“I had thought I felt the cold, slimy belly of a toad on my mouth.” The reader will find this kiss at a key moment in La Regenta, we will not say which one so as not to spoil the plot too much for those lucky ones who have not yet tasted this wonderful literary banquet. Because La Regenta, Clarín's masterpiece, is above all a very tasty novel, in which gastronomy and the kitchen play a great role.
Not a novel; a novel of a thousand pages that was originally published in two volumes, in 1894 and 1895. A cathedral of literature as imposing (but much more luminous) as that of Vetusta, the other great protagonist of the work, actually the city of Oviedo , here renamed, but recognizable in all its details and miseries. It is no coincidence that when talking about La Regenta other jewels from the jeweler come to light...
Madame Bovary (1857) and Anna Karénina (1877) form the other two vertices of this triangle. Let each reader decide the position on the podium, but the stories of these three unfortunate women, driven to adultery, loneliness and ignominy, deserve a place of honor in any library. A little further away, but without losing sight of them, is the also extraordinary and very current Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).
Its author, D.H. Lawrence, died at age 44, in 1930, a century before the campaigns of the
La Regenta has so many merits (have you really not devoured it yet?) that the one we bring up today often goes unnoticed: Clarín is also the author of the great gastronomic novel of the Spanish 19th century. Culinary metaphors run rampant from beginning to end in the work, which presents the reader with “the very noble and loyal city” of Vetusta in the middle of a siesta, “digesting the stew and the rotten pot.”
As Ana Casanova explained here, the name does not honor the stew. Rotten, that is, destroyed, were the condiments. Olla Poderida could also refer in ancient Spanish to “poderida as powerful (the pot of the powerful), because it is a powerful recipe.” How forceful are the lunches, meals, snacks and dinners that Clarín describes when he talks about the powerful, the rotten with money.
Because then, of course, there are the miserable ones who will never taste or smell the delicacies that parade, for example, on the table of the Marquises of Vegallana. Ana Ozores, nicknamed the Regent because she is married to the former regent of the Provincial Court, the former president of this judicial body, as austere at the table as in bed.
Don Víctor Quintanar is a man much older than his wife. He loves her, but they sleep in different beds and he doesn't know how and can't make her happy. With hunting, theater and poetry, he already has it all. We have cited the works of Flaubert, Tolstoy and Lawrence as links in that same golden chain of which Clarín is a part. But one could also cite Dangerous Liaisons, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803).
Also in La Regenta there is a Marquise de Merteuil, a Viscount de Valmont and a Madame de Tourvel. That is, an ex-lover, Visitación Cuervo, who pushes her former love, Álvaro Mesía, into the arms of another woman, Ana Ozores. She visits the one at the bank (so called because her husband is a bank employee) and encourages Álvaro Mesía to conquer the square when she sees him looking lustfully at Ana Ozores. And with what expression she does it!
The ex-lovers are on a balcony, under which the Regent passes. When she has already disappeared, walking away from her down a deserted street, Álvaro continues searching for her with her gaze “loaded with lasciviousness and irritated self-love, confused with desire.” Then Visit approaches and whispers in his ear: “Eat it!” That's what he tells her, not "go for it", "go on an adventure" or "came her in with your charms". No, nothing like that. He eats it and throws the leftovers in the trash.
Eat it, too, because you can, and not like those street children who in the novel wonder what the taste of the things “that the gentlemen eat” will taste like. Unattainable delicacies like oranges or custard. You, Álvaro Mesía, a regular guest at the meals of the Marquises of Vegallana, are powerful, like the protagonist of El primo Basilio, by José Maria Eça de Queirós, who eats Luisa without caring what happens next.
Eat it like “woodcocks, partridges, chickens, pigeons, monstrous eels, monumental hams, white and brown blood sausages, purplish sausages,” as well as “yellowish pears, other grilled pears, almost red ones, golden and scarlet apples.” , and the mountains of walnuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts” that filled the Vegallana cupboard, the cornucopia of “the most exquisite edible fauna and flora of the province.”
Emma Penella (protagonist of Gonzalo Suárez's 1974 film) and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón (protagonist of Fernando Méndez-Leite's 1995 miniseries) have given the face to Ana Ozores, that woman who travels in the same car as Luisa Mendonça from Brito, Emma Bovary and Anna Karénina. The wagon of edible women, from which Constanza Chatterley knew how to get off in time, who ate and let herself eat whatever she wanted.
The Regenta sometimes felt like “half an unlit cigar,” like one of those “abandoned cigars” that her husband left next to the cup of coffee, a man “incapable of smoking a whole cigar and of loving it completely.” Reader, run to the nearest library or bookstore, if you haven't already. Take home a copy of this novel, eat it and discover the taste that “the cold, slimy belly of a toad” leaves in your mouth.
