I couldn’t help remarking how certain manifestations of Olivia’s vital energy, certain prompt reactions or delays on her part, yearnings or throbs, continued to take place before my eyes, losing none of their intensity, with only one significant difference: their stage was no longer the bed of our embraces but a dinner table.
This quotation establishes the narrator's ongoing displacement of the language of love and desire ('vital', 'yearnings', 'intensity') for the sensory language of taste. This is important for two reasons: first, it suggests that the descriptions of food within the text carry subtextual meanings relating to the couple's relationship; and second, it suggests that Olivia's response to food is a placeholder for any direct linguistic communication between the pair. As the narrator summarizes, they are 'communicating with flavors through a double set of taste buds, hers and mine'.
"You're always sunk into yourself, unable to participate in what's going on around you, unable to put yourself out for another, never a flash of enthusiasm on your own, always ready to cast a pall on anybody else's, depressing, indifferent—" And to the inventory of my faults she added this time a new adjective, or one that to my ears now took on a new meaning: "Insipid!"
Olivia's appraisal of her husband draws out one of the central differences between the two characters. Where she is portrayed as sensitive and perceptive, always attentive to the subtleties of the Mexican cuisine, he is characterized by his disinterest in the world around him. The word 'insipid', from the Latin for 'tasteless', demonstrates both this apathetic outlook and suggests that the narrator himself is lacking vigor. It is a pivotal moment in the story because the reader is given new insight into Olivia's thoughts on her husband and their marriage.
"It could be the victim himself, supine on the altar, offering his own entrails on the dish. Or the sacrificer, who assumes the pose of the victim because he is aware that tomorrow it will be his turn. Without this reciprocity, human sacrifice would be unthinkable."
In this quotation, the guide Salustiano offers two different symbolic interpretations of the chacmool (a sculpture of a reclining figure with his head turned). His suggestion that the figure could be interpreted as either the victim or the sacrificer feeds into the text's wider argument that humans play both roles – the devoured and the devouring.
The dish they had served us was called gorditas pellizcadas con manteca — literally, plump girls pinched with butter. I concentrated on devouring, with every meatball, the whole fragrance of Olivia — through voluptuous mastication, a vampire extract of vital juices.
Following Olivia's description of him as 'insipid', the narrator comes to the realization that his relationship with Olivia needs to be reciprocal. He mistakenly saw himself 'eaten by her, whereas [he] should be [himself] the one to eat her'. This quotation demonstrates his change in his perspective. As he imagines himself 'devouring' 'the whole fragrance of Olivia', the language of sex and desire ('volumptuous') coalesces with the technical language of taste ('mastication'). Importantly, this fantasy takes place when he is eating a suggestively named Mexican dish, therefore also demonstrating his sampling of the country and its culture.
Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a riverbank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes stared into each other's with the intensity of serpents'—serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cruzana, and enchiladas.
The story ends with a single sentence of over a hundred words, within which Calvino abridges the text's various themes into tortuous, serpentine syntax. The central image of the self-devouring serpent (which Salustiano previously described as 'a symbol of the continuity of life and the cosmos') suggests the interconnectedness of all human life, which the narrator now sees in his relationship with Olivia and his exchange with Mexican culture. In the final words of the story, he turns to the cuisine itself ('sopa de frijoles', 'huachinango a la vera cruzana', 'enchiladas') as an example of this rich sensory engagement with the world.
