Читать книгу The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel онлайн | страница 25

We stayed on the plantation for five days. During this time I drank little but chocolatl; it was combined with honey, with flowers, with aniseed, with nutmeg and even with achiote, which made the mixture almost red in colour. We always drank from the same gourd. Then we would sleep and play together. All consciousness seemed lost.

At the back of the dwelling was a hot room in which we steamed our bodies, switching them with twigs and bundles of grass, before swimming in the lake and massaging each other dry. We found ourselves half-sleeping, half-waking, in both night and day, and clung to each other as if our bodies could never be separated.

We spoke in a mixed language, part Nahuatl, part Castilian. Ignacia told me that her family had travelled from the far south, from Chiapas, and that they would surely return there. I asked if I would be with her, and she laughed, telling me that we came from different worlds, and could only be together if the earth changed, or if we lived for hundreds of years, or if we lived so many lives, dying and being reborn so often that we would inevitably meet once more, either in this world or the next.

Ignacia spent one whole day making a turkey dish with chillies, vanilla, aniseed and chocolatl. She used a small obsidian knife, unfurling onions, slicing the chillies in quick deft movements, and grinding all the ingredients into a thick spicy paste, which she began to beat with the silver molinillo. This tool seemed to be the secret to her preparation, as it aired and whisked the mixture at the same time. It was some ten inches long, with protruding spikes, like a miniature weapon.

Water now boiled in pans over fires, the turkey roasted, and as she mixed almonds, raisins and sesame together, she made me inhale each spice before its inclusion in her mole poblano. She stripped cinnamon from the bark of a tree and it smelled of early autumn after rain; she broke the petals of star anise, and rubbed my fingers with hers. We ground each spice together and the bouquet of aniseed, cinnamon and almond welled up before us; and then, as Ignacia melted the dark chocolatl, the air became heady with the fragrance of onion, chilli and cacao.