“High Cuisine” by Amparo Dávila
Translated by Jeanie R.C. Toscano, Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
They grew during rainy season, in orchards. Hidden between the leaves, attached to stems or amid humid weeds. That’s where they tore them from in order to sell them, and they were sold for quite the steep price. They were typically three for five cents or fifteen cents a dozen when in abundance. At home they would buy two pesos-worth every week since it was our obligatory Sunday meal, or more frequently still if we had guests over for dinner. With this stew my family would regale distinguished guests or our most cherished ones. “You can’t find them this well prepared anywhere else,” my mother boasted proudly whenever they praised the dish.
I remember the somber kitchen and the pot where they cooked them, prepped and pickled by an old French man; the wooden spoon, darkened by use, and that fat cook, a ruthless woman, merciless in the face of pain. She was unmoved by the piercing screams; she kept stoking at the stove, blowing on the coals, as if nothing was happening. I could hear them crying all the way from my room in the attic. It was always raining; their screams would always mix with the sound of the rain. They wouldn’t die fast enough. Their anguish, interminably prolonged.
I would spend all of that time locked in my room with the pillow over my head, and even so I could hear them still. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I would hear them again. I never knew whether they were still alive, or whether their screams had gotten stuck inside of me, inside my head, in my ears, outside and in, hammering, tearing at my entire being. Sometimes I would see hundreds of little eyes sticking to the dripping wet glass of the window. Hundreds of round black eyes. Bright, humid, tearful eyes, begging for mercy. But there was no mercy in that house. No one was moved by that cruelty. Their eyes and their screams followed me, and they follow me still, wherever I go. A few times they sent me out to buy them; I always came back without them, claiming I hadn’t found any. One day they began to suspect me and they never sent me out again. The cook would go in my stead. She would come back with a full pail, and I would stare at her with the greatest scorn you can possibly direct at the cruelest of murderers; she would furrow her snub nose and bellow out a disdainful blow.
Her preparation always ended up a complicated and time-consuming matter. First, she would place them in a box laced with grass, and she would give them a strange herb to eat, evidently with great pleasure, which at the same time served as a tonic. And they would remain there for a day. The next day they would bathe them carefully so as not to hurt them; they would dry them and put them in the pot filled with cold water, aromatic herbs and spices, vinegar and salt. When the water began to warm up they would start to cry, cry and cry…They cried sometimes like newborn babies, like squashed mice, like bats, like strangled cats, like hysterical women…That time, the last time I was in my house, the feast was long and thoroughly savored.
Read a selection of international haunts from UCI School of Humanities scholars here.
