On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  “I’m a publisher, too,” he said. “I published these—I want to publish more.”

  I picked up a few and leafed through them, impressed by the care with which they had been printed: lovely designs, beautiful typefaces, vivid illustrations—of fabulous animals, jungle foliage, witch-like faces with intimidating noses.

  “Maybe you can write a story for me,” he said. “I’ll make a picture. I’ll publish it.”

  “I’ll write one as soon as I have an idea.”

  “Good, good,” he said, and we shook hands, but he did not let go of my hand. He tugged me to the case where, on my arrival, I had seen the large ink drawing of the mass of moving shrimp. He lifted the lid of the case.

  “The camarones,” he said. “I saw you looking at it. Take it—my gift.”

  He signed it for me, and hugged me, and in a whirl—his bouncing gait, his wild hair—he was gone.

  Some time after that, my friend Juan Villoro, strolling in Oaxaca, happened to see Toledo hurrying to his library. Juan said hello and mentioned my visit.

  “He’s a good gringo,” Toledo said, which delighted me. You can’t have higher praise than that in Mexico. But Juan had more to report.

  He had texted his girlfriend in Mexico City: “I just saw Toledo.”

  “Pide un deseo!” she texted back immediately—Make a wish! Because any encounter with this powerful man was lucky, magical, an occasion to celebrate.

  San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya

  Done with my lessons in Mexican and my mezcal sessions with the hospitable Guillermo Olguín (“Look for me when you come back,” he said), and uplifted by having seen Francisco Toledo, I moved out of Oaxaca city and drove to San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya, a large but compact and coherent village, like an island in the sea of big fields of agave, garlic, and maize, about fifteen miles to the south. I rented a room in a small posada, Ex-Hacienda Guadalupe. The hacienda was an ancient-looking place set on a hillside, owned and run by Michael Sledge and his partner, Raúl Cabra. Sledge was one of the writing students I’d taught in Mexico City, though “writing student” gives a misleading impression. He was about fifty, widely read, with a scientific background. He had published two excellent books, to good reviews: a novel based on the life and love of Elizabeth Bishop, The More I Owe You, and a memoir, Mother and Son, about his coming out as a gay man. His work in progress, Seclusia, most of which I had read and admired, was a fictional version of the Mexican residence of the English aristocrat Edward James. This extravagant and surrealistic estate of follies and gazebos James built in a valley in the rain forest of San Luis Potosí. James claimed to be the illegitimate son of King Edward VII, was very wealthy, a patron of the arts, a part-time art collector (surrealistic masterpieces), and a full-time eccentric. “But I don’t want to build a house,” Edward says in Sledge’s book. “I want to build a ruin.”

  Sledge was a patient man, amazingly so, a good-tempered gringo who had lived in Mexico, mainly in Oaxaca, for twelve years, fluent in Spanish, knowledgeable about Mexican customs and literature, well connected, and wise. It was Sledge’s lot as a long-term expatriate to have to endure the obnoxious observations of breathless know-it-alls who, on a hectic visit, flying in to Oaxaca for a few days, wrote simplistic pieces about its people and its food, multiplying mistakes and mishearings.

  In extolling Oaxaca in the travel pages of a newspaper or magazine, the visiting writer on a weekend junket nearly always romanticized the experience and idealized the state, ignoring the fact that it is one of the poorest areas in the country, and that the city’s traffic is maddening and often at a standstill because of political protest blockades or the sheer volume of cars. They bought charmless, machine-made bags, believing them to be hand sewn, and reported that the covered 20th of November Market, near the Zócalo, where they bought the bags, was a traditional tianguis rather than a prettified shopping area cooked up specifically for tourists. Gushing over colonial-era churches, these travel writers seldom pointed out that they were built by the forced labor—or slave labor—of the indigenous people, and in praising the church at the ancient ruins in Mitla failed to mention the salient point, that Mitla was a Zapotec religious site that was destroyed so that its stones could be reused to create San Pablo Villa de Mitla church, to displace the old gods and to demonstrate the domination of the colonizing power.

  As Sledge told me, with barely suppressed fury, “These writers show a total lack of curiosity or understanding beyond the most superficial perception of the place and people.”

  I was one of those know-it-alls, but Sledge was helpful in correcting my blunders, and he became an ally in my quest to penetrate the hinterland. Raúl, too, an artist, designer, and entrepreneur, knew the villages of artisans—weavers, sandal makers, plaiters of baskets, ceramicists, and painters.

  The Templo de San Jerónimo, designed by Dominicans, built by Zapotecs in the late sixteenth century, was said by Oaxaca guides to be the best example in the whole valley of the high style of interior decoration—baroque on the outside, painted ceilings and archways inside, retablos of miracles, every altarpiece and wall and pillar painted, and even the eighteenth-century organ in the loft had cherubic faces daubed on it. The American photographer Paul Strand had come to the village of San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya in the early 1930s, to take pictures of the church for his iconic portfolio of gravure prints, Photographs of Mexico (1940).

  But the village was tiny and poor, like hundreds of others in Oaxaca state: a small waffle of streets, a plaza that looked like an afterthought, a number of abandoned houses, a hole-in-the-wall grocery store. The singular church was visible from every street. The whole place was surrounded by plowed fields, the plows pulled by horses or mules, steered by a plowman smacking their flanks with a stick. San Jerónimo was near the road to Mitla, not far from the high terraced ruins of Yagul, and if you took a right on the main road and stayed on it, you’d pass through the Isthmus and Chiapas; if you persevered, you’d end up in Patagonia, since this was the Pan American Highway. In spite of the grand name, the highway was a modest-looking two-lane, Mexico Route 190 at this point, potholed and bumpy for many miles south.

  Ex-Hacienda Guadalupe was a thick-walled one-story building of granite blocks that had been restored by Sledge and Raúl. Its footprint was a large hollow square, and its rooms were ranged around the enormous—big as a tennis court—central paved patio, with white plastered walls and a fountain. The whole place was cool and well lit, its shady spots draped with sleeping rescue dogs: perfect for reading and writing. I was happy there. I was undisturbed in my work. I was Don Pablo.

  The hacienda was five miles from Tlacolula and its vast, celebrated market, busiest on Sundays and noted for its hawkers, mainly indigenous Zapotecs and Mixtecs, their handicrafts, their fruit and vegetables, their flowers. The pleasure in visiting markets in distant countries is mainly self-indulgent and voyeuristic, but apart from listing the items for sale or describing the faces of the stallholders, not much to report. One market is pretty much like another in its color and profusion, except for what’s on offer: dead dogs hung on hooks in the markets in China to be made into stew, sharks in the Philippines, used (American-donated) clothes in Zambia, pickled snakes in Vietnam, endangered species elsewhere. In Juchitán, a month after visiting Tlacolula, I saw buckets of sea turtle eggs for sale, forbidden of course, but tasty: “Pero muy sabroso, señor.”

  In his “Market Day” essay, D. H. Lawrence mentions the variety of the produce and the crafts, and of the contending Zapotec and Mixtec voices, and then shrewdly observes of markets in general, “To buy and to sell, but above all to commingle.” That is the mood of most markets, men boasting, women chatting companionably, boys being boys and flirting, girls being shy, children engaged in improbably difficult jobs: small girls scrubbing pots, small boys hauling heavy sacks—the daunting sight, frequent in Mexico, of child labor.

  The streets surrounding Tlacolula Market are closed on Sundays so that the market can sprawl beyond
the arcades and the big building itself, allowing stalls to line the streets. The interior is sectioned off, sausages here, chocolate there, aisles of shoes and T-shirts, pink underwear and religious items, and videocassettes. The making of mezcal is a tradition in the town: lots of stalls selling the potent liquor, hawkers tempting passersby with shots. Stacks of flattened salted fish, and at the meat section one odd piece of meat, a small red carcass with an inedible gray bristly tail attached to it, a javelina or skunk pig, perhaps for peccary posole. The beauty of market stalls: piles of heirloom tomatoes, the twenty varieties of sun-dried peppers, clay pots of Oaxacan mole sauce.

  The faces of the stallholders—old women sitting amid their homegrown fruit and vegetables, baskets of prickly pears, pieces of embroidery—were classic Zapotec, the faces you see on the carved walls of Monte Albán and in high relief on slabs, the same noses and square jaws and in some cases the same headgear of folded cloth. Heavy and hawk-nosed, the women wore full skirts and blouses picked out in stitched flowers, nearly all of them with a headscarf wrapped in the fashion of their particular pueblo, in a twisted kerchief, a swag of thick cloth, or a flattened turban, each one a species of identification and pride. Those in the know could tell where they lived from the style and weave of the cloth.

  Tlacolula is incidentally a tourist attraction—big baffled gringos shouldering their way through the narrow aisles of carved skulls and track suits (“Look, Kevin, the old and the new”)—but as a traditional tianguis that has existed for centuries the market is not organized to please them. How could it be? The dining area serves fatty meat wrapped in greasy bread, fried grasshoppers, and gourds of pulque, and the burned, blistered, wheel-like tlayudas do not in the least resemble the smaller dainty ones offered in the cafés of Oaxaca city.

  These enterprising market men and women are among the poorest in Mexico, the ones who hanker to go to the US because they are hard-up, and who hanker to come home, because a market like this exists nowhere else. Like most traditional markets, this one is a meeting place of like-minded people, about selling goods, of course, but also about commingling, seeing friends, and in a state with one of the lowest literacy rates, swapping the news of the day.

  In one annex with a high ceiling and the smack of recently tanned leather—pinching the nose, stinging the eyes—the sandal sellers sat among their piles of aromatic footwear. D. H. Lawrence makes a point of talking at length about malodorous sandals, having heard that an essential ingredient in the tanning of Mexican leather is human excrement, a traditional practice still used in parts of the country.

  “Meet my sister-in-law,” Sledge said at a sandal stall in Tlacolula. This was Sarahi García, who was married to his stepbrother, Richard. One of their businesses—a cottage industry, really—was the making of huaraches, leather flip-flops, and other, more substantial sandals, the very sort that Lawrence haggled over on his visit to the market. (“How much do you give?” “Nothing, because they smell.”)

  We talked awhile. I said I was interested in meeting people who had been to the States.

  “We have many in our village,” Sarahi said. “You wouldn’t believe how many have crossed the border.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Come to San Dionisio. You can ask them.”

  San Dionisio Ocotepec: The Crossing

  Like most of the people in San Dionisio, Sarahi García’s first language was Zapotec. Sarahi did not speak Spanish until she began school, and still spoke Zapotec at home and in the village. It was a specific dialect, which linguists termed Tlacolula Valley Zapotec. When I later met her father, Don Germán, the patriarch of the large García family, I saw in his steady, assessing gaze and skeptical smile a confident man, proud of his lineage, loyal to his culture, and somewhat satirical. Because of her marriage to a gringo, he called Sarahi “La Malinche.”

  Most people who heard her father say this laughed uncomfortably and averted their eyes. As I had learned in Mexico City, La Malinche, an indigenous Nahua woman also known as Doña Marina, was the young lover, interpreter, and go-between for the conquistador Hernán Cortés. She was also the mother of his first son, Martín. La Malinche was seen by some as a brilliant tactician, and by others as a traitor for sleeping with the enemy. There are still conflicting opinions in Mexico about this singular woman.

  Teasing, especially the public sort, as well as the joshing in a joking relationship, always contains an element of hostility. Sarahi bore her father’s teasing for her marriage to Richard with forbearance and dignity. She was very beautiful, with delicate features and a kind of hauteur in the way she carried herself, always striding, always wrapped in a colorful scarf. But her father’s needling also demonstrated how in Mexico nothing is forgotten, how the past exists in the present. People sometimes mentioned that when a bad habit was criticized—for example, littering, which is one of Mexico’s most visible roadside blights—the excuse for it often began, “Well, you see, the Spanish, when they colonized us, did the same thing.” Thus, the five-hundred-year-old figure of La Malinche persists in the minds of most Mexicans and is still in dispute—as a paragon of indigenous womanhood, as a temptress, as a traitor.

  Sarahi’s village, the small hamlet of San Dionisio, was scattered on the slopes of a low hill. Steep and curving streets followed the contours of the slopes, defying the usual Spanish-imposed pattern of right angles. The nearer hills are cultivated—it’s an agricultural village. One of the crops is agave, for mezcal production, which is popular and profitable here (the main highway is called La Ruta Mezcal). Another San Dionisio crop is marijuana, bought by visiting narcos, processed, and transshipped north. A mainstay of the village is the steady flow of remittances from San Dionisians who are working in the United States. Sandal making was an option, too, but apart from that and fieldwork, there wasn’t much else. Many young men from San Dionisio waited at the roadside at Matatlán—on the main thoroughfare twenty miles away—hoping to be picked up to spend the day as casual laborers, for which they’d earn about $3.

  As I was parking my car near Sarahi’s house—one-story, but occupying most of a block—an old man approached and said hello and “welcome” in the formal manner of a campesino seeing a stranger in town. We talked for a little while and exchanged names. He was Pedro.

  “Have you ever been to the States?”

  “I was in the States for seven years, señor! I loved it. California—pretty.”

  “Any problems with the police?”

  “No problems at all.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “La cosecha,” he said. The harvest. “Working in the fields.”

  “You loved the United States but you came back here.”

  “Yes, because I was sick. And now I’m old. I’m seventy!”

  “I’m older than that.”

  “Not true!”

  Another man who returned from the States to his home in San Dionisio was Fortino Ruiz, a sandal maker. He was fifty-one now, but when he was thirty-five he decided to try to cross the border.

  “What made you want to cross?” I asked.

  “For money—that’s all,” he said. “People go with an idea in mind. To get money to build a house, or to save money to start a business here. They come back because their family is here. And their future.”

  In Fortino’s case he did not stay long, a few months in Los Angeles, washing dishes. But he hurt his back, was unemployed, and decided to return to San Dionisio.

  “But how I got there,” he said, brightening. “That was an adventure. But a long story.”

  “I’m a writer,” I said. “I like long stories.”

  “Okay. I went with four guys from here in 2001,” he said, settling into his chair in the yard next to the sandal tannery. “We flew to Tijuana, to find a way to cross. We went from one coyote to another to find the best price and the most security. The coyote we chose charged us one thousand dollars per person, because the route was easier. A harder route would have been cheaper.


  “We went to a hotel to make a plan—no money had changed hands. Some guys showed up in a truck. We had never seen them before. We were dropped at a taxi stand in Mexicali. Some other guys met us. They said we were headed for a place called Punta del Cerro, and they took us to a store. One said, ‘Buy food and water for two days.’

  “By then there were ten of us. We got into three cabs. It was night as we drove off. Rabbits were jumping across the road. It was exciting, it was like a movie!

  “About forty minutes later the cabs stopped and we got out. We began walking. We walked until about three in the morning, not on a path, though we could see a sort of way. We ate and we rested, then we set off again. At about four-thirty we found a fence—barbed wire. We squeezed through it. It was the border, of course, but not a serious fence.

  “At that point the coyote said, ‘No fire. No smoking. No talking. Keep walking.’

  “We walked until ten in the morning, and rested, then set off again. Around four or five o’clock that day we came to the desert, and it was very hot. We had backpacks, the water we carried by hand.

  “The sun went down. We kept walking, and walked until about one in the morning. It was very cold, and we were tired. We rested awhile, then walked until dawn. Sand got into my shoes, I got blisters, I was limping.

  “There were two women with us. They were twenty-two or twenty-three. One of them was lagging behind. I carried her water bottle, another guy carried her backpack. They said they couldn’t make it. They began to cry.

  “We helped them and struggled on. By this time we had very little water or food left. We asked the coyote, ‘How far?’

  “He said, ‘Our ride is beyond that mountain.’ I could see the mountain. The coyote said, ‘But it’s farther than it appears.’