In Like Water for Chocolate, as surrogate father, the mother demands filial obedience. She runs a ranch on the U.S.-Mexican border, with three daughters and two female servants. “Never needing a man for anything,” she embodies paternal law. Jovita González in Life along the Border explains: “In his large, strongly built stone or adobe house, the ranchero led a patriarchal existence. As head of the family his word was authority, no other law was needed and there was no necessity for civil interference. An offense, where criminal or moral, met with severe punishment.” To care for her mother, Tita, the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry; the second daughter, Rosaura, is presented in marriage to Pedro, originally the lover of Tita; Gertrudis, the oldest daughter, runs off with one of Pancho Villa’s men, works in a brothel, becomes a general, marries a general, smokes cigarettes, and learns to drive a car. Knowledge that Tita has been conceived out of wedlock causes her mother’s husband’s death and leaves the daughter fatherless. She is raised by surrogate mothers, women who neither marry nor have children, servants who can neither read nor write. Undernourished by a mother whose sexual transgression has left her a widow and in a man’s role, Tita is raised in the kitchen and learns to cook.
In Chocolat, Vianne is raised by a single mother who struggles to feed her only daughter because she has no patience for cooking, for food that demands time. Always on the move, she is a traveler, a fugitive, changing places, changing names, on the run from the law for infringing minor laws to ensure her survival. She has taught her daughter to read tarot cards, not recipes. Vianne is also illegitimate, with the law of the father re-embodied as “the Black Man,” the priest, the figure of death, threatening to steal the daughter from the mother who refuses to remain in place. The daughter eventually nurses her mother, who wants to see America before succumbing to a terminal illness. When the mother is hit by a cab in New York City, the daughter moves to France and gives birth to a daughter.
Men are symbolically powerful but socially marginal. Male lovers appear as mulattos and gypsies; they mirror the social ostracism of rebellious daughters but fail to make them respectable. One man refuses to marry the daughter he loves in order to obey her mother; another, unable to commit to the mother, will never know his daughter. Fire is their fate—forms of arson that turn them into patients or deprive them of property. Like Rochester, who loses his sight in the fire at Thornton Hall before he is entitled to marry Jane.
As unmarried women, Tita and Vianne prepare the food for ceremonial occasions that mark rites of passage for others. Vianne is self-taught, poring over menus from restaurants where she and her mother could not afford to eat. She learns the names of dishes she has never tasted, and she collects recipes, torn from magazines abandoned in train stations, into a scrapbook. Compared to cooking, chocolate-making is not considered time-consuming. Tita is taught by Nacha, the cook, and she collects recipes handed down to her in a cookbook that will be the only object left once the ranch has burned down and will in turn become the novel the reader is reading. Recipes require enormous labor: fattening up and castrating roosters to make capons or breaking 170 eggs for a wedding cake. Tita prepares the wedding feasts for her lover when he marries her sister and for her niece who marries the son of the American doctor, perpetuating the tradition for which she herself remains ineligible.
Vianne opens an artisanal chocolaterie in a small village in the southwest of France, an area that claims to be the oldest site of continuous chocolate manufacture, authentically local and distinctly French. On Shrove Tuesday, while others think about fasting, La Céleste Praline opens the doors of what used to be a bakery. Easter Sunday, the privileged moment for expensive confectionary purchases, is greeted by a chocolate festival across the square from the church. While self-employment in the provisioning crafts is premised on the work of a married couple and the creation of a new business tends to coincide with marriage, Vianne pays for the building with cash. Unlike her mother, she has a bank account and a trade.
A chocolatier is known as a “maison” or “house,” “a corporate family unit that held commercial property (ideally) in perpetuity,” “a unit of production encompassing the dual roles of enterprise and household,” identified by a patronym. The husband produces chocolates in the private space of the workshop, and the wife sells the chocolates in the public space of the boutique, as explained by Susan Terrio. Vianne greets her customers with “I know everyone’s favorite” and proceeds to offer them their favorites “on the house,” bypassing commercialized relations with village locals. Selling requires sustained emotional labor that is less demanding than that required of a daughter, in hotel rooms too small, caring for a mother who believes “we don’t need anyone but each other.”
Tita, after the death of her surrogate mother, takes on the role of ranch cook. If she is denied marriage, is she allowed love? Afraid of becoming “the last chile in walnut sauce left on the platter after a fancy dinner,” Tita prepares meals like “quail in rose petal sauce,” “a dish for the gods” according to Pedro, and assists in the birthing and feeding of his children. The daughter accuses the mother of killing her nephew by banishing the family to San Antonio, while the mother accuses the daughter of producing an illegitimate child with her brother-in-law. Rosaura, who wants her daughter to grow up in “the sacred institution of the family,” agrees to a pact whereby Tita agrees not to have a child if Rosaura agrees that her sister and her husband may continue to meet in secret.
In September, while Tita is making chocolate, roasting the cocoa beans and reserving part of the cocoa butter for lip ointment, Gertrudis arrives for a cup of freshly whipped hot chocolate. Tita, having wished for her sister’s appearance so that she might discuss her unwanted pregnancy, serves her: “In this house they made hot chocolate like nobody else’s, since they took so much care with every step in making it, from its preparation to the whipping of the chocolate, yet another critical procedure. Inexpert beating can turn an excellent-quality chocolate into a disgusting drink, either by under- or overcooking, making it too thick or even burnt.” Chocolate reminds Gertrudis of the maternal home she is nostalgic for, while for Tita the home is where the mother repeatedly returns from beyond the grave to chastise her youngest daughter. When Gertrudis gives birth to a mulatto baby, Tita reveals their mother’s secret, an illegitimate pregnancy with a Negro escaping the Civil War, legitimized by the unwanted marriage to Tita’s father.
Vianne serves a hot chocolate that is stronger than espresso, transforming her shop into a café, creating an ambience that combines the intimacy of home with the pleasure of celebration, regardless of the day. Blurring the line between the personal and the professional, she drinks chocolate while serving it to others. She becomes an empathic confidante to those whose losses are graver than her own: the owner of a dog who is dying, the wife of an abusive husband, a grandmother prevented from seeing her grandchild. Rather than demystifying the family as sacred institution by exposing its secrets, Vianne provides for those outside its traditional structures within a public space.
French chocolatiers trace their craft to the Aztecs. The cocoa bean was revered before Christ and thereby transcends the moral imperatives and hypocrisies of a church that seeks to control women’s sexuality through marriage. In Chocolat, the melting of couverture takes place in a petit bourgeois enterprise across from the cathedral by producing the “raw and earthy tang of the Americas.” On Easter, a giant chocolate statue of Eostre, with corn sheaf in one hand and a basket of eggs in another, dominates the window display. Swiss chocolate appears in the novel in the form of supermarket chocolate the priest remembers having as a boy, too expensive then and not sufficiently sophisticated now.
Chocolate enables a mode of production in which reproductive and productive labor are no longer at odds. Mothering takes place within an economy that clouds the distinction between profit and gift exchange and diminishes the difference between public and private. The unpaid labor of the cook on a ranch and confectionary offered “on
the house” are forms of social reproduction that maintain gender roles even as they offer a critique of familial and ecumenical traditions.
While the French try to increase the consumption of chocolate that relies on a repressed colonial past, the Swiss try to preserve within a global economy the name “Swiss chocolate” for confections to be consumed the very same day.
Crossing the U.S.-Mexican border or American expatriation in France considers local consumption part of transnational flows, enabling fictions that legitimate relations seeking to survive in spite of interdictions.
Gold
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History
Secrets are shared. Numbers are whispered into unwilling ears. Every day in the orphanage they are recited, like a catechism. They are marked underneath tabletops, inside wooden chests. The name of the bank. The number of the account. Eventually, the name and number are forgotten. The furniture is removed. Sums have been deposited under someone else’s name. A stranger has been told “in a bank.” Revealing additional specifics might encourage theft by an imposter.
Article 47(b) of Switzerland’s 1934 Banking Act: “Anyone who in his capacity as an officer or employee of a bank … violates his duty to observe silence or his professional rule of secrecy … shall be liable to a fine of up to 20,000 francs or imprisonment of up to six months, or both.” Tax evasion, as opposed to tax fraud, is a civil matter, not a criminal one. William Tell was a tax evader. Article 47(b) was not invented for Jews but, some say, was first used to protect Jews: Swiss bankers refused to repatriate funds to Germany or provide information about the accounts of German nationals.
French Huguenots secure their capital against Catholic kings, and following the French Revolution royalists protect their property by seeking out private banks in Geneva, hidden behind small brass plates. The portfolios of the rich are managed with discretion, to secure rather than increase wealth not tied up in land. Protestantism liberates finance from both ecclesiastical rule and individual guilt. Private banks are not allowed to advertise, can’t solicit deposits, don’t publish balance sheets, are not governed by the Banking Act. They are not entitled to buy gold.
Swiss banks rely on a steady stream of clients with liquid assets who are fearful of the future and deposit money they then pretend they don’t possess. (Faith, Safety in Numbers)
Bank secrecy belongs to the Privatsphäre, not the private but the secret sphere, not the private understood as the bedroom or the body, but an individual’s entitlement to secrecy about health, family life, and financial affairs. The right of refusal to provide information to anyone outside the Gemeinde. Secrecy is what makes Swiss banking unique. The abolition of bank secrecy could lead to a withdrawal of funds by foreigners and the collapse of the Swiss economy. In 1996 bank secrecy is lifted for all dormant and heirless accounts belonging to victims of the Holocaust. In 2009 bank secrecy is lifted for 250 UBS clients suspected of U.S. tax evasion.
Until 1990 there existed in Switzerland a Form B that entitled an attorney to open an anonymous account for a client. The account was opened in a fiduciary capacity, with the principle’s name withheld. These are numbered accounts, where the rightful accountholder never appears and is known only to the bank’s director. When a client withdraws money, he or she remains seated upstairs in a boardroom while the director goes to the cashier to withdraw the requisite sum. Dormant accounts fall into two categories: for the first, for which creditors exist for material assets conveyed to Switzerland before or during the early stages of the war, heirs present themselves without death certificates or documentation proving they are the deceased’s sole heir. These are dormant accounts, where no transactions have taken place for years. The second, or heirless accounts, have no identifiable heirs. Whole families have been gassed or shot. If a creditor cancels a custodial agreement, the bank is at liberty to destroy relevant documents after ten years. If the creditor is unknown, that is, has not closed the account, the bank may not destroy any records. If an account is orphaned, the bank is legally bound to seek out the person’s heirs. In the early postwar years, dormant accounts were transferred to so-called collective accounts. Eventually they disappeared into the bank’s undisclosed reserves.
When the Berlin Wall falls, and the Iron Curtain comes down, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II is celebrated, national archives are declassified for the first time in fifty years, and the final chapter is once again not closed.
Laundered money is money “washed in the Alpine snows” (Faith, Safety in Numbers). Swiss bankers are the chief launderers of looted Nazi gold; they organize sophisticated laundry routes. The Germans deliver gold to Switzerland and are reimbursed in Swiss francs. They take these francs to Turkey, Portugal, Sweden, and Spain (the other so-called neutrals) to buy raw materials. The central banks of these countries buy back the Nazi gold from the Swiss National Bank by using Swiss francs. Looted gold is gold that has been taken from the gold reserves of the national banks of eleven occupied countries (monetary gold) and from wedding rings, gold dental crowns, bracelets, watches, earrings, artificial limbs, and spectacle frames of concentration camp victims (Totengold) delivered by the SS to the Reichsbank under the code name “Melmer.” This gold-laundering machine remains in operation until three weeks before Hitler’s suicide. In the subterranean galleries of the Kaiserode potassium mine near Merkers, U.S. infantrymen discover the gold reserves moved out of Berlin after the Reichsbank was hit by an Allied air raid. In a huge, unventilated room they find bags of paper money and gold currency, neatly arranged in rows, as well as gold bricks, Passover goblets, and paintings from the German National Art Museum. It takes four days to unload twenty-two railcars into a mine with five hundred kilometers of tunnels. In 1946 Britain, France, and the United States establish the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold to redistribute 303 tons of gold to claimants “in proportion to their losses.” Claims from central and eastern European nations, already behind the Iron Curtain, take years to resolve.
Swiss francs are as good as gold. (Smith, Hitler’s Gold)
Manganese, a resistant metal, used in the manufacture of gun barrels, is imported from Spain; tungsten, also called wolfram, the metal with the highest melting point, used in making dies for shells, comes from Portugal; stainless steel, used to manufacture ball bearings, is imported from Turkey. All of this is paid for in gold.
Gold does not oxidize in air or water and is the most malleable and ductile of pure metals. Too soft for monetary use, it is alloyed with copper or silver. Much of the gold mined in history is still in circulation. Gold is a chance discovery. Europe has produced little gold while South Africa has produced 50 percent of all gold ever mined. In 1971 the dollar was no longer convertible to gold, and in 1975 the price of gold was left to the free market. Hoarding gold bars, some think, provides a hedge against inflation.
“In general, real gold and non-existent gold were equally important in the Discovery, Conquest and the Colonization of the Americas” (Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1920). Gold was born in the Indies, died in Spain, and was buried in Genoa. If Spain was poor, it was because it was rich. The strangeness of the New World enhanced gold’s worth. Columbus, who failed to find gold, provided substitutes for wealth in the form of wonders. Indians used gold for ornamentation, the visibility of adornment promising the possibility of hidden treasure. Indians were wiped out by the hard labor of “river gold” (Vilar, A History of Gold and Money) with no opportunity to plant crops, engage in childbirth, resist organisms. “The economy of gold … was actually an economy of flesh, because selling and renting captured Indians as slaves became more profitable than mining” (Vilches, New World Gold). Queen Isabella banned imported brocade embroidered with thread made of precious metals, worried that her subjects were “squandering their fortunes, enriching foreign merchants and dissipating the national treasury” (Vilches, New World Gold).
“Money, which itself changes in value, is therefore a strange mea
sure of value” (Vilar, A History of Gold and Money). It should circulate like blood in the body. The central bank is like the heart, and should not let money lie stagnant. Money is not wealth, but gold is. Gold is a symbol of value, not a measure of wealth. “Gold-money embodies the functions of archetype, token, and treasure in one single object” (Vilches, New World Gold). Money is a medium of exchange that can take the form of metal or ink. The generation of money by money breeds illegitimate offspring. All the gold that arrived in Seville generated an ocean of paper.
Gold is a monetary metal used for international transactions and the wages of mercenaries. Metallic money becomes a commodity when its monetary value is in conflict with the market value of its metal. England is the home of the gold standard, gold as the incarnation of transcendental value. Switzerland is the last country to tie its currency to gold.
Gold is melted down by the Prussian mint and given pre-1939 German serial numbers. Convoys of trucks cross the Swiss border at Basel for the subterranean vaults of the Swiss National Bank in Bern. Bars are counted, classified, and registered below ground, then stacked on shelves. Every bar possesses its own identity card.
Belgian gold is sent to France prior to occupation and by France to Dakar before the French collapse, then moved inland to Kayes in September 1940. The Vichy government agrees to return the gold, some 4,944 sealed boxes weighing over 240 tons, to the Reichsbank. At Kayes it is loaded on a train to Bamako on the Niger River, then light trucks and riverboats transport it to Timbuktu, and finally to Goa. From there, it is moved by truck and camel north through the Sahara to Colomb-Béchar and by train to Algiers. It is moved the ten thousand kilometers by air to Marseilles with French and German aircraft (two tons per trip). The gold reaches Berlin in May 1942.
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