CHAPTER ONE + + + ONIONS AND TEARS + + + POLYRHYTHMIA AND EURHYTHMIA WITH ONE SMALL ARRHYTHMIA

Take care to chop the onion fine. to keep from crying when you chop it( which is so annoying) I suggest you place a little bit on your head. The trouble with crying over onion is that once the chopping you have started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know is just can's stop. I don’t know whether that's over happened to you but I have confess it's happened to me, many times.
Tita was so sensitive to onions, anytime they were being chopped they say they should just cry and cry; when she was still in my great-grandmother’s belly her sobs were so loud that even Nacha , the cook, who was half-deaf, could hear them easily. Once her wailing got so violent that it brought on an early labour. And before my great-grandmother could hear them, easily. Tita made her iterance into this world permanently, right there on the kitchen table amid the smell of simmering noodle soup, thyme. bay leaves and coriander, steamed milk, garlic and, of course onion. Tita had no need for the usual slap on the bottom because she was already crying as she emerged; maybe that was because she knew then that it would be her lot in life to be denied marriage. The way Nacha tells it, Tita was literally washed into this world on the great tide of tears that spilled over the edge on the table and flooded across the kitchen floor.
That after noon when the uproar had subsided and the water had been dried up by the sun, Natcha swept up the residue the tears had left on the red stone floor. There was enough salt to fill a tea pound sack - it was used for cooking at lasted a long time. Thanks to het unusual birth, Tita felt a deep love for the kitchen, where she spent most of her life from the day she was born.

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From that day on, Tita's domain was the kitchen, where she grew vigorous and healthy on diets of teas and thin corn gruels. This explains the sixth sixth sense Tita developed about everything concerning food. Her eating habits, for example, were attuned to the kitchen routines; in the morning when she could smell that the beans were ready; at midday, when she sensed the water was ready for plucking the kitchens; and the afternoon , when the dinner bread was baking, Tita knew it was time for her to be fed.