A Network of Smells
This text composed of three short stories was originally intended be comprised of five, one for each of the senses. Only three senses made it into the final product because the author died before completion. The result remains, however, an exercise in imagery such as this passage which describes a “network of smells.”
“We understood whatever there was to understand through our noses rather than through our eyes: the mammoth, the porcupine, onion, drought, rain are first smells which become distinct from other smells; food, non-food; our cave, the enemy's cave; danger— everything is first perceived by the nose, everything is within the nose, the world is the nose.”
The Sounds of the Palace
In “The King Listen” the conceit of the story steeped in the imagery of the sense of sound; a palace has been transformed into an ear. Such a transformation inevitably heightens and intensifies even the most minute of sounds so that one can trace the arc of the day through what hears:
“in the morning the trumpet blares for the flag-raising on the tower; the trucks of the royal household unload hampers and casks in the courtyard of the stores ; the maidservants beat the carpets on the railing of the loggia; at evening the gates creak as they are closed, a clatter rises from the kitchens, from the stables an occasional whinny indicates that it is currying time.”
Cannibalism
The title story focuses on the sense of taste as a couple eat their way through a Mexican vacation. At one point, things begin to take a weird left turn, however, and the imagery becomes that intertwines the story’s obsession with eating and sexuality to become an exercise in cannibalistic imagery:
“It was the sensation of her teeth in my flesh that I was imagining, and I could feel her tongue lift me against the roof of her mouth, enfold me in saliva, then thrust me under the tips of the canines. I sat there facing her, but at the same time it was as if a part of me, or all of me, were contained in her mouth, crunched, torn shred by shred.”
The Tea Party
The title story also takes a brief break from its obsession with the sense of taste to present a portrait of political unity in which sound and sight take front and center. It is election time in Mexico and the tea party is an ironic commentary upon the dirtier aspects of political campaigning in a country notorious for elections that are, indeed, no polite tea party:
“Under the broad, empty vaulted ceiling, three hundred Mexican ladies were conversing all at once; the spectacular acoustical event that had immediately subdued us was produced by their voices mingled with the tinkling of cups and spoons and of knives cutting slices of cake. Looming over the assembly was a gigantic full-color picture of a round-faced lady with her black, smooth hair drawn straight back, wearing a blue dress of which only the buttoned collar could be seen.”
