IV.
With courteous good wishes, we left the señors’ pleasant company, and went on, still in the direction of a church-tower. The shops were far from interesting, much like others down in the islands, with the exception of a chocolate-shop, which we found to be the sales office of a factory where a great deal of prepared chocolate is made, for Caracas is a great chocolate market. After we had filled our pockets with all we could carry, of chocolate blocks and chocolate fishes and chocolate dolls, we started on again, munching the chocolate as we went, until we came at last to the Cathedral, which was in a state of mortar and lime and scaffolding, due to having the cracks from last October’s earthquake doctored up in the same matter-of-fact way that we clean house in the spring.
Well, we were glad at last to have seen the inside of the Cathedral, for even without the suggestion of a guide-book, we had in a sort of way felt that we ought to do so; such a slave of “Ought” does the traveller become, in spite of utmost precaution.
By this time the sun was nearing noon, and we naturally turned in the direction of the Gran Hotel de Venezuela as the only available place in which to rest; that is, I thought it was the only available place, but the Spanish Student knew better. How he knew, or when he had experimented, he would not say, nor could the truth be forced or dragged from him, as he walked on toward the Gran Hotel de Venezuela; but I had a suspicion, from the decided click to his step, and a lurking joy in his eye, that he had forsaken the Gran Hotel de Venezuela; that he had discovered a new Arcadia, and, oh! it was so delightful to feel that it was not the Gran Hotel de Venezuela. Then he stopped at a lattice,—I am sure there wasn’t a door in the house—at the lattice of an enticing Dulceria, and we sat down where it was cool and quiet, and I waited to see what would happen. El propietorio appears. At once, at the sight of the Spanish Student, the señor smiles, and disappears. They had met before. The señor enters once more,—for we are not to be left to an ordinary waiter,—this time with two tall glasses,—very tall, thin glasses.
If you could only have felt the fatigue of that moment! We had tramped about three hours, under the high, white sun, with the drowsy spell of noon creeping stealthily over the city, and even over the insatiable tourist; if you could have been with us to have seen the two tall glasses, filled to the brim, placed on the table by mine host himself, you, too, would have concluded that it was no small matter to be thus refreshed. It looked like lemonade, and yet it didn’t, and it tasted,—well there’s no other explanation possible; it was bewitched. Mine host had crossed his heart, looked twice over his right shoulder, turned three times on his left toe, and then pronounced the spell.
One taste convinced me that it took a lot of things to make that lemonade,—a lot of things besides limes and water, and whatever that lot of things was, it was the finest combination I had ever known. Mine host pronounced it lemonade; so did the Spanish Student, though I heard him suggest “un poquito de Rom Imperial” to the señor. With one taste, all fatigue took wings, everything took wings. The bent-wood table capered off with the bent-wood chair, and the long, fly-specked mirror cavorted from side to side with the parrot-cage. Everything was lovely and undulatory, and life was one long oblivion of the red-headed housekeeper at the Gran Hotel de Venezuela.
He, the one opposite, leaned back and looked amused and satisfied, and said: “There’s more coming.”
“What, more lemonade?”
“No, not more lemonade, but more of something else.”
And then it came. Again two tall glasses of a delicious rose-coloured ice, made of fresh wild strawberries, gathered that morning among the glistening dew of the Andes. In the centre of the ice, like the rakish masts of a fairy’s ship, two richly browned, delicate tubes of sweetened pastry bore the ensign of our feast.
They reminded me of the lamplighters we children used to make at a penny a hundred, on winter evenings by the crackling coal fire.
You remember? Or have you never had the fun?
You take a bit of paper an inch wide and twelve inches long, wet your finger, give a queer kind of twist to one corner and up it rolls, in a long, neat shape. Double it over at the end, and there you are. Sometimes it unwinds, and then it is exactly like the confectioner’s roll in Caracas, only white instead of a rich, luscious brown.
From that moment on, all other attractions of Caracas, the University, the Casa Amarilla, the Pantheon, palled in attraction before that Dulceria. It became to us, and to every one we met, the loadstone of Caracas. To taste of an ice made from berries picked among the valleys of the Andes is no small matter, and to quaff a lemonade which, without suspicion, could still fashion wings at least as lasting as those of Icarus of old, is also no small matter, and may we not be forgiven and no questions asked if we confess to more than one return to the Dulceria shop just across the Plaza in Caracas?