In the midst of Advent, the church calls us to an especially embodied contemplation. One characterized by lack, expectancy, unrealized potential: The exact state most conducive to and most reliant on faith. I’d like to suggest a spiritual resource, one that nourishes me anew each time I approach it: “Como agua para chocolate.” Itwas first a novel published in 1989 by Laura Esquival, and then a wonderful film released in 1993. Just this year, HBO has revived the timeless story into an ongoing limited series. Reading Esquival’s novel, watching the film and keeping up with HBO’s weekly installments are all forming part of my Advent practice.
“Chocolate” takes place over decades, beginning with the Mexican revolution. The story follows Tita De La Garza, the youngest of the daughters of Elena De La Garza, a landed gentlewoman and widow who operates her late husband’s hacienda near the U.S.-Mexico border. The story’s conflict is Tita’s love for Pedro Muzquiz, son of another local aristocrat, whom she is forbidden to marry because of her maternal family’s long-standing custom of setting aside their youngest daughters to take care of their mothers as they age. After Mami Elena refuses Pedro’s proposal on Tita’s behalf, she offers instead the hand of her oldest daughter Rosaura, which Pedro accepts as it gives him the opportunity to live in the same house as Tita.
The distinguishing feature in “Chocolate” is Tita’s cooking: She infuses all of her emotions into her food, which when eaten, fills the diner with the same emotions. Tita, Esquival writes, “Didn’t distinguish between tears of laughter and tears of sorrow. For her laughing was a form of crying.” In fact, she began crying in the womb and was born on the kitchen table, carried into the world by a tsunami of tears, which when dried left behind enough salt to fill a 10-pound bag. The family’s Indigenous servant, Nacha, swept up the salt and used it for years. From the beginning, we see that the body is in some mystical way bound up with food, and that Tita is literally the “salt of the earth.”
Esquival’s tactic of using fantastic imagery or events to express spiritual realities in otherwise realistic settings is a uniquely Latin American idiom known as magical realism. Magical realism generally captures the enchanted worldview which flows from sacramentality and compels us to look for the spiritual import of all material things. It’s an idiom defined by normalizing the fantastic, and it feels distinctly Catholic in its capacity for paradox, mystery and a casual acceptance of strange happenings. Yet Esquival’s story is uniquely Catholic, notwithstanding its surface-level indifference to religion. The church itself is only a set piece in “Chocolate” — a necessary one for any story set in Porfiriato Mexico — and Esquival characterizes the local priest as a passive beneficiary of the morally bankrupt aristocracy (political undertones foregrounded in HBO’s new adaptation). Esquivel’s Mexican church is at best enervated by centuries of unchecked hegemony and, at worst, corrupted by centuries of bald power-grabbing.
But what makes the story so intractably Catholic is the extravagance of its magical realism combined with its primary venues: the body and food. In “Chocolate” food does not represent spiritual states, it contains them and brings them from one body into another. And despite its reputation as a steamy novel, readers know that Tita and Pedro’s frustrated love remains unconsummated for decades, instead being sublimated via Tita’s cooking. In that sense, the story perpetrates a certain very Catholic ideal of spiritual glorification by fleshly mortification. And when Tita and Pedro do finally make love, after everyone who might possibly object has died, they both succumb to ecstasy and pass on. Ecstasy in the original sense, meaning the barriers between them are dissolved; they transcend themselves and absorb each other.
Esquival’s themes develop what for me is one of the best demonstrations of Catholic orthodoxy and a crushing rebuke of both materialism and gnosticism. Over and over again, we are made to understand that these character’s bodies are imbued with their souls, and that their souls are intelligible only through their bodies. Tita has a heart, and everything she does with her hands she does also with her heart. So her heart is in her handiwork, all her handiwork is heartwork. Thus, when Pedro eats Tita’s handiwork he eats her heart. Sound familiar?
Advent is a particularly apt season for contemplating “Chocolate.” After all, the story is about clinging to hope and transforming adverse circumstances with purity of heart. It reminds us that neither the machinations of the devil nor the ubiquity of human sin have the power to defeat goodness. It reminds us also that goodness is small, meager, patient; it does not dominate, but faithfully persists. And our Lord, with his coming, vindicates the small, meager, patient and faithful. This Advent, may we, like Tita, love with our hands — praying and blessing all we touch that it might become as love in the hearts of others.
Photograph courtesy of HBO