Thinking it over ...
The holiest triumvirate
By Félix Alfonso Peña
Food, drink and love — is there a holier triumvirate? I hold in my hand an iconic reminder of its holiness: a glass of homebrewed iced tea, dark amber and sweet, the sides glistening with condensation. Behind it, five decades distant but so close and vivid I feel I could reach out and take her proffered refreshment, stands my tía, Alicia Peña Vda. de Aréchiga. To a young boy of seven or eight years, she seems tall, and will always remain so in memory. The impression follows from her slender, angular figure. She is pale, her dark hair perfectly coiffed in a dignified Fifties 'do, but the customary sternness of the face made strong by tragedy, obligation and unwavering commitment to duty is softened by a smile that I know comes from offering that simple glass of iced tea. The glass is a tall cylinder partially wrapped in a paper napkin — never was a drink offered to guests in her house without the dignifying gesture of a napkin that felt soft against the hand and helped one hold on to the beverage. Within it, ice cubes jostle against each other, their sharp edges an abstract contrast to the smooth circularity of the glass. She stands in the back doorway of the home she kept with muicle and plúmbago bushes against the outside walls, and deep shade on the east side of it. But it is the glass, and the smile, and the prospect of refreshment and certainty of love that make the moment and anoint the memory. The strong, sweet lemony taste is inseparably bound with the love. So is the delightful smell of flour tortillas toasting on the griddle in the kitchen where my grandmother, María Tays de Ramos, dutifully ignores pleas not to cook because the afternoon heat is too stifling and she should not be standing by a hot stove. Not to be dissuaded, she tears off chunks of the masa and rolls them into testales, flattened balls with a small dimple on the bottom. Leaning into the rolling pin — I think it was an old broomstick that her brother Enrique had sanded down for her — she deftly turns out several perfectly round tortillas, cooking some while she rolls out the rest. Eschewing a spatula, she flips them swiftly with practiced fingers, tapping them at the right moment to make them puff up. Broken into pieces and dropped into the fresh cup of sweetened coffee, the tortillas are the merienda that a little boy needs every afternoon for more than the simple nourishment. It is the psychic and spiritual comfort of family and place and security amidst the hubbub of growing up and of not knowing which roads he may someday take and how far he may have to travel, or when he will realize that, in the purely physical sense, he cannot return to what was. But the gift freely given cannot be taken back: It is the moment of knowing that one is worth the bother, the napkin around the glass, the time spent bent over a table and before a stove that radiates heat within the heat of a South Texas afternoon, that somebody cares enough to refresh your spirit and your soul. Food and drink prepared with simple love: a secular triumvirate fused into a sacrament. |