This dermal method reminds me of the celebrated case, recorded in the annals of modern medicine, of a man whose joints were so rigid that he was stiff as a statue but who after being attacked by bees and suffering forty-seven bites on his chest was by week’s end leaping about and bending up and down with no trace of his former impairment. I have also heard that deformities of the bone can be remedied with bat excrement and wasps’ nests, which, I should add in passing, also have aphrodisiac virtues. Rhinoceros-horn powders also facilitate the technique called kabbazah (taken from the Arabic word for “clasp”), which some expert women use to lead their lover to Allah’s Paradise by squeezing and suctioning contractions of the muscles of their intimate parts. Malicious tongues attributed this rare talent to Diane de Poitiers (1499–1566), with whom King Henry II of France fell madly in love, even though she was twenty years older than he. This wise woman, accepted by all as his official lover, held the place of sovereign until the death of the king, and it is believed that she kept her muscles toned and trained well into advanced age. Kabbazah demands nothing of the male, whose role is totally passive. If he is by nature lacking in staying power, pulverized rhinoceros horn will lend it to him.

  Love potions are not only hangovers from antiquity, they are a prosperous modern business. I remember that in Venezuela, my friends, some of them professionals who worked with the most sophisticated computers, would slip off to Santería shops to buy good-luck amulets, protection against the evil eye, and elixirs for a variety of sentimental purposes. There are philters to cure excessive jealousy, to detect infidelity, to regain the favor of the indifferent, to soften the resistance of chaste women, to alienate the lover of whom we’ve tired, and to punish those our heart longs for but who keep us at arm’s length. Right in the center of the city, amid the steel-and-glass skyscrapers of great corporations, it is possible to commission a trabajo, a magical fetish, to attract love. With an article of clothing, hair, fingernail clippings, or handwriting of the person you want to win, the brujo or bruja makes a doll, which will then be subjected to various enchantments.

  Here we need to concentrate on common plants, however, not examples of sorcery. There are aphrodisiac plants like yohimbine (Pausinytalia yohimbe), which is obtained from the bark of a tree in Cameroon and sold in shops specializing in herbs and pornographic appurtenances with the warning that it is poisonous and that an overdose can provoke strong tremors, anguishing hallucinations, and unbearable digestive disorders. Marijuana and hashish, also aphrodisiac, are considered innocuous in many parts of the world but forbidden in others because they mitigate moral judgment, induce laziness, break down inhibitions, and empty the heart of its concerns, symptoms authorities do not look upon with kind eyes. Marijuana was known as a stimulant by all of ancient Europe, from the Greeks to the Vikings, and in a good part of the East, especially China and Arabia, as well as among the Indians of North and South America. Today it is still one of the most widely used drugs, even—perhaps especially—in countries where it is illegal.

  Cocaine, another forbidden substance, is an alkaloid derived from the leaves of the coca bush; it, too, excites the imagination and the senses. It is addictive, and when accompanied by loneliness and poverty it has tragic consequences for life. Coca leaves, on the other hand, patiently chewed, help the Indians of the high plains of Bolivia and Peru bear the rigors of their fates and the hunger of five centuries.

  In Tantric rites in India they used a mixture of hashish, honey, and ambergris. This cult, whose followers have been persecuted for more than two thousand years, predates Hinduism and is related to yoga in that both place an emphasis on breathing and asanas, but Tantra also explores the possibilities of eroticism as a path to illumination. The idea is to transform the libido into spiritual energy. From the point of view of a grandmother who still has not renounced the sins of lust and fantasy, one of the more interesting aspects of the practice is the variety of Tantric exercises intended to prolong the tension before the man reaches climax, thus guaranteeing the woman’s pleasure and a unified orgasm. Sad that there is such a sparse number of Tantric initiates on these shores . . . Oh, well, nothing to be gained in regrets, better to do as Aesop’s fox did when he couldn’t reach the grapes, and say that since they were green he wasn’t interested in them anyway.

  My experience with this mode of sensuality is limited to an incident involving a pair of gloves. Once, many years ago, I needed to buy gloves because it was such a cold autumn in Venice. I went into a shop about as wide as a closet where in a glass showcase there was a display of the most beautifully made gloves. The clerk—or maybe he was the owner—was a prim little man who affected a magician’s mustache and a dark three-piece suit. He took my hands in his as if he were holding a wounded dove and with such amorous care that I felt a shiver run down my spine and all my body hair stand on end. A wave of sweetish cologne wafted into my nostrils as he bent over my hands. I thought he was going to kiss them and had an instant’s panic, but instead he limited himself to inspecting them closely, for a long time, as if he were studying a diamond. Then he turned my hands over so that the backs rested in his palms, which were dry and very warm, like fresh baked loaves of bread. With unbearable lightness and deliberation, his index finger followed the lines of my destiny, brushed the tips of my fingers, traced circles of fire around my wrists. Blood was pounding in my temples, and he obviously knew that, because he could feel it pulsing in the veins at my wrists. He raised his eyes and looked at me without smiling. We both knew; I think we stopped breathing for an eternal moment, until I couldn’t stand it any longer and turned my face away, embarrassed. He murmured something in Italian that to my ears sounded like a declaration of love, but it may have been the price of the gloves. Finally, reluctantly, he released my hands to go to a drawer and pull out a pair of sepia-colored chamois gloves as soft as a squirrel’s belly. And then, with infinite concentration, he began to fit them on my hand, finger by finger, looking into my eyes, pausing at each joint, panting, his lips moist. I was twenty-three years old, and that man must have been at least sixty, but our ages were erased and we both entered the eternal limbo of illusory lovers.

  That happened thirty years ago, yet I still remember with absolute precision the feelings I lived in those moments. I have never forgotten either the exact hue of the gloves, the floral scent of his cologne, or the perverse softness of his hands caressing mine—least of all, my terrible excitement. Ever since that time I have regarded my hands with affection because I see them through the eyes of that Italian glove salesman. That, I believe, is Tantra.

  There are countless plants whose effects are based more in magic than in science, such as the tenebrous root of the mandrake. That is one of the most common ingredients in the love philters of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It had to be picked at the foot of the gallows, where it had been sown by the sperm of men hanged or tortured on the wheel. It was said that when touched by the knife’s blade, the mandrake cried out, and that anyone who heard that wail would lose his senses for the rest of his days. In his comedy La Mandragola, Machiavelli used the myths about this diabolical plant to develop his thesis: “The origin of movement and of change in earthly things begins in the appetites and the passions.”

  The plot is classic: an old man married to a young woman wants heirs, and a young Don Juan makes use of that desire to cuckold the husband and seduce the wife. The youth convinces the old man that the mandrake, rooted up at night by a black dog, will assure his wife’s fertility, for it was known to have worked in the case of an unidentified queen of France. He warns him, however, about the powerful poison of the mandrake: he who first has sexual congress with the woman who takes it will die within a week. So the husband agreed that his wife should lie first with the young man, disguised as a vagabond, so that he will be the one to absorb the plant’s poison and thus spare the old man’s life. The end justifies the means, concludes this great Florentine of the Renaissance. Everyone ends up happy: the old man is unaware he has been tricked, the woman discovers pleasure, and the lying young gallant achieves his goal.

  Most erotic stimulants in popular use are sold without a medical prescription and are legal, despite the fact that some, such as Spanish fly, pose grave dangers. I suppose that in desperate cases a few tablespoons of ginseng in your soup, or the contents of a couple of capsules of Chinese herbs on your salad, can do no harm. Very few people die from the effects of natural medicines.

  Fillet of a fenny snake,

  In the caldron boil and bake;

  Eye of newt, and toe of frog,

  Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,

  Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sling,

  Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing;

  For a charm of powerful trouble,

  Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

  Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,

  Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf

  Of the ravined salt-sea shark,

  Root of hemlock digged i’ th’ dark,

  Liver of blaspheming Jew,

  Gall of goal, and slips of yew

  Slivered in the moon’s eclipse,

  Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,

  Finger of birth-strangled babe,

  Ditch-delivered by a drab,

  Make the gruel thick and slab.

  Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,

  For th’ ingredience of our caldron.

  —William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  The Language of Flowers

  In the past, flowers, among their many enchantments, had the task of transmitting subtle amorous messages, but in all the haste of the twentieth century this art has become a dead language. I don’t see any advantage to reviving it. It’s like Sanskrit: there’s no one to speak it with. But just in case the reader of these pages is given to moments of madness, I’m going to devote a few paragraphs to the language of flowers. My experience is that in the Western world it doesn’t pay to invest too much effort in details as delicate as these, because most of the time they are totally ignored. Drastic methods yield better results.

  The symbolism of flowers reached its apogee in the midnineteenth century during the reign of Queen Victoria in England, although it wasn’t there the language originated but in Turkey, where it was used to send coded love notes within the harem. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who as the wife of a British ambassador lived in that country from 1716 to 1718, introduced the language of flowers into England. It evolved through several decades until it became a romantic epidemic so sophisticated that by using different combinations in a bouquet it was possible to maintain a long correspondence without a single written word.

  Ladies placed great care in the selection of the paper for their notes, because even printed flowers could convey messages. A handkerchief embroidered with pansies was an indication that the lady would never forget her sweetheart, with roses, a promise of love. If the needle masterfully re-created the quince flower, the recipient could consider himself fortunate, because quince indicated lifelong fidelity. Things reached the point that the placement of the ribbon on a bouquet determined whether the sentiments expressed referred to the giver or the receiver, and the hand with which flowers were presented or accepted affected their meaning, as did the place on her body the woman chose to wear the offering: the nearer the heart, the more accessible she was to love. Thence the tradition of giving a corsage before a dance; the lady selects the place she wants to pin them, whether at hip, waist, hair, or bosom. Any way you look at it, it’s an abominable custom; no dress ever looked good with all that rubbish attached to it.

  Urban Landscape-Lovers, painting by Larry Wilson, Superstock.

  If flowers were handed or accepted with the blossoms pointing downward and the stems up, their meaning was completely reversed. So if a swain came to call carrying a bouquet of tulips with a bow on the left, which was tantamount to a declaration of love, and the lady handed them back with the heads upside down, that meant there was no shred of hope for the suitor; his rejection was final. The interpretation was not that dramatic in every case; it depended on the variety of the flowers. Anemones, for example, represented forgetfulness, but a bouquet presented with the flowers pointing down did not translate as nostalgia, and a hyacinth, which from the time of Greek mythology spoke of sorrow, or a calendula, which also embodies suffering, did not turn into an expression of joy.

  No one has time for such complexities nowadays, and we have to imagine that if you’ve progressed to the stage of cooking aphrodisiac dishes for your date, it won’t matter with what hand he gives you the red rose or where you decide to pin the camellia. A few basics are more than enough: the color red proclaims passion; white, purity; pink, tenderness; yellow, forgetfulness; purple, modesty (although now feminists claim that color). To a Victorian it would have been maladroit to give yellow flowers to someone you wanted to win, but today flowers are so expensive that we appreciate the gesture without dwelling on such details. I still remember with pleasure the last time someone brought me a flower: a thirsty, newspaper-wrapped sunflower in the hands of my five-year-old grandson.

  Wild daisies, from which we plucked the leaves when I was young to find out whether the redhead on the corner loved us, symbolize innocence. Once it was believed that a libation brewed from these humble flowers and drunk with regularity could assuage the pain of madness and reintegrate dispersed spirits. The narcissus is, logically, the flower of vanity and egotism. Its name derives from the Greek legend of Narcissus, a shepherd in love with his own reflection in a pool, who died trying to kiss that image. Besides conceited, not too bright. The poppy—opium flower—expresses surcease from sorrow, temporal pleasure, and relief from shortness of breath, but for the English, because of its color, it also symbolizes the blood of soldiers fallen in war. Geraniums, which rarely are included in a bouquet because of their sharp odor, are by their color a representation of sadness, disillusion, consolation, and other rather useless sentiments.

  The heliotrope, whose name in Greek means “with the head turned toward the sun,” indicates sincerity and devotion in love; it is given as a promise or allegation of fidelity should one have been detected in a compromising situation. Lilies predict a message. This is an interesting flower; in some cultures of the Mideast and Mediterranean it is associated, because of its shape, with the female genitals, as is true of the orchid as well, but the lily is also the flower of purity, the Virgin Mary’s flower, and, not least, the emblem of France, the fleur-de-lis. The flower of the lavender signifies distrust. The perfumes of violets and jasmines have such high aphrodisiac qualities—especially at night—that they can turn the most virtuous of maidens into an insatiable nymphomaniac, yet in the language of flowers violets symbolize modesty and jasmine represents elegance, discretion, and grace. The scent of the tuberose is also irresistible to women, although nauseating to most men. Lilacs connote humility, but ever since the Renaissance these flowers have been credited with the ability to excite men. I had them in my garden for years and never knew that because of them the postman harbored lustful intentions. To the Victorians, incapable of confessing thoughts of passion in the presence of a lady, lilacs also stood for the first move toward professing their love; they were a way of testing the water before making a more explicit declaration, which might consist of a bouquet of white roses—purity—followed immediately by another of red roses—love. Never together, because that would mean separation and death, as in the fate of Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliet. Finally, after formalizing the betrothal, if the suitor was very bold he might offer his fiancée branches of the flowering almond to express his sublime passion without beating about the bush—almond or any other.

  According to the classic language of flowers, the forget-me-not meant true love and remembrance. An Austrian legend tells the story of two lovers who were walking along the Danube when the girl, who always had her way, saw a small blue flower floating in the water and nothing would do but that her young man get it for her. He leaped into the river at her bidding but was caught in the current and pulled under. With his last burst of strength, he reached the flower and tossed it to his sweetheart, calling, “Forget me not.” For me, nevertheless, this small blue blossom will always be the symbol of exile. When it became my fate to leave my country following the military coup of 1973, I was able to take very few things with me. My grandfather, my mother-in-law—whom I loved with rare devotion—my friends, my family, and the incomparable landscape of my homeland were all left behind in Chile. As for Lot’s wife when she was fleeing Sodom, the rule was not to look back, but who can leave the house where her children were born without one last look? I didn’t as yet know that I was cutting off my roots with a brutal slash, that little by little I would dry up like a mutilated tree, and that only the unrelenting exercise of memory would keep me, again like Lot’s wife, from turning into a pillar of salt. In the bottom of my suitcase I carried a little bag containing dirt from my garden, intending to plant forget-me-nots in that unknown country where I was to begin a new destiny. Forget me not, pleads the one who is leaving. Which explains why I chose that delicate flower to symbolize my exile—for its name alone. But the flower did not thrive in the exuberant climate of the Caribbean, and gradually, at the same pace that my nostalgia grew, it died.

  From the Earth with Love

  In ancient Greece the statue of the god Priapus, son of Aphrodite, stood erect—literally—in every garden as custodian of fertility and agriculture and as protector against thieves. The representation of the deity was often reduced, more accurately, expanded, into the shape of an energetic phallus, called olisbokolice. Today very few people can give themselves the luxury of growing their own vegetables, and neither is there humor or space for a scandalous god in the garden, even though in the embers of our collective memory the success of the harvests is still intimately linked with human eroticism and fertility. The cult has been lost in history, but even today in some Mediterranean villages the men wear phallic amulets around their neck to guard against the evil eye.