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  In fact, Tita no longer gave a damn either about what people would say when their love affair was made public.

  For twenty years she had respected the pact the two of them had made with Rosaura; now she had had enough of it. Their pact consisted of taking into consideration the fact that it was vital to Rosaura to maintain the appearance that her marriage was going splendidly, and the most important thing for her was that her daughter grow up within that sacred institution, the family—the only way, she felt, to provide a firm moral foundation. Pedro and Tita had sworn to be absolutely discreet about their meetings and keep their love a secret. In the eyes of others, theirs must always be a perfectly normal family. For this to succeed, Tita must agree to give up having an illicit child. In compensation, Rosaura was prepared to share Esperanza with her, as follows: Tita would be in charge of feeding the child, Rosaura of her education.

  Rosaura’s side of the bargain was that she was required to live with them on friendly terms, avoiding jealousy and complaints.

  For the most part, they had all observed the treaty, though it was least successful in respect to Esperanza’s education. Tita wanted Esperanza to have a different education from the one Rosaura had planned for her. So even though it wasn’t part of the deal, she took advantage of the moments Esperanza spent with her to provide the child with a different sort of knowledge than her mother was teaching her.

  Those moments added up to most of the day, for the kitchen was Esperanza’s favorite place and Tita was her best friend and confidante.

  It was during one of these afternoons in the kitchen when Tita learned that Alex, John Brown’s son, was courting Esperanza. Tita was the first to know. He had seen Esperanza again, after many years, at a party at the school she was attending. Alex was finishing medical school. They were attracted the moment they met. When Esperanza told Tita that when she felt Alex’s eyes on her body, she felt like dough being plunged in boiling oil, Tita knew that Alex and Esperanza would be bound together forever.

  Rosaura tried everything to prevent it. From the first, she was flatly and frankly opposed. Pedro and Tita pleaded Esperanza’s case, which started a struggle to the death between them. Rosaura insisted loudly upon her rights: Pedro and Tita had broken the pact; it wasn’t fair.

  It wasn’t the first time they had argued about Esperanza. That had been when Rosaura insisted that her daughter shouldn’t attend school, since it would be a waste of time. If Esperanza’s only lot in life was to take care of her mother forever, she didn’t have any need for fancy ideas; what she needed was to study piano, singing, and dancing. Mastering those talents would be tremendously useful, first of all, because Esperanza could provide Rosaura with marvelous afternoons of entertainment and amusement, and second, because she would stand out at society balls for her spectacular performance. She would captivate everyone and would always be welcome among the upper class. With great effort, after three long conversations, they managed to convince Rosaura that besides singing, dancing, and performing at the piano, Esperanza need to be able to talk about interesting subjects when she was around, and for that she had to go to school. Very reluctantly, Rosaura agreed to send her daughter to school, but only because she had been convinced that Esperanza would not just learn how to make agreeable and amusing conversation there, but would mingle with the cream and upper crust of Piedras Negras society in grade school. Esperanza went to the best school, with the object of improving her mind. Tita, for her part, taught her something just as valuable: the secrets of love and life as revealed by the kitchen.

  That victory over Rosaura had been enough to prevent another serious argument until now, when Alex was introduced and with him the possibility of an engagement. Rosaura was furious when she saw that Pedro and Tita were staunchly behind Esperanza. She fought with everything she had, she fought like a lioness to defend what according to tradition was her right—a daughter who would stay with her until she died. She kicked, she screamed, she yelled, she spit, she threw up, she made desperate threats. For the first time, she broke their pact and hurled curses at Pedro and Tita, holding up to them all the suffering they had caused her.

  The house became a battlefield. Slammed doors were the order of the day. Fortunately this did not go on for long, because after three days of the most violent and heartrending battle between the two sides, Rosaura, due to her terrible digestive problems, had died of . . . whatever she had died of.

  Having brought off the wedding between Alex and Esperanza was Tita’s greatest triumph. How proud she felt to see Esperanza so self-confident, so intelligent, so perfectly prepared, so happy, so capable, and at the same time, so feminine and womanly, in the fullest sense of the word. She looked so beautiful in her wedding gown, waltzing with Alex to “The Eyes of Youth.”

  When the music was over, the Lobos, Paquita and Jorge, came up to congratulate Pedro and Tita.

  “Congratulations, Pedro, your daughter couldn’t have found a better match than Alex for ten miles around.”

  “Yes, Alex Brown is a wonderful boy. The only sad thing is that they’re not going to stay with us. Alex won a grant to get his doctorate at Harvard University, and they’re leaving for there today, right after the wedding.”

  “How awful, Tita! What are you going to do now?” inquired Paquita venomously. “Without Esperanza in the house you’re not going to be able to live with Pedro. Oh, but before you move someplace else, give me the recipe for these chiles in walnut sauce. How exquisite they look!”

  The chiles not only looked good, they were indeed delicious—never before had Tita done such a marvelous job with them. The platters of chiles proudly wore the colors of the flag: the green of the chiles, the white of the nut sauce, the red of the pomegranates.

  These tricolored trays didn’t last very long: the chiles disappeared in the blink of an eye . . . how long ago it seemed that Tita had felt like a chile in nut sauce left sitting on the platter out of etiquette, for not wanting to look greedy.

  Tita wondered whether the fact that there was not a single chile left on the platters was a sign that good manners had been forgotten or that the chiles were indeed splendid.

  Her fellow diners were delighted. What a difference between this wedding and that unfortunate day when Pedro and Rosaura got married, when all the guests had been overcome by food poisoning. Today, instead of feeling a terrible longing and frustration, they felt quite different; tasting these chiles in walnut sauce, they all experienced a sensation like the one Gertrudis had when she ate the quails in rose sauce. Again Gertrudis was the first to feel the symptoms. She was in the middle of the patio, dancing with Juan to “My Beloved Captain,” and as she danced, she outdid herself singing the refrain. Every time she sang “Ay, ay, ay, ay, my beloved captain,” she remembered that distant day when Juan was a captain and she met him in the open field, completely naked. She immediately recognized the heat in her limbs, the tickling sensation in the center of her body, the naughty thoughts, and she decided to leave with her husband before things went too far. When she left, the party started to break up. All the other guests quickly made their excuses, coming up with one pretext or another, throwing heated looks at each other; they too left. The newlyweds were secretly delighted since this left them free to grab their suitcases and get away as soon as possible. They needed to get to the hotel.

  Before Tita and Pedro knew it, along with John and Chencha, they were the only ones left on the ranch. Everyone else, including the ranch hands, was making mad passionate love, wherever they had happened to end up. Some, under the bridge between Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass. The more conservative, in their cars, hastily pulled over to the side of the road. The rest, wherever they could. Any spot would do: in the river, on the stairs, under the washtub, in the fireplace, in the oven of the stove, under the counter in the drugstore, in the clothes closet, on a treetop. Necessity is the mother of invention, and of every position. That day it led to some of the greatest creativity in the history of the human race.


  For their part, Tita and Pedro were making a powerful effort to keep their sexual impulses under control, but they were so strong that they went right through their skin and came out in the form of heat and a distinctive smell. John noticed and, seeing that he was the third wheel, said good-bye and left. It hurt Tita to see him go off alone. John should have found someone else when she refused him, but he never had.

  After John left, Chencha asked permission to go to her village: it had been several days since her husband left to build a house there, and she had suddenly gotten a strong urge to visit him.

  For the first time in their lives, Tita and Pedro could make love freely. For years they had had to take all sorts of precautions so that no one would see them, so that no one would suspect them, so that Tita would not become pregnant, so that she wouldn’t cry out with pleasure when they were inside each other. But all that was over now.

  With no need for words, they took each other’s hands and went into the dark room. Before entering, Pedro took her in his arms, slowly opened the door, and before his eyes the dark room was completely transformed. All the furniture had disappeared. There was just the brass bed standing royally in the middle of the room. The silk sheets and bedspread were white, like the floral rug that covered the floor and the 250 candles that lit up the now inappropriately named dark room. Tita was moved at the thought of the work that Pedro had done to prepare the room in this way, and so was Pedro, thinking how clever she had been to arrange it all in secret.

  They were so filled with pleasure that they didn’t notice that in a corner of the room Nacha lit the last candle, raised her finger to her lips as if asking for silence, and faded away.

  Pedro placed Tita on the bed and slowly removed her clothing, piece by piece. After caressing each other, gazing at each other with infinite passion, they released the passion that had been contained for so many years.

  The striking of the brass headboard against the wall and the guttural sounds that escaped from both of them mixed with the sound of the thousand doves flying free above them. Some sixth sense had told the doves that it was time to flee the ranch. With them fled all the other animals—the cows, the pigs, the chickens, the quails, the lambs, the horses.

  Tita was aware of none of it. She was experiencing a climax so intense that her closed eyes glowed, and a brilliant tunnel appeared before her.

  She remembered then the words that John had once spoken to her: “If a strong emotion suddenly lights all the candles we carry inside ourselves, it creates a brightness that shines far beyond our normal vision and then a splendid tunnel appears that shows us the way that we forgot when we were born and calls us to recover our lost divine origin. The soul longs to return to the place it came from, leaving the body lifeless.” . . . Tita checked her passion.

  She didn’t want to die. She wanted to explore these emotions many more times. This was just the beginning.

  She tried to still her breathing, and only then did she hear the flutter of the wings of the last doves as they flew off. Apart from that sound she heard only their hearts beating fiercely. She could feel Pedro’s heart pounding against her chest. Suddenly the pounding ceased. A mortal silence spread through the room. It took her but a moment to realize that Pedro was dead.

  With Pedro died the possibility of ever again lighting her inner fire, with him went all the candles. She knew that the natural heat that she was now feeling would cool little by little, consuming itself as rapidly as if it lacked fuel to maintain itself.

  Surely Pedro had died at the moment of ecstasy when he entered the luminous tunnel. She regretted not having done the same. Now it would never again be possible to see that light, because she could no longer feel anything. She would but wander through the shadows for eternity, alone, all alone. She would have to find some way, even if it was an artificial one, of striking a fire that would light the way back to her origin and to Pedro. But first she had to thaw the freezing chill that was beginning to paralyze her. She got up and went running to the enormous bedspread that she had woven through night after night of solitude and insomnia, and she threw it over her. It covered the whole ranch, all three hectares. She pulled from her bureau drawer the box of candles that John had given her. She needed to have plenty of fuel in her body. She began to eat the candles out of the box one by one. As she chewed each candle she pressed her eyes shut and tried to reproduce the most moving memories of her and Pedro. The first time she saw him, the first time their hands touched, the first bouquet of roses, the first kiss, the first caress, the first time they made love. In this she was successful; when the candle she chewed made contact with the torrid images she evoked, the candle began to burn. Little by little her vision began to brighten until the tunnel again appeared before her eyes. There at its entrance was the luminous figure of Pedro waiting for her. Tita did not hesitate. She let herself go to the encounter, and they wrapped each other in a long embrace; again experiencing an amorous climax, they left together for the lost Eden. Never again would they be apart.

  At that moment the fiery bodies of Pedro and Tita began to throw off glowing sparks. They set on fire the bedspread, which ignited the entire ranch. The animals had fled just in time to save themselves from the inferno! The dark room was transformed into an erupting volcano. It cast stone and ash in every direction. When the stones reached high enough, they exploded into multicolored lights. From miles away, people in neighboring towns watched the spectacle, thinking it was fireworks celebrating the wedding of Alex and Esperanza. But when the fires continued for a week, they came to get a closer look.

  A layer of ash several yards high covered the entire ranch. When Esperanza, my mother, returned from her wedding trip, all that she found under the remains of what had been the ranch was this cookbook, which she bequeathed to me when she died, and which tells in each of its recipes this story of a love interred.

  They say that under those ashes every kind of life flourished, making this land the most fertile in the region.

  Throughout my childhood I had the good fortune to savor the delicious fruits and vegetables that grew on that land. Eventually my mother had a little apartment building built there. My father Alex still lives in one of the apartments. Today he is going to come to my house to celebrate my birthday. That is why I am preparing Christmas Rolls, my favorite dish. My mama prepared them for me every year. My mama! . . . How wonderful the flavor, the aroma of her kitchen, her stories as she prepared the meal, her Christmas Rolls! I don’t know why mine never turn out like hers, or why my tears flow so freely when I prepare them—perhaps I am as sensitive to onions as Tita, my great-aunt, who will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes.

  The recipes in this book are based on traditional Mexican recipes and have not been tested by the publisher.

  An Anchor Book

  PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing

  Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  Anchor Books, Doubleday, and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Like Water for Chocolate was originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1992. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Doubleday.

  Esquivel, Laura, 1950—

  [Como agua para chocolate. English]

  Like water for chocolate: a novel in monthly installments, with recipes,

  romances, and home remedies / Laura Esquivel, translated by Carol

  Christensen and Thomas Christensen. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Translation of: Como agua para chocolate.

  I. Title.

  PQ7298.15.S638C8613 1992

  863—dc20 91-47188

  CIP

  This translation is for Claire and Ellen.

  Copyright © 1989 by Laura Esquivel

  English translation copyright © 1992 by

  Dou
bleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday

  Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  First Anchor Books Trade Paperback Edition: November 1995

  This book is also available in print as ISBN.

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-3277-8

  v3.0