On a corner in the town of El Corozo there is a store run by Doña Mercedes and her granddaughter Teresita. On the door is a notice written in golden letters. "Come in and taste the food of the gods", because chocolate is their specialty.
Teresita a young brunette, with laughter in her face, is teaching her friend Carmelite how to work in the store.
"We have an important order for Don Nemecio's birthday celebration. Can you imagine he is 105 years old!...as old as Methuselah. We are going to prepare a thousand chocolate bonbons filled with blackberry liqueur and a thousand bonbons filled with Maracuya liqueur in addition to the chocolate cake with almonds".
"By the time of this order?", Carmelina thinks it is a lot of chocolates for herself. When she was a little girl, she was bitten by a tsetse fly brought by one of the ships from Africa. She falls asleep everywhere, even while eating, and on more than one occasion she has almost lost her life by drowning while bathing in the river.
"They have to be ready by Saturday, we barely have a day left, and we also have to make five hundreds chocolates for the store".
The crowing of the roosters and the barking of the dogs announce the dawn. And for an hour now, Teresita and Carmelina have been working hard in the kitchen of the store.
"I'm going to open the store, it's already nine o'clock. You stay here working on the chocolates. You already know how to do it, but if you have any doubts, ask me. Don't do anything without consulting me, you know my grandmother is very delicate with her things"
"It's all right Teresita, don't worry". Carmelita is already tired of kneading the cocoa paste. It has to be well stretched and as soft as the baby's skin. Its aroma spreads in the kitchen, goes out the door and everything in the store is impregnated with the strong, bitter but delicious mixture of compounds, continues down the main street and enters each of the houses waking up the nighttime dwellers by the drum dance and the aguardiente.
At one o'clock in the afternoon, Teresita, after attending to the customers, enters the kitchen and finds Carmelita with her body heavily slumped in the chair, her frizzy black hair sticking out of her cap, her swarthy and plump arms hanging on both sides helplessly.
"Carmelita!, what are you doing sleeping?"
Carmelita wakes up startled, "Who is sleeping?"
"You were sleeping, with all the work to do. My grandmother trusted that I could fulfill this commitment and I ask you to help me and what you do is sleep during working hours".
"I've only been asleep for a few minutes, don't bother".
After lunch, Carmelita continues with her work. The cocoa dough is very heavy, her arms hurt, and she is still missing a thousand bonbons.She recalls seeing a cocoa paste in a pantry at the end of the hallway. And Carmelita is looking for the dough already prepared and with it, she makes the chocolates filled with parchita liqueur, the five hundred for for the store and also the cake. At the end, she still has a lot of energy.
When Teresita enters the kitchen she is amazed, it is sparkling clean and the chocolates are arranged on the trays and the cake is beautifully decorated with the slivered almonds forming a spiral. When the store closes at eight o'clock at night, everything is ready to be delivered in the morning.
On Saturday morning, the order is delivered to the Gonzalez family's home. The party should start in the afternoon. The table in the center of the garden is adorned with bouquets of carnations on a white tablecloth of yellow flowers. Thirty chairs await the guests.
Teresita and Carmelita celebrate the successful completion of the work,
"You know, I slept very well last night, I didn't feel tired, I think that working in the store did me a lot of good".
"That's the effect of chocolate, that's why the emperor Moctezuma drank cocoa every day, it gave him the strength to keep that harem of women he had".
"Teresita!, my dear granddaughter, come help me!", Doña Mercedes was outside with a load of boxes.
"Grandma!, come on Carmelita
"Good to see your grandmother".
Upon entering the store, Grandma makes a quick inspection.
"Everything is very clean, how did it go with the order for the Gonzalez family?"
"Very good grandma, if you had seen Carmelita how quickly she made the chocolates and also the cake, she was incredible and a great help to me".
Carmelita's face was full of pride and she was waiting for Mrs. Mercedes to thank her, but this did not happen, the grandmother came closer and closer until she was in front of her. Her gaze was inquisitive, she seemed to want to read her mind.
"Don't tell me Carmelita that you dared to take the cocoa paste that I had kept in my cabinet".
Carmelita's mouth dropped open
"Let's go soon to the Gonzalez's house", doña Mercedes was a little worried
When they were arriving they heard a great noise, in the yard there were hens and roosters mounted on the table and one or another chick running among the plants in the garden. And a big black pig was eating everything that had fallen to the ground.
Mercedes prepared this chocolate paste many years ago, from the fruit of some trees that some Trinidadians brought and that her father had planted near the house so that it would mix with the criollo cocoa and give more strength to the plants. But the fruits of the offspring of these crosses were getting smaller and smaller. Her father assumed that those Trinitario cocoa plants were going to ruin him, so one day he cut them all down, except for two, because the cocoa from their fruits had saved his daughter Mercedes from a very high fever.
Twenty years later, Antonio Guzman is lying in Mercedes' father's hammock. He is an authoritarian man. Mercedes works day and night to take care of him and his five children. She gets up every morning before the rooster crows and goes to bed with the starlight. That night, she had a dream about her father, who told her that until that day Antonio would to bed in his hammock. Mercedes got up and prepared cocoa from the fruits of the surviving trees. She poured Antonio a big cup of hot chocolate, so hot that it burned his mouth and hands, but still he kept drinking. And he asked for another and another until he had four cups. He stopped, went for a walk into the jungle and did not return. Mercedes was left alone in charge of her five children, who never asked what had happened to their father, they were relieved by his absence.
"We are going to take all those hens, roosters and chicks and lock them in the corral".
"Grandma, what about the pig?"
Leave him alone, although he is very fat, but I don't think he has much time left to live. But in this Doña Mercedes was wrong, Don Nemesio lived many years more, digging ocumo and yams in the humid jungle of the peninsula of Paria. In the streets of the village the children run around with chickens and chicks that have appeared overnight.Teresita pays them a few coins to keep them away from the store where they go every morning to ask for chocolate.
Thank you very much for reading, this is my entry in The Ink Well Fiction Prompt #117
The images were edited in Canva.
The translation from Spanish to English was done in www.deepl.com
