The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel. James Runcie
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the recipes, so rich the variety of meat. There were locusts with sage, and fish with peppers and tomatoes. There were frogs with green chilli, venison with red chilli, tamales filled with mushrooms, fruit, beans, eggs, snails, tadpoles and salamanders. Small earthenware braziers stood by the side of each dish, and over three hundred men waited upon us, bringing torches made from pine knots when the sky began to darken.
Montezuma sat at a table covered in cloths with Cortés alone by his side. A screen had been erected so that no one should see them eat, and tasters stood at each end, checking the food before it was served. After the meal three richly decorated tubes, or pipes, filled with liquid amber and a herb they called tobacco were placed in front of them. The screen was removed, and Montezuma encouraged our leader to smoke and drink as we watched jesters and acrobats, dwarves and musicians dance and play and sing.
Truly, this is a place of wonders, another world, and I urge Your Sacred Majesty to send a trustful person to make an inquiry and examination of everything that I have said in order that your Kingdoms and Dominions may increase as your Royal Heart so desires.
From the town of Tenochtitlán, dated the fifteenth of November fifteen hundred and nineteen, from Your Sacred Majesty’s very humble servant and vassal, who kisses the Very Royal Feet and Hands of Your Highness – Diego de Godoy, notary to Herná Cortés.
To tell further of the evening would have been to include information only pertaining to myself for which, I am sure, the Emperor had little concern.
Yet I know that it was on this night that my life changed irrevocably.
Five hand-maidens dressed in simple cream tunics now arrived in the banquet bearing an urn. One of these women caught my eye and smiled.
I could not help but stare. Her olive skin seemed to glow in the half-light, and her dark hair shone.
She gestured to the urn, brought over a jug, and poured a deep brown liquid into my goblet.
Bringing the drink to my lips, I found that the beverage had a cool and bittersweet taste, enlivened perhaps with chillies, and that it was not possible to discern its full effect with ease.
The woman nodded at me, encouraging me to continue.
Supping again, the strangely comforting taste began to intrude upon my palate as if one sip could never be enough. It was a liquid that only inspired further drinking, and it began to fill my entire body with its smoothness, as if I need no longer fear the affliction of the world; and all anxiety might pass.
I smiled at the woman and made a gesture to inquire as to the nature of the drink. She replied with one word: ‘Cacahuatl.’
At this the soldiers around me roared, jesting that I had drunk liquid caca, and that it would soon emerge from my body as a substance no different from the way in which it had entered.
I turned away with great sadness at their vulgarity. They had not tasted as I had tasted. They had not felt their life change in an instant.
As the meal progressed, I found that I could think of nothing else. I wondered what kind of life this woman led and where she lived. Did she make the beverage, or simply serve it? Perhaps I could learn something of the language and speak to her? The drink had left me so desirous of more that I wondered if perhaps it was a kind of medicine, or if I had been drugged, so tired did I now find myself.
As I lay on my mat that night, under a dais of yellow silk, I realised that I could no longer think of Isabella, but only of the mouth and eyes of the woman who had served me, savouring the sense of ease and peace she had provided. I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed that this woman was coming towards me, slowly and relentlessly, and that I could not escape. Backing away, I could not take my eyes from hers, as she kept walking towards me. Isabella’s voice came into my head, telling me to go, to run away, into a forest. I turned and ran, but found myself in an orchard of fig trees, where Isabella’s pet canary lay dead on the ground. The lady with the cacahuatl was looking down at the bird, and then said, in Spanish, ‘Voló golondrina’, the swallow has gone, the opportunity is lost.
What could this mean?
I awoke with a start, greatly troubled by my dream, and found a return to sleep almost impossible. It was clear that I would find no rest until I saw the lady once more.
The next morning we began our exploration of the marketplace. Stalls filled with exotic and extraordinary goods had been set out as far as the eye could see: embroidered cloths, capes and skirts; agave-fibred sandals, skins of wild beasts, cottons, sisal and ropes; robes made from the skins of pumas and jaguars, otters, jackals, deer, badgers and mountain cats. There were stalls selling the richest of spices: salt and sage, cinnamon, aniseed and black pepper; mecaxochitl, vanilla, ground hazelnut and nutmeg; achiote, chillies, jasmine and ambergris. Stalls of firewood and charcoal jostled with traders roasting fowl, foxes, partridges, quails, turtle-doves, hares, rabbits, and chickens as large as peacocks. There were even weapons of war, laid out for purchase, as their owners sharpened flints, cut arrows from long strips of wood and hammered out axes of bronze, copper and tin. There were flint knives, two-handed swords, and shields, all ready to be bartered, exchanged or sold.
There were thirty thousand people here, each in search of new delights. The method of buying and selling was to change one ware for another; one gave a hen for a bundle of maize, others offered mantles for salt. But everything was priced, and for money they used the strange brown almonds I had seen one of the natives spill in his canoe when we first arrived. These, we were told, were the beans of the cacao tree, and were held in great regard. One of them could buy a large tomato or sapota; a newly picked avocado was worth three beans, as was a fish, freshly prepared on a stall and wrapped in maize. A small rabbit would sell for thirty beans, a good turkey hen might cost a hundred, and a cock twice that amount.
From another corner of the marketplace rose the smell of cooked food: roasted meat in various sauces, tortillas and savoury tamales, maize cakes, dishes of fish or tripe and toasted gourd seeds sprinkled with salt or honey.
And then I saw the lady who had served me the previous evening, sitting at a stall, carefully grinding cacao beans on a low basalt table. I was lost in amazement, realising that this drink must surely be one of the greatest of delicacies, for she was destroying the actual coinage of the realm in order to create it. If one could only find the source of these beans, and the flower in which they grew, one might perhaps find the secret of all future wealth.
By the lady’s side stood a man whom I took to be her father, roasting beans over a fire, sweeping them backwards and forwards with a fan made from rushes. He then sieved them, removed the husks, and poured them onto the lady’s table.
Here she crushed the beans with a roller, creating a thick, dark-brown paste which was scraped away into a large gourd and given to a second woman, who now added a little water.
My lady then took the heart of a sapota seed, and began to grind it. This too was added to a small quantity of water, and passed to the second woman.
Then she took some maize, ground it in a gourd and mixed it in the same manner, until the time came to combine all three pastes, which were aerated by vigorous whisking and the slow addition of more water.
And, at last, my lady stood on a chair and poured the finished mixture of cacao, sapota seed and maize down from a great height into a new, larger bowl, where it was whisked into a foaming liquid, and poured into a richly decorated calabash gourd which she held out for me to taste.
I drank of the heady concoction, the foam stretching up towards my nose. It was a strange, almost bitter drink, more spicy in nature than the previous evening. I reached into my knapsack for one of the small sets of bells I had brought with me for barter and the lady smiled so invitingly that I found I could not but meet her gaze.
But then: disaster.
Aguilar, the interpreter, tried to pull me away, arguing that I was neglecting my duties by indulging in flirtation. He told me that I must rejoin Cortés immediately, and keep a note of the sights we saw.
‘What