“What will my friends in the prayer group say when they hear this!” she said with a sigh.

  “They’ll never know, Mother. By the time we finish this book, they’ll all be in their graves.”

  CARMEN BALCELLS

  I admit that I was terrified at the prospect of proposing the idea of a book about aphrodisiacs to Carmen Balcells, the world’s most famous literary agent, whose mere presence causes editors to break out in a cold sweat and writers to grovel in fits of fawning. This woman has invested a great deal of effort in my so-called literary career. From the beginning, when in 1982 the mailman delivered a package containing the original manuscript of my first novel, The House of the Spirits, to her desk in Barcelona, she has hatched ambitious plans for me and with impressive patience has waited, and continues to wait, for me to mature gracefully, like a good wine. Proof of her unshakable faith is that with each of my visits to Barcelona she prepares the most awe-inspiring—and aphrodisiac—dish in her repertoire: an authentic Catalan soup. No one can describe with justice the spectacle of Carmen in her kitchen, wrapped in her apron, a kerchief around her head and a string of curses upon her lips, juggling wooden spoons, black iron pots, mountains of ingredients, bottles of spices, sprigs of herbs, and generous dashes of the best brandy. It is impossible to describe the aromas issuing from her stockpot, the savor of a broth to raise the dead, the texture of the chunks of blood sausage, chicken, and beef that melt in your mouth. At Carmen Balcells’s round table, the china is the finest porcelain, the tablecloth starched linen richly embroidered in cloistered convents, the goblets cut crystal to hold the best Rioja wine, and the spoons of heavy antique silver, a bequest of remote ancestors. And after several hours of spirited labor in the kitchen, we go to the table, where with due ceremony Carmen extracts the treasures of her magnum opus from a potbellied tureen and fills our plates. And we eat until our souls rise up sighing and the most hidden virtues of our wretched humanity are renewed as that blessed soup seeps into our bones, sweeping away with one stroke the fatigue of all the disappointments gathered along the road of life and restoring to us the uncontrollable sensuality of our twenties. But I live in California, where everyone nibbles on kiwi and ricotta and jogs through the streets with crazed concentration, so I had forgotten the famed Catalan soup when I called Carmen in Barcelona to tell her, timidly, that instead of the grand novel she has been awaiting for fifteen years, what would fall upon her desk was a bundle of divagations on sensuality and recipes from my mother’s kitchen.

  Photograph, Luis Miguel Palomares.

  “Deu meu!” she exclaimed—I’m not sure whether in Latin or Catalan—with the same exalted tone she would have used had Cervantes gifted her with one of his manuscripts. And with that legendary generosity that separates her from the sharks of the literary community, Carmen offered me the recipe for her extraordinary stew as a gift for the readers of this book. You will find it, naturally, in the section on orgies.

  ME

  One January night in 1996 I dreamed that I jumped into a swimming pool filled with rice pudding (see Arroz Con Leche, or Spiritual Solace), where I swam with the grace of a porpoise. It’s my favorite dessert—rice pudding, that is, not porpoise. I love it so much so that in 1991, in a restaurant in Madrid, I ordered four servings, and then a fifth for dessert. I ate them down without blinking, with the vague hope that that nostalgic dessert from my childhood would help me bear the anguish of seeing my daughter so ill. Neither my soul nor my daughter improved, but rice pudding remains associated in my memory with spiritual comfort. There was nothing, however, elevating about the dream: I dived in, and that delicious creaminess caressed my skin, slipped into all the crevices of my body, filled my mouth. I awoke feeling happy and threw myself on my husband before the poor man realized what was happening to him. The next week I dreamed I was arranging a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla; I slathered on guacamole and salsa, rolled him up, and wolfed him down. That time I woke up in terror. And a few days later, I dreamed . . . well, there’s no point in going on with the list, it’s enough to say that when I told my mother of these cruelties, she advised me to see a psychiatrist—or a cook. You’re going to get fat, she added, and so I decided to confront the problem with the only solution I know for my obsessions: writing.

  Photograph, Marcia Lieberman.

  After the death of my daughter, Paula, I spent three years trying to exorcise my sadness with futile rituals. Those years were three centuries filled with the sensation that the world had lost its color and that a universal grayness had spread inexorably over every surface. I cannot pinpoint the moment when I saw the first brush strokes of color, but when my dreams about food began, I knew that I was reaching the end of a long tunnel of mourning and finally coming out the other end, into the light, with a tremendous desire to eat and cuddle once again. And so, little by little, pound after pound and kiss after kiss, this project was born.

  My role in this team effort required research. I’m not complaining. I have discovered in the vast array of books passed through my hands more than one little gem I had never known. I wrote these pages in a room in my house, because at first I didn’t want the piles of explicitly illustrated books to lie around my office exposed to the eyes of my virtuous assistants and the occasional visitor. Neither did I want to display this material in my home, so I began by keeping it under lock and key, but as I became familiar with all the possible, and even a few impossible, positions for making love, as well as all the devices, philters, balms, lotions, spices, herbs, drugs, ostrich plumes, and candy penises offered in the marketplace, I left books scattered around everywhere, and my grandchildren, innocents who have not yet reached the age of reason, built playhouses with them, as if they were perverse bricks from another tower of Babel. After gazing at them for so long now, nothing impresses me, or my grandchildren either.

  Aphrodisiacs

  How to define an aphrodisiac? Let’s say it is any substance or activity that piques amorous desire. Some have a scientific basis, but most are activated by the imagination. Cultures and individuals react to them in their own way. For thousands of years, humanity has experimented with countless possibilities in an incessant search for new stimuli, a search that led to pornography and the genesis of erotic art ancient as the dawn of millennary cave paintings. The difference between the two is a question of taste; what is erotic for one may be pornographic for another. For the Victorians, Evil was everywhere. They covered the legs of their tables to preclude bad thoughts, and a young lady was not allowed to hang a man’s portrait on the walls of her room, for fear that the painting might look on as she was undressing. It didn’t take much to excite those good folks.

  Some aphrodisiacs function through analogy, like the vulva-shaped oyster or phallic asparagus; others by association, because they remind us of something erotic. They also work through suggestion, because we believe that when we eat the vital organ of another animal—and in some cases, that of another human, as happens among cannibals—we absorb their strength. In general, anything with a French name seems aphrodisiac. Serving mushrooms with garlic isn’t at all the same as champignons à la Provençale, nor is ham and cheese comparable to a croque-monsieur. The same criteria apply on the battlefields of love. It is a good idea to assign suggestive names to the different postures, as in the enlightened erotic manuals of Asia. It isn’t necessary to remember the authentic terms; you can invent them and no one will be the wiser: delicate butterfly in somersault, swooning lotus flower in lake with ducks, and others of that ilk. Of course, we cannot overlook therapeutic stimulants, plants, and hormones, but after testing a good number of them I believe that sensorial stimuli are more effective: daring games, massages, shows, erotic literature, and art.

  Patriarchal societies, which means nearly all of them with the exception of a few Indian tribes lost in the chronicles of forgotten conquistadors, are characterized by a real obsession with virility and its symbol: the penis. One must, after all, produce children—male, of course—to guarantee succession and maintain the power of the family. In every phallocracy, aphrodisiacs are very important, given the limitations of the capricious male appendage that is wont to fade from surfeit, if not from the owner’s shortcomings. As soon as men conceived the curious idea that their superiority over women is based in that organ of their anatomy, they began to have problems. They attribute disproportionate powers to this prized possession; in truth, it is rather insignificant compared to an arm or a leg. And as for the size . . . frankly, the names of weapons and tools it often goes by are little justified for something that can comfortably be fitted into a sardine tin—although I doubt anyone wants to try that. You merely need to glance below a man’s navel to calculate how much help he will need to keep his morale flying high; hence the interest in aphrodisiacs.

  Eating and copulating depend less on the digestive and sexual systems than on the brain, as does nearly everything that happens to us, which is but dream, illusion, deception. Shakespeare has a wonderful line about this, but I’m sorry, I couldn’t find it. Instead, I can quote Calderón de la Barca, who said in “Life Is a Dream”:

  What is life? An illusion,

  a shadow, a fiction

  For all of life is a dream

  And dreams? dreams are dreams.

  As for food and sex, nature demands a minimum, quite basic, for the preservation of the individual and the species; all else is ornamentation or subterfuges we invent to celebrate life. The imagination is a persistent demon; the world would be black and white without it. We would be living in a paradise of the military, fundamentalists, and bureaucrats, in which the energy we today invest in a good table and good lovemaking would be directed to other ends, such as more disciplined methods of killing one another.

  If we ate only wild fruit and copulated with the innocence of rabbits, we would be saved quantities of literature on these themes; millions of trees would escape their fate of being turned into pulp, and the seven deadly sins would not include lust and gluttony, thus significantly increasing the numbers of souls in Paradise. But nature has endowed us—or cursed us—with an insatiable brain capable of imagining not only all manner of stupendous foods and variations on love, but, along with them, the corresponding guilt and punishment. Ever since the first humans dropped a vulture or rat carcass on glowing coals and then celebrated that agape with festive fornication, the bond between food and sex has been constant in all cultures. We do not know whether it works that way among animals, but observing the raccoons that come to steal my cat’s food, I have noticed that on nights of the full moon, they yowl on the rooftops imitating the love cries of the neighborhood felines. There’s something in those disgusting cans of fish paste that stirs the hearts of cats and raccoons alike.

  Papaya, Naranja y Lluvia, painting by Sylvia Ordóñez, 1992, collection of Sr. Iván Mendiola, Galeria de Arte Actual Mexicano.

  Aphrodisiacs are the bridge between gluttony and lust. In a perfect world, I suppose that any food that is natural, healthful, fresh, attractive to our eyes, mouthwatering, tempting—that is, that has the same virtues one looks for in a mate—would be aphrodisiac, but the truth is quite the opposite. In the untiring quest for ways to put starch in the frail male member and rectify the indifference of inattentive women, we go to such extremes as swallowing powders made from crushed cockroaches. The study of the stimulating virtues of food is so ancient that it is lost in the night of civilizations buried for centuries. Many recipes have disappeared down the cracks of history, but some have endured in oral tradition. More than two thousand years ago there was a Taoist monk in China whose wife wafted through this life refining her mind and her healing gift by practicing love with countless volunteers, while her husband took note of those marathons and perfected a diet to preserve her health, provoke crystalline dreams, and increase his wife’s genital jubilation. She followed the diet religiously, with most excellent results. This monk was also the author of a poisonous elixir with a mercury base, which when ingested after a lifetime of meditation and herbs illuminated the mind and speeded the spirit in its final astral voyage, leaving the body inert but impervious to decomposition. His wife, his faithful disciple to the end, took the potion as well.

  And now, while we’re in China, I must not overlook a priestess, mentioned in the book The Monkey Goes East, who came to be the most powerful female Tao master. This woman maintained that reality is achieved only through sexual ecstasy. More than a thousand men a year, devout followers, dedicated their lives to ritualistic discipline in order to convert their sexual energy into spiritual energy and thus achieve illumination, but most of them lost control when they gazed upon their female master’s beauty, fell along the wayside, and wasted away. She absorbed their male energy and kept as eternally beautiful and young as a girl of seventeen. The story tells that she lived five hundred years.

  In other cultures, fasting and abstinence are recommended for attaining illumination. Fasting and abstinence, however, are also aphrodisiac, even though it is painful to go to such extremes. During the Middle Ages, in some regions of Europe there existed a tradition that bride and groom should sleep three nights together before their wedding, naked but without touching, separated by a sword. In several erotic texts, to whet desire, total fasting and rigorous chastity is counseled for a minimum of six days. How do saints, anchorites, gurus, fakirs, priests, anorexics, and others who practice these eccentricities as virtues conquer the demons of the flesh?

  Just as there are ways to heighten desire, there are those known to quench it. Among the surest antiaphrodisiacs is bad breath (in this case, there is no room for euphemisms). Not long ago, dental problems were unavoidable; there was no damsel or gallant over fifteen, however noble and illustrious, who did not have rotten teeth and inflamed gums. Many substances thought to be aphrodisiacs are merely aromatic, astringent, or antiseptic. Other antiaphrodisiacs worth mentioning are the common cold, a naked man in his stocking feet, a woman with her hair in rollers, television, and ordinary fatigue. Some substances are considered fatal to the libido: valerian, for example, which in small doses has a long-standing reputation as a stimulant—it used to be mixed with beer or wine to liven up the clients in brothels—in large doses causes spasms, narcolepsy, aberrant thought, and a repugnance for lovemaking. Ice-water baths are also counterproductive: if they are used to calm the mad, imagine how they may congeal the ardor of desire. The list continues with vinegar, whose medicinal virtues include reviving one from a faint, but which also provokes vomiting, sets the teeth on edge, and produces temporary impotence, because it cools the blood. In the old days they used a lettuce tea drunk at bedtime and alum under the bed to prevent the lustful dreams of young men in the military service and in religious orders. By the way, my Catholic friends add to this list the saintly devotion of praying the rosary in bed, which puts the most faithful to sleep, as well as the most lovesick. On this point, there is more than one opinion. The cucumber, which because of its shape is considered erotic in many regions, was in others used in monasteries to calm the virile ardor of the monks. I don’t know whether they ate it, applied it in compresses, or used it in ways I prefer not to detail. When in doubt, my grandfather always said, refrain.

  In these pages I intend to offer, to the extent of my knowledge, a description of the most common aphrodisiacs. I hope you have them in your kitchen and that they add to your life the touches of flavor and good humor so badly needed in the whirlwind of modern life. We go racing through our days as if to see who can be first to die. All that’s left to be said is that if you are lucky, and these tonics give the desired result, you will live and die happy, perhaps of a sudden attack caused by a combination of gluttony and lust, the only capital sins that encompass the possibility of style—the others are pure evil and ruin.

  The Spice Is in Variety

  Now is the time to state, with absolute frankness and before the reader wastes any more time reading, that the only truly infallible aphrodisiac is love. Nothing can stay the burning passion of two people in love. When love exists, nothing else matters, not life’s predicaments, not the fury of the years, not a physical winding down or scarcity of opportunity; lovers will find a way to love each other because, by definition, that is their fate. But love, like luck, comes unbidden, thrusts us into a state of confusion, and burns off like fog when we attempt to hold on to it. As to the reliability of love as a stimulus, therefore, it becomes the luxury of a fortunate few, unattainable for those who have not been the target of its arrow. So that leads us to the second most powerful aphrodisiac: variety.

  Variety renews amorous ardor again and again; that explains polygamy and infidelity, both of which are exhausting. The wise King Solomon loved—in addition to Pharaoh’s daughter—many women Jehovah disapproved of, not for their numbers but because they were foreigners: “And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned away his heart.” (1 Kings 11:3)

  How could an aged Solomon handle that many women? Even with aphrodisiacs and divine aid at his beck and call, one thousand is an epic number. Once after I had six women at my house for tea, I had a headache for a week. And how could I cope with, well, not a thousand by a long shot, but even two men? Since I no longer have energy for more than one lover at a time, I have to look for other ways to insinuate surprise into my love life. So one day I disguised myself in a platinum wig and sunglasses—burdened still with scruples that a decade in San Francisco has not managed to eliminate completely—and went down to a porno shop in the gay district, looking for educational material for these pages. I didn’t pause too long before the S&M appurtenances, the sexually explicit dolls—including a sheep called the Inflatable Ewe—or the attractive vibrators with fluorescent lights, not even one that played a Viennese waltz when it was plugged in, like an old-fashioned music box. I headed straight for the shelves of books, where I proceeded to fill a couple of shopping bags. I got so wound up in making my choices that only my eagerness to get started reading them out of sight of witnesses could drag me out of there. Since my mother was waiting for me at home, I tried to hide my new acquisitions so that my shamelessness wouldn’t take her breath away, but before long I caught her leafing through them, sitting in her rocking chair with a cup of chamomile tea. Our conclusion, after weeks of fascinating reading, is that if you aren’t going to change your partner, you’d better at least introduce variety into your practices.