Dreaming of Guacamole-Slathered Antonio Banderas and Leading the Chilean Senate

By Nisha Susan

Isabel Allende is now the first woman leader of Chile’s senate. This continues to blow my mind a little bit, even though yes, yes she is the daughter of Salvador Allende and yes, yes, Latin American writers have a history of involvement in politics (Mario Vargos Llosa ran for President in Peru; Neruda campaigned as a presidential candidate in Chile for four months before withdrawing and supporting another candidate. Neruda was a senator and a close advisor to Allende; Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz were at different ends of the Mexican spectrum). Still. It’s kind of exciting to think of the people you read as a teenager running a country.

At one point, in my teens and early twenties, every left-leaning, wanting-to-sound-deep man I met was thrusting Latin American poetry and fiction on me (while stroking their beards and looking into yonder western distance). I read some, chucked some and hide some others under my bed (to be joined a decade later by Bolaño). Allende, even then did seem like magic realism lite, full of orange sunsets and girls in fabulous skirts on motorcycles and a bunch of food.

Shortly after that I realised that we were going through a viral flu of Indian writers in English attempting heavy-handed magic realist food writing, the absolute worst of which I still maintain was a novel called Ishq and Mushq, which, if I remember right, had magic-realist tea-making, on a par with the movie version of Mistress of Spices. I blamed Allende and I blamed Like Water for Chocolate, which was adapted into a Hindi series, Margarita (starring Rajeshwari Sachdev and Milind Soman).

But Allende forever redeemed herself in my eyes in the writing-about-food department. Quite by accident I discovered her Aphrodite, a collection of recipes for aphrodisiacs. In interviews about the book, Allende says she had been in mourning for her daughter Paula for a while when she had a dream of a naked Antonio Banderas slathered in guacamole and rolled up in a tortilla. This she saw as the beginning of her recovery.

While the book could have drowned in its own aromas (certainly the reviews are mostly fainty-swoony) Allende retained a sense of light-heartedness. There’s a bunch of stuff about cooking in the nude and about grandmothers (the most oppressed category of character in writing about food, grandmothers should sue).

The biggest clue about the project lies in the description of her (and collaborator Robert Shekter)’s experiments on people with these recipes. “Friends who, as they enjoyed the aphrodisiacs, were informed of their power confessed to delicious thoughts, winged impulses, fits of perverse imagination and secretive behaviour, while those who knew nothing about the experiment devoured their fare without visible change.”

Knowing nothing about Chilean politics, I leave you with the thought of other cultural figures you loved fecklessly (Shah Rukh for PM!) or not running the country. Meanwhile, do get your hands on Aphrodite for several hours of fun and some competent, if slightly old-fashioned, recipes.