I can’t imagine Confucius as a young man, nor can I imagine him being very quiet. The image of the venerable elder is a prototype that only exists in the masculine: a man who ages well and who becomes such an upstanding member (pun very much intended) of society that he can show up anywhere and be not only well respected, but well heard. My grandfathers, for example, fit this model, or at least they tried to. And I listened to them, one until he died and the other until I stopped seeing him. But as for my grandmothers, one with whom I spend half my week and the other whom I haven’t seen in the past eight years, I don’t remember ever encountering a circle around them, laughing at their great one-liners, nor can I recall a single moment in which they’ve attempted to regale anyone with pompous lectures.
I know for certain that Abuela wasn’t brought up to become a Venerable Elder. I don’t think she ever even thought about growing old, and that’s why it’s so difficult now for her to let herself be taken care of and to understand that just because she has a house doesn’t mean she needs to prove she can keep it squeaky clean. To me, a Venerable Elder is far more likely to allow himself to be “unproductive” than Abuela is to notice the impressive caretaking apparatus that two of her daughters have set up for her, or to listen to Doctor S when he says she shouldn’t even think about using cleaning products because her respiratory system can’t tolerate such strong fumes.
Even so, she needs to make herself heard. And the method she’s figured out for doing this will remain engraved in some part of my intellectual or sensory memory forever, because it was one of the greatest discoveries and greatest advancements in my own understanding of Abuela. I’m referring to the day I realized that this woman with whom I spend half my week, this old woman with delicate skin and a pointed sense of humor, this woman whom I call Abuela had, among her many skills, the mystical and powerful gift of ventriloquism.
Appendix: In Which the Author Comes to Understand Abuela’s Ventriloquism
Like any story worth telling, this one begins with shredded beef. In one of her recurring meditations on the unanswered questions of the universe, the Author realized that whenever she went out to eat quesadillas or tacos de guisado, she always preferred the ones with shredded beef or tinga de res, but never in her life had she prepared it herself, most likely due to her long-standing wariness of pressure cookers and her ignorance regarding the type of beef used in the preparation of this dish.
So she did what any woman seeking such information would do: she asked her grandmother.
“Abuela, what type of beef do you use for tinga de res? I’d like to make it this weekend.”
It was Friday.
“Ah, well, tomorrow I’m going to the supermarket with your mother. We’ll buy the meat, and we can make it here on Monday.”
A perfect plan.
Monday arrived and, indeed, the package of skirt steak was waiting in the refrigerator. Abuela played her role of culinary guru to perfection, and the Author came one step closer to conquering her fear of pressure cookers1 thanks to the skill of its cared-for caretaker, who took over by confirming the exact moment at which the valve “started dancing” and then counting down the minutes until the beef was cooked to perfection. It was also Abuela who turned off the stove, made space for the pot to sit off the heat, and opened it after it had cooled down, not without making fun of the fearful expression of the Author, who maintained the necessary distance while Abuela executed such a risky operation. Brave caretaker.
The Author did the rest of the work: she shredded the beef, prepared the stew, and was the first to try it. It tasted exactly like it did at the quesadilla stands. Since she had to leave early that day, she left the stew for dinnertime, when almost the entire family would be together.
But the next day, when the Author arrived and asked if all the diners had enjoyed yesterday’s special, she couldn’t have imagined that the response would leave her cold: “Ay, they barely even ate anything,” said Abuela, and an outside observer would have clearly seen the sadness travel across the Author’s face as Abuela concluded, “I don’t think we’ll make that again, since they said they didn’t like it.”
That afternoon, at lunchtime, the Author couldn’t contain her curiosity and, when she found herself alone with her mother, asked why they hadn’t enjoyed the tinga de res. Madre was confused: “We did like it! We even had seconds. It’s your grandmother who can’t eat beef because it’s too tough for her.” Mystery solved.
The Author thought back: how many times had she heard Abuela make a categorical statement on behalf of someone else in order to decide something? “You know your mother doesn’t like nopales,” “your tío told me that we shouldn’t use this cleaner,” “I heard on TV that you shouldn’t do that.” If someone wanted to play Sherlock Holmes and follow the thread of each one of these statements back to its supposed origin, it was perfectly plausible that she would only find one false step after another. Madre had never blasphemed against the sacred nopal, Absent Tío had only commented on the smell of some piece of furniture in passing, and even when Televisión says what you should and shouldn’t do, it could just as well have said nothing on the subject in question. This dissociated voice that, at its core, pointed to a will that needed to legitimize itself but could only do so through others (even if doing so meant telling a lie) amounted to a type of mechanism, and it was a mechanism that had been constructed since who knows how long ago.
And the Author went even further because, in order to articulate even the smallest decision, she thought, Abuela resorts to ventriloquism. At the traveling market that comes every Wednesday, she has to talk to herself, argue with herself, convince herself every time she’s faced with the dilemma of buying one thing or the other, making complete statements out loud that only she can hear but that undoubtedly offer her assurance when the time comes to decide whether to buy chicken or fish. She also talks constantly while she washes the dishes or cleans the stove, even though no one can hear what she’s saying except for her. This voice could be one she learned to activate in order to distinguish herself from others who were speaking for her; it could be that this doubled voice creates an internal dialogue each time she needs to make a decision, because traditionally she’s always been confronted with other voices that decide for her, and she needs to rebel against them. So, the Author thought, I’d love it if Abuela didn’t have to go to such lengths to say what she wants, but I also love that she’s had the creativity to find a way to be heard.
And the Author plays along, even with another form of ventriloquism Abuela uses when she can’t do something and knows it, and so makes statements in which she herself seems to be the subject, but which in reality are orders for the Author. Like the day when Abuela was diagnosed with severe bronchitis and was under strict orders not to cook but spent all of breakfast saying: “Today I’m going to make some mole.” And the Author was extremely confused, because everyone knew Abuela wasn’t supposed to cook anything, until she realized that it wasn’t Abuela who was going to make the mole, but someone else: the Author herself. And she had to learn how to respond when, for example, she needed to start writing this book, and Abuela said: “What if I make some verdolagas in chile verde?” The Author responded: “Not today, Abuela. I can’t,” and they understood each other.
“I’ll make it another day, then.”
“Yes, you can make it another day, Abuela.”
You can either challenge this ventriloquism or play along. And after thinking a lot about it, after a lot of lost patience and a lot of sorting things out, the Author decided that she would choose, a thousand and one times, to play along with Abuela, listening to and obeying the dolls as if she couldn’t see the ventriloquist behind them.
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1 The history of the pressure cooker is full of events that support this distrust—perhaps more accurately termed the “survival instinct”—that the Author exhibits with regard to such devices. The official record states that French physicist and inventor Denis Papin (1647–1712) presented the prototype of his digesteur, the precursor to the pressure cooker, to the Royal Society of London in 1679 and, thanks to this invention, gained acceptance into the ranks of the very prestigious academy, but that “curiously” it was not popularized until the twentieth century. These three centuries of silence are not at all strange, nor are they a coincidence: the dark history of the pressure cooker begins soon after, around the time Papin decided to find a way to prepare hard-to-cook foods that would require less time and less energy.
There are also several rumors that Papin himself was a victim of his obsession with pressure and steam and that this is what brought him to his death. None of these statements have been confirmed, and they probably never will be, given the historical impossibilities of piecing together such records, but there is one document, dated October, 1712, that recounts a domestic accident resulting in the deaths of one male scientist and two women, the surrounding details of which could lead you to believe that the inventor of the pressure cooker was the first victim of his own creation. He wouldn’t be the last.
Curiously, reports of verified incidents of violence in which the pressure cooker played a starring role are mostly found in church archives. Due to the severity of the injuries and the lack of understanding when it came to steam, the victims and their families had no way to legitimize what had happened to them and often turned to religion as a form of emotional support and as a means of protesting or petitioning the authorities, in this case saints, virgins, or Jesus Christ himself by way of the priests. In this way, several accidents of various kinds have been recorded by disturbing documentary evidence such as, for example, a plaster cast in which you can see the deformities caused by this type of explosion in the face of a woman who worked as cook for a wealthy household.
Even today, the basilica of Our Lady Aparecida in the Brazilian city of Aparecida, is one of the most important sources for those tracking the influence these domestic devices have had in the private sphere, along with their ever-unregulated dangers. Among the shrines within this church is a whole section of votives dedicated to all those whose lives have been saved after accidents involving a badly positioned valve, an imperfect seal, or a premature opening. Brazil, of course, is a country that is highly enthusiastic about pressure cookers.
It’s possible that the increasing danger pressure cookers represent to human safety is due to the principle, also human, that nothing that withstands pressure for a long time can remain unmoved, since at certain magnitudes of internal pressure, all valves will fail. In a letter written by Lord Thomas Reinfeld, member of the Royal Society of London at the time Papin presented his pressure cooker prototype, Reinfeld explains to his doctor, Sir Philip Malone, that during Papin’s presentation there had been several skeptics who questioned the form, purpose, and risk of such an invention. One of these skeptics, whose name has been crossed out from the document for reasons unknown, asked Papin if he realized the risks involved in commercializing a device that could possibly explode, and compared his invention to the case of Andrew Brewer, an apparently mild-mannered man who just a few weeks before had murdered two local bakers over a disagreement about the price of the bread he was buying for his family. The police reports revealed that this man came from an extremely stressful situation, already in debt and out of work, with many mouths to feed at home. Through his questioning of Papin, the skeptic established this analogy—which is still relevant—that subjecting any material to too much pressure can have truly unfortunate consequences.
In 2011, Al Qaeda launched a website, the purpose of which was to instruct potential terrorists. They published an article entitled “How to Make a Bomb in Your Mother’s Kitchen” that explained, step by step, how to use pressure cookers for intentionally explosive purposes. The organization was operating under the assumption that no one would suspect anything about a person buying these devices in a store or online and that all of the potential places to prepare such a device fell within the domestic sphere, always so friendly and obliging, even toward budding terrorists. After praising the effectiveness of the pressure cooker as “an easy bomb,” the article explained that all you needed was sugar, matches, nails or buckshot, gunpowder, and these simple instructions, the only remotely complicated part of which was making a detonator from the filament of a regular incandescent light bulb and a watch. According to the article, it would barely take the bomb-maker two days, and he would be capable of killing “at least ten people” with an investment of less than a hundred dollars.
After the Boston Marathon attack on April 15, 2013, fears over the consequences of this device reached their peak. Apparently, the two Russian-born brothers who were accused of this terrorist act had been searching for pressure cookers on the internet before the attack, in order to build the bombs that would murder three people and injure 260 others in wide-ranging degrees of severity. This paranoia went so far that in August of that year Michele Catalano, a resident of Long Island, received a visit from six officials with a search warrant who wanted to make sure that she wasn’t a terrorist, since she had been searching for pressure cookers on the internet, and her husband had left open a search for extra-large backpacks on his computer at work, which his boss had seen and alerted the authorities about.
But you don’t need murderous intentions for a pressure cooker to cause pain and suffering. Every family has its own terrible story like that of the famous Dr. Guerra who, on one of his Sundays off, opened the pot that had been cooling for several hours only to have the entire batch of caldo tlalpeño explode all over his face and body, causing him second-degree burns, just because something had obstructed the valve, and the pressure had never been released. Or the story of Tía Soledad, a newlywed who didn’t know how to tell that the device wasn’t yet ready to be opened and ended up with a flan napolitano on the ceiling and her self-esteem all over the floor.
Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that a pressure cooker can reduce cooking time to between a quarter to a third of what it would take to prepare something with traditional methods involving metal pots and pans. The difference when compared to clay cookware is even more incredible: a kilogram of beans can take up to four hours to cook in a clay pot, while in a pressure cooker the same quantity of beans will be ready in half an hour. It must be said that, as with everything related to domestic work, there is a subjective opinion held by some people (particularly those of the male gender) that insists that the flavor of foods prepared via traditional methods is better than that of those prepared in ways designed to accelerate their cooking time, such as the pressure cooker, the microwave, etc. There isn’t really a way to measure such claims, which makes you think that perhaps the taboo around pressure cookers arises from a misunderstanding of the domestic context—a misapprehension that will always demonize volatility and ease.
