Juan Villoro
How tasty are we? Some people lack salt, and others stimulate all the senses. Love is whimsical.
No one understood it better than Italo Calvino, whose centenary is celebrated these days. His most fruitful reflections on food and passion occurred precisely in Mexico. Shortly before his death, he conceived a book on the five senses that would remain unfinished. Fortunately, the text dedicated to taste was impeccably executed and gave the title to the posthumous volume: Bajo el sol jaguar (Under the Jaguar Sun).
In that story, the protagonist travels to Oaxaca in the company of Olivia, his wife, and discovers that the vernacular cuisine is an intricate encyclopedia. Is it possible to capture all the messages of that wisdom?
The couple stays in a hotel that was once a convent. In the lobby, a colonial-era painting portrays an old priest and a young nun; at the bottom of the canvas, the characters’ story is told; they were so close that when he died, she became seriously ill and soon caught up with him in heaven—a love story between beings devoid of physical contact.
Before that painting, Olivia says: “I want to eat chiles en nogada“. The phrase seems arbitrary, but it acquires logic at the table. The couple tastes the complex delicacies that Mexican cuisine owes to the convents. Olivia savors the meals with the unmistakable gesture of ecstasy; the “extreme notes of the flavors” enter her body, activating a sensory score. The peculiar mixture of sweet, spicy, and salty, the chromatism of the sauces, and the crunchy delight of the totopo (tortilla chip) generate for them an unknown hedonism.
That food offers a key to understanding the relationship between the priest and the nun painted in the vestibule. Seeing the delight with which Olivia eats chiles en nogada, the narrator understands she is ingesting an absolute aphrodisiac. Unlike potions that stimulate eroticism, Mexican stews are not a means to an end but an end in themselves. Tasting them is such a radical pleasure that it requires nothing else: “Do you feel?” asks Olivia, squinting her eyes.
At that moment, the narrator might have remembered that the Mexican convents’ culinary excellence reached the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s highest palate. In 1676, Pope Innocent XI tasted a pipian in almonds made by Sister Inés de la Purificación, a nun from the Santa Catalina de Siena convent in Mexico City. When faced with that sauce, the pilot of St. Peter’s boat launched an unforgettable eulogy in verse: “Beati indiani qui manducar pipiani“.
Calvino’s account suggests that the convents’ recipes allowed people to love each other sensually without the need to touch each other. The narrator himself goes through something similar, for he has not been close to the woman who eats before him in a state of plenitude for some time.
Soon after, the couple visits the archaeological site of Monte Alban, accompanied by a guide. From the aesthetic wonders, they move on to the unavoidable theme of human sacrifice. It is clear that those who died to pay tribute to the gods were part of a sacred ritual. Cut open, they were prey to the vultures that ate the viscera and took them to heaven, establishing a link with the divinity. What happened to the rest of the corpse, already turned into God’s flesh?
Olivia advances a hypothesis: if the sacrificed was sacred, his body could not be wasted. An exemplary Mexican, the guide neither supports nor contradicts her. Upon returning to the hotel, the couple meets a friend, a great connoisseur of pre-Hispanic culture. She takes the opportunity to question him about the human sacrifices: “What the vultures didn’t take, where did it go?
Nervously, the friend accepts the possibility of sacred anthropophagy, which requires strong condiments to hide the taste of the human and “celebrate the harmony of the elements achieved through sacrifice, a terrible, flaming, incandescent harmony”.
From absolute aphrodisiac, the couple has moved on to the possibility of devouring each other. In the last scene, the narrator notices that Olivia looks at him with an unusual appetite.
Mexican cuisine is so tasty that it prepares people to be eaten.
Perhaps for this reason, our country has the only national coat of arms representing wild gastronomy: the eagle devouring the snake.
This was published in Spanish on October 27, 2023, by Reforma.
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