N.B. I wrote this in the spring of 2015 but many of you have not seen it before.
In Santiago, Chile, young lovers have a curious habit of consecrating their affection by placing a padlock on the railing of a local bridge and tossing the key into the Rio Mapoche, thus supposedly insuring that their amor will endure forever.
I discovered this in January, shortly after I arrived in the city, when during one of my long walks I crossed the Puente Racamalac (also called the Puente Condell), a rainbow-shaped footbridge in the Parque Balmaceda. I was reminded of it again on Valentine’s Day, when near the end of another long walk I crossed the bridge while two TV news crews were shooting some footage, presumably for a timely feature on the love locks, which I presumably wrecked by being a stout, sweaty, middle-aged American.
Puente Racamalac in Santiago, Chile
What’s most interesting to me, as a social historian, is that this custom is not an ancient one, but rather very new. In fact, it seems to have arrived in Chile only in 2012, following the release of the Spanish romantic drama, Tengo ganas a ti. In that movie, the main male character pledges his love to the main female character with a lock on a bridge, in this case the Pont d’en Gómez in Girona, Catalonia. Here’s the scene:
The 2012 Spanish movie Tengo ganas de ti (In English, I Want You) is based on a hit Italian movie from 2007, Ho voglia di te, which in turn was based on a 2006, best-selling romance novel of the same name by the Italian screenwriter and novelist, Frederico Moccia.
Moccia, 44, says he just dreamed up the ritual. “I liked the idea of tying locks to love because it is more solid, tangible,” he said. The book sold 1.1 million copies, the movie version came out – and soon life began imitating art.
The original lock scene of the book and the Italian movie was the famous Ponte Milvio over the Tiber River, built in 115BC, and site of the battle that made Constantine the first Christian emperor in 312AD.
As testament to how fast things spread in the modern world, within a few months of the Italian movie appearing, the city authorities in Rome had to start cutting locks off the bridge, lest the weight of them collapse the ancient structure. A similar dynamic has played out across Europe. In Paris, a footbridge over the Seine near the Louvre, the Pont des Artes, was also recently in danger of collapsing from the weight of Moccia’s love locks. The Parisian authorities responded with bolt cutters and a social media campaign. The lovers of Paris responded by moving to the Pont de l’Archevêché near Notre Dame.
Lovers locks on the Pont de' L’Archeveché in Paris
Curiously, Moccia’s novel has not yet been translated into English, despite doing very well in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian and Chinese. However, as we’ve seen with the spread of roadside memorials to traffic victims, something introduced to American roads via Mexican immigrants, sentimental customs have a way of getting to the USA and spreading rapidly.
So, look for love locks on an American bridge near you, coming soon.
N.B. Moccia’s novel was finally in 2021 translated into English as Two Chances with You.
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Few things are more distressing or funny than watching a fat man labor up a steep hill. And at the end of February 2015, at the height of the Chilean summer, when temperatures in Santiago were in the mid-90s, I was that fat man.
I was dragging myself up Cerro San Cristobal, the steep hill with the statue of the Virgin Mary on top, because I had foolishly agreed to accompany two dozen 19-year-olds to Torres del Paine, a trip that would include, I had been told, an 18-mile hike into the mountains of Patagonia. I was thus preparing myself by taking long daily walks—five or more miles—through Santiago, walks punctuated by stops at various picadas and fuentes de soda for nourishment and refreshment, usually in the form of a lomito italiano and a fanschopp or three.
A lomito italiano and a schopp, but not a fanschopp
I was trudging up Cerro San Cristobal because I had at last concluded that long sidewalk strolls in the flatlands of Santiago were insufficient preparation for mountain climbing. And, so there I was, mid-morning, two-thirds of the way up the hill, out-of-breath, red-faced and sweating like a prize sow, and the worst part was, that I was not alone. Cerro San Cristobal was packed with bikers, walkers, picnickers, and tourists, and because of that, I was being repeatedly accosted.
“Sir. Are you okay,” asked a park volunteer in a green vest, “Do you need help? A drink of water?” He held out a plastic bottle.
“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
Two hundred paces up the hill…
“Do you need assistance, Sir,” said a young woman with a clipboard, “there’s a bench right there.”
I waved her off with a grunt.
Another three minutes trudge and a pair of Carabineros in a patrol car slowed to crawl next to me, both of them gawping. Just when I was sure they were going to ask if I needed a ride to the hospital, the one in the passenger seat pointed to the front and they accelerated away. I suspect they thought I was going to die, and were worried they would have to lift my body into the ambulance.
My biggest mistake was thinking there would be a motero, someone selling mote con huesillos every few hundred meters on the way up Cerro San Cristobal . I had not brought along any water. My entire rehydration plan was based on mote con huesillos. I expected that, like everywhere else in Santiago, mote con huesillos would be available for purchase from a cart at frequent intervals.
I was wrong.
Mote con Huesillos. So strange, so good.
Mote con huesillo is one of those things that doesn’t knock you out, so much as sneak up on your blindside and grab you in a bear hug.
When you first encounter mote con huesillos, on your first trip to Chile, you don’t think you will like it, but you order it anyway because everyone around you has one in their hands. And when you try it, you notice the intense sweetness, but not much else. Yet, by the end of the second week, you’ve ordered it several times and can’t stop thinking about it, hoping you’ll have have another one soon.
Mote con huesillo is the most peculiar libation since bubble tea. It’s a sweet syrup of caramelized sugar water, served ice cold, with a pair of rehydrated dried peaches and a fistful of mote, wheat slow-cooked in an alkaline solution, i.e. nixtamalized.
It sounds like something concocted by German naturists as a breakfast food, except it’s sweeter than honey, more filling than spatzel, and more refreshing than anything found in Germany that isn’t served in festive, one-liter steins.
As the advertisement says, mote con huesillo is the “drink of Chile”, a fact that may be disputed by the patrons of the pisco sour, but not by me, and not by hundreds of thousands of Santiagueños who support a motero on every corner. “More Chilean than mote con huesillos,” is a popular saying, the equivalent of “more American than apple pie,” and liking it is the ultimate test of chilenidad, of Chileanness.
A motero selling mote con huesillos. Not seen on the way up Cerro San Cristobal
The story of how mote con huesillos found its way into the Chilean diet starts, as do so many of these stories, with the Mapuche, the native people who held off the Spanish and remained independent of colonial control for nearly 300 years.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the Mapuche were one of the few New World peoples who readily adopted Old World crops. In 1544, Pedro Valdivia, the Spanish conquistador who founded Santiago, distributed a large amount of wheat seed to the caciques of the Mapuche, as part of the effort to pacify and civilize the natives. The Mapuche planted it and loved it. Wheat grew especially well in the soil and climate of the Mapuche territory, and added a dimension of flavor and food security to the Mapuche diets. It provided enough extra food that it actually enabled the Mapuche to better resist the Spanish. So, it is with some justification that the Chilean historian José Bengoa calls the Mapuche “la gente del trigo“, the “Wheat People”, which as far as it goes is a half-accurate description of a badass people who came very close to defeating the Spanish.
Oddly, although wheat became a major staple in the Mapuche diet, it was not usually served in the form of bread. That came later, in the late-17th century, likely introduced by Spanish and creole women who had been captured by the Mapuche.
One famous example of such a captive is Isabel Vivar y Castro who was captured in 1633 and made the wife of the Mapuche cacique Curivilú. Two years later, she gave birth to his son, Alejandro. A few years after that, Isabel and Alejo were “rescued” by the Spanish and taken back to Concepción, where Isabel was ostracized for having been the wife of an indio, and Alejo for being a mestizo. Her response was to become a nun, and to give the boy to the Franciscans to raise. Alejo grew to adulthood, joined the Spanish army as an arquebusier, was denied promotion because he was a mestizo and deserted, returning home to his father. Once back in Araucanía, Alejo became an important war chief, a toqui. He introduced up-to-date Spanish military techniques and lead an army that destroyed Spanish forts and massacred settlements. In 1660 he was killed by his two native wives for getting drunk after a victory and raping a captive Spanish woman. (Chilean history, largely unknown, is wild.)
So, bread arrived late and was first enjoyed by the chiefs, who were most likely to have captive white women around the camp. Early European and Chilean visitors, both voluntary and involuntary, rarely mentioned bread in their accounts of Mapuche meals until the 18th century. Instead of bread, the Mapuche enjoyed their wheat as mürke, or mulke (in Spanish, harina tostada), toasted wheat ground into a coarse flour and then made into a gruel called ulpo, which is mixed with any variety of liquid, from honey to milk to water to jam, and served hot or cold.
Today, harina tostada makes its appearance in some odd places. Chileans like to sprinkle it onto watermelon as a condiment. They add a tablespoon or two of toasted wheat to cold water as a summer beverage, or into beer or wine as part of a native cocktail called the chuplica. It’s also added to stews as a thickener, served with sugar as a candy, or with fried onions as a snack. There's even a toasted wheat ice cream.
Sandia con harina tostada, watermelon with toasted wheat. Chilenidad!
The way the Mapuche prepared wheat was the same way they prepared maize: toasted over a fire and milled on a stone mortar with a stone pestle. And, if you’re toasting wheat the same way you’re toasting corn, why not also slow-cook whole kernels of wheat in a pot filled with wood ashes? Although, wheat flour, unlike plain corn meal, has no trouble making a dough, nor is it deficient in niacin or protein. But, if you nixtamalize wheat the result is mote, a plump bit of chewy goodness, not unlike pearled barley or bulgar wheat. It can be added to stews and soups to provide more body and extend the dish cheaply, or mixed with green beans as porotos con mote, or with potatoes in papas con mote.
By the 19th century, moteros, the sellers of mote, were a fixture in Santiago, with a large number of them congregating in the Barrio Mapocho around the Cal y Canto bridge, near the present-day Mercado Central. There, near the river, they had ready access to water, a necessity as the production of mote required a great deal of it. Their technique for processing wheat into mote would have been exactly the same as shown in the video below (except for the plastic buckets), where Señora Herminda Diaz Riquelme of Los Sauces in the Araucanía Region (old Mapuche territory) makes artisanal mote in the old fashioned way.
At 0:43, you can see Sra. Diaz R. sifting wood ashes, the key ingredient in the alkaline solution that nixtamalizes the wheat. The last half of the video is devoted to the extensive washing of the mote.
Another major agricultural product of colonial Chile was dried peaches, huesillos, which were mentioned in various sources as early as the 17th century, and were one of the items regularly exported to the more opulent colonial city of Lima, Peru.
The real conundrum for food historians of Chile is when mote met huesillos, the Chilean version of who got chocolate in my peanut butter. The best guess is that mote con huesillos was something cooked up in the late 19th century, in Santiago, as a summertime refreshment for city dwellers. There’s a good consideration of the problem at the blog Eating Chilean written by a retired American professor of anthropology.
However it got together, by the second decade of the 20th century, mote con huesillos was well established, as evidenced by this postcard from 1915:
It’s as if they’d never seen a camera before.
That gawping look on the faces of the boy and the man on the far right of the photo, that’s exactly how the Carabineros looked at me as I trudged to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, as a curiosity that might turn into something unpleasant and dangerous.
It was my fault I hadn’t brought any water on my hike up San Cristobal. I thought it likely that there would be moteros all along the way, dispensing their sugary Balm of Gilead to the needy. But also because the best place in the world to have a mote con huesillos is at the top of Cerro San Cristobal.
In my mind, Cerro San Cristobal and mote con huesillos go together like dried peaches and nixtamalized wheat.
At the top of San Cristobal, after you get off the funicular, but before you head up the flight of stairs to the base of the Virgin Mary statue, there is a patio with a half dozen stands selling souvenirs, snacks, drinks, and mote con huesillos. Buy a mote con huesillos, go to the edge of the patio, sit on the wall, and gaze at the city spread out beneath you. It’s a view that will reward you many times over, and a mote con huesillos is the best thing to drink while you look at it.
But, whatever else you do, take the funicular up to the top of Cerro San Cristobal. Please, take the funicular!
I wrote and published this piece a few years ago, but I think it’s one of the better things I’ve written and needs to be shared more widely. I’ll be back next week with something new.
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I’ve just managed to work my way through the first three seasons of the big breakout hoo-haw melodrama The Chosen, a series somewhat sorta based on the New Testament story of Jesus and his Apostles. On the one hand, it’s excessively annoying, filled as it is with glaring anachronisms, clunky acting and near blasphemies. On the other hand, I feel somewhat compelled to watch it, mainly because the actor playing Jesus, Jonathan Roumie, is very good, and because, despite the idiocies, there’s something alive about this production.
And furthermore, as you can see on slide 12, our 3rd quarter miracle metrics exceeded projections.
Idiocies is a strong word, but hear me out. For some reason, writer/director Dallas Jenkins has decided that all of the actors portraying Jews must speak in the most phony-baloney “Aramaic” accent possible. It’s sort of Fiddler-on-the-Roof as filtered through a Los Angeles kombucha bar. Meanwhile, all the Roman characters speak the plainest, Midwestern American, a hilarious detail that implies the story is being told from the point of view of a random centurion. The silliness is laid on even thicker when we find that, at the court of Herod Antipas, the official Chuza and his Christian wife Joanna look and sound like patrician Yankees, John Cheever’s high WASPs in fancy dress, while the few Greek characters who wander on stage speak with British accents. The effect of this directorial decision is to emphasize the foreignness of Jesus and his runty followers. We viewers are outsiders, gentiles, looking on as these people with their funny accents enact their melodramas.
On the other hand, the costumes look great and the sets are quite handsome and atmospheric, although certainly too luxurious. The Apostle Simon, a humble fisherman—hammily played by the Israeli actor Shahar Isaac—lives in a lavishly appointed home, a multi-room Restoration Hardware townhouse with well-made furniture and lots of space. The problem here is that most moderns gravely underestimate the pervasiveness of poverty in the pre-modern world. In Ancient Rome, something like 90 percent of the population would have been near, at or below subsistence level, most of them earning what little bread they received as peasants working the land directly. Another 8 percent—some merchants, traders, a few artisans and officials—enjoyed a “moderate surplus”, leaving the vast majority of the resources for the remaining 2 percent, the elites. According to the historians Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller this was “the Roman system of inequality.” It’s also why economic matters figured so importantly in Jesus’s message, something The Chosen doesn’t really deal with, preferring instead to portray the Apostles as being drawn from the prosperous burghers of Galilee.
The Apostles trying to get to the end of the month.
Aside from the furniture, one way this disregard for historical poverty shows up is in the domestic lighting budget. The Apostles burn candles like Jesus is made of money. It’s a small detail, but one that I find very annoying. In the first place, beeswax candles have always been relatively expensive. In the second place, 1st century Judaeans used almost nothing but small pottery lamps that burned olive oil. In fact, lamp fragments are one of the most commonly found things in Near Eastern archeological sites, and archeologists keep finding lamp workshops because lamps were such a common household article. This candle profligacy won’t register with most people, so I suppose this is a me problem, not a problem for the people who keep the Yankee Candle Store in business.
I don’t want to keep talking about The Chosen’s many historical inaccuracies and errors, not even its cockeyed, thoroughly modern view of gender roles, or literacy. I don’t want to do that because I want to get to what this production does right, and what it does right most of all is the actor Jonathan Roumie, the charismatic center of this production. Roumie has a handsomely sympathetic face with soft eyes and a sweet smile. As an actor, he so completely transcends the pedestrian writing that you find yourself wishing he’d been cast in a more competent production. Writer-director Dallas Jenkins has a tin-eared talent for clunky phraseology, best displayed in his version of The Sermon on the Mount, delivered at the beginning of Season 3. In the Bible, the Sermon on the Mount is an electrifying moment of divine instruction, rendered in The Chosen as a plodding series of Jesus’s greatest one-liners. “Consider the lilies of the field.” Yet, we don’t blame Roumie for the failure of the dialogue nor the silly accent. He’s too engaging and too sympathetic, his emotions seem too true. You can’t help but like him, even when the writers are doing him dirty.
Jesus is tall and the Apostles are short. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
Jenkins, however, does do a few things well dramatically. The first is that he delivers Jesus to us in small doses, keeping us in suspense and making Roumie’s on-screen time precious. Jesus is a mystery in The Chosen, and rightly so. And the mystery of Jesus, and why he chooses these 12 men to be his Apostles, is the motive power behind the series, not the small-stakes soap operas that are the lives of the Apostles. The second thing is that the miracles seem genuinely miraculous. Jenkins wisely choose to underplay them. No angelic music, or radiant light, just Jesus putting his hands on the afflicted and a few seconds later they realize they’re healed. It’s a shockingly effective and moving technique, one that brought me to the brink of tears a couple of times.
Of course, the real success of The Chosen has more to do with it being a soap opera than a true reflection of Jesus’s ministry. Jenkins’s smartest decision of all, from an entertainment standpoint, is inventing personalities and complicated backstories for the twelve Apostles. Instead of simple fishermen, tentmakers and reformed tax collectors, we get Matthew the autist, estranged from his parents, Thomas the caterer, hot to marry the headstrong Ramah, and Simon the reformed Zealot assassin with the crippled brother. These subplots provide grist for the Jenkins mill, soap opera complications that play out while we’re waiting for Jesus to do his thing. It’s emotionally manipulative and, as these things frequently are, addictive.
Ultimately, The Chosen is a near perfect reflection of American Christianity in the first half of the 21st century, blandly therapeutic and middle class. The Apostles are not desperate religious revolutionaries, fanatics following the Messiah, they’re your neighbors on the cul-de-sac with the same petty concerns and family complications. One of the most revealing subplots is when Zebedee, the father of James and John, decides to start an olive oil business to “support the ministry”. For those outside the current Evangelical zeitgeist, this is known colloquially as a “kingdom business” or “business-as-mission”, an American innovation that transforms business success into spiritual ministry, capitalism as a form of Christian witness. So, Jenkins succeeds completely in making the Apostles relatable to the average American mega-church-goer, but at the cost of both historical accuracy and spiritual truth. In doing so, he inverts the values of the New Testament, in which desperate men and women, sinners, sailors, thugs, and reformed prostitutes, living on the edge of starvation and death, upend the world with a message of salvation. Jenkins’s Apostles seem to risk little and gain less from the arrival of Jesus. Their lives are barely disturbed, which is pretty much the current American model of Christianity.
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Authenticity is overrated. I say this as someone who has gone to great lengths to find a bowl of real Peruvian tripe soup in a South American market. Culinary authenticity is not just overrated, it doesn’t exist in the 21st century. It’s a myth. Everything is connected and interrelated now. Everything is jumbled up, nothing exists in isolation. Everyone has a cellphone now. There are no more hidden food traditions waiting to be discovered; no more ancient grannies in jungle huts who’ve never seen a cookbook or a bag of MSG. The most remote places in the world have been brought into the clear light of TikTok. Anthony Bourdain ate warthog anus with Kalahari bushmen nearly 20 years ago.
I bring this up because last month I went home to Northern California for the first time in six years, and one of the only things I could think about was eating a tostada at La Hacienda, an old-school Mexican restaurant, a place that would be dismissed as too Americanized by online hipsters.
La Hacienda tostada and a squeeze bottle of their secret sauce
Chico is a small city 90 miles north of Sacramento in the Central Valley, a place that’s had the same relaxed hippyish vibe for the past 50 years. La Hacienda is the oldest restaurant in Chico, founded in 1948 by Nate and Tomasa Ybañez, who, according to a 1977 advertisement, “brought old family recipes to Chico and soon became known for their authentic Mexican cuisine”; family recipes brought from Fresno, it should be noted.
The tostada itself is impressively large and delightful, a crispy, plate-sized corn tortilla mounded over with beans, shredded iceberg lettuce, red onion rings, cheddar cheese, and slices of tomato and avocado, all of it very fresh. Your only decision when ordering is chicken, beef, pork or more beans. This is not a spicy dish. The meat carries what spice there is, a subtle undercurrent of chiles and cumin. I have historically wavered between chicken and pork, both of them very tasty.
What sets the dish and La Hacienda apart is the secret sauce, a sweet, very sweet, addictively delicious pink dressing served in a squeeze bottle. Back when Sunset Magazine was dispensing West Coast cool to the world, the Ybañez family refused to disclose the recipe to them at any price. Today, it’s only known by two people, who guard it like the crown jewels. Online spoilsports suggest it’s just honey, mayo, red wine vinegar, garlic and cumin. I’m dubious. The flavor seems more complex than that. It’s certainly more addictive than those ingredients suggest.
You’ll note, in the photo above, that there’s a single black olive nestled among the onions, which brings me back to that original discussion of authenticity and whatever that means. That black olive is a clue that this might be more than an Americanized knock-off of a muy autentico Mexican dish, that this tostada might be its own thing with its own noble history.
Black olives from Corning, California, my hometown.
Black olives aren’t just that garnish your great aunt trots out at Thanksgiving, they’re a marker of Californio cuisine, of a distinctly California version of Spanish-Mexican food that developed in the 19th century. Here’s the writer Georgia Freeman describing it in her piece The Secrets of California’s Oldest Recipes
Marianne began cooking from these recipes four decades ago, when she married Jim Poett, a seventh-generation cattle rancher, and moved with him to the family’s 181-year-old ranch near Santa Barbara, on California’s Central Coast. The notebook was a trove of family history, as told through the recipes that the women of the family were eating and cooking in the ranch’s early years. And Marianne found that many of them have an important ingredient in common: black olives. “Olives are the sign of a California-style recipe,” Marianne explains to me as she juggles a variety of jobs, taking phone calls from the local newspaper (where she is the editor), improvising a recipe for tomatillo salsa, and arranging homegrown flowers in cans to decorate the table for the feast she is cooking for the two dozen friends and neighbors who are on the ranch to help brand the family’s cattle today. “If you see olives in a recipe for enchiladas or tamales, you know it’s from here.”
And if you need further proof of the importance of olives in Californio cuisine, here’s an excerpt from an English newspaper, The Pall Mall Gazette, January 15, 1894.
I had to include the part about “yellow-haired Cortez from sunny Spain”.
Note that the location, here, is Santa Barbara, California, where a tamale is a “mixture of chicken, cheese, chillis, olives, raisin and corn-flour,” a combination that would be impossible to find in Mexico City. Same for an enchilada, which the same author describes as being made of “layers of chillis, olives and cold meat well mixed with pepper sauce” and rolled up like a “French pancake.”
What confuses people obsessed with authenticity is that olives do not play much of a role in Mexican food in Mexico, where for a variety of reasons, some cultural, some climatological, they aren’t much seen. But, in California, 250 years ago, when Father Serra established the missions he immediately planted grapes and olives, both of which flourished in a climate that was closer to Spanish than Mexican. Which is why olives and raisins were in those tamales in Santa Barbara.
This means that generations of oven-baked chicken enchiladas, cooked up in Omaha and Oklahoma City, and garnished with sliced black olives from California, are more authentic than tacos al pastor cooked on a shawarma trompo, something that only arrived in Mexico in the 1930s.
¡Muy autentico!
See what I mean about authenticity being a crock? Culture is too polymorphous and mutable to pin down with a blunt term like “authenticity”. You can’t bludgeon a living cuisine into your square hole with prescriptive rules about what is and isn’t “authentic”. Things get away from you, and take on a life of their own, out-racing you and out-living your needless ire.
As a historian of food and culture, I care about the truth and about trying to untangle the Gordian knot of influence and counter-influence. As an eater of some repute, I care about taste. I don’t care much about authenticity. It’s too much of a slippery eel to get my hands around. All I can tell you is that the tostada at La Hacienda is delicious, something proven by the generations of diners who’ve kept that place in business. I can also speculate, with some justification, that that tostada, with that single black olive, is the remnant of an older food tradition, of a very old California way of cooking lying just out of view, hidden by our mania for the “real”.
P.S. I’m almost positive there were a lot more black olives on the La Hacienda tostada 40 years ago, when I first had one, but I’m not sure if that’s a real memory or not. What I am sure of, however, is that I’ve got a lot more to say about the topic of Mexican food in America and the role of California in its dissemination, but I’ve got more work to do before I spring that on you. In the meantime, if you haven’t subscribed, please do so. Also, hit me up on Twitter. See you next week!
P.P.S Georgia Freeman’s substack, The California Table has a lot of great recipes from the Golden State.
It’s amazing what incels could accomplish in the era before the internet and building codes. Back before video games, Twitter and obtrusive county bureaucracies, men without women would sometimes engage in heroic acts of folk architecture, art brut, using nothing more than a pick and shovel, or maybe a Fresno scraper and mule.
Such were my thoughts on Memorial Day as I was guided around the Forestiere Underground Gardens in Fresno, where the main topic of the tour was how, in the first half of the 20th century, a smallish Italian bachelor named Baldassare Forestiere carved an underground paradise out of a plot of $1-an-acre, Central Valley hardpan. It’s an impressive achievement, scraping an unforgiving land with hand tools into more than a mile of tunnels and rooms, all so he could plant grapes and kumquats.
Happily, it was wonderfully temperate last Monday, 80 degrees and clear skies. The best time to visit, however, is in the middle of July, when it’s 110 and the sun beats down, making it easier to understand why a man might burrow into the earth and take his fruit trees with him. The Central Valley in summer is not a place for the weak or easily discouraged.
Look at those grapes! Baldassare had reason to be smug.
The perpetual bachelorhood of Baldassare Forestiere was at the forefront of my mind because, of course, he’d have to be bachelor to do what he did, the ultimate incel. No man with a wife would be allowed to waste so much time and energy on such a ridiculous obsession. More than that, I would imagine that Forestiere would not just be wifeless, but that he would have to have been grievously disappointed in love; spurned, jilted, dumped or dismissed. I’m not alone in guessing that. The novelist T. C. Boyle imagined that very thing in a 1998 short story version of Baldassare’s life, having him rejected by the stout, cockeyed niece of a Greek short-order cook, thrown over for Hiram Broadbent, heir of the Broadbent poultry fortune.
25 feet below the surface, the ultimate man cave.
Boyle’s account of Forestiere’s origin story is explicitly fictional but seems functionally true, the sort of detail that could not be false. Great heartbreak often occasions great works of art, or at least heroic feats of effort, however misdirected. Even if not true, the key thing is that Forestiere was wifeless, a man without a woman, likely through no choice of his own. Thus, to use the graceless modern term, he was an “incel”, an involuntarily celibate man, consigned to loserdom in world in which all the Chads and Stacys have paired off. Today, he’d likely find rough solace in video games and pornography, the misogynistic musings of pickup artists and online malcontents. But, in the first half of the last century, none of those outlets were available. All he had was a pickax, a shovel and 80 acres of nearly worthless land.
And here’s the thing, Baldassare Forestiere was not alone in his madness. There were other heroic incels building their own fantastical landscapes at exactly the same time. Consider, Edward Leedskalnin, a tiny Latvian mason who built a castle out of coral in southern Florida, a magnificent edifice erected on the ruins of a crushed romance.
Leedskalnin’s muse/anti-muse was Agnes Skuvst, a 16-year-old Latvian girl who broke their engagement on the night before their wedding, sending Ed into a tailspin that would last the rest of his life. His “Sweet Sixteen”—frequently mentioned in his eccentric writings on magnetism—was the motive power that propelled Leedskalnin to America, where he carved out and stacked 10-ton blocks of porous stone, building a monument to his own tender emotions.
Or consider Sam “Simon” Rodia, who, in South Central Los Angeles, turned being dumped by his wife into a soaring assemblage of detritus, towers of repurposed trash reaching for the heavens. Asked to explain his motives for building his 99-foot-tall Watts Towers, Rodia simply answered, “I wanted to do something big, and I did.”
That sentiment, “I wanted to do something big,” is the key to understanding the impulse that produced such monumental and monomaniacal works. Besides being womanless, Forestiere, Leedskalnin and Rodia were remarkably similar, all three immigrants, craftsmen and laborers, born between 1879 and 1887, and conspicuously tiny, a fact often commented upon in newspapers.
“The small man” driven to greatness.
The “little man” Baldassare Forestiere was 5’4”, Edward Leedskalnin “just over 5 feet tall”, and Sam Rodia “a tiny man, at 4’11”. Imagine being an immigrant, a working man, a man of smallish stature competing for girls with the Hiram Broadbents of America, your opposite, “a big, fat man…Wears a straw hat winter and summer…Always got money in his pocket.” Your chances are not good.
So, how does a man leave his mark on the world? That’s the question. How does a man leave his mark on the world?
For most of us—big, fat men with money in our pockets—we get married and have children. Most of us are content that our monument to the future survives in our lineage. That’s the best we can do, have our genes continue. But if you’re a small man with work-hardened hands and a broken heart, unable to find a woman who will have you, you might pick up a shovel and get to work.
Or, at least, in that specific moment, in the first half of the 20th century, on the edges of the continent where land was cheap and foreigners were welcome, you might buy a piece of scrub land and build something big; you might harness the power of your inceldom, into a gesture of heroic creation; leaving your mark in the most direct way possible, by transforming the very earth into something fantastical.
Or, if you are middle class and formally trained, you might transmute your pain into the highest art, as the Catalan architect Antoni Guadi did. Rejected by Pepeta Moreu, her hair the “color of old gold, almost mahogany,” the daughter of a patron, Gaudi’s disappointment “left a lasting mark.” So, he remained a lifelong bachelor, saying, “I have never felt a calling for marriage”
Thus, Gaudi is the patron saint of incels, a rejected man who embraced his celibacy and tamed Eros, channeling his passions into a lifelong devotion to God and art. In doing so, he produced one of the most startling and sacred architectural visions of the modern era, the Sagrada Familia, a work that carries the hopes of man heavenward, and Gaudi’s mark upon the world into eternity. If, in the elemental scheme, Forestiere is earth, Leedskalnin water and Rodia air, then Gaudi is super-celestial, the architect of the realm beyond the stars.
The architecture of the realm beyond the stars.
Like the three amateurs, Gaudí rejected the straight lines and reproducible forms of the machine age, the standardizations of the 20th century. Like them, his work took organic forms, curving, eccentric, inwardly animated and natural. But where theirs was raw, improvised and private, his was ordered, transcendent and very visible. If they carved their pain into private mythologies, Gaudí turned his into a public liturgy, aided by patrons, clients and a public that cheered him on.
Suffering is not the only way to achieve artistic greatness, nor was romantic rejection the only motivation for a figure as complex and pious as Antoni Gaudi, but to deny the role they played in producing works of art is to miss something our comfortable and connected 21st century no longer values. The therapeutic methods of the modern medical system have done little for art, and not much more in easing our existential pain. Only faith in God, connection with our fellow humans, hard work and art can do that.
Finally, notice that I’ve used the term “incel” throughout this essay deliberately, as a provocation. I want you to see that the frustrated desires—physical and spiritual—that manifested as untutored greatness in Rodia, Forrestiere and Leedskalnin are the same impulses that manifest as baseness in the modern Internet incel. The difference lies not in the depth of anguish or loneliness, but in the ability to howl at the world. Before the internet, a lonely man might speak through stone, steel and shovel. Today, he shouts anonymously into the void and his voice is echoed and amplified back to him, his worst and bleakest thoughts incorrectly reinforced as “reality”.
Not only has the Internet allowed us to shout, it has also stripped us of our ability to endure in silence, to sit quietly with our grief and process it, to take our loneliness and boredom and transform them into something more noble. Likewise, so few of us engage in hard physical work anymore, thus few of us know that a body exhausted by labor can make us forget, that work is, in Poe’s words, “respite and nepenthe from thy memories.” And physical labor is exactly one of the things you think about when you’re visiting the Forestiere Underground Gardens, of how much physical effort it took for Baldassare Forestiere to dig out that much dirt. Thanks to the internet, the modern incel is detached from himself, his body and his innermost thoughts. If he clings to his phone, has no way of coping with his condition except formless rage and bad behavior, instead he needs to disconnect and pick up a shovel.
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week with something new. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter. Cheers!
