Dulce de Higos

I want to write about ovaries – my ovaries. For 35 years, I had the pair – the symmetrical duo. Then, on a bumpy five-hour bus ride to Bilbao, one twisted. It had filled with blood, and blown up in size, growing as round and heavy as a grapefruit. I landed in a crowded Spanish hospital, was prescribed pain medicine, and then I flew back over the Atlantic. There, my gynecologist drained the ‘grapefruit’. It filled up again almost immediately.

Our ovaries just don’t behave. Never – not in my family. My mother, my aunts, my grandmother – we are full of midnight emergency trips, hospital beds, cut up bodies. My doctor eventually clipped mine out. The clinical term for an ovary saturated with blood is a “chocolate ovary”. It’s a disgusting, yummy name. It was my left ovary.

Endometriosis. It’s a name that doesn’t suggest much, and certainly doesn’t convey the Victorian horror novel experience of living with it. Excessive growth of tissue along the uterine wall gets torn off during menstruation, which can result in painful cramps and exaggerated bleeding. The pain resembles a kind of grinding of the uterus, a stretching, pressing, and stabbing of the body’s most delicate spots. I bleed in clots the size of fists, uncontrollably, so anemia becomes an issue. So does infertility. Women with endometriosis also tend to form multiple cysts in their uterus. I had a number of them. The one that nearly did me in had bloomed inside the ovary itself. Driving along the rustic, dusty Basque countryside, my ovary engorged, twisted, and nearly burst.

In these modern times, women like me lean on pharmaceuticals, surgery, acupuncture, meditation, psychiatry…but my mother remembers Mama Chabe. Mama Chabe, my great grandmother, grew up in Tanicuchi, a bitterly chilly Andean town south of Quito. Every month, when she began to bleed, she locked herself in her bedroom. She kept to her bed for days. There was little comfort for her – none in the way we know. She just lived through it – the back pain, the nausea, the headaches,  the relentless, exaggerated bleeding, the closed-off half-life. It must have caused a great weariness in her, that war within her  body.

Many times – between trips to the doctor – I imagined holding my ovary in my hand. It wasn’t damaged and swollen like the one inside of me, but whole and healthy. It would feel small in my palm, but deep and heavy, and perfectly shaped. A healthy ovary should look like a fig, that same sort of tear drop shape, and that same size. The ovary in my mind’s eye would look like the most perfect fig imaginable. The stuff under the skin always promised something spectacular, rather than something menacing or hurtful.

To me, the perfect fig is an Ecuadorian fig. I think about Ecuadorian figs often –  their healthy plumpness, and their abundance. The figs are just bountiful there – you see heaps of them, everywhere. Mostly, you find them huddled together in deep, wide pots over busy fires. They look – in those pots – like crowded ovaries.  They’re alive, shimmering in their juices, with the blossoming, warming scent of sugar and spices – dulce de higos.

I remember coming upon the scene in my aunts’ kitchens many times – that giant golden pot of bubbling caramel, the biting smell of cinnamon, the glistening pile of figs.

The figs (and their juices) do most of the heavy labor. Their bottoms are cut into a cross and then tumbled into the paila, with water, spices, and a few cups of panela. Inevitable in Ecuador, but somewhat difficult to find here*, panela is unprocessed, unrefined cane sugar sold in dense beige rounds. The panela melts in with the water and the fig juices, and becomes a rich syrup. The cut-up figs suck it in, its mineral, molasses taste.

The mixture boils, and then simmers. After a while, the skin on the figs deepen to the color of chocolate, and then even deeper than chocolate, to an espresso color. Then they begin to truly gleam. The whole thing bubbles over the heat, but never for too long. The figs shouldn’t melt, or dissolve, or fall apart. They should keep their shape. The figs should remain figs.

My aunts serve dulce de higos the traditional way – two or three whole figs in petite glass bowls, with the caramel drizzled on top. The skin of the figs breaks readily with the spoon, but the meat inside stays firm. An amber juice oozes out. It smells like licorice, and it has a heady, intimate taste. We eat with a slice of tender white cheese. It’s cool and salty. We nibble the cheese, and dip it in the warm syrup. Then we relish the beautiful discord on our tongues.

I think about eating figs when I have problems with my ovaries. And why not? Why not get fat off them, and eat them with abandon? Why not get some life out of them? It’s me in front of a fig, and I sink my teeth into it. It feels like flesh in my mouth. And tastes as rich and delicious, and as dark. It tastes like treat served up only for me, something that I’ve come upon in the darkest room of a fairy tale.

 

* Happily, I’ve recently been able to find panela in local Hispanic markets here in D.C.