The older women, fat, solemn, powerful, lift out the booty and arrange it on the plates. The first servings are for the lepers, who stand some distance away. And then, layer by layer, the treasures emerge from the pit, beginning with the fruit of the sea, followed by meats and vegetables and, last of all, the broth in the clay pots, which is served boiling hot in paper cups. One sip is equal to the jolt from half a bottle of straight vodka. Anyone who has tasted that broth, the concentrated essence of all the flavors of earth and sea, will never again be satisfied with other aphrodisiacs. One cannot possibly describe the taste, only speak of its effect: it explodes like dynamite in the blood.

  I wrote Eva Luna in an apartment in the heart of Caracas, where it was impossible to do a true curanto. Trying to imagine a recipe that would have the same power as the Easter Island aphrodisiac, it occurred to me to try to copy it in a kettle, not an original inspiration, since others more expert had already tried it, successfully. This meal is stimulating not merely for the quality of the ingredients, but especially for the bacchanalian atmosphere implicit in its preparation. The euphoria begins long before tasting it. As I was unable to find a clay cassoulet large enough, I bought the largest aluminum vessel I could find, not so big around as tall, and fitted with a tight lid, and set myself the task of experimenting again and again, adding and taking away, until I came out with something similar to what I had eaten on Easter Island.

  Curanto in a pot requires the same laborious preparation of ingredients as the one cooked in the ground pit, but it cooks rapidly, which means you have to pay special attention to the seasoning, since you can’t count on the slow work of the heated stones. That gentle alchemy brings out the spirit of the ingredients, distilling them into the broth. The earth, banana leaves, smoke, and the slow cooking give the island dish an inimitable flavor. It wasn’t the same in my kitchen in Caracas until I cast aside my tentativeness and with herbs and spices achieved a blast similar to that of the dynamite curanto on the Easter Island beach. And so was born Aunt Burgel’s aphrodisiac recipe, which I don’t dare offer here, because Panchita has one that’s much better.

  A bacchanal is a rather delicate undertaking, so choose your guests carefully. Not everyone is up for abandon. Forget your solemn friends, the silly ones, anyone overly religious or overly married, the hypochondriacs, and the melancholics. From among those left, select a group with robust constitutions and open minds. In order to avoid misunderstandings, notify them in writing of the time, place, and conditions of the fiesta, adding the traditional RSVP at the bottom, so you will know how bounteous your curanto must be; nothing more embarrassing than having to interrupt an orgy to send out for pizza. If your finances are in the shape mine are, I suggest you accept contributions: a kilo of squid, a salmon, sausages, lobsters, a hen, and of course, wine in abundance. As your friends arrive, bring them to the kitchen to help with the preparations, and the party will begin there. Using the excuse of not ruining your clothes as you clean the shrimp, peel onions, and chop chickens, you can begin to shed your clothes early in the evening: lively music and wine are de rigueur; other aphrodisiacs are optional.

  Panchita’s Curanto En Olla

  Take a large kettle or pot of clay, iron, or heavy aluminum, and line the bottom with a layer of spinach leaves, onions lightly sautéed and studded with several cloves, a bunch of herbs—don’t forget rosemary and bay leaf—a few carrots chosen with an eagle eye, turnips, peppers, and garlic cloves. Then in a large frying pan, with method and enthusiasm, lightly brown smoked pork chops, pieces of skinless, tender chicken, and the best-quality sausage; once browned, place in orderly layers in the kettle, beginning with the pork chops and ending with the fowl. The night before you will have left garbanzos to soak; as soon as you skim off the skins, place the garbanzos in a mesh bag so they don’t scatter through the stew. This addition contributes both flavor and entertainment: if the garbanzos stay hard, your bacchants can shoot them like spitballs, and if they turn soft, they are delicious and aphrodisiac. Add salt, pepper, and a few drops of Tabasco or hot chili, and pour in half a bottle of dry white wine. Cover the pot with a clean cloth and top it off with several volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or maybe a brick, so the steam can’t escape. Leave everything at a rolling boil for fifteen minutes, while the guests you’ve invited to your orgy enjoy their wine and fresh oysters. (The advantage of oysters, in addition to their powers of arousal, is that opening them requires teamwork. You don’t want to put them in the curanto because they are much tastier raw.)

  After a quarter of an hour, take off the lid and add medium-size potatoes, cleaned but not peeled; fish cut into portions, with head and tail retained for flavor—tuna, conger, swordfish, and other succulent, firm-fleshed fish—and last of all, shellfish, starting with those that take longest to cook, such as crab and shrimp, and ending with mussels, all well washed, of course, unless you want sand in your stew. Use fresh shellfish just as they come, crustaceans and mollusks still in their shells, but omit lobster, because alive they draw a lot of attention and you can’t put a dead lobster in the pot. The squid will give body to the broth, as does the juice of a large lemon, a few sprigs of cilantro, a few more turns of the pepper grinder, and more wine—this time, the whole bottle. Weigh down the lid the way you did before, using the encyclopedias or the brick, and cook for a half hour longer, this time on a low flame.

  When you take off the lid, a fragrant column of steam will billow out, rising toward the skies like a holy offering, and as you eat your way through the treasures, beginning with the lightest and ending with the pork, you come to the Olympian nectar collected at the bottom of the pot, the essence and spirit of all the ingredients, well seasoned and hot, that you drink with prudence in little clay jugs, knowing in advance that it intoxicates the soul and unleashes lust for all eternity.

  Soup for Orgies

  This soup has a robust country flavor that raises a sweat on your eyelids and awakens your basest instincts, even a desire to recite poetry. It’s a very concentrated broth of meat and vegetables to which the whole Spanish landscape has been added. This dish, which can make friends of enemies and revive the passion of the most world-weary, is Carmen’s favorite. It’s what she always serves at her orgies. No way around it, it takes a lot of work, but it’s more than worth it. The privileged guests who have tested its effect pass through the world commenting on its virtues, thereby spreading Carmen’s fame far beyond the horizon.

  Ingredients

  FOR 10 BACCHANTS

  6 quarts water

  1/2 hen

  1 veal bone

  5 ounces bacon, well marbled

  1/2 pound pork ear and jowl

  1 pig’s foot

  1 ham hock

  1 turnip

  1 carrot

  1 celery stalk

  2 leeks

  Salt

  1 fryer

  1 pound veal ribs

  1 pound veal hock

  1 1/4 pound potatoes

  1 cabbage

  1/2 pound pork sausage

  1/2 pound garbanzos, soaked in water overnight

  MEATBALLS

  1 pound lean pork, ground, or 3/4 pound pork and 1/4 pound veal

  1 egg

  1 clove garlic

  2 tablespoons bread crumbs soaked in milk

  1 sprig parsley, chopped

  1 tablespoon flour

  Preparation

  A huge pot is absolutely necessary for this recipe, a minimum 10-quart capacity. Set to boil water, hen, veal bone, bacon, pork ear and jowl, pig’s foot, ham hock, and vegetables for the stock: turnip, carrot, celery, and leeks. Salt, too, of course. Cook for 1 hour.

  This is more than enough time for cooking the garbanzos and preparing the meatballs, which hold no mystery. Mix ground meat with egg, garlic, milk-soaked bread crumbs, and parsley, and stir. Shape into balls, and dredge in flour.

  Remove skins from the garbanzos, and put in a large pot with plenty of cold water; cook slowly until soft. Drain, then cook 10 minutes more in a small amount of pot liquor, to give them flavor. Keep warm.

  When the stock has cooked for at least an hour, add the fryer, veal ribs and hock, and meatballs, and continue to cook for at least 1 1/2 hours, until they are very tender and the entire house smells like Paradise. Strain off the stock, and divide into two pots, one large, one medium. In the larger one boil the potatoes and the cabbage, and put well-strained stock into the other.

  Pour a couple of inches of the stock into a large, heatproof vessel (it can be Pyrex), and keep warm over a very low flame. Carefully arrange the cut-up hen (after removing skin and ugly bones), the meat cut into equal-size pieces, laid out in families: pork, veal, fowl, jowl, with meatballs in the center, separating the meat from the fowl. The garbanzos can be served at the side of the platter or in a separate bowl. This is the platter that will be taken to the table, and so it must be arranged with a certain aesthetic intent or it will look like the result of a road kill.

  At the last moment, just before gathering around the table, add pork sausage, which needs minimal cooking, to the broth containing the potatoes and cabbage. After a few minutes remove it from the stock and place it on the platter with the meat. Arrange the cabbage and potatoes on a separate platter.

  It goes without saying that there are no fixed rules for an aphrodisiac casserole like this. You can give wing to your imagination, adding sausage, smoked meats, different vegetables, and, if you want to add an exotic South American touch, cassava and corn on the cob. Carmen spares no expense or effort when it comes to an orgy. In her zeal for excellence, she often divides her divine stock into several tureens and in one, for example, serves the stock with corn and finely cut-up chicken, and in another stock with rice, in another vegetables, and so on.

  Photograph, Luis Miguel Palomares.

  Once everyone has recovered from the effects of the orgy, and before the guests say good-bye, she leads them to the kitchen, where they help wash up the mountain of pots and pans used in the feast.

  About Tastes

  Food, like eroticism, starts with the eyes, but there are people who will put just about anything in their mouth. In Samoa, live octopus is a delicacy. Natives of those islands hold the beast to their face, let the tentacles wrap around their head in an involuntary embrace, then bite the beak and, mouth-to-mouth in a long kiss of death, suck out its insides. Poor creature.

  The first time I saw edible snails, I thought they were a joke. It was a winter day on the great square in Brussels, more than thirty years ago, one of those gray days that seem to stretch on for weeks. A man stood on a corner selling little paper sacks of French fries and snails. I had to watch with my own eyes as a mustached burgher dug those slimy worms from their shells with a toothpick and popped them in his mouth before I learned the true breadth of human nature.

  In Sichuan, in the interior of China, I had to choose my breakfast from a pond writhing with sea snakes. The cook hooked out mine with a forked pole and five minutes later presented it in my soup. That was less traumatic than the huge land snake with green scales another chef had cooked and served on a plate surrounded by hot peppers and potatoes, its head raised as if to strike. It had a very strong taste, like slightly spoiled fish. Earlier I had seen the cook shaking a live mouse by the tail above a wooden box that held the reptiles; the minute one slipped free from the tumult, he seized it behind the head and broke its neck. I don’t know how after cooking it he was able to get the head erect and wearing that ferocious expression. I tasted it to be courteous, and ate the peppers.

  In some parts of Mexico, fried ants are the children’s favorite treat—sweet and hot—and in Chile the spider that lives in the sea urchin is thought to be aphrodisiac, as long as you eat it while it’s alive. You place it on the tip of your tongue, and when the innocent arachnid tiptoes toward the back of your mouth, you slowly crush it against your palate until it is smashed flat. These barbarities, which would break a vegetarian’s heart, are erotic for others. There are those who appreciate the remnants of cadaver of octopus, snail, snake, or spider in the kisses of their companion.

  The skink is a North African lizard that from times as remote as Greek and Roman antiquity has been said to have fantastic aphrodisiac powers. The snout, feet, and especially the genitals are soaked in wine and cooked in a bed of herbs. The Persians mixed the flesh of the skink with ground pearls and amber. An exquisite aphrodisiac was also prepared from the hippomanes, a small slice of flesh taken from the forehead of a newborn colt and mixed with the blood of the beloved. If the blood was from the menses, the effect could be fulminating. It is suspected that Caesonia gave Caligula a similar brew to win his love, causing the frenzied and arrogant madness that led him to commit so many crimes, but this explanation is typical of historians, who always find a way to blame the woman.

  In any case, the boundary between erotic philters and poisons is so subtle that sometimes it vanishes completely, sending more than one love object to the grave. Currently in the United States, as in many other countries, it is illegal to prescribe or administer philters, just as it is forbidden to practice the magic called “black.” On the one hand, science disqualifies magic as pure superstition, and on the other, condemns it as dangerous.

  Sometimes it is better not to ask what you’re eating. In the end, it doesn’t much matter. My son’s favorite treat was fried potatoes smeared with condensed milk, and one of my brothers caught flies on the windowpanes and, to win bets from a semisadistic uncle who seeded the years of our childhood with unforgettable tales, ate them alive. In the most refined European gastronomy, kidneys in sherry, brains in butter, tongue with nuts, tripe with tomato, and even pigs’ feet are considered true delicacies by the most discerning palates, yet none of these is presentable on a North American table. Before the arrival of the white men with their tin cans and their manias, the Eskimos supplemented their diet with raw seal viscera and bear excrement, rich sources of proteins, vitamins, and minerals. The brains of monkeys, some other animal species, and us humans contain a substance of extreme aphrodisiac strength, thence the practice of eating brains and probably the origin of cannibalism.

  Oscar Kiss-Maerth (1914–1990) was a Hungarian monk who developed and personally tested a strange theory about evolution based on anthropophagy. I don’t know how he obtained the raw material for his experiments, but it must have been a thoroughly repugnant process, because in his last years he became a vegetarian. Certain medieval alchemists pulverized the brains of birds, particularly doves, and used the powder, dissolved in wine, as a remedy for impotence. In China and other regions of Asia, the brains of live monkeys are morsels much desired. They present the monkey in a narrow cage beneath a table with a hole in the surface that secures the already trepanned head of the primate. I won’t go into further detail here because this is not a book about nightmares, but eroticism and cuisine. If you are one of those people who steadfastly believes in the magical virtues of something that hair-raising, I suggest you eat alone and not broadcast it.

  The Creation of Eve, pastel by Martin Maddox, 1989.

  Alligators and Piranhas

  Deep in the Amazon, in the heart of South America, where the jungle can be so thick that if you wander two meters away from the trail you are lost in Venusian vegetation, monkey is greatly appreciated as food. I saw one skewered from mouth to anus roasting over a fire, burned to a crisp but still looking like a child. Depending on the season, the texture is tough or tender, but the flavor is always strong and sweetish. The jungle is an enormous, hot, exhausting, mysterious labyrinth in which one can wander in circles forever. With its birdcalls, screeching animals, and stealthy footfalls, the jungle is never silent; it smells of moss, of dankness, and sometimes you catch a mouthful of a clinging odor like rotted fruit. To inexpert eyes, everything is green, but for the native, it is a diverse and endlessly rich world: there are vines that gather liters and liters of pure water to drink, bark that reduces fevers, leaves used to treat diabetes, resins to close wounds, a milky sap that cures a cough, rubber for affixing arrow points—in short, it is the largest biogenetic preserve on the planet. The Indians use a poison extracted from plants that they throw into the water to stun the fish. They collect them when they float to the surface, then eat them without danger because the poison quickly degrades.

  After the waters of the Río Negro and the Salomoes flow together, the river is called the Amazon. It is as broad as the sea in Normandy, a dark mirror when it is calm, terrifying when storms erupt. In a glass, water from the Rio Negro is a kind of amber color and has the delicate flavor of strong tea. At dawn, when the rising sun stains the horizon red, rosy dolphins come out to play, one of the few Amazonian fish that are not eaten, because the flesh is bitter and the skin unusable. The Indians harpoon them, nonetheless, and rip out their eyes and genitals to make into amulets for virility and fertility.