by Paul Theroux
The old scarred Oaxaca houses, the whole yellowish place of sun-struck and eroded stucco and stone, looked as though it had been carved out of aged cheese. The stone that gives Oaxacan architecture its distinctive mottled yellow-green-tan color is volcanic tuff, known in Spanish as toba volcánica, or cantera verde, which is quarried from hills all over the region. In spite of their plain facades, many of the larger buildings had shaded patios and courtyards, and large interior rooms, and some interior courtyards with roofed entryways (zaguanes) resembled atriums, with fountains, stone carvings, and brittle palms in dusty pots. Many of the ancient churches, the monasteries and convents, and the great temple of Santo Domingo had been confiscated and desecrated under the reform laws spearheaded in the 1860s by President Benito Juárez, who was born in the small village of San Pablo Guelatao, in the mountains northeast of Oaxaca, and raised in the city. “That chapel? It was a stable for horses,” Oaxaqueños said of the most beautiful church interiors. “And this convent was a barracks.” But when the wave of anticlericalism had passed, the churches and convents were restored to their former glory, along with the plazas and the Zócalo. Still no luxury resorts have been built.
D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, and Aldous Huxley—all visitors, inspired in their writing by their immersion in Oaxaca—would recognize the place today, would grow sentimental, would probably find a table in a rooftop bar, the same wobbly table they’d sat at before, and order some local artisanal mezcal to drink, and marvel about how little had changed. The Oaxaca allusions in Mornings in Mexico, Under the Volcano, and Beyond the Mexique Bay are not dated in any significant way. Lawrence extols the hike to Huayapam, Lowry praises the powerful mezcal, Huxley anatomizes the architecture: they would not be disappointed by Oaxaca today, or much else in the south.
The Mexican republic comprises thirty-one states. The north of the country lies in America’s cruel, teasing, overwhelming shadow—a shadow that contains factory towns, industrial areas, smuggler enclaves, and drug routes. Mexico City, in the middle of the country, is like an entire nation, of twenty-three million people—much larger than any Central American republic. But the south of Mexico, the poorest region, is a place apart, rooted in the distant past, some of its people so innocent of Spanish, they still speak the language of the 2,500-year-old civilization of Monte Albán, a few miles outside Oaxaca, enumerating the beautiful temples by counting all ten of them in Zapotec on their fingers: “Tuvi, tiop, choon, tap, gaiy, xhoop, gats, xhon, ga, tse.”
The sanctions against bulldozing the classic architecture of Oaxaca and making room for resorts have kept the town’s soul intact. Not many cities in Mexico can say that; not many cities in the world. Oaxaca is remarkable for having resisted modernization—a great impulse for any venerable city—and for valuing its cultural heritage. Because traffic is slowed to a crawl by the narrow streets, most people walk. A city of pedestrians moves at a human pace in most other respects, too, and is inevitably a place where small details are more visible, and noticed and appreciated. Strollers see more, and are more polite, than drivers.
Being poor, many Oaxaqueños have had to uproot themselves and become travelers and emigrants in order to make money—a greater proportion of them here, and in the southern states of Chiapas, Puebla, and Guerrero, than elsewhere in Mexico. In the course of three weeks in the city, I met many—men, mostly—who had worked for a spell in the US, or in a maquiladora on the border.
“I labored for three years in a factory that made televisions,” a man told me, and thumped a table with his hands, demonstrating the procedure, “fitting a piece of plastic panel with screws, all day, every day.”
There was the young man who mopped floors at a Holiday Inn in Dallas, the waiter who had made pizza in Racine, the attendant at a car wash in Anaheim; all—or most—confided they’d been illegal, and some of their stories were of ordeals.
“It was back in ’95,” the former car wash worker said. “I walked five days in Sonora, and crossed the border. I got to Tucson after a week, and worked in California for eight years. I was eventually deported—just as well, my family is here. I’m staying in Oaxaca. Nowadays I would have to pay the mafia five thousand dollars to get me over the border, and I probably wouldn’t make it.”
The constant references to the United States, all the talk of people who have relations there, the descriptions of their long and difficult trips there, their sadness, always, at having to return home—“My mother is old,” “My father died,” “My family is here,” “My grandma is sick”—made it seem as though the US was a satellite of Mexico, like a moon, anchored in space, adjacent to Mexico, always visible and seemingly available but kept just out of reach, a terrible tease, circulating in the sky.
Because Oaxaca had remained its old self, the town’s human scale allowed you to cross the heart of the city unobstructed in less than an hour, walking from the far south side, up Bustamante from the Periférico, past the Zócalo at the center, continuing to the perimeter road on the north end, the old Pan-American Highway, designated Niños Héroes de Chapultepec. Oaxaca’s colonias and newer residential areas lie at greater distances, but even a traditional rural village, such as the settlement against the mountainside at Huayapam, was a fifteen-minute drive. A car is a burden in town, though, because of the slow-moving traffic and the scarcity of parking spaces.
The texture of Oaxaca was apparent in the course of any stroll: the hawkers, the beggars, the squatters, the improvisational buskers and musicians and singers lining the cobblestone streets; the women with small children selling handicrafts—carpets, weavings, carvings, vivid grinning painted skulls set out on a straw mat; the blind man singing his heart out, playing a guitar, while a small, dirty, barefoot child solicited tips from passersby with a plastic cup. They constitute the foreground—the “color”—of all writing about Oaxaca, from D. H. Lawrence’s first visit in 1924 onward. Anywhere else, such street life would seem pathetic, but in Oaxaca the blind singer is forgivable, and valued as another example of folklore.
That most of these street vendors are Indians—Zapotec and Mixtec—deepens the town’s cultural authority: five hundred years after the conquest—Oaxaca was founded in 1529—the same indigenous people persist, tenacious and undiluted, still speaking their ancient languages, easily recognizable as Mexico’s native aristocrats, their same hawk-nosed profiles chip-carved on the murals disinterred from the ruins at Monte Albán and Mitla, not far away. As Benito Juárez (raised speaking Zapotec) described his own family, they are “Indios de la raza primitiva del país”—that is, Indians of the original race of the country.
Because of the wide doorways that line the sidewalk, and the open doors, Oaxaca’s streets are filled with the fragrance of its characteristic cooking: the aroma of warm, buttery string cheese, eight kinds of drizzled mole, the creamy fragrance of fresh cacao beans, and the scorched tortillas of the folded-over tlayuda. All this to the sound of guitars and accordions, the laughter from bars, the vitality more obvious now, in the weeks leading up to Halloween and the Day of the Dead. Many strollers were already in costumes—princesses and monsters and villains and the black-suited troupes wearing skeleton suits, children, dwarfish and disguised, who look more terrifying in skull masks because of their small size, like demon homunculi, all of them dancing to blatting brass bands and snare drums along the nighttime streets.
Lessons in Mexican
For weeks, my daily walk in Oaxaca took me from my posada, along Pino Suárez and Avenida Benito Juárez, to the perimeter road of the Child Heroes of Chapultepec—the coffee shops, the areas of broken pavement, the antagonistic graffiti, violating the facades and soaked into the old stonework:
HOY BARRICADAS, MAñANA LUCHA. Today barricades, tomorrow the struggle.
And: SE ALISTAN LAS BOMBAS, SE AFILA EL PUñAL. The bombs are readied, the dagger is sharpened.
And: ZAPATA VIVE!
The newspaper kiosks displayed lurid headlines, always of mayhem, car crashes, or cartel murder
s, and photographs of bullet-riddled or dismembered corpses. The lampposts and scrawled-upon walls were pasted with advertisements for snake oil remedies or quack doctors. Farther along the avenue, the Teatro Juárez, with nightly performances of music and dancing; and across the avenue, the park El Llano—the Plain—families picnicking on the grass, lovers embracing on benches, children climbing on the bandstand. El Llano’s weekly market, with its many stalls (puestos), sold T-shirts and fried grasshoppers, flying ants and maguey worms, and all the varieties of street food, from the simple tacos and tlacoyos you could hold in one hand to gorditas that took two hands.
I knew that walk, because at the intersection of those two major roads, the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca lay in shady gardens behind a high wall. The Instituto resembled a monastery, as old Mexican school compounds often do, and its scalloped arches, pitted colonnades, and cool verandas made it seem even more cloistral, with an air of muted contemplation, in a garden of royal palms, and bougainvillea and plumeria in bloom.
I walked that way every day for the next three weeks, schoolbooks in my damp hands.
Having signed up to improve my Spanish, I arrived there early the first day for the nine o’clock class, with my blank notebook and my plump, untasted Spanish-English dictionary. And the old first-day-of-school anxiety came back, the sense of confinement and submission that I had felt as a student long ago, the uncertainty—waiting for instructions, feeling small and vague and futile, all reminders of how much I had hated school. How even now I avoided colleges for the way they are smugly sequestered and out of touch. (I have, for almost fifty years, accepted any writing assignment to make a living, in order to stay away from a campus as a writer in residence.) My heart sank as soon as the iron gate clanged behind me at the archway of the Instituto’s entrance, and I was, so to speak, walled in. I felt a sense of incompetence—not from any lack of self-esteem, but from a long-ago experience of hectoring and impatient teachers. I also thought: I have been here before, I am too old for this.
But I had vowed to speak the language with more subtlety, and the welcoming staff, while insisting on speaking nothing but Spanish, were reassuring and friendly, joshing me in the way of a new boy. I took an aptitude test—written and spoken—to gauge my proficiency and was assigned to an intermediate group—five other students. But my first acquaintance was startling.
“Are you doing this for college credit?” I asked a young, pretty, pink-faced woman wearing a hoodie with a college logo on the front.
She laughed in a girlish gasping way, became pinker, tugged her hood down over her ponytail, and smiling in confusion, said, “I’m thirteen years old!”
This was Miley. I frowned, trying to think of the last time I had spoken to a thirteen-year-old fellow student in a classroom, and concluded that it was perhaps in 1954, when I myself was thirteen, at Roberts Junior High—the Eisenhower administration.
Alan, the young man to her left, said, “Yeah. I’m picking up a credit.”
A Japanese woman entered the room, greeted us in Spanish, and opened a thick Spanish-Japanese dictionary, turned some tissuey pages, and began annotating them. This was Akiko, very thin, very watchful, seated with her legs twisted together and hugging herself this chilly morning. It was only after a few days that I realized that she knew Spanish fairly well but spoke it with such a heavy Japanese accent she was unintelligible.
Two other students arrived, Marcie, a lawyer from Texas, and Dieter, a German émigré, living in Canada, and averse to answering my questions—staring in response to any inquiry. Six of us, awaiting our teacher.
The sunny somnolence of a classroom, the odor of decaying books, the weird apprehension mingled with boredom and impatience; the sense, most of all, of being unprepared and somehow confined, the awkwardness of this assorted bunch being in the same room—I had not been trapped this way for sixty years.
The teacher entered, a stocky smiling man, carefully shutting the door and greeting us as he shrugged off his leather bomber jacket and draped it on the back of a chair. He greeted the others, then leaned toward me and gave his name as Herman.
“Uno más?”
“Si, soy novio,” I said, and there was laughter, because I had introduced myself as a fiancé or boyfriend (novio) when I had meant to say that I was new (nuevo).
Both Dieter and Miley laughed the hardest at my stumble, Dieter with a callow giggle, Miley with a snorting hoot. Marcie, the Texan, winced in sympathy and shook her head. She was in her late forties, perhaps: we two were the adults.
Herman asked me my name.
I said, “Mi nombre es Pablo, pero yo prefiero Don Pablo, porque . . .” My name is Paul, but I prefer Don Pablo, because . . .
“Por qué?” Herman grinned at my presumption.
“Porque soy un gringo viejo y . . .” Because I’m an old gringo and . . .
“Y qué?”
“Y tengo muchas . . . experiences . . .” And I have many experiences . . .
“Experiencias de vida,” he suggested. Life experiences.
“Sí. Soy viejo, y tengo muchas experiencias de vida.”
Old and experienced, that’s me.
“Pero no soy un pensionado,” I said, insisting I was not retired.
Herman then launched in Spanish (which I could follow but not write down) into a long and interesting disquisition on retirement in Mexico, emphasizing the strange notion of being a pensionado here, because although men and women did retire in their mid- or late sixties after forty or fifty years of work, they received no pensions from the government. Pensions were provided only for people who had paid into a private plan, which only a tiny minority, mostly city dwellers, were able to do. And as salaries were small and it was hard to accumulate savings, the prospect of retirement filled most people with gloom.
Welfare was unknown, Herman said, and even medical care was very basic. In the absence of any help from the government, the children of retirees took on the burden of supporting their parents. That was why I had seen so many grandparents with the Mexican families at the hotels in Mazatlán and Puerto Vallarta, and so many of their careworn adult children. Herman finished by saying that the government did little to help old people.
And then he thanked me, because I had provoked this explanation by saying that I was not a pensioner. “Bueno, Don Pablo!” Herman turned to the class, and as it was Monday, he asked us how we had spent the weekend.
“Has visitado las iglesias?” Have you visited the churches?
I clawed at my cuff and sneaked a look at my watch, assuming a half hour or so had passed. But it was only ten past nine. What a long time remained between now and the end of this class at one o’clock. I stifled a yawn and copied Herman’s question into my notebook.
Marcie cleared her throat and, in clear grammatical Spanish, declared that she had spent Saturday morning at the cathedral and shopping in the Zócalo, and in using the expression sin embargo, reminded me that it meant “nevertheless.” Alan had gone to Monte Albán with Dieter, and Akiko and Miley reported on their respective weekends.
And when it was my turn I said, “Sí, he visitado la iglesia de Santo Domingo,” not because I had visited it, but because I needed to make a coherent reply, and Santo Domingo was near my posada, and I added, “Sendereando, también,” because I wanted to use the elegant word for hiking I had heard in Tepic.
“Fui sendereando, fui caminando,” Herman said, offering me a choice, helping me out. I was hiking, I was walking.
“Fui caminando.” I was walking.
And so it began, improvisation and fumbling and mendacity, the hallmarks of all my studying as a youth in school. I was a student again, bluffing my way through lessons, as I had done for years.
“Encontraron algunos problemas?” Herman asked in general. Faced any problems?
Alan and Dieter had a bus problem, Miley had gotten lost, and I was impressed that she knew the verb form, “Me perdí.” Marcie had not encountered any problems, nor had Akiko, who stammered a
reply.
“Don Pablo?”
“Sí,” and I added, “Sin embargo, un poquito pequeño,” and then said, “Un problema por mi, en los pisos mojados y pisos resbaladizos,” improvising again, because they were words on a sign I had seen in a hotel stairway in Puerto Vallarta, warning of wet floors and slippery floors. I had chanted the sign, making myself remember, and Herman affirmed that I could also use it for politicos resbaladizos, slippery politicians.
“Has probado la comida Oaxaqueña?” Herman asked me, making a scooping gesture to his mouth. Have you eaten any Oaxacan food?
“No, señor. He estado en Oaxaca dos días solamente.” I’ve only been in Oaxaca two days—two days exhausted by travel and the altitude. Faltering, I added, “La comida Oaxaqueña—es sabrosa?” Is it tasty?
“Muy sabroso, muy especial,” Herman said. Very tasty, very special. “Marcie?”
She said, “Sí. Me gusta comer las tlayudas.” Yes, I like to eat tlayudas.
Tlayuda, Herman explained, was a Nahuatl word for a local specialty, a baked corn tortilla spread with asiento (lard), beans, shredded vegetables, maybe avocado, maybe tasajo—thin strips of beef—or chorizo, and covered with melted string cheese called quesillo. The tlayuda was sometimes referred to as Oaxacan pizza, but the comparison was inexact.
“Chapulines?” Herman said.
He explained, with gestures, that a chapulín was small, and it jumped, and it was deep-fried and very tasty.
“Yo he probado muchos chapulines,” Alan said, and then, in a patronizing aside to me, “Grasshoppers.”
“También yo he probado chapulines en Africa,” I said. I’d eaten grasshoppers in Africa. And I asked, “Hay chapulines en el mercado?” Do they have grasshoppers in the market?
“Muchos en el tianguis”—and Herman explained that tianguis, like tlayuda, was a Nahuatl word meaning outdoor market. At El Llano park, a few blocks away, on certain days when the tianguis was held, I would find fried grasshoppers and, in certain months—and he smiled—“chicatanas y hormigas.”
