Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  To reach the patio and, from it, our stairs, we had to pick our way among the little tables of the reception. We were already close to the far exit when, from a table at the back of the hall, one of the few male guests rose and came toward us, arms extended. It was our friend Salustiano Velazco, a member of the would-be president’s staff and, in that capacity, a participant in the more delicate stages of the electoral campaign. We hadn’t seen him since leaving the capital, and to show us, with all his ebullience, his joy on seeing us again and to inquire about the latest stages of our journey (and perhaps to escape momentarily that atmosphere in which the triumphal female predominance compromised his chivalrous certitude of male supremacy) he left his place of honor at the symposium and accompanied us into the patio.

  Instead of asking us about what we had seen, he began by pointing out the things we had surely failed to see in the places we had visited and could have seen only if he had been with us—a conversational formula that impassioned connoisseurs of a country feel obliged to adopt with visiting friends, always with the best intentions, though it successfully spoils the pleasure of those who have returned from a trip and are quite proud of their experiences, great or small. The convivial din of the distinguished gynaeceum followed us even into the patio and drowned at least half the words he and we spoke, so I was never sure he wasn’t reproaching us for not having seen the very things we had just finished telling him we had seen.

  “And today we went to Monte Albán,” I quickly informed him, raising my voice. “The stairways, the reliefs, the sacrificial altars…”

  Salustiano put his hand to his mouth, then waved it in midair—a gesture that, for him, meant an emotion too great to be expressed in words. He began by furnishing us archeological and ethnographical details I would have very much liked to hear sentence by sentence, but they were lost in the reverberations of the feast. From his gestures and the scattered words I managed to catch (“Sangre…obsidiana…divinidad solar”), I realized he was talking about the human sacrifices and was speaking with a mixture of awed participation and sacred horror—an attitude distinguished from that of our crude guide by a greater awareness of the cultural implications.

  Quicker than I, Olivia managed to follow Salustiano’s speech better, and now she spoke up, to ask him something. I realized she was repeating the question she had asked Alonso that afternoon: “What the vultures didn’t carry off—what happened to that, afterward?”

  Salustiano’s eyes flashed knowing sparks at Olivia, and I also grasped then the purpose behind her question, especially as Salustiano assumed his confidential, abettor’s tone. It seemed that, precisely because they were softer, his words now overcame more easily the barrier of sound that separated us.

  “Who knows? The priests…This was also a part of the rite—I mean among the Aztecs, the people we know better. But even about them, not much is known. These were secret ceremonies. Yes, the ritual meal…The priest assumed the functions of the god, and so the victim, divine food…”

  Was this Olivia’s aim? To make him admit this? She insisted further, “But how did it take place? The meal…”

  “As I say, there are only some suppositions. It seems that the princes, the warriors also joined in. The victim was already part of the god, transmitting divine strength.” At this point, Salustiano changed his tone and became proud, dramatic, carried away. “Only the warrior who had captured the sacrificed prisoner could not touch his flesh. He remained apart, weeping.”

  Olivia still didn’t seem satisfied. “But this flesh—in order to eat it…The way it was cooked, the sacred cuisine, the seasoning—is anything known about that?”

  Salustiano became thoughtful. The banqueting ladies had redoubled their noise, and now Salustiano seemed to become hypersensitive to their sounds; he tapped his ear with one finger, signaling that he couldn’t go on in all that racket. “Yes, there must have been some rules. Of course, that food couldn’t be consumed without a special ceremony…the due honor…the respect for the sacrificed, who were brave youths…respect for the gods…flesh that couldn’t be eaten just for the sake of eating, like any ordinary food. And the flavor…”

  “They say it isn’t good to eat?”

  “A strange flavor, they say.”

  “It must have required seasoning—strong stuff.”

  “Perhaps that flavor had to be hidden. All other flavors had to be brought together, to hide that flavor.”

  And Olivia asked, “But the priests…About the cooking of it—they didn’t leave any instructions? Didn’t hand down anything?”

  Salustiano shook his head. “A mystery. Their life was shrouded in mystery.”

  And Olivia—Olivia now seemed to be prompting him. “Perhaps that flavor emerged, all the same—even through the other flavors.”

  Salustiano put his fingers to his lips, as if to filter what he was saying. “It was a sacred cuisine. It had to celebrate the harmony of the elements achieved through sacrifice—a terrible harmony, flaming, incandescent…” He fell suddenly silent, as if sensing he had gone too far, and as if the thought of the repast had recalled him to his duty, he hastily apologized for not being able to stay longer with us. He had to go back to his place at the table.

  Waiting for evening to fall, we sat in one of the cafés under the arcades of the zócalo, the regular little square that is the heart of every old city of the colony—green, with short, carefully pruned trees called almendros, though they bear no resemblance to almond trees. The tiny paper flags and the banners that greeted the official candidate did their best to convey a festive air to the zócalo. The proper Oaxaca families strolled under the arcades. American hippies waited for the old woman who supplied them with mescalina. Ragged vendors unfurled colored fabrics on the ground. From another square nearby came the echo of the loudspeakers of a sparsely attended rally of the opposition. Crouched on the ground, heavy women were frying tortillas and greens.

  In the kiosk in the middle of the square, an orchestra was playing, bringing back to me reassuring memories of evenings in a familiar, provincial Europe I was old enough to have known and forgotten. But the memory was like a trompe l’oeil, and when I examined it a little it gave me a sense of multiplied distance, in space and in time. Wearing black suits and neckties, the musicians, with their dark, impassive Indian faces, played for the varicolored, shirtsleeved tourists—inhabitants, it seemed, of a perpetual summer—for parties of old men and women, meretriciously young in all the splendor of their dentures, and for groups of the really young, hunched over and meditative, as if waiting for age to come and whiten their blond beards and flowing hair; bundled in rough clothes, weighed down by their knapsacks, they looked like the allegorical figures of winter in old calendars.

  “Perhaps time has come to an end, the sun has grown weary of rising, Cronos dies of starvation for want of victims to devour, the ages and the seasons are turned upside down,” I said.

  “Perhaps the death of time concerns only us,” Olivia answered. “We who tear one another apart, pretending not to know it, pretending not to taste flavors anymore.”

  “You mean that here—that they need stronger flavors here because they know, because here they ate…”

  “The same as at home, even now. Only we no longer know it, no longer dare look, the way they did. For them there was no mystification: the horror was right there, in front of their eyes. They ate as long as there was a bone left to pick clean, and that’s why the flavors…”

  “To hide that flavor?” I said, again picking up Salustiano’s chain of hypotheses.

  “Perhaps it couldn’t be hidden. Shouldn’t be. Otherwise, it was like not eating what they were really eating. Perhaps the other flavors served to enhance that flavor, to give it a worthy background, to honor it.”

  At these words I felt again the need to look her in the teeth, as I had done earlier, when we were coming down in the bus. But at that very moment her tongue, moist with saliva, emerged from between her teeth, then immediately
drew back, as if she were mentally savoring something. I realized Olivia was already imagining the supper menu.

  It began, this menu, offered us by a restaurant we found among low houses with curving grilles, with a rose-colored liquid in a hand-blown glass: sopa de camarones—shrimp soup, that is, immeasurably hot, thanks to a quantity of chiles we had never come upon previously, perhaps the famous chiles jalapeños. Then cabrito—roast kid—every morsel of which provoked surprise, because the teeth would encounter first a crisp bit, then a bit that melted in the mouth.

  “You’re not eating?” Olivia asked me. She seemed to concentrate only on savoring her dish, though she was very alert, as usual, while I had remained lost in thought, looking at her. It was the sensation of her teeth in my flesh that I was imagining, and I could feel her tongue lift me against the roof of her mouth, enfold me in saliva, then thrust me under the tips of the canines. I sat there facing her, but at the same time it was as if a part of me, or all of me, were contained in her mouth, crunched, torn shred by shred. The situation was not entirely passive, since while I was being chewed by her I felt also that I was acting on her, transmitting sensations that spread from the taste buds through her whole body. I was the one who aroused her every vibration—it was a reciprocal and complete relationship, which involved us and overwhelmed us.

  I regained my composure; so did she. We looked carefully at the salad of tender prickly-pear leaves (ensalada de nopalitos)—boiled, seasoned with garlic, coriander, red pepper, and oil and vinegar—then the pink and creamy pudding of maguey (a variety of agave), all accompanied by a carafe of sangrita and followed by coffee with cinnamon.

  But this relationship between us, established exclusively through food, so much so that it could be identified in no image other than that of a meal—this relationship which in my imaginings I thought corresponded with Olivia’s deepest desires—didn’t please her in the slightest, and her irritation was to find its release during that same supper.

  “How boring you are! How monotonous!” she began by saying, repeating an old complaint about my uncommunicative nature and my habit of giving her full responsibility for keeping the conversation alive—an argument that flared up whenever we were alone together at a restaurant table, including a list of charges whose basis in truth I couldn’t help admitting but in which I also discerned the fundamental reasons for our unity as a couple; namely, that Olivia saw and knew how to catch and isolate and rapidly define many more things than I, and therefore my relationship with the world was essentially via her. “You’re always sunk into yourself, unable to participate in what’s going on around you, unable to put yourself out for another, never a flash of enthusiasm on your own, always ready to cast a pall on anybody else’s, depressing, indifferent—” And to the inventory of my faults she added this time a new adjective, or one that to my ears now took on a new meaning: “Insipid!”

  There: I was insipid, I thought, without flavor. And the Mexican cuisine, with all its boldness and imagination, was needed if Olivia was to feed on me with satisfaction. The spiciest flavors were the complement—indeed, the avenue of communication, indispensable as a loudspeaker that amplifies sounds—for Olivia to be nourished by my substance.

  “I may seem insipid to you,” I protested, “but there are ranges of flavor more discreet and restrained than that of red peppers. There are subtle tastes that one must know how to perceive!”

  The next morning we left Oaxaca in Salustiano’s car. Our friend had to visit other provinces on the candidate’s tour, and offered to accompany us for part of our itinerary. At one point on the trip he showed us some recent excavations not yet overrun by tourists. A stone statue rose barely above the level of the ground, with the unmistakable form that we had learned to recognize on the very first days of our Mexican archeological wanderings: the chacmool, or half-reclining human figure, in an almost Etruscan pose, with a tray resting on his belly. He looks like a rough, good-natured puppet, but it was on that tray that the victims’ hearts were offered to the gods.

  “Messenger of the gods—what does that mean?” I asked. I had read that definition in a guidebook. “Is he a demon sent to earth by the gods to collect the dish with the offering? Or an emissary from human beings who must go to the gods and offer them the food?”

  “Who knows?” Salustiano answered, with the suspended attitude he took in the face of unanswerable questions, as if listening to the inner voices he had at his disposal, like reference books. “It could be the victim himself, supine on the altar, offering his own entrails on the dish. Or the sacrificer, who assumes the pose of the victim because he is aware that tomorrow it will be his turn. Without this reciprocity, human sacrifice would be unthinkable. All were potentially both sacrificer and victim—the victim accepted his role as victim because he had fought to capture the others as victims.”

  “They could be eaten because they themselves were eaters of men?” I added, but Salustiano was talking now about the serpent as symbol of the continuity of life and the cosmos.

  Meanwhile I understood: my mistake with Olivia was to consider myself eaten by her, whereas I should be myself (I always had been) the one who ate her. The most appetizingly flavored human flesh belongs to the eater of human flesh. It was only by feeding ravenously on Olivia that I would cease being tasteless to her palate.

  This was in my mind that evening when I sat down with her to supper. “What’s wrong with you? You’re odd this evening,” Olivia said, since nothing ever escaped her. The dish they had served us was called gorditas pellizcadas con manteca—literally, “plump girls pinched with butter.” I concentrated on devouring, with every meatball, the whole fragrance of Olivia—through voluptuous mastication, a vampire extraction of vital juices. But I realized that in a relationship that should have been among three terms—me, meatball, Olivia—a fourth term had intruded, assuming a dominant role: the name of the meatballs. It was the name gorditas pellizcadas con manteca that I was especially savoring and assimilating and possessing. And, in fact, the magic of that name continued affecting me even after the meal, when we retired together to our hotel room in the night. And for the first time during our Mexican journey the spell whose victims we had been was broken, and the inspiration that had blessed the finest moments of our joint life came to visit us again.

  The next morning we found ourselves sitting up in our bed in the chacmool pose, with the dulled expression of stone statues on our faces and, on our laps, the tray with the anonymous hotel breakfast, to which we tried to add local flavors, ordering with it mangoes, papayas, cherimoyas, guayabas—fruits that conceal in the sweetness of their pulp subtle messages of asperity and sourness.

  Our journey moved into the Maya territories. The temples of Palenque emerged from the tropical forest, dominated by thick, wooded mountains: enormous ficus trees with multiple trunks like roots, lilac-colored macuilis, aguacates—every tree wrapped in a cloak of lianas and climbing vines and hanging plants. As I was going down the steep stairway of the Temple of the Inscriptions, I had a dizzy spell. Olivia, who disliked stairs, had chosen not to follow me and had remained with the crowd of noisy groups, loud in sound and color, that the buses were disgorging and ingesting constantly in the open space among the temples. By myself, I had climbed to the Temple of the Sun, to the relief of the jaguar sun, to the Temple of the Foliated Cross, to the relief of the quetzal in profile, then to the Temple of the Inscriptions, which involves not only climbing up (and then down) a monumental stairway but also climbing down (and then up) the smaller, interior staircase that leads down to the underground crypt. In the crypt there is the tomb of the king-priest (which I had already been able to study far more comfortably a few days previously in a perfect facsimile at the Anthropological Museum in Mexico City), with the highly complicated carved stone slab on which you see the king operating a science-fiction apparatus that to our eyes resembles the sort of thing used to launch space rockets, though it represents, on the contrary, the descent of the body to the subt
erranean gods and its rebirth as vegetation.

  I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun—into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest, down the high steps onto the forest of tourists with super-8s and usurped, broad-brimmed sombreros. The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll; I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting.

  Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a riverbank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes stared into each other’s with the intensity of serpents’—serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la veracruzana, and enchiladas.