Prevod

I have just related how one of the first three olive trees planted in Peru was appropriated by a certain Chilean fellow, who incurred nothing less than major excommunication for the theft. This terrifying measure induced him, years later, to restore the stolen cutting, which on the banks of the Mapocho, or some other river, had given rise to a famous olive grove.

Whenever I heard the saying “Of olives, one,” I imagined there was no wit or meaning in it, and that it was merely the offspring of a rhyming dictionary or of some fellow who went hunting for echoes and consonances. But you shall see how utterly mistaken I was, and how that saying, like this other one—“One olive is gold, the second silver, and the third kills”—has both a history and a reason for being.

Of a man who generally finds favor or makes himself agreeable, people have always said, “He has the luck of olives”—a saying of considerable depth, for olives have the virtue of being neither half-liked nor half-disliked, but wholeheartedly one or the other. “To arrive in time for the olives” was another expression our grandparents used to mean that someone had turned up at dessert during a banquet, or witnessed only the end of a celebration. A “cobbler’s olive” was what they called an olive that had lost its color and fine flavor and, for want of juice, was beginning to shrivel. Thus they would say to a beautiful woman whom years or ailments were beginning to spoil, “My dear, you’ve become a regular cobbler’s olive.” Presumably the brethren of Saint Crispin could afford to eat only the rejects.

Several chroniclers relate—and I shall name Father Acosta among them, since he is the one who comes most readily to mind—that in the early days, at grand banquets, each guest was presented with a single olive as a mark of great indulgence and magnificence. The host, as though apologizing for a stinginess that was in fact sheer luxury, since the crop was small and exceedingly costly, would say to his guests, “Gentlemen, of olives, one.” And so the saying was born.

By 1565, four olives could be bought for one real in the orchard of Don Antonio de Ribera. This price allowed a host to be lavish, and from that year onward three olives were allotted to each place setting.

Whether people thought good manners required them not to finish everything on their plates, or whether the master of the house, acknowledging their praise of the olives, would say, “One olive is gold, two are silver, and the third kills,” the fact is that the little verse’s conclusion gave many a Christian food for thought. Having chewed the first and second olives, they dared not venture upon the last, for that would have amounted to knowing suicide. If the third one kills, let us leave it on the little plate, and let your grandmother eat it.

As time went by, there came the days of ño Cerezo, the olive seller by the Bridge, an old relic who at the age of seventy gave people occasion to compose this witty, epigrammatic quatrain at his expense:

They say about town that Cerezo has got his wife with child. I say it cannot be, for he cannot do such a thing. As I was saying, in Cerezo’s day the olive was the inseparable companion of a glass of aguardiente; and every good Peruvian turned up his nose at beer, having quite enough bitterness of his own. Hence the phrase used in the days of San Martín and Bolívar when it was time for elevenses (now called lunch, in gringo parlance): “Gentlemen, let us go and give a little olive a soaking.”

And why, someone will ask, did people in the old days call the business of patching up one’s stomach after midday “elevenses”? Why? Eleven are the letters in aguardiente. Now the impertinent inquirer knows.

Thank God no one offers us a measured ration today, and nowadays we stuff ourselves with olives without being frightened by sayings. How times change!

Today we still say, “Of olives, one—but if they’re good, a dozen.”