The Discovery of Chocolate (14 page)

‘It is of your son’s making.’

Mother and father looked at their small and nervous child.

His mother swooped down upon him.

‘My son,’ said Bertha, tearfully. ‘You did this?’

‘I did, Mama …’

Then she clasped him, I think, as tightly as a mother ever clasped a son.

‘O, my darling boy,
mein Liebchen, mein Liebchen …
’

Edward’s small head rested on her shoulder, and he looked back up at his bemused and beaming father. It was a tight, desperate and protective circle of family love, as if they were clinging to each other against the dangers of the world. This was why people have children, I realised, not to send a semblance of themselves into the future, but to put on some small armour, however frail, with which to confront the terrible insecurities of our existence.

‘What shall we call it?’ asked Trude.

Each member of the family tasted the cake and tried
to think of a name, as if its rich moistness could provide inspiration. Edward’s cake … chocolate surprise … Diego’s folly … until at last I conjured a name from the air. ‘Let it be called Sachertorte, in memory of this day and this family,’ I said.

‘A capital idea, my good friend,’ Franz replied. ‘Let us preserve the memory of our family in cake.’

His wife wiped away a tear and apologised for her former harshness.

‘My nerves are so bad,’ she sobbed.

‘I can recommend chocolate for all nervous debilities, Madame,’ I replied, ‘if you would allow me to advise you?’

‘Of course, of course.’

‘I hope you will forgive my follies in your kitchen.’

‘I will, Diego,’ she said, quietly, ‘with all my heart.’

And then she held out her delicate hand for me to kiss.

At last, all was well.

That night we took the remains of the cake to our dinner at the hotel, and Herr Sacher insisted that I should instruct the cook in its creation the very next morning, paying particular attention to the relationship between the moistness of the cake, the texture of the apricot, and the dark smoothness of the chocolate. We would use only the finest ingredients, and serve it with a freshly beaten, lightly sweetened cream to provide a cool finishing touch, enhancing the texture and prompting the flavours.

It was, it must be said, a triumph.

T
his cake proved particularly suited to the Viennese temperament and I was soon placed in command of a small delicatessen within the hotel in order to sell Sachertorte to the general public. It was a hard winter and the people of the city appeared to wrap themselves in as many clothes as they could find, eating to excess at every opportunity, fattening themselves up against the cold. Observing them, I was able to understand for the first time the notion that we are what we eat, and realised that perhaps it should not surprise us if we feel refreshed by grapefruit, lightened by a lemon soufflé, pleasured by wine, or reassured by chocolate. In our choice of victuals we can predict our future well-being; not only in our bodies, which are comforted, filled, strained or over-burdened, but also in our minds. I began to discover that food could actually generate emotion; and that whereas certain substances might make us agitated and aggressive, others might soothe and calm. I began to study where these emotions might lie and in which part of the anatomy they were concentrated, discovering that alcohol made me depressed, eggs and cheese did not agree with my stomach (causing both fear and insecurity),
whilst sausages made my face feel greasy and my body lethargic. Only chocolate offered stability and consolation.

The delicatessen became so successful that we were able to take on extra staff and I was relieved of its daily management in order to concentrate on my research. Herr Sacher was convinced that I could create further delights, and provided me with a small culinary laboratory next to the kitchens in which I could undertake a series of experiments. He asked me to pay particular attention to the creation of chocolate liqueurs which guests could savour in the smoking room after dinner, and my shelves were soon filled with strange marinades, pickling jars and fermenting fruit: raspberries nestled in crème de cassis, cherries were drenched in cognac, and prunes improved immeasurably once they had been saturated in slivovitz. I believe that I was the first to use an early form of Grand Marnier, allowing the sureness of the chocolate to mingle with the zest of the orange and the attack of the alcohol.

But, as the years passed, and my experiments grew increasingly complex, I became even fonder of alcohol than I was of chocolate. I started to drink as I worked, pouring glasses by my side as I created a Kirsch roll or filled a chocolate ball with cognac, and it eventually became clear to me that I was quite unable to cook without this necessary fortification.

After several months the addiction took hold so surely and so firmly that I was trapped before I had been able to realise what had happened.

When I walked through the streets of Vienna, in the Graben, or down the Kartnerstrasse, I blamed my longevity, my boredom and my lack of hope for this inexorable slip
towards the delusive and belying attractions of the bottle. Whereas chocolate might satisfy an instant craving, I found that it made me too easily satisfied, too replete, whereas wine or brandy offered more graduated pleasures. With alcohol I no longer needed to be the prisoner of a lengthy memory and an uncertain future. I could slowly slip out of consciousness, escaping the terror of my infinite life, freeing myself into oblivion.

At first I convinced myself that this was a good thing, and sought out those who drank, recognising them in the street by the burgeoning floridity in their faces, the moments of carelessness in their grooming, and their soulful and distracted airs. After a minor setback, or a blunted ambition, these people had searched for the same desperate reassurance I sought myself. Out of fear, out of the need of courage, they had believed that drink might make them safer, happier, wittier, louder, cleverer, or simply forgetful of the pains of life.

Together with these new acquaintances, I sought out conviviality, escape from labour, licence and true freedom, little recognising that at the moment when alcohol appears to provide its greatest liberty one is most truly imprisoned by it. I noticed the sacrifices people made to purchase yet more drink, buying in small and regular quantities so that the effect might be less noticeable. In those who still retained employment I observed the over-eagerness to please mixed with the terror of discovery, whilst in those who had long lost the fight for self-preservation I could find only resignation, acceptance and the abandonment of any who sought to save them.

Perhaps my alcoholism was a slow attempt to kill myself,
an endeavour to waste as much time as possible in order to end the terrible sentence of my slow life. I felt even more detached from the everyday realities of my existence, as if I was sleepwalking, haunted by memory, uncertain whether I lived or dreamed.

For although the crowds along the Kartnerstrasse seemed to understand the purpose of their lives, fulfilling their duties and their responsibilities with a grim and somewhat stoic determination, unable to live, and unwilling to die, my life was the exact opposite of theirs. I was still unwilling to live and unable to die.

The people in the streets also looked strangely familiar, even though I knew I could not possibly have met them before. It was as if they were the ghosts of people I had known in centuries past, and as they travelled through their lives, convinced of their own unique place in the universe, I could not help but think that they led an almost identical existence to those who had gone before them. Of course the world had changed, but the inherent character of its inhabitants had not.

Everything seemed both foreign and familiar. I was frequently confused, as each day now seemed to repeat itself. Sometimes I dreamed that the city was full of identical people, all moving at the same pace; at other times I dreamed that it was full of different versions of Ignacia, and that I would be haunted by each one in turn until I found my true love. In the distance ahead of me I would often see women who looked as if they must surely be her. I began to walk behind them, imagining what would happen if my instincts were correct. A woman’s hair might fall in the same way, or she would have the same walk. My memory
was so uncertain that I would follow these women in a trance, hardly daring to believe that I might meet Ignacia at last, excited beyond all reason at the possibility of joyous reunion and eternal salvation walking a few paces ahead of me. But each time I quickened my pace and drew alongside the woman in question, I could see that her nose was different, or that her hair fell differently, or that she wore spectacles. I was then appalled by the stupidity of my imagination. These women were but distortions of Ignacia. They were not, and never could be, her. My dreams and my despair now stretched so deeply and so monotonously across my days that I drank even more heavily.

And then, believing that life could offer no escape from my delusions and no comfort for my despair, I decided that I would have to cease this humiliating and pointless pursuit of women in the streets of Vienna and seek a more direct course of relief from Ignacia’s absence, even if I had to pay to do so.

The girl I visited was called Claudia.

I had thought of trying to find someone as dark as Ignacia, but believed that this could only make my depression far worse. It would be better to find an almost exact opposite, and Claudia was certainly that. Her most prominent characteristic was her long red hair, worn as if it had never been cut. It cascaded down her back and fell as low as her waist. She also possessed the most pallid complexion I had ever seen. It was so pale and so frail that it sometimes broke out into a rash which spread like a faded pink necklace, giving her a vulnerable yet peculiar allure; and although she was surely malnourished, poor and desperate, there was such certainty in her manner and such strength in her
beliefs that I could not but submit to her strange beauty.

It was a demeaning liaison which lasted several months: she needed my money, whilst I needed her comforts, and we were trapped in an ever descending spiral of despair. I punished Claudia for her availability and for her poverty, chastised Ignacia for not being with me, and then castigated myself for my depravity. ‘Is this what men do?’ I asked myself. ‘Is this the dark heart of us all?’ There was so little tenderness in our actions that I began to fear that I would never be able to climb out of the sordid depths in which I found myself and discover true love again, for it seemed that I had lost that most precious human quality of all – hope.

‘Why do you do this?’ I asked one evening after Claudia and I had again sought some form of release from our troubles.

‘Why do you?’ she replied.

‘Out of desperation …’

‘Then you know the answer.’

‘So we are the same,’ I said, realising that my time was up.

Claudia had risen from the bed and was now stooping to pick up her lingerie. She turned to look me fiercely in the eye, her nakedness brazen in front of me.

‘No. We are not,’ she said savagely. ‘You can help yourself. You have money and privilege. I have nothing.’

She walked into a small bathing area and began to change.

‘You have beauty,’ I called.

‘A losing beauty. The poor do not live long.’

I knew that she hated these conversations, privileged men
taking a strange fascination in the poverty of prostitution.

‘How long?’

‘Tie up my corset please,’ she asked, sitting back on the bed. ‘My father died when he was forty.’

‘It is strange,’ I said, pulling at the laces of her bodice, ‘that you should want to live and I should want to die.’

‘I do not have the luxury to choose,’ she replied firmly.

Feeling the lace strings between my fingers, I realised , that I could either pull them as tightly as possible, or unfurl her clothes once more. I wanted to ravish her all over again and began kissing the back of her neck, pushing her down onto the bed, but Claudia forced herself away from underneath me.

‘You must go. My next guest is about to arrive.’

‘Let me pay him to go away.’

‘No. For if I lose him, and then later lose you, I have nothing,’ she said, pulling on her nightgown.

‘Don’t you love me?’ I asked.

‘How can I love you? Do you love me?’

‘I like you,’ I said. ‘I need you.’

‘But you do not love me?’

‘No.’

‘Then what am I supposed to do?’

‘Do you hope to love?’

‘I am beyond love,’ said Claudia.

‘You are too young to be so sad.’

‘Love is rarer than you think.’

It became distressing to visit Claudia. She had closed herself off to so much of the world that after several weeks in her company I decided that I must do something to arrest her air of sorrow and mistrust. I wanted to arouse
her, to bring her back to life, to make her feel once more. Perhaps we could even redeem one another.

And so, on my birthday in early June, I gathered a basket of the first strawberries of summer and asked her to light a small fire. She told me that the room was quite warm enough and that the last of the frosts must surely have passed, but I persuaded her that the most delightful of sensory experiences awaited her.

After placing the strawberries in a crystal bowl, I began to melt a dark and bitter chocolate in an improvised bain-marie over the fire. If the Marquis de Sade had been so successful with his raspberries, I knew that I could easily match his endeavours with a fuller and more succulent fruit.

And so, as the chocolate melted, its aroma filling the room, Claudia and I slowly undressed each other, letting our clothes fall silently to the floor. We knelt down by the fire, and then began to dip the tips of the sweet wild strawberries into the warm and newly melted chocolate, feeding each other in front of the flames.

The taste was extraordinary. Our mouths were filled with the dark and bitter fullness of the chocolate and then instantly refreshed by the tender succulence of the newly ripe fruit. We kissed, rolling the taste and texture of chocolate and strawberry backwards and forwards between us, losing ourselves completely in this shared moment of hunger and satisfaction, as if we were consuming the richest, darkest and sweetest flavours that had ever been created, no longer knowing if we were taking or giving, no longer aware of where our bodies began or ended.

The room was filled with heat and flesh and chocolate.
Even when we thought that we might be sated by passion, the fresh taste of the strawberries cleansed and revived us, letting us plunge once more into the dark and secret world of our desire.

I took up my pastry brush and began to paint Claudia’s breasts with chocolate, covering her pale, alabaster skin with its darkness, stroking her nipples with an upward movement so that they had never been so hard or so high.

Then I began to lick the chocolate gently from her breasts. Its very thickness meant that nothing could be rushed, that this moment must seem to last for ever, as if we had been granted the secret of eternal longing. I was child and man; Claudia was both mother and lover. I could sense and even taste her milk beneath the chocolate as I sucked at her breast. We had entered a world beyond time.

At last I looked up to see Claudia’s face, to find the light in her eyes, to see her happy.

She smiled fondly as she saw that both my nose and my mouth were now coated in chocolate.

Then she looked down at her breasts.

‘Oh,’ she said, quietly, suddenly sad, ‘look.’

‘You are beautiful,’ I whispered, before resuming my task.