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?