Like Water For Chocolate

Techniques

The form of Like Water for Chocolate, spelled out in its subtitle, "A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies," creates a hybrid of typically female texts—the cookbook, the personal diary, the romance, the how-to manual—that allows for maximum flexibility on the part of the narrator. The book reads like the sort of conversation between friends or family that might take place around the kitchen table, filled with free associations, abrupt shifts in time or place, and changes in mode from narrative to exposition. The recipes are personal in tone, the sort that might be spoken aloud while working. For example, the book opens with, "Take care to chop the onion fine. To keep from crying when you chop it (which is so annoying), I suggest you place a litde bit on your head ...." The voice goes on to say that "once the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know, you just can't stop." But the tears in this book come from more than onions, and the recipe provides the perfect segue into the tears Tita shed when she was born and on to the many tears she shed in her life, both of joy and sorrow. The frame of the cookbook with the story in installments also provides the perfect authenticating device for the narrator, Tita's grand-niece, who is reconstructing her story for us some fifty years later on the basis of the surviving cookbook/diary, which we're told Tita began the day Gertrudis ran away. This text is supplemented by details told to her by her mother, Esperanza, who heard the stories from Tita herself.

The narrative is enhanced by marvelous exaggerations, verging at times on the tall tale. The tears Tita cried at birth left a salt residue on the floor that when swept up filled a ten pound sack. The bedspread she began the day Pedro first spoke of marriage grew until it covered the whole ranch, all three hectares. The longing and illness produced by Rosaura's wedding cake create a river of vomit that sweeps Rosaura away. The excitement caused when Tita throws out bits of tortilla to the chickens creates "a hen hurricane [that] was boring a hole in the dirt of the patio, a hole so deep that most of the chickens disappeared from the face of the earth. The earth swallowed them up."

Such extreme details serve to intensify the real experiences. Other events go further—into the realm of magic, where happenings cannot be explained by the laws of the universe. The longing Tita unconsciously bakes into Rosaura's wedding. cake, the powerful sexual stimulus contained in the quail with rose petals, the milk that fills Tita's breasts to feed Roberto are some such magical events. Unnatural heat and light are generated by moments of passion: the wooden shower that bursts into flame from the heat of Gertrudis's body and the pink cloud that wrapped itself around Juan and drew him to her from the field of batde; the "plumes of phosphorescent colors . . . ascending to the sky like delicate Bengal lights" from the dark room the night Tita and Pedro first make love; the transformation of that room on their final night into an erupting volcano spewing out stones and ash and multicolored lights visible for miles. The dead appear as well—Nacha, Morning light, Mama Elena. Mama Elena's presence at the Three Kings' Day celebration is felt by many, even the dog, who begins to bark and back away in fear. In a later appearance to Tita alone, Tita's declaration of "I hate you, I've always hated you!" is enough to make her disappear forever but not before shrinking to a tiny light that begins to spin feverishly toward an oil lamp next to Pedro, exploding it into a thousand pieces and setting Pedro afire. Images of heat and cold, fertility and castration, light and dark abound in this book. By far, however, the most important imagery is associated with food. Food, as Kristine Ibsen observes, "transports both the characters and the reader into a sensual dimension of reality." In Esquivel's own words,

the simple act of cooking is, in fact, an act of love. . . . And I am convinced that cooking ... is an inversion of the couple's sexual role. This nurturing that our essence carries, and that our love carries and all these emotions, where we are all contained—this is how the woman can, in fact, penetrate the man, this is how it converts, and the man is the passive one, he receives this, and for me it is very intense and very erotic.

We see this process at work at the dinner table: "It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being into the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal's aromas. That was the way she entered Pedro's body, hot, voluptuous, perfumed, totally sensuous." That consummation, in turn, infuses Ger-trudis's body, and she becomes the medium to live out their passion in flesh and blood. Love is invariably associated with food. Tita declares Esperanza and Alex in love, for example, when she tells her aunt that "when she felt Alex's eyes on her body, she felt like dough being plunged in boiling oil" just as Pedro's glance, years earlier, made Tita realize "how fire transforms the elements, how a lump of corn flour is changed into a tortilla."

Sometimes food imagery is used to denote absence of love, Faced with the prospect of telling John she would not marry him, Tita "felt complete empty, like a platter that held only crumbs, all that was left of a marvelous pastry." Sometimes, too, cooking cannot do its magic. To be totally successful, cooking must be done calmly, lovingly, slowly. Negative vibrations during preparation— like rushing or arguing—can be disastrous. When Tita is preparing Beans with Chile for John and his Aunt Mary, the beans refuse to soften because they "had witnessed her fight with Rosaura. That meant all she could do was to try to improve their mood," which she does by singing a song full of love. Immediately, the beans allowed the liquid in which they were floating to penetrate them, they swelled until they were about to burst. The kitchen must be a place of love in order for food to reach perfection. Interestingly, the food image in the tide suggests emotions at the danger point: "like water for chocolate" is a common Mexican expression for being on the verge of boiling over, whether in passion or anger.

Copyright © 1998, by Walton Beacham. All rights to this book are reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or in any information or storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write the publisher, Beacham Publishing Corp., P.O. Box 830, Osprey, FL 34229-0830. All Rights Reserved.