished by keeping the birds in clean pens with plenty of corn and water.
Fifteen days before the turkey is to be killed, begin feeding it small walnuts. Start with one the first day, the next day put two in its beak, and keep increasing the number this way until the night before it’s to be killed, regardless of how much corn it eats voluntarily during this period.
Tita took care to feed the turkeys properly; she wanted the feast to go well, for the ranch was celebrating an important event: the baptism of her nephew, first son of Pedro and Rosaura. This event warranted a grand meal with mole. She had had a special set of earthenware dishes made for the occasion with the name Roberto on them, for that is what they had named the beautiful baby, on whom all the family and friends were lavishing gifts and attention. Especially Tita who, contrary to what she had expected, felt an immense tenderness toward the boy, completely overlooking the fact that he was the product of her sister’s marriage to Pedro, the love of her life.