Aphrodite, p.11
Aphrodite, page 11
In that same warm river where the previous afternoon I had seen a couple of Russian tourists catch dozens of piranhas, I had swum naked. Although these fish have such a bad reputation, they normally do not attack people and, along with alligators, are useful for cleaning the water; they fulfill the same function as birds of prey: they eat carrion. They are delicious and, to some Brazilian palates, even aphrodisiac, but those tourists from Moscow had no intention of cooking them; they were fishing for the sport, catching them and throwing them back in the river. Some piranhas had taken the bait many times, leaving their mouths raw and bleeding. Like some of us humans, who keep tripping over the same stone in our path, the piranhas never learn.
In these same waters there are more than thirty kinds of stingrays, all very dangerous, and the river is also home to the legendary anaconda, largest of all water snakes, a prehistoric creature that can reach fifteen meters in length. It lies lethargically in the mud, waiting for its lunch to swim by in the form of a distracted fish. I was assured that they don’t eat people, but in Malaysia I saw the photograph of a boa split open with a man’s body inside. I have no reason to believe that the Amazonian anaconda would be any more considerate than its Asian cousin.
Alligators, another aphrodisiac dish of the region, are hunted at night. I went out in a canoe with an adolescent guide, a young Indian who openly laughed at my ignorance. The boat was equipped with a powerful battery-operated spotlight, which when turned on dazzled bats and huge, brightly colored butterflies—also the piranhas, which in their terror would leap right into the boat. To throw them back in the river, we picked them up very gingerly by the tail, because one bite from their terrible jaws can take off a finger. The Indian would beam his light in among the tree roots and, when he spotted a pair of red eyes, unhesitatingly jump into the water. You would hear a great thrashing sound, and a half minute later he would reemerge with a jacaré, an Amazon crocodile, he had caught bare-handed and was holding by the neck, if it was small, and with a cord around its jaws, if it was larger.
In one village, composed of a single extended family of Sateré Maué Indians, I tasted jacaré for the first time. It was beneath a shared palm roof hung with a few hammocks where several young Indians and a centenarian elder were resting, lost in the smoke of their tobacco. A half dozen children were running around naked, and when they saw me they scampered off to take refuge among the women, although a pair of mud-covered, skin-and-bone dogs came running up to sniff at me. One of the Indians, the only one who spoke a few words of Portuguese, showed me his humble belongings—arrows, a knife, some empty tin cans used as cook pots—and then led me to a small clearing in the vegetation where they had planted manioc, that miraculous root from which the Amazon peoples derive flour, tapioca, bread, and even a liquor for their celebrations. Out of curiosity, I walked over to the fire burning in a corner of the roofed area and found a crocodile a meter and a half long, quartered like a chicken, sadly roasting, its claws, teeth, eyes, and hide intact. Two piranhas were strung on a hook, along with something that resembled a muskrat; later, after a closer look, I realized it was a porcupine. I tried everything, of course: the jacaré tasted like dried and reconstituted codfish, the piranhas like pure smoke, and the porcupine like petrified pig—but I shouldn’t judge indigenous cooking by that one limited experience.
Aphrodisiac Cruelties
Sheep vulvae and cow udders are infallible stimulants according to the testimony of Messalina and other women of dubious virtue, but for reasons of feminist solidarity, we omit those recipes. The testicles of certain animals, generally those who have the reputation of being potent, are equally prized in several cultures. Nothing is more appreciated in North Africa than the balls of the lion, which supposedly transmit strength, courage, and sexual power. The same was believed true of the ass in Greece, where men not only ate those glands but wore them around their necks as an amulet for virility. Testicles are not always easily found in the market, and once in your hands, what to do with them, anyway? In the country, when bulls are castrated, those intimate parts are threaded onto a spit and roasted over coals, usually in the presence of the ex-bulls, now steers. In an eighteenth-century erotic cookbook I found a rather more sophisticated recipe. You boil the testicles in salted water, let them cool, peel off the skin, dice them so fine they can’t be recognized for what they are, mix them with onion, fried minced calf liver, and bacon, season generously with rosemary, clove, cinnamon, salt, and pepper, cover with a thick wine sauce, and use as filling for a meat pie. Cook in the oven for a half hour. It’s awful.
Spring Fever, painting by Martin Maddox, 1991.
In the Argentine and Chilean regions of Patagonia, in the south of the south of the American continent, lies an unending stretch of flat, windlashed land where a straggly vegetation struggles to grow. It is one of the largest reserves of meat in the world. Animals graze freely on that enormous pampa, never suspecting that their one purpose in life is to supply the meat, milk, and, in the case of the sheep, wool industries. My grandfather earned his living raising sheep in Patagonia and shipping their wool to England, from which it often returned converted into sweaters and blankets. At shearing time many hands were needed, and men crossed the border by the hundreds to work. Dogs drove the terrified sheep from the pasture to the corrals, where they were vaccinated, then herded through to the hands of the shearers. The most expert of the men could shear a fleece in the blink of an eye, pinning the animal down with one arm while wielding the huge scissors in the other hand. Electric shears had not reached those parts in my grandfather’s day. That was also the time they marked and counted the flock, selecting the breeding stock and separating the young bucks, some for the slaughterhouse and others, after they were castrated, to be fattened and continue to produce wool and meat.
The workers began their day with a hunk of bread, chicharrones (fried skin, fat, and intestines), and mate, the green, bitter tea so esteemed in that region. They would not have another bite to eat until dusk, when the day’s work was done. At sunset they lighted fires to roast slaughtered animals, guitars were resurrected, and the men shared enough liquor to soothe their souls and warm their bones but not enough to get drunk, since they had to begin at dawn with a clear head. The testicles of the castrated animals, roasted on the spit, were considered delicious. In Patagonia Express, Luis Sepúlveda describes a blood-curdling scene in which the men, making a show of their machismo, castrated the sheep by biting off their balls, but I never saw that happen. Shearing was a man’s work; women had no place in that barbaric pampas ritual.
I am reminded of “The Butcher,” a story by the French writer Alina Reyes, about a man who every week bought goat testicles from the butcher to maintain his extraordinary sexual powers. Without a word, the butcher would hand them over in a carefully wrapped package, himself convinced of their effect but not daring to test them, because, as Reyes writes: “That part of the male anatomy, so vilified in jokes and commentaries, nevertheless demands respect. It is no exaggeration to say that you can’t go very far without stepping into sacred territory.”
It’s true, we treat the male organs with solemn deference. In the United States, the case of John Wayne Bobbitt made history. His wife, fed up with violence and abuse, waited one night until her husband was sleeping, then cut off his penis with a single slash of her butcher knife. Surprised at her own virulence, she jumped into her car and raced down the highway, but a few miles down the road realized she was carrying that piece of flesh in her lap. So she threw it out the window. Anyone would have done the same. Later, police with flashlights scrupulously searched the highway until they found the amputated appendage—they would never have taken such pains had it been female flesh—and rushed it to the hospital, where doctors sewed it back in place. The details, with color photos and vivid television images, were flashed across the country, for months dominating the imagination of countless women and occasioning a surge of insomnia among the male population. John Wayne Bobbitt, like his namesake, ended up in the film industry, a star. He specializes in pornographic movies, and now anyone curious enough can observe, on the big screen and in Technicolor, that pathetic, scarred pickle. They say that some women fight for the chance to test personally whether that Dr. Frankenstein handiwork functions.
And by the way, do you remember the Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses? It’s the story of a woman and a man whose sexual passion leads them to the extreme of closing out the world to do nothing but make love, excluding everything else from their lives. Searching for more and more intense sensations, they discover a game in which she strangles him with a silken muffler to prolong his erection. Every time, she draws the scarf tighter; every time the pleasure is longer and more brutal . . . until finally she kills him. Desolate when she realizes that she has lost him, she cuts off his genitals. The film is based on a true story of a woman who wandered around in open fields for five days with her lover’s genitals in her hands, until she was stopped by the police. In a spectacular trial, which captured a nation’s sympathy, she was sentenced to only five years in jail. When she emerged, free, she returned to her former profession as a prostitute, with startling success. Although she charged ten times the rate of her colleagues, men traveled from remote provinces and stood in line for hours to play the game of the silken muffler.
About Eroticism
In the forties, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller survived for a while by writing erotic stories for a man who paid them by the page. This client, known to them only as the Collector, remained anonymous, piquing the indignant curiosity of the two great authors who lent their talents and their pens to satisfy his caprices. This collector of pornography did not appreciate style and repeatedly asked them to “cut the poetry” and concentrate on the sex, because that was all he was interested in. Nin wrote him a letter in which she masterfully defined the essence of eroticism:
Dear Collector:
We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.
It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.
You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformation, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.
If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, mood, there are no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.
How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repealed wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry: Cut the poetry! No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gestures; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, Peversity and art.
We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must by now be completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
Large Birds and Small Birds
Nearly all game birds are considered aphrodisiac, but not roosters, chickens, and domestic turkeys, melancholy creatures that know nothing about love. These birds spend their short lives in atrocious cages with no visual perspective but the tail feathers of their nearest fellow, fed on fish meal, soused with hormones, and tricked by artificial lights that force them to grow fast and lay eggs as if obsessed. The instant they reach the ideal weight, they are killed. They know nothing of the adventure of pulling a worm from the soil or chasing another bird of the opposite sex. They are so miserable that misery is about all they can pass on. However, if you can manage to find free-range chickens and turkeys, the ones that go around happily pecking in natural sunlight, you can also include them in your erotic cuisine.
Some of the birds we list here tend to come from hatcheries, but their dark meat and strong flavor have a breath of the exotic and the wild capable of stimulating the human imagination, especially when prepared with abundant spices, herbs, and liquors. Nondomesticated birds have the reputation of being more aphrodisiac than their domestic relatives. That’s true of the dove-and-pigeon family, but what Christian is going to eat a dove that symbolizes the Holy Spirit, unless, that is, he is dying of hunger, like a friend of mine, an exile in Canada, who crept out nights to the park to catch sleeping pigeons and then cook them on a forbidden hot plate in the fleabag where he lived. His rented room was heated by a radiator regulated by coins fed into a slot. My friend found a much more economical way to make it work: he bought chocolates shaped like coins, carefully removed the contents, and saved the metallic paper. He ate the chocolate, filled the wrapping with water and placed it on the window ledge, where the polar cold froze it within a few minutes, removed the paper, which he would again use as a mold, and placed his ice-minted coin in the meter. Every month the inspector would come and labor in vain to repair the meter.
Pity the dove, a silly bird with neither imagination nor malice. One flew off from Noah’s ark after forty days of the universal deluge and returned with an olive branch in its beak, which indicated the passengers could disembark because now there was dry land. The wretched innocent could never suspect that it would end its days sizzling in olive oil. Doves did not always represent fertile ground for Jews, or Christian peace; once they were associated with Aphrodite, Astarte, and Juno, goddesses of sexuality. In the mythology of India, they represent copulation and life. Panchita and I had decided not to include any recipes for dove in this book, in order not to wound the sensibility of any religious persons or lovers of metropolitan fauna, but we were unable to resist the temptation.
Carrier Pigeons of Love
At a casual glance, these birds all look alike, but there are ring doves disguised as partridges, pouter pigeons that cause a stir at dawn, tourist pigeons around plazas and cathedrals, guerrilla doves that bomb your balcony with their droppings, and, of course, carrier pigeons. All these varieties can be attracted with bread crumbs, and you can snag one in a careless moment and stick it in the oven, following this old recipe:
Catch two doves and wring their necks without compassion. Before they get stiff and your conscience begins to plague you, submerse them in boiling water for 3 minutes; take them out, and, while still warm, pluck them. Rotate them above a gas flame to burn off any down that escaped you. Cut off feet and head and slit open the chest to gut them. Rub them with butter, lemon, salt, and lots of pepper, and leave them to sleep the just sleep of the dead for 24 hours. Pierce a clove of garlic with a spice clove and insert both into a small onion and wrap all three in a strip of bacon. (Repeat the operation, because you will need two stuffings.) Slip these embellished onions inside the birds and close the opening with a toothpick. Pour over a cup of good cognac and light it. When the flame burns out, cook the doves for 1/2 hour in a medium oven, basting them with melted butter and liquor to taste. Serve with sweet potatoes and glazed carrots, accompanied by a good white wine.
My suggestion would be to buy your birds already dead and plucked. Many years ago there was a chicken coop at the back of the patio in my grandfather’s house, a disgusting idea I don’t recommend. After the departure of the aged cook whose chore it was to feed and kill them, the chickens died only of old age, because no one wanted to assume the cruel responsibility of cooking one of those creatures with whom all of us in the family had a personal relationship. So, after a while, when there was no one to clean out the coop and the odor had attracted the attention of the police, a close friend of the family offered to carry out the massacre.
This friend was a giant of a man with the neck of a gladiator and a laborer’s huge hands, who had lived for years as a follower of a strange religious sect and was said to have been brain- and heart-washed, depriving him forever of human emotions. The man strode into the chicken coop with the aplomb of a bullfighter and cast a sneering look at the doddering hens, arranged in the invariable semicircle in which they lived their monotonous existence. I don’t know what he saw in their eyes, but he backed out of the coop, this time gliding like an ice-skater, and asked for newspaper and glue. He spent an hour constructing paper cones to cover the heads of the chickens, so they would not have to witness the systematic murder of their companions as they awaited their turns. Once every one of the hens was duly hooded, he chose one at random and tucked her under his arm. Someone had explained the procedure to him: give a half twist to the neck, and jerk the head. That is what he did, after much vacillation and two cigarettes, but he was betrayed by his own strength, and to his horror, he ripped the skin right off his victim’s head. With a guttural cry he dropped the unfortunate bird, which then trotted around flapping its wings and rattling its last death rattle.
