Like Water for Chocolate: Chapter 2: February Summary & Analysis

The chapter begins with a recipe for the Chabela wedding cake, which Tita and Nacha are baking in preparation for Rosaura and Pedro’s wedding. Tita shakes with nausea, as each of the 170 eggs she breaks and beats looks like the testicles she had to cut off the roosters they ordered to serve as capons. Mama Elena put Tita in charge of the castrations, and all other wedding preparations, as punishment for skipping Rosaura’s engagement party. Tita remembers her horror at castrating the first rooster, thinking to herself that her mother should have castrated her instead. Mama Elena had seen Tita’s face, and slapped her. Now, making the cakes, Tita beats the last eggs, ready to “complete her martyrdom once and for all.” Tita believes she hears a baby chick inside one of them, and panics. When they find no baby chick, Mama Elena yells that she won’t tolerate hysteria.

After days of preparations, Nacha and Tita are exhausted. On the final night before the wedding, Nacha and Tita are finishing the last of the cakes. After Mama Elena goes to bed, Nacha can sense that Tita is in a terrible state. She embraces Tita, telling her to let out her tears, because she won’t be able to cry at the wedding the next day. Nacha is sad for Tita because, as the narrator remarks, she is “on her side.” Nacha doesn’t get along with Rosaura, a “picky eater” who has often secretly fed Nacha’s cooking to the dog. In contrast, Tita has always been willing to try anything. Holding each other, Nacha and Tita cry into the cake batter until Tita’s tears are dry.

After finishing the cakes, Tita and Nacha add the marmalade filling they made the month before. Tita remembers the day she carried the apricots in her skirt from the garden. She ran into Pedro, who stared at her exposed legs, and she dropped the fruits. He tried to explain why he was marrying Rosaura, but she refused to listen. She ran away, into the room where Gertrudis and Chencha were embroidering imported wedding sheets with a chastity opening so that the couple could have sex without seeing each other naked. Imports were hard to get during the war, but Mama Elena had bought the sheets from a smuggler. Tita is horrified by the sheets’ whiteness, and is overcome with memories of little girls in white virginal “may-day” dresses, of wedding dresses and white churches where she had dreamed she would one day get married. For several days, everything she sees appears white.

Remembering the day she saw Rosaura’s sheets, Tita begins to see white everywhere again and her tears return. She is crying into the fondant cake icing when Nacha sends her to bed. Nacha finishes the icing and at the end licks some of it from her finger. She is overcome with a wave of longing, remembering all of the family’s weddings she has helped prepare, each time wishing the next wedding would be hers. She remembers her own fiancé, who Mama Elena’s mother had forced away. Nacha spends all night crying, and the next day she is too ill to go to the wedding.

At the wedding, Tita hears the guests gossiping about her terrible situation. Determined not to let herself be a spectacle, she focuses on controlling her expression by remembering times in her life when she felt smug. She remembers when she disobeyed her mother as a kid and swam across the Rio Grande with a group of boys, beating them all to the finish. When she was fourteen, she rounded up her family’s horses after a group of boys had scared them loose. The carriage driver and the village men were amazed that she did what they failed to do. In the reception line at the wedding, Tita congratulates Rosaura and Pedro. Pedro pulls her near, telling her he has only married Rosaura so that he could remain close to Tita. Hearing this, Tita’s joy and hope return, and she no longer sees the wedding as a loss.

After the guests eat the wedding cake, they all begin to feel a sense of desperate longing and to cry over lost love. Some become nauseous, and vomit all over the floor. Tita, unaware that her tears from the night before are the supernatural cause of the mayhem, continues eating the cake without experiencing any of its effects. Vomit and tears fill the wedding hall floor, covering Rosaura’s wedding dress. Even Rosaura get sick, and that night, she and Pedro agree not to have relations until they both recover. When Tita returns home, she finds Nacha dead in her bed, clutching a photo of her old fiancé. Mama Elena blames Tita for poisoning the cake to ruin Rosaura’s wedding, and beats her so badly that she isn’t able to get out of bed for weeks.