If one opens up chaos, magic also arises. One cannot say what the effect of magic will be, since no one can know in advance, because the magical is lawless, which occurs without rules and by chance, so to speak.
C.G. Jung – The Red Book
Both guinea pig and squirrel are classified within the order Rodentia. They are true rodents that share the defining feature of front teeth that grow continuously, requiring them to constantly gnaw to wear them down.
Along the route from Cuzco to the Sacred Valley is a particular stretch of road where numerous street-food vendors sell roasted guinea pig. Splayed bodies are skewered and turn over a spit. The mammal, called cuy in Spanish, has been consumed since pre-Inca times.
It is at Edward Rimachi Yanqui’s home in Huayqui, however, that I have the opportunity to sample this traditional Andean specialty. Relatives are visiting for the weekend, a cause for celebration.
Wander past the kitchen through the breezeway leading to the rear garden patch. Turn right upon exiting the stone jamb. Immediately there is found a cuy house. This is a long rectangular enclosure with a low corrugated metal roof. Open the door and the odor is pungent. Some 500 guinea pigs live here. Avoiding my feet, they scurry away in semi circles, continuing to munch on sheathes of grass.
How many guests will be at the table? Yanqui corrals several of the rodents and breaks their necks.
Back in the kitchen that same morning, Yanqui’s mother and two daughters are dehairing the cuy. I walk in on the primeval sight. It triggers a visceral reaction I am unable to control. Tears well up in my eyes and I don’t know why. (Could you flay your pet cat or dog?) The cuy have had their internal organs removed and their entrails have been collected in a bucket. Mother is holding a dead guinea pig by the tail and dunking it into a caldron of boiling water. The animal’s hide, I learn, will soften, making it easier to depilate.
“Would you like to help us?” the sisters ask in Spanish through a throbbing in my ears that I can’t explain. The glances between them seem bemused, a mix of amusement and befuddlement. They sit me down in front of a stone pestle and mortar, the most enormous I have ever seen. My task, mercifully, is to grind into a pulp a combination of garlic, salt and wild herbs. It will be used to marinate and season the cuy before roasting the beasts in a clay oven.
In the end, I am proud of myself. I have participated in producing a feast for the family. The guinea pigs are rotated over hot coals, their white skin turning crisp and cinnamon-colored. There is no place for the squeamish. Tiny claws at the end of tiny toes and tiny incisors protruding from tiny jaws mean that each cuy looks like a tiny Dracula waiting to pounce. Wine is shared from a single shot glass passed among us all. And there is mate de muña, a tea made from a type of mint. One ancient country gentleman drinks chicha from a hollowed-out cow’s horn cup. Avoiding the ever-present flies, we sit on wooden benches and crates in the breezeway. Everyone but me is speaking Runasimi/Quechua. Separate boy and girl teams play football on the worn and weathered village square. “We are very machista in Huayqui,” I am told. Plates carbohydrate-loaded with the ubiquitous potatoes and corn as well as sweet potato and spaghetti, “Just one small piece,” I say. In a few moments, adjusted to the marvelousness of it all, I bite gingerly into my first rodent.
The Sacred Valley is home to extraordinary individuals. Lilia Harli is a fictional character whose talent in the kitchen is based on a real persona hailing from Lima, the gourmet capital of Peru. I never saw Lilia cook cuy, the bony animal that, when roasted, I discover, tastes buttery like dark chicken meat. But the following is my homage to her and to Peruvian cuisine. In the spirit of experimentation, daring, and perhaps provocation, it relates to the order Rodentia. A rat is a rat is a rat.
Have you ever had a meal prepared for you before where the woman working in the kitchen danced about the counter tops like the painter Jackson Pollock moved around his canvas? I expect cooking to be a process where the cook pays attention to the recipe. “Anyone who can read can baste, brew, batter, beat, blanch, bake, braise, barbecue and blend,” a systematic creature of analytical method might say. Lilia Harli does not operate so. “I’m a creator, not a line chef repeating the same old dish time-after-time,” she declares. Harli doesn’t own a restaurant. Eventually, when she does, as is inevitable given her zeal, food won’t be about consistency, but about amuses bouches and taste experience in the vein of modern eateries that offer specials. Lilia worships the idea of being as open to anything and everything as she can. Even dining in the dark, a trend creeping into our global paradigm, appeals to her. “No boundaries! Let us heighten the senses beyond sight to those of sound, scent, taste and touch, increasing gastronomic pleasure in a kind of blind patrons’ cafe where every course is sex on a platter and equally as gratifying,” is this cuisinier’s mantra.
As a part of her particular psychosis, Lilia rides a flaming horse within herself. This means she must daily tame the beast before the beast tames her. “It’s as if I can’t escape myself,” she laments, “or the squirrels running any which way inside my head.” For Jackson Pollock, painting was choreography, a terrible trip the light fantastic in which he intuitively chased mysterious harmonies that are the fractals – the snowflakes, seashells, branching trees and peacock feathers – of the natural world. Lilia Harli’s canvas is the plate, her medium food. Like Jackson Pollock’s samba in the studio, Harli’s conga in the kitchen, far from disorganized or careless, is grounded in rhythm. This goddess has learned that when she allows herself to progress from a flowing through to a staccato condition followed by a dissolution into chaos, what comes out on the other side can be unpredictable and new, something magical with no precedent. Cooking as choreography with mind of no mind, the movement language of the ancients that led to tonal communication and speech, for Lilia, is the fastest way to quiet the brain. It empties her and offers her, in a word, bliss.
In this brave new world where the borders between yang and yin are becoming blurred, male can be more than bright, dry, hard, active, penetrating and controlling; female can be more than dark, wet, tender, containing, receptive and consenting. It is in Lilia’s artistic feat that these exquisite and equal energies are most in the process of shape shifting into the other. When not in the kitchen, Lilia Harli’s emotions can sit close to the surface. She connects easily with people because the restraints inhibiting social intercourse in most of us are not in Lilia’s psychology. Lilia can explode into friendship that may not last the test of time. She sometimes demands a yes-or-no answer, attempting to separate what is gray into black and white, yet wants unchallenged latitude for herself. Despite her affableness, she can emit a quality of detachment, disconnectedness, indifference and unpredictability, a lack of empathy more often associated with an aloof feline than an amiable hound. Lilia, the woman, projects faith in her own absolute authority. A brilliant but ornery-spirited Cheshire Cat with a reality of her own, she might disappear for a week, tail first, leaving not even a smile.
When getting her hands into the vegetables, however, all this changes. Lilia metamorphosizes. No longer the archetypal rebel-without-a-cause figure that is Jackson Pollock, Harli waltzes balletically into an elegant universe and becomes the androgynous and subtle Boy George, the rock star chameleon of her 1980s fascination. Like a silken spider’s web, she is strong and delicate all at once, sensing everything in her evanescent orb. “Do you really want to hurt me?” she sings. Lilia, though, no longer cares. The squirrels racing helter-skelter inside her head have become synesthetic. Color overlaps with texture, and the smell of a sizzling stir fry sounds like stars. It is here, beyond space-time, that the lamb chop freeplays with the parsnip, loved but unpossessed, the beetroot, wrapped by the dreaming prawn, floats in a blushing blanket of sky.
“Sex on a platter,” Lilia exclaims, “order up!”
Janice Jada Griffin is a graduate of Sotheby’s Institute Of Art in London, a designer and an internationally-sold painter who owned her own art gallery in Portland, Oregon, for a decade. She lives and works in Santa Fe, and is currently writing a book based on her ongoing experiences in Peru. For more information, visit avant-garde-art.com or email her at soul@avant-garde-art.com.
