Levantón Andino
Levantón Andino
A Smoothie in Mérida
High up in the green mountains around Mérida, Venezuela, morning mist is descending and settling on the city below. I’m on a bench in Mérida’s bustling market, called Mercado Principal, trying to let my stomach settle a smoothie that wants to come back up.
On a recommendation from a local friend, I went to the market this morning to visit a juice vendor named María Luisa de Rangel. Twenty-seven years ago, María Luisa asked each member of her family to come up with an ingredient that would contribute to her super smoothie, called Levantón Andino (meaning Andean Boost). They proposed baby formula, fish eggs, raw quail eggs in the shell, raw chicken eggs, ox’s eyeball, rum, Chuchuhuaza liquor (a powerful aphrodisiac extracted from the bark of the Amazonian Chuchuhuasi tree) and beer among others. María Luisa wasted no time investigating the right quantities, best flavors or proper health codes and began selling her 26-ingredient aphrodisiac energy drink to troves of adventure junkies, students and desperate couples.
I was in line with the best of them that morning, though near the front, so rather than getting a fresh version of the smoothie, I got the last of the Levantón in a pitcher that was pulled from the bottom of the fridge. I made the decision not to ask when it had been made, which I regretted as I watched the other smoothies being prepared:
Cantaloupe, raspberries, milk and sugar floated among egg yolks. María Luisa plucked two ox’s eyeballs from a cooler of them staring back at me. “I get them from a local farmer,” she said.
While she hit blend and sat back, I sucked up a bit of my magenta-colored Levantón and tried not to think about its contents. The texture was somewhere between yogurt and pudding and the taste was like raspberry fluoride. A couple standing next to me were waiting for the fresh stuff. “It’s good, yeah?” the man said rhetorically. They were regulars at María Luisa’s place.
I tried. I really tried. I got a bit less than one-third of the way through the 8-ounce cup before I couldn’t take another sip. It was harmless in appearance, it looked like any other smoothie I’d drunk but my expectations of feeling like Rocky Balboa drinking raw eggs were met with the reality of my stomach feeling unmoored on a rocky ship.
I sat for a few minutes and politely ditched my smoothie for coffee while I watched the couple blissfully down their Levantón. I tried to imagine them in a lusty state after the aphrodisiacal spark had hit. They would look at each other deeply and say, “Wow, that was some smoothie. Hang on, you’ve got a bit of eyeball in your teeth.”