On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  Fascinated by his work and his activism, I was provoked to become one of those intruders. Incurable nosiness is the true traveler’s essential but least likable trait. I put in a request to see Toledo; I knew someone in Oaxaca who knew his daughter. Toledo had traveled widely in his early life, but he was rooted here in Oaxaca and had lived in the city for decades. He was a critic, a satirist, a portrayer of government abuses and assaults by foreign companies on Mexican life and culture. With protests and demonstrations he defied developers and gringo junk food franchises. Lately he had taken on Monsanto and its use of genetically modified crops, disastrous for traditional farmers in Mexico. A repeated description of the man was “Mexico’s greatest living artist.”

  His daughter Sara said she would help arrange the meeting. She was tall—taller than me—half Danish, helpful, and prepared me for the visit, explaining that her father had not been well. She said that it was in my favor that her father knew that eighteen of my books, in both Spanish and English, were on the shelves of IAGO, the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, a graphic arts museum and library housed in a colonial building across from the city’s famed Santo Domingo church.

  IAGO was one of a number of cultural institutions that Toledo had founded. A contemporary art museum, MACO, was another, along with a photographic archive (Toledo was also a distinguished photographer), a rare-book library, a shop that produced handmade paper, and an environmental and cultural protection nonprofit organization. The institutes and exhibitions and libraries were free. Toledo believed that anyone who wished should be allowed to enter the precincts of these places at no charge. As a country boy himself, he hoped that people from small villages, often intimidated by museums and the forbidding entrances of public institutions, would visit, so that local people could look at art produced locally.

  I asked Sara if it was true (as I had heard) that upon hearing news that a McDonald’s might open in the Zócalo, her indignant father had threatened to strip naked and demonstrate.

  “Maybe the threat worked,” Sara said. “He didn’t take his clothes off, but he would have done so if necessary. In the end, he walked up and down giving away tamalitas as a protest. After a year, he won.”

  Toledo had had help in defying McDonald’s. One compañero was the Oaxaca artist Guillermo Olguín. A tall, handsome man in his late forties, Olguín had invited me to his walled compound where, under the trees, as chickens pecked at our feet, we drank mezcal and talked—he owned a thriving mezcal business. Olguín was widely traveled. He’d lived in Japan, India, the US, and Cuba, and longed to go to Madagascar. His moody, complex paintings—many of them collages of old photos worked over in black ink or brushstrokes, among withered illegible documents—reflected his travels, his obsessive collecting in foreign bazaars. The paintings seemed like palimpsests, layered memories of journeys in time and space.

  “I grew up using the library Toledo founded,” Olguín told me. “He’s a giant. And he was successful because of his talent, not his connections.”

  “Tell me about the McDonald’s protest.”

  “Toledo called me and said that they were going to build this thing in the Zócalo,” Olguín said. “And would I help? Of course, yes—civil society has a voice. We bought banana leaves for the tamalitas. I did the posters. We were the soldiers, you can say, to represent the people. Others joined in. We set up tables, people gathered, we gave out the tamalitas—no, Toledo didn’t strip naked, as he’d threatened, ha! But it was a happening, and it did the trick.”

  I mentioned to Olguín that one of my reasons for wishing to see Toledo was that he was just a year older than me. As the years have passed, I have nurtured a special feeling for anyone close to my age. It means that we grew up in the same world, in the austere aftermath of World War II, that we knew the same terrors and tyrants and heroes, as well as the same cultural touchstones, certain fashions, banned books, forbidden words, items of slang, the music of the fifties—rock ’n’ roll and jazz. We were in our early twenties in the tumble and conflict of the sixties: the civil rights movement, Vietnam, women’s lib, a new way of looking at ourselves and the world, the hope we felt seeing oppressive institutions shaken up; we shared a bellicose mood, too, thanks to guerrilla wars and decolonization in Africa. We had lived through an era when authority was challenged by people like us, from the margins of society, like Toledo’s, whose origins were obscure and inauspicious.

  Francisco Benjamín López Toledo, the son of a leatherworker—shoemaker and tanner—had been born in a small village near Juchitán de Zaragoza, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, nearer to Guatemala than to Mexico City—and being Zapotec, nearer culturally to the ancient pieties of the hinterland, too. While still a child Toledo moved with his family to Minatitlán, near Veracruz, where his father set himself up as a shopkeeper. Toledo was a dreamy child, much influenced by the myths and legends of a rural upbringing, elements that later emerged in his art. When his parents recognized his talent for drawing they sent him to Mexico City to study graphic art techniques at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. He was just seventeen, but even so he was singled out for his brilliance, and held his first solo exhibitions two years later, in Mexico City and Fort Worth, Texas. Restless and now solvent, ambitious to know more, but still young—barely twenty—he went to Paris, to continue painting, sculpting, and printmaking.

  All these biographical details are freely available in books, catalogs, articles, and online, including the approving words of the French novelist and art critic André Pieyre de Mandiargues, who became acquainted with Toledo’s work in Paris: “I know of no other modern artist who is so naturally penetrated with a sacred conception of the universe and a sacred sense of life, who has approached myth and magic with such seriousness and simplicity and who is so purely inspired by ritual and fable.”

  Nostalgic less for the big world of Mexico than for his remote ancestral world of the Zapotecs, Toledo abandoned Europe and returned home in 1965, first to Juchitán, determined to promote and protect the arts and crafts in his native state of Oaxaca (he designed tapestries with the craftsmen of Teotitlán del Valle), and then moving to Oaxaca city, where he helped create a cultural awakening, with his indignation and his art.

  “He works all the time,” Sara told me. “He’s still painting. He’s multitasking. He makes fences of iron—well, they look like fences. They’re sculptures. He works with all sorts of materials—felt, carpets, tiles, ceramics, glass, laser cutouts. He makes toys. He makes felt hats for little kids.”

  “And tamalitas.”

  “That, too. He’s pro-Oaxaca,” she said, and laughed softly. “They were going to put up a big statue of Don Quixote somewhere in the city. Another protest. ‘If you do this, I will take my clothes off.’ After that, no statue!”

  Monsanto, more villainous than junk food or a kitschy statue, was the target of another protest. The company had bought 1.7 million acres in Sinaloa in order to produce yellow corn, a genetically modified variety Monsanto termed “nano corn.” Mexico knew a little bit about corn growing, having domesticated corn eight thousand years ago. But Monsanto’s importation of its Frankenstein corn was seen as subversive, and that genetically modified corn plantings would contaminate ancient native varieties. As bad as that, the toxins designed to protect the GMO grain against pests would indiscriminately destroy insects useful to pollination and the natural order.

  “Monsanto held some trials,” Sara said. “Their corn pollinated the local corn, and it died. They’re not allowed to introduce seeds here. The government banned them after the protests.”

  Her father, she said, still had strong links with his birthplace in Juchitán. The earthquake that had destroyed the parts of Mexico City where I had been teaching also laid waste to much of the city of Juchitán. Many people were made homeless.

  “We formed a group called Amigos de IAGO and set up forty-five soup kitchens in and around Juchitán and in other parts of the Isthmus,” Sara said. “We were feeding five thousand
people a day for four months, until people got back on their feet.”

  And she explained that the soup kitchens were not an entirely outside effort—a charity, doing everything—but rather a cooperative system, mostly operated by the Juchitán people themselves.

  “Having something to do was therapeutic for them,” Sara said. “It took their mind off the earthquake.”

  I said that I intended to drive there in a few weeks.

  “I can give you some names,” she said. “It’s a little dangerous now, with so much destruction. People are still desperate.”

  Not long after this chat with her, she gave me the word: I could meet Toledo at the arts center, where a show of his work was being mounted.

  I arrived early enough to have a brisk walk-through of the show and was dazzled by the variety of works—iron sculptures flat against the wall like trellises of metal filigree, lurid posters with denunciations in large letters—one of these showed Benito Juárez sleeping on eight or ten ears of corn, and written above him, Despierta Benito! (Wake up, Benito!) and Y di no al maíz transgénico! (And reject genetically modified maize!). There were hand puppets, hats, lithographs of mottoes, dolls in Zapotec dresses, a felt corn cob labeled Monsanto with a skull on it, and serene ink drawings—a large one completely covered with a shoal of beautifully rendered darting shrimp, flashing to one edge of the paper.

  “Hello.” I looked up from the drawing and saw Toledo walking toward me.

  The first thing, the most obvious aspect of the man, was his head—a large head, accentuated by wild hair, much too big for his slender body. He had a slight torso, thin arms, skinny legs, looking doll-like and improbable. He was wide-eyed, unsmiling, and intense, but courtly, austerely polite in the manner of old-fashioned Mexicans. He was dark, Zapotec to his fingertips, and his untucked white cotton shirt made him seem darker. I also felt at once, seeing his crooked smile and the way he bounced when he walked, that he had too much heart and humor to make himself unapproachable. Some people are so generous they have a justifiable fear of the clutches of strangers.

  “This is lovely,” I said of the drawing of the darting shrimp.

  “Camarones,” he said, and tapped the glass of the case it lay in, shimmering with life and movement. “I like the way they swim together. You see the pattern?” And as though this explained everything, he added, “Juchitán is near the sea.”

  With a movement of his hand, he signaled to his daughter that he wanted coffee.

  He became animated, smiling, as we walked around the exhibition. At the Despierta Benito! poster he said, “This is against the government.”

  A lithograph under glass was a copy of a seventeenth-century Spanish manuscript listing a Zapotec vocabulary, for the use of missionaries and officials. Another was also based on an old document, but one with images of slavery—men and women, their legs and hands in shackles and chains, titled De la Esclavitud (Of Slavery).

  “This is me,” he said of a mass of feathers, titled Autoretrato en Plumas, which, with concentration, I discerned was Toledo’s face picked out in gray pin feathers, glued to a board, a startling likeness. He laughed as I examined it.

  And more: a woodcut of two rhinos copulating, a cracked mirror (“the sister of Snow White”), a spider web in steel wires, a portrait of Albrecht Dürer, his hair and beard rendered with actual hair.

  “Dürer was fascinated by hair,” Toledo said.

  And a large work of many faces, individual portraits of the forty-three students who had been abducted and killed at Ayotzinapa, the faces printed in melancholy tints, like icons.

  “Sad,” Toledo said. “A tragedy.” He steered me out of the exhibit to a small table where two cups of coffee had been placed, along with a pile of books. “Sit, please. You can sign them? For our library.”

  I signed the books and thanked him for meeting me at short notice. I told him he was the only person in Oaxaca I wished to meet, and when I said this was not simple adulación, he dismissed it with a wave of his hand.

  “My English is no good.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “I’m old, I forget,” he said. “I’m going to stop painting sometime.”

  “Please don’t say you’re old,” I said in Spanish, “because I’m the same age. We are men of judgment.”

  “Maybe. I like to think so,” he said in English.

  “I’m interested that you went to Paris when you were very young,” I said.

  “I was twenty,” he said. “But in Paris I was alone, and lonely. I worked, I did painting and prints. Tamayo was kind to me. I felt less lonely with him.”

  The renowned Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo had gone to Paris in 1949—fled, perhaps, because he found himself out of sympathy with the passionately political muralists—Rivera, Orozco, and others—and skeptical of revolutionary solutions. Wishing to go his own way, Tamayo took up residence in New York City in 1926 and after the war worked in Paris. He encouraged Toledo to paint in his studio, and though Tamayo was forty years older than Toledo, they had much in common, both Oaxacans of Zapotec ethnicity, both resisting classification, making art in prints, in painting, in sculpture. In the end, Tamayo returned to Oaxaca, like Toledo.

  “I came back to be among my own people and my family,” Toledo told me. “I wanted to speak Zapoteco again, in Juchitán.”

  “So you were happy then?”

  “No. I couldn’t work there,” he said. “It was the noise, too much activity. I liked the place. I was home. I could speak Zapoteco—my grandfather and father and others spoke it. I don’t speak it well—I understand it. But I wanted to paint, so I left.”

  “Did you miss Paris?”

  He cocked his considerable head. He said, “In Paris I fell in love with a woman. She was Vietnamese. I had an idea. I planned to go to Vietnam with her—this was 1964, when it was very bad there.”

  “What was your idea in going to Vietnam in wartime?”

  “Just to see it,” he said simply. “I thought I could teach drawing in classes to American soldiers. And I could meet the girl’s parents, but . . .” He shrugged. “The girl’s parents would not support my application for a visa. So in the end I left Paris. I went to New York City, but I was lonely there, too.”

  I mentioned my feeling of meeting someone my own age, how we had both lived through the events of the sixties—Vietnam, demonstrations, political and social upheaval. And he would have experienced at close hand the massacre of students in 1968 in Mexico City.

  “You’re my age, but you’re strong,” he said. He clapped me on the shoulder. “Driving your car in Mexico!”

  “But I’m sure you drive.”

  “My wife drives, not me.” He tapped his chest regretfully. “My heart. I don’t travel. There is danger on roads. There is danger on planes. I don’t like airports.”

  “No one likes airports,” I said.

  “I don’t like the colors in airports. I don’t like the colors of the insides of planes. I don’t like the smells.”

  All these seemed to me sensible objections to air travel.

  “What happened to the Vietnamese woman?”

  “Funny thing. She married a GI and went to live in California,” he said. “Now she’s a widow, and old, but I still talk to her. She comes to Oaxaca—I see her here, we are friends.” He became restless, adjusting his posture on the chair, holding the coffee cup but not drinking. He said, “Have you seen what is happening in Mexico?”

  “I’ve traveled a little bit—driving around. I drove from the border, stopping in towns and talking to people. I stayed awhile in Mexico City. I’m trying to make sense of Mexico.”

  “Are you having success?”

  “Yes. I have Mexican friends. I’m happy!”

  “Good for you, amigo!”

  We talked about Mexico City. He told me of his studies there, and the artists he’d met. I asked him what he thought of Frida Kahlo, because as a budding artist he would have known her work when she was at the center of
attention, as an artist, as a public figure, iconic, adored or disputed over—she died in 1954.

  “I started out hating her,” he said. “Then later I began to see that she represented something. And outsiders were interested in her. Her life was so complex and painful. So she is something,” he said, and in an echo I was to hear about Mexican novelists, sculptors, poets, playwrights, and musicians, wanting an outsider to understand the wealth of Mexican creativity, he added, “But there are so many others!”

  To change the subject, and suggest a place I’d been, I clicked on my phone and showed him a photograph I’d taken of a tiny peasant woman in a remote mountain village in the Mixteca.

  Toledo peered at the photo and frowned. “She’s poor,” he said. “Nothing will happen to her. No one cares about her, or people like her. No one cares about the poor, or about their lives. The government doesn’t care.”

  “But these are the people I’ve been trying to write about, the ones I want to talk to—about their hopes.”

  “Mexico is in a bad time now,” he said. “It’s not just the US and Trump. It’s other things. Drugs and gangs, and the immigration from Central America.” He gestured, spreading his thin arms, his delicate fingers. “Oaxaca is in the middle of it all.”

  “But you’re working. That’s the important thing. Tamayo worked until he was ninety.”

  “He was strong. I’m not,” he said. “My studio is here, I’m still painting. I make things from felt, from metal, from paper and cloth. I look at the paintings I’ve done and I’m not that satisfied. I’ve done so many! I want to move on and do other things. I’ll show you.”

  He led me back to the exhibition, past the metal sculpture, the felt hats, the light box of transparencies of a human body, pull toys, and laser cuts of insects, including a large black scorpion. He opened a chest in which booklets were piled. I took them to be children’s books, but he explained that they were stories he had illustrated.