1940s Archive

Saludos

Part V

Originally Published October 1944

Her name was Maria de Jesus Portilla. The first time I saw her she was coming down the garden path in that measured, dignified gait that only an Indian woman has. She was barefooted, her white apron had lavender pockets on it, and black braids that showed almost no grey hung over her shoulders. On her head she carried a ten-gallon gasoline tin in which grew a gardenia shrub newly blossomed, the perfume of which preceded Maria de Jesus.

Her dark old face wrinkled into a friendly smile as she caught sight of me lying in a deck chair under the orange tree. “Señora,” she said, “in the market they say that you need a cook. I am a cook.” She lifted the gardenia plant from her head and set it on the grass. She looked it over carefully, and picking the whitest and most perfect flower, handed it to me. Then she sat down on the grass near me.

“What can you cook?” I asked.

Pejerreyes,” she answered promptly. “They are good when you fry them in Spanish olive oil and serve them with a sauce of garlic, onions, tomatoes, and chile.” The Peruvian pejerreyes, the tiny delicious white fish, I knew, but not the sauce, which I guessed to be of Maria's invention—probably very hot and very good.

“What else?” I questioned.

“What does the Señora like?” she countered.

“At the moment nothing appeals to me,” I said dismally. “I have just come this morning from the Clinica Americana where I’ve been for weeks with malaria. I have no appetite whatever.”

Maria’s face grew sombre with sympathy. “Ah, Señora,” she sighed, “I, too, have had the paludismo. I know.”

“There is one thing I never want to eat again,” I reminisced with some bitterness.

“Yes, what is that?” she asked with interest.

“Red jello. I had it for breakfast, I ate it for lunch, and I dined on it. It was all I had to eat for days and days.”

“What a barbarity!” exclaimed Maria de Jesus. “I could make you a nice little caldo for dinner—a pretty little soup of clams, the kind we call señoritas—small ones.” She chatted on about steaming the clams in an iron kettle (did we have one?), and adding the juice of the raw fish with crushed garlic, onion, and cloves. I got lost in the maze of unfamiliar cooking terms, but the concoction began to sound very much like the soupe à la Vendeenne for which I remembered a strange little Paris restaurant.

She glanced up at the morning sky. “It is still early enough that I could find good little clams in the market; what else shall I buy for the Señora?”

At that point I said, “Whatever you think we should have. Please bring me my purse from the dining room table.”

She came back with Tuti, the big police dog, sniffing her heels. “For this policía so handsome and grande,” she announced, “I shall buy a pound of ground beef. I shall salt it and cook it with carrots and spinach.”

I gave Maria de Jesus Portilla a twenty soles note and said, “You’d better look in the kitchen. I think it’s absolutely bare. The tenants who moved out this morning have left not so much as a grain of salt.”

Victoria, the maid who had been left by the departed tenants, appeared in the garden shaking her dustcloth. She looked in astonishment at the erect little old figure disappearing into the kitchen as though she had always belonged to the household. “Maria is the new cook,” I told her. “Please show her around.”

Cooks in Lima, good or bad, I knew were scarce; the people to whom my friends Lyn and Manuel Manduley had rented their house while they were on vacation in the United States, had thoughtfully taken with them the cook Lyn had been at so much trouble to train. Now Lyn and Manuel were expected back in two weeks or so, and I wondered what kind of a showing I’d be able to make for them when they did come. Perhaps Maria de Jesus of the bare feet and the gardenia-crowned head wouldn’t be Lyn’s idea of a servant, but just then I was too enervated from fever to care very much. I had been Lyn’s guest upon various occasions when I had returned to Lima for brief respites from jungle life; always her cuisine had seemed perfect, and her hospitality of no less a quality in graciousness. Now, as some small return for her kindness, I had left the hospital to take over the house and the dog until she should return.

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