| VACATION #9 MAKING CHOCOLATE IN CHIAPAS It's late August, the rainy season. You're driving north from Guatemala through Mexico to Los Angeles in a l965 Chevy pickup with your furniture and all your belongings. The load is shifting and the plastic sheet and ropes aren't staying in place. You turn off to a little town to look for someone to build wooden sides on the truck. Villa Comaltitl�n, Chiapas, population five thousand, isn't much more than a bus stop on the highway through the lush lowlands of southern Mexico. There is a bar on the corner which you nickname El Dulce Alivio (the Sweet Remedy), a moldy stucco box, painted turquoise and topped with a corrugated tin roof. The front is protected with a wooden overhang, long ago painted white. People huddle under it when the torrents of rain prevent them from waiting at the road for the bus. Inside, the dirty white walls and wooden ceiling reflect little light on the dark rainy afternoon, but the fluorescent tube provides enough and casts a green glow, repeated by the painted green chairs and tables, a single room which is restaurant, bar and hangout to the campesinos who live nearby. The room smells of beer and urine (the restroom being unvented), sweaty bodies and the heavy smell of garlic and pork from the caldo the due�a, Flor Gordillo, cooks up each day. The cinnamon-skinned men stand lean against the small bar or sit at tables smoking, drinking, laughing. Their reddish-brown faces intensified by the complementary green -- the white of their eyes as pronounced as the whiteness of their teeth, often seen, for they smile and laugh often. They still wear their sombreros although it has been raining for five days. There is no letup from the heat either. Their cotton shirts stick and itch, and they scratch the places where the mosquitos bit them the night before. The flies litter the tables, sluggish under the weight of the heat, flying with as little effort as possible. You stop in to see if you can find a carpintero to build sides on your truck. Flor and you quickly become friends over a couple of beers. She treats you to some of her homemade soup. Between downpours, you follow Flor down a muddy path that curves between banana trees and coffee flowers. The family that Flor takes you to meet have a carpenter shop adjacent to their house. The home and family business is only a few steps from the River Chalaca, where later you go to swim, do your laundry, and catch freshwater shrimp. The two grown sons take four days to build the wooden sides on the truck because they can't work when it's raining. In the meantime, the family adopts you. They won't let you stay in the hotel. For four nights the father gives up his bed to you and sleeps on the concrete floor. They feed you all sorts of delicacies like corn empanadas, torito pinto tamales (made with black beans and white cornmeal), and varieties of fruit you've never heard of that grow in their garden. You sing songs, and they tell you stories of the grandmother who recently died at the age of one hundred fourteen -- and they show you how to make CHOCOLATE. Your now adopted uncle (the father of the family) takes you with him to his brother's ranch to pick cacao. It looks like a member of the melon family, but it grows on a tree, on the trunk as well as the branches. You break it open easily by hitting the fruit against another tree. Inside is meat, and in the middle are black seeds in a bowl filled with a white gooey substance. The white is sweet when you suck it off the seeds, but you don't save it. After rinsing the seeds in the creek, you carry your harvest home to dry in the hot tropical sun. One night you and the whole family sit around the table and push the husks off with your thumbs and forefingers. When you finish the tedious job of removing the husks, the mother spreads the seeds out on a large flat pan and toasts them on a wood stove, stirring them constantly. At this point the seeds taste very much like coffee. She puts the roasted seeds into a five gallon bowl with a handful of cinnamon sticks. In another bowl she puts about five pounds of sugar. Her daughter-in-law, Chole, carries the bowl filled with the cacao seeds and you carry the one containing the sugar. It's a hot morning and the two of you walk to town to have the cacao ground up. Grateful to get out of the sun, you step into the nearly empty room of an unmarked store. It has a rough concrete floor. The main item that occupies the room is an old dilapidated grinding machine way past retirement age. The only piece of furniture is a hammock, on which you sit while waiting your turn. Two women are having their corn ground up for tortillas. When it's your turn, the attendant cleans the machine of corn. Then Chole gives him fifty centavos. She pours the cacao seeds and the cinnamon sticks into the top. The machine shudders. What suffering! Such screeching and moaning! You can't talk over it. The ancient grinder shakes and sputters and one time it quits all together. The belt breaks, but the attendant pieces it together and starts it up again. The machine is so hot it's ready to shake itself into a million pieces. The oily cacao begins to ooze out the bottom of the grinder, brown and warm and sensuous -- and then your nostrils tell you ... it has become CHOCOLATE. The bowl it falls into is half-full of sugar. Chole mooshes it all together affectionately with her hands. When the machine is turned off she reaches up into it to pull out every bit of cacao stuck in there. Her brown arms and hands are covered with chocolate. She becomes a chocolate confection. The two of you carry the warm chocolate-smelling stuff home. It feels almost alive, being the same temperature as your bodies. It's heavy and you each carry your precious burden like a child on your hip. Then it's the mother's turn. She gets her fingers into it and rolls up greasy little two inch balls, these she leaves to dry into hard rocks. What you now have are hard balls of very strong chocolate -- just mildly sweet, ready to store or use in hot chocolate, frosting or candy. That evening the mother serves you hot chocolate. The taste and smell are indescribably delicious. You have known this substance since it was attached to the tree -- just a seed hidden in an innocuous looking fruit. Mmnnn! You have lived a chocolate-lover's dream! ***** |
| Carol Ann ( Gratsos) Howell... page 11 |