In her depression because of the death of her nephew, Tita can not to say like the patient of Kristeva for instance can: “I have lost an indispensable object which in the last instance is my mother. But no, I discover her in the signs, and because I accept to lose her I don’t lose her, I can bring her back in the language”. (Kristeva, 1994:59) After the discovery of her mother secret love affair Tita’s consolation and understanding for her mother disappear in front of the frightening appearance of her mother ghost, which is so realistic and unchanged by the death that is equally dreadful and equally worried for Tita’s moral.
Tita’s coming out of the depression, according to her nature is through tears. The narrator tells with the same Cervantes humor that as in the moment of Tita’s birth when from the river of tears Nacha has filled bag of five kilos with salt, that she then has used for cooking, so John when he saw the stream of tears and realizes that it is Tita’s tears, he blessed Chencha and her soup of beef tails because she has done what his remedies failed to do: Tita to cry.
Between the love – passion and the love – security, between Pedro and John, Tita chooses the passion, although after the unpleasant experience of fake pregnancy and after realizing that Pedro is a weak person she experiences some changes in direction of her emancipation. But this emancipation, this rational defining of the roles of the sexes, the accepting that the world is for men in many aspects, does not mean a radical turn in her love. It is not a question of transformation of love into non-love, but rather it is the transformation of the quality of love, namely, less passion and more loyalty. What’s more such a desertion of the love is not consistent with Tita’s gentle nature, with her capability to be loyal to herself, above all.
Because of that, and because of the Laura Eskivel knowledge and skill to convert ironically the main features of the trivial genre, leaving only its palest lines to satisfy the understandable need for ordinary human happiness, Tita will not experience a happy end with John Brown. Tita was asking herself back in chapter II about the destiny of the youngest daughters doomed to stay with their mothers, according to the tradition: “Has anyone asked the youngest daughters what they think about that? Can they know the love, when they are not allowed to marry? Or even that is not allowed?”
That’s why Tita reacts so ardently against the idea that Rosaura’s daughter has to repeat the same destiny as Tita and not to marry in order to care for her mother. As Tita is a physical mother to Rosaura’s son, so she is a spiritual mother to Rosaura’s daughter, Esperansa, since she will not allowed the girl to repeat her unfortunate destiny. In this way the two children of Pedro: the dead boy, who would not have died if he had not been taken from her, and the daughter, are compensation for Tita’s desire for a child, her actual realization in motherhood and completion of the love relation with Pedro, as well.
Laura Eskivel conveys her narration supremely refusing to expand the melodramatically alluded fulfillment of Pedro’s desires. This relation will not end happily, because that would be entering the code of the trivial genre. She enters that rare stereotype of authors who associate the love with death, in agreement with the thinking that “the sublimity of love consists of the anticipation of its own death”. (Baudrilliard: 92)
All the pathetic moments, all the melodramatic parts of the story Laura Eskivel displaces in the last chapter within the summary. December. End of the year. End of a year, but an end of the time, as well. The narration jumps and a time hole gapes for the reader. The intention to open many questions has to be imputed to this method of narration. The answer to the most important question is: yes, Tita and Pedro are still in love!
The death of the lovers in the art provokes an excitement, in spite of how many times it has been repeated in the history of the art. The passionate and kind love scene from the last chapter can be read in the melodramatic code only out of malice. Otherwise, with little more of knowledge and enthusiasm, it can bring into mind the cosmic love scene of Zeus and Hera in the Iliad.
In the moment of the highest exaltation, in the vision of the firing tunnel, Pedro will depart, and when Tita realizes that there is no way the unique experience to be repeated, to rekindle her inner fire, because with him all the lighters have left, she will try to warm herself with the enormous cover of her pains. It will fail and then she will remember the matches John has given to her.
When Laura Eskivel will say through her narrator that Tita was eating the matches, it becomes clear to us why the mixture for the matches is placed in the text as a recipe. The mixture for matches is dangerous, but is a food by which help it is possible to attract the loved one, so its bizarreness can be ignored. Moreover, Tita has proven in so many cases that she is able to stand bitter tastes. But when in the text on the repeated meeting, on the coming back through the tunnel we see that Pedro is waiting for her, then even as female readers we forgive him all his conformity and we start to believe that we have been informed less about his inner life, just because of the “limited” female perspective of narration.
The fire that as a metaphor and a common sema of the love and of the food passes through the whole novel is not an all-destructive, eschatological fire. Before it, just on time all the animals escape from the property, and the generous ash of this fire yields various kind of animals, sweet fruits and vegetables.
The novel “Like water for chocolate” fascinates with its unusually chosen title. It tingles with the exotic recipes, with the cleverness of the little handy advises. It knows how to make us laugh with the recognizable Cervantesain humor, with the ironic pathos, and above all with the comparisons correspondent to the gastronomic aspect of the discourse: red like the apples in front of her (19p); indifferent like a cabbage (126p); when Pedro hugged, her body trembled like jelly (139p); Tita was literally like water for chocolate (149p); she thought her head will burst like popcorn (149p) etc.
The novel “Like water for chocolate” tells us about life in such a unusual way, that we turn with astonishment to our own evaluation of some things in life as profane. This vista of Laura Eskivel confronts us with the kitchen, which becomes at once a wonderful semantic center, and to paraphrase Julia Kristeva: a place where death and femininity, killing and birth, mortality and vitality meet.
Is it strange if after the reading of this novel we discover our capability to cry without onion, and if surprisingly, unexplainably synaestheticly we feel this text as wonderful flavor in our mouth?
Translated by Katarina Cipuševa
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