Authors: Norman Lewis
But oysters remain by common consent at the top of the aphrodisiac league, despite the extraordinary physical passivity of molluscs compared with tigers and Liberian children. Throughout recorded history, many
bon viveurs
have sworn by them. Casanova, bolstered by their support, is said to have become the lover of 130 women, two of them nuns who rapidly forsook their vows after being plied by the seducer with oysters and champagne. The latter I have no argument with—champagne’s useful consequences are easily demonstrable—but aphrodisiac oysters seem to me no more than a persistent and universal self-delusion. I have thought so ever since an experience suffered in my youth, nearly sixty years ago, on a journey by dhow up the Red Sea.
I had gone with two friends in the hope of entering and exploring the Yemen, in those days hardly known in the western world. Permission to land was refused, and shortly afterwards we ran into a storm which stripped away the dhow’s mainsail, forcing us to take refuge on the desert island of Kamaran, a few miles off the Arabian coast. The island’s principal inhabitants were a tribe of pearl-fishers, who spent their lives scouring the sea bottom in search of oysters and had developed a lung capacity which enabled them to stay underwater for up to four minutes. The diver wore a clip on his nose, a weight round his leg and was connected by a line to a dhow from which he leaped feet first. Having collected the oysters in his basket, he gave the signal to be pulled up. Coming to the surface, he was on the point of suffocation. Sometimes divers were brought up unconscious and occasionally they could not be revived. They suffered from neuralgia, rheumatism and tuberculosis, and tended to have short lives. Their main problem, however, was dietary. The island of Kamaran could not support one blade of grass—nothing could be induced to grow there. The pearl-divers lived on oysters and a little seaweed, and although these resources were said to contain the minerals necessary to sustain life, the local medical evidence was that the divers possessed an abnormally low sexual drive and a low level of fertility, to which was ascribed the fact that one-child families were the rule. If a child died, the only hope of replacing it was for the would-be father to slip away illegally for a few weeks to an oyster-free diet in the Yemen.
Kamaran was then a British possession with an administrator from England. ‘But don’t you eat oysters?’ I asked him, and he shook his head in amazement at the idea. ‘In a cold climate and in moderation perhaps,’ he said, ‘but not here. I don’t recommend you to try them either. They have an inconvenient effect.’
What exaggerations are committed even by the most sophisticated of us in the pursuit of love!
I came across further telling evidence against the aphrodisiac properties of seafood, this time on a trip to Cuba in 1960. I was there to interview Ernest Hemingway when I stumbled on a prawn-eating craze that had taken hold of Havana. He seemed to be the man responsible for Havana’s sudden rush to prawns.
Hemingway had sunk quietly into the background towards the end of the Batista regime, to re-emerge with Castro’s entry into the capital and be photographed in a congratulatory hug with the Maximum Leader. His first reappearance in the press was to lecture the Cubans on their eating habits, reminding them that shortages of rice and beans, the nation’s staple diet, were always possible, and that rich resources of seafood remained largely unexploited in their coastal waters. He assured them that the best prawns in the Caribbean awaited harvesting off the Isla de Juventud (Youth), where they were currently eaten only by the natives with a well-known result that had given the island its name.
Of all the many bars in Havana, one called Sloppy Joe’s was then the most celebrated, largely because it was Hemingway’s custom to put in an appearance there every day at about 1 p.m., accompanied by his admirers. They would then perform the daily ritual of prawn-eating that attracted so many sightseers. I went to Sloppy Joe’s one day, and although a bout of influenza had kept Hem at home, the prawn-eating ceremony, Hemingway-style, went ahead as demonstrated by his friends.
The scene was very Cuban. The regulars, their high-heeled boots polished for the second time that day, sat sipping their Hatuey beer waiting for the performance to begin. Two or three decorous and extremely beautiful mulatto prostitutes were hanging about, flapping their fans in the background. The sweet smell of the shore blew in through the open windows, carrying with it the twitterings of canaries in the shade trees. These birds were the descendants of the thousand or two released in celebration of a birthday by the dictator Batista. From the distance another sound inseparable from the old Cuba could be heard—the incessant tapping of drums.
At exactly one o’clock, the door was flung open, and in trooped the men who had come to eat prawns. The newcomers lined up along the counter; the bartender selected a fine and extremely active prawn from his tray, brushed it with oil and dropped it on the hotplate. Here it squirmed and snapped, emitting the faintest of hisses, before being snatched away to be presented on a blue saucer to the first of those in the line.
The recipient took it in a tissue between his fingers and bit off its head. This he dropped on the immaculate floor before he thrust half the body into his mouth and began to crunch. It was Hem’s contention that all that was most valuable in a prawn was in immediate contact with the inner shell or concentrated in the underbelly and the legs. The whole prawn, minus the head, was thus subjected to meticulous chewing, and all that could possibly be swallowed went down the throat.
The first prawn-eater did just this, and I was close enough to him to listen to the subdued crackle of the shell in his jaws. When he spat, as delicately as he could, a pinkness of prawn juices mixed with blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. He edged away from the bar, and the prawn-eaters waiting their turn followed. Soon a whitish detritus of prawns’ heads and a greyish pulp of shell fragments spread across the floor among the sparkling boots.
In ten minutes, it was all over and time for the serious drinking to begin. But did this manly performance of Papa Hemingway and his disciples at Sloppy Joe’s benefit any of them in any conceivable way or delay the process of ageing, as in the Island of Youth? Almost certainly not. The novelist, when I eventually met him, appeared old for his years and, after the jubilant shots taken with Castro, a persistent melancholy had returned to his expression. A year later, at the age of sixty-two, he was to blow his brains out. There had been some talk of mental instability in the press, but this his brother denied. Ernest’s tragic end, he said, had been due not to any mental decline but to his despair at the treachery of a body in which throughout his life he had taken so much pride.
So much for prawns.
But what about peas—or cheese? Casanova’s formidable record is unexceptional by comparison with that of Ninon de Lenclos, the eighteenth-century beauty who is reputed to have had more than 5,000 partners in an outstandingly active forty years. Asked if, in what is an essentially repetitious process, she ever experienced boredom, her reply was, ‘Certainly not. Love may look always the same, but indeed it is new and different on every occasion.’ She attributed her outstandingly successful amatory career partly to the assistance provided by pureed peas, to which she sometimes added a little sherry. She was also partial to cheese, which would come as no surprise to an Italian; cheese is one of the supreme aphrodisiacs of the Italian people, if we allow that aphrodisiacs have any real existence.
Italian cheese in its most distinguished form—
mozzarella di bufala—
certainly has most of the attributes upon which aphrodisiacs base their mysterious attraction. It may not quite reach the heights of those witches’ brews which tempt the sexually sluggish with their fusion of hope and alarm: ‘Take several brains of male sparrows,’ Aristotle instructs, ‘and pigeons that have not begun to fly’—these to be boiled with turnips and carrots in goat’s milk, and then sprinkled with clover seeds. But authentic
mozzarella di bufala
is rare, and rarity (plus difficulty of access or extraction) is the thing.
The cheese is produced in tiny quantities in an almost inaccessible swamp south of Naples by an outdated animal whose ancestors were probably brought to this once-Greek colony in classical antiquity. Because there is so little of it, and because it is so superior to its many commercial imitations,
mozzarella di bufala
is expensive. During the Second World War, I spent a year in the vicinity of these swamps and watched the unsuccessful peasant descendants of a heroic past sloshing miserably through the swamp water to root up the occasional edible plant. The finest present I could send to any Italian friend driven by the disruptions of war from this splendid area was a kilo of mozzarella with all the overbrimming magic that for them it contained.
It was during my war year in Naples that I first noticed one of the outstanding mysteries concerning aphrodisiacs. Why were so many educated men prepared to submit themselves, even if only occasionally, to patent absurdities and primitive beliefs?
Many of my Italian friends had completed university courses. One was a lecturer in psychology, and several were doing well in medicine and the law. Nevertheless, they were superstitious about food. There was the borderline case of the semi-magical properties attributed to
mozzarella di bufala,
which was at least appetising and nutritious, but I found less to excuse the custom of two academics who feasted at Easter time on newly hatched storks, and a surgeon happy to experiment with a soft cheese from Vesuvius to which a macerated lamb’s foetus had been added. My friends did not deny that the interest lay in the possibility of enhanced sexual pleasure.
A feature of Naples in those days was a black market of proportions and complexity almost certainly exceeding anything else on earth. Cargoes equivalent to those of one ship in three unloaded in Naples were spirited away, later to reappear for sale in the Forcella market, where even the latest in machine-guns might be hidden under the counter. Since it was well known that this market was operated by the chiefs of the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, which was staffed at its higher levels by members of the Italo-American Mafia, it was accepted that there was little to be done.
Eventually I was instructed by the field security officer to carry out some preliminary analysis of the army’s losses in terms of quantities and values, and I told him that the most important losses were of penicillin, little of which was getting through to the military hospitals. When he asked me what was being done about this, I told him that I had arrested the principal dealer and taken him to Poggio Reale jail. ‘And is he still there?’ the FSO asked, to which the unhappy reply was that the man had been freed after three days. At the time of his arrest, he had laughed in my face. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘You are nothing and can do nothing. Last night I had dinner with the general, and if you continue to make a nuisance of yourself, I can have you sent away.’
Since nothing was to be done about the penicillin, my energies were diverted to the problem of vanishing food supplies from the base depot. Here, behind a high electrified fence on the outskirts of Afragola, capital of the Neapolitan Camorra, the local Mafia, several thousand tons of tinned foods were piled high. Lorries came up from the port every day to add to this vast accumulation, and by night roughly the same number of lorries trundled down to the nocturnal black markets of neighbouring towns, carrying about the same amount of corned beef, which had been delivered to the depot earlier on.
I suspected that the eventual destination of much of these provisions was the many restaurants in the area that had recently opened under the stimulus of war, and I set out to pursue this theory. It was against the orders of the military government for members of the armed forces to eat in civilian restaurants, but the most pleasant of them were usually chock-a-block with British and American officers knocking back raw Neapolitan wine and listening to Neapolitan songs about love and betrayal.
Vincenzo a Mare, the most romantic of these places, was on the Posillipo shore under the villa where Nelson had paid court to Lady Hamilton and close to the spot where, after watching the obliteration of Pompeii, Pliny had set off for a closer view of the disaster from which he never returned. It was also here that Cuoca, the last great Camorra chieftain, had been brought in old age for a traditional funeral feast by the underlings who proposed to get rid of him. He was feasted, praised, hugged and kissed by all, and then, full of well-being and at peace with the world, an expert with a mattress-maker’s needle stabbed him to death.
Part of my task was to know everybody, and I knew Umberto, the restaurant’s owner. ‘What are you serving today, Umberto?’ I asked him one day, and he told me
frutti di mare,
based, as I knew, on such atrocious materials as sea cucumber and an obscene marine worm abundant in local waters.
‘What about
carne alleata
?” This was the Neapolitan term for any brand of black-market meat abstracted from the base depot and served up secretly at extraordinary prices. ‘Some of your customers are eating canned meat,’ I said. ‘This carries a prison sentence.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is brought here by an American colonel,’ he said.
I asked him the price, and he told me.
‘It is very dear,’ I said. ‘Twice the price you are charging for
frutti di mare.
How do you explain that?’
‘For
carne alleata
we are paying very much, because is better.’
‘For what?’
He oscillated his hips in a revolting fashion.
‘Per fare amore,’
he said.
‘Bring me one of the tins,’ I told him. He brought one in a bag, and we went into a corner together where he opened it.
‘Spam,’ I said. ‘Of all things. Spam, an aphrodisiac. Just imagine it. Do you personally believe this is good to
fare amore
?”
He laughed. ‘They are all eating it for this purpose. But for me personally—you want I tell you straight? I don’t eat any of these things. For me is good wear a medal for San Rocco. This is OK for me. This is doing trick.’