by Paul Theroux
The muxes regard themselves as a third sex and say they are unique to the Isthmus. Unlike Spanish, the Zapotec language is accommodating—in Zapotec, as in English, there are no grammatical genders. You wouldn’t know from the Zapotec word ijueze (friend) whether the friend was male or female. The presence of the muxes among the homeless and bombed-out Juchitecos, the cruising street thieves, the guitar player, the children hawking candy, and the exhausted construction workers—all this enhanced the doomsday atmosphere, the sense that the End Time was upon us and everyone was living in the street, in a world turned upside down, watching movies amid the ruins.
A distraction in the main plaza was the noise of birds, thousands of black birds that looked to me like grackles, flights of them alighting on tree boughs and making a shrill racket. They were great-tailed grackles, as I was to find out, filling the plaza with their shrieks and adding to the mood of chaos.
“Do people have a fear of being inside?” I asked.
The streets were thronged with people standing and sitting, mixing cement, patching walls, and selling nuts and fruit. Yet the windows and doorways that were still intact had no lights in them. And with the tangles of wires hanging loose in the street for the temporary lights, and the lanes blocked by rubble, it looked like a war zone, but a heavily populated one.
“Yes, they are afraid in their houses.”
Earlier in the day, Francisco and I had eaten fish and shrimp in a restaurant of long trestle tables enclosed in a high-ceilinged, steamy tent—the fish from the seaside town of Salina Cruz on the Gulf of Tehuantepec. And I wondered, as you wonder over fish in Mexico: Am I being poisoned?
Dinner was served next to an open-air improvised kitchen-diner, in a backyard where lightbulbs were strung overhead—a vacant lot between two broken buildings. The kitchen, in a corner, threw up greasy smoke, the diners sat in plastic chairs, a ladder was propped against one of the cracked walls, and a motorcycle was parked near the stack of tortillas. What looked at first like festive bunting was laundry drying on a line, sheets and pajamas and the pink pennants of ladies’ bloomers.
Families dined sedately, talking in low voices, a table of a dozen people smilingly celebrating a birthday (presents formally presented and ritually unwrapped, the guest of honor an older woman in a blue dress), all of them eating and drinking. And this being a Mexican restaurant of a sort, children chased each other, teasing in singsong, and small babies bawled in their mothers’ arms.
I thought, as I had in San Dionisio, how this jumbled and malodorous backyard of people and junk and laundry, when studied objectively for a long moment, represented a kind of order, everything in place for a purpose, and—chewing the torpedo of my tlacoyo de frijol and nibbling at spicy shrimp—more than mere order: it was an example of pure harmony.
I went back to the Hotel Xcaanda and was sick as a dog.
The Squitters
It is a truism that Mexican travel usually involves a spell of gut sickness, known in Mexican slang as chorro, a splash. Because the ailment is almost inevitable, shared by most travelers, it is unremarkable—hardly worth a mention, and a bore when it is introduced in a conversation or as a paragraph in a book. Many travelers can top my squitters story, two days and two nights of paralytic misery in Juchitán, made all the more miserable by the humid heat, 97 degrees in the shade most days, and the unbreathable night air thickened with the shrill, triphammer racket of grackles, the sour tang of smoke from the smoldering ruins of buildings, the cooking fires, the dust thrown up by skidding scooters, and the stink of pulverized adobe of the wrecked town. I thought I might be critically dehydrated and need an IV drip, not just my home remedies of salted water and sports drinks and no food. I had bowel-shattering cramps and light-headedness, with the obsessive mental cataloging: was it the slippery shrimp, or the sinister stew, or the bulging tacos, or maybe the tlacoyo eaten in the stinking backyard? Possibly the sip of tainted water when I brushed my teeth. It doesn’t matter. You wait for the dizziness to pass, the paralysis to ease, the cramps to abate, the appetite to return, drinking Epix and Jumex sports drinks to rehydrate, praying it’s not dysentery, and dreading another aftershock of the quake and the threat of upchuck. And one day you wake, as I did, and you’re restored and ready to hit the road again.
The only justification for my mentioning it now is to say that while I was laid up with the squitters in Juchitán, I remembered Francisco Toledo’s request in Oaxaca—“Maybe you can write a story for me. I’ll make a picture. I’ll publish it”—and to kill time, I wrote the story.
The Palenque
The two trudging men had arrived just before dawn, so I was told. Traveling among the cold, huddled villages of the Mixteca Alta in rural Oaxaca, I took the story to be true. But I also felt it was intended as a cautionary tale, a warning to me, since I was—like the strangers in it—also a stranger, with many questions.
The drifting morning mist under the low sky was whipped with blown grit (the story continued). The men moved through the valley past the wind-scoured hillside and the bouldery slopes, where the quijote claws of agave clumps were upright and stark in the thin topsoil: the small uncultivated agave, the wild kind known as criollo.
The first of the morning sun, a blur, then a stripe of light puddling pinky purple in the mist, lit the two men from behind, putting their faces in shadow. So the goatherd, who saw them plodding along the road and scattering his animals, found their darkened faces unreadable. Their clothes were unfamiliar—identical—like uniforms, a suggestion of officialdom.
Seeing the goatherd stumbling across the loose stones of the field, following his animals, one of the men called out, “Wait—don’t go. We want to talk to you.”
The voice was friendly, yet when the goatherd turned and the men were facing the sunrise, their apparent friendliness did not persuade him, because now their faces were illuminated by the weak rays of the dawn, the muted violet giving them the yellow eyes and sallow skin and bluish lips of corpses—especially ghoulish on that hillside of dark agave claws, the boulders like tombstones.
“We’re strangers here.”
That was so obvious to the goatherd it seemed like a feeble way of tricking him. Anyway, as strangers there was nothing they could offer him in the way of reassurance; strangers came here only to carry something away, never to improve the village. And it was known that strangers were confident intruders who lingered just long enough to seize what they were looking for—baskets, woven hats, mezcal from the palenque—then move on.
But the road was bad, sixty stony miles, because in places it also served as a seasonal arroyo, snaking up the valleys and along the hills, a thoroughfare of rubble that prevented any cars from traveling on it. Only drivers in the biggest trucks dared it, the flatbeds that brought barrels of oil and carried away drums of mezcal.
Now the two men were close, their faces still eerily lit. They were dressed warmly, in thick woolen jackets and black trousers, but what the goatherd noticed was that their heavy boots were shiny—disconcertingly so, for how was it that the men could appear at the end of a long stony road and not have dusty boots? It was as though they had dropped from the sky.
Aware of the suddenness of the strangers and their fine clothes, the goatherd kept his distance. But like all goatherds he carried a wooden staff that he used to guide his animals, tapping their flanks or pounding the stones with it, to direct them to where some grass still grew on the eroded slopes. And the staff served as a weapon, a cudgel he’d used on a maddened dog once, clubbing him senseless as the dog gnawed at his sandal, leaving slobber on his toes.
“We just want to ask a few questions.”
That and something else alarmed the goatherd: they were each wearing a little badge on the lapel of their woolen coats. The idea that they were officials, that they had status of some kind, was as worrying as their being strangers.
“We won’t hurt you.”
Anyone who said that had a violent intention—otherwise, why would they
deny it?
Raising his staff chest-high to defend himself, the goatherd backed away.
One of the men unfolded a large sheet of paper. Its whiteness, its paradoxical purity in this field of dark stones and blown dust and agave claws, seemed like something malign.
Flourishing a blue pen, the first man said, “What’s your name, and where is your house?”
This was too much for the goatherd. He turned aside, and with long strides he made his way across the slope, not showing fear but moving with determination through the agave plants. The goats followed, as though sensing he was leading them to a place of better grazing.
The two strangers watched him go, pondering his departure with bewildered frustration. And when he’d dropped from view in the steepness of the hill, the men turned and picked their way back to the road, heading for the village in the valley below. They could see the whole of it, the one long street interrupted in the middle by a square of plaza, and a white church with two spires at the end, at the edge of town.
The narrow rough road became a wider paved street at a brick and stucco archway, the formal entrance to the village, a saint’s name and the Mixtec name of the place after it inscribed in green-flecked gold on the crossbar of the arch. Unlike other village archways, the place name was not followed by the word “Welcome.”
From the archway onward the road was straight and smooth, dividing the village in half, all the houses fronting the street, outbuildings—kitchens—just behind them, woodsmoke rising from them at this hour, paddocks and wash houses and latrines, and small backyard corrals where burros were tethered, tugging on their ropes.
The entire village of single-story houses lay on this one street, from the archway to the plaza and onward, to the far end, the church. No people were visible, though the woodsmoke indicated that cooking was under way. A dog trotted sideways, its head down, the only movement on the street, pausing to worry a thing half hidden in shadow—a rag, a cat—then ducking into an alleyway.
One of the strangers began writing on the bright page on his clipboard as the other knocked at the door of the first house. No one answered, but when he knocked again the wooden door opened just wide enough to reveal a face.
The face was squarish and heavy, with a wide forehead, beaky nose, broad mouth, and jutting chin, similar to the ones on the bas-reliefs of the ancient ruins near here, a face from a temple wall, but flesh, dark cheeks and coarse black hair—a woman in the crack of the door with a long braid lying against her back.
She peered with narrowed eyes, saying nothing.
“Good day,” the first stranger said. “May we ask you some questions?”
At this, the woman’s gaze became intense and rueful, a fastening onto the questioner’s face, as though regretting she had noted his features.
“We are from the health department,” the other stranger explained. “We’re carrying out a medical survey.”
As he spoke, he wrote on his pad, seeming to note the number of the house stenciled on the door. The first stranger said, “May I ask your name?”
The woman said, “Atalia,” and pushed the door, and when it was shut came the bump of wood clapping behind it, a sound like an exclamation mark, barring the door.
At the next house, a slit in the middle of the door flicked open, a dark eye against it.
The first stranger repeated his question, the eye blinked, and the muffled reply sounded like “Juana.”
“How many people live here?”
“Many” was the muffled reply. “All of them are men—my husband, my strong boys. Dogs, too.”
But after this assertion there was silence, not the macho growl from the interior the strangers expected. And before any of the strangers could speak, the tiny opening in the door squeezed shut, like the closing of an eye.
Crossing the road to the houses on the other side, the strangers noticed a man standing a distance away, at the level of the plaza. They seemed to recognize him as the goatherd, who had somehow entered the village and overtaken them. He held his staff across his body as if for protection, his head tilted up in an attitude of triumph.
The first stranger smiled at the boasting goatherd and, now on the other side of the road, knocked again.
This time the door was opened—slowly, but wide enough for the man standing in the doorway to be wholly revealed. He was middle-aged and mustached, the same smooth ancient face, the hue of an old plank of wood, the broad mouth and heavy jaw giving him a look of stubbornness.
Yet he answered the questions, offered his name and that of his wife, the ages of his children—three of them—and gave his profession as mezcalero.
All this time he was glancing across the road at the houses the strangers had just left.
“Your children,” the first stranger asked, “are they at home?”
The man shook his head and his features softened. His stubborn expression was smoothed, as he slowly smiled and threw the door open.
“Come inside! Have a cup!”
The strangers hesitated, but encouraged by the man’s shouts, they stepped past him into the small room, dimly lit and smelling of dampness and woodsmoke. Meanwhile, the man had uncorked a slender bottle and was pouring the clear liquid into two china cups.
“Teacups,” one of the strangers said.
“Better than tea, my friends.”
And when they had downed the liquid, and gasped with pleasure, he poured two more, and was wagging the bottle at them, against their protests, as they slipped out the front door, thanking him.
The small boy at the next house—an agave gatherer, he said, though he could hardly have been more than eight or ten—answered for his parents. They were at the palenque, he said.
“Doing what?”
He said they were preparing the piñas, chopping the quijotes from the agave he had harvested. He said their names, but was unable to spell them.
Then he bowed his head and whispered, seeming to pray, “You must go now.”
Smiling at him, their lips still damp, their eyes glassy from the mezcal, they started across the road again and winked at each other, the self-mockery of drudges going about their rounds—yet they were brisk, approaching another front door.
At that moment, a loud, familiar metallic note was sounded that penetrated their bodies and rang in their ears, the spirited shriek of a trumpet and the rattle of a snare drum, followed by the blatting of a trombone. They turned to see four men following them—the fourth was strumming a guitar, drowned out by the louder instruments. They were dressed in ragged coats, and two wore hats woven of palm strips, and their boot heels were worn flat. But the music was glorious, the drumming and trumpeting brightening the air and filling the road with life.
The strangers had to raise their voices to compete with the loud music, and they could not help but smile when, one after another, the villagers came to where they stood holding a bottle of mezcal and two glasses, urging the men to have a drink. Although the demeanor of the campesinos was friendly, their replies were terse, but they divulged enough for the strangers to fill in the blanks of the questionnaire.
“Is this about taxes?” one woman asked.
“It is to help you,” the second stranger said.
“How did you find us?” another woman asked, pouring mezcal.
“It wasn’t easy. Your road is very poor.”
“It is poor for a reason,” the woman said, and clutched her apron, which was stained as though with tobacco juice. Seeing them glance at her apron, she said, “It is from the palenque.”
By the time the strangers reached the plaza, a bricked square edged with dry bushes, the musicians had mounted the roofed platform in the middle where they played, their music echoing from nearby houses. The strangers sat on a hard bench, scribbling for a while, nodding to the beat of the music, summarizing what they had been told. Women passed them, some carrying wood in their arms, others leading burros burdened with wood, a bundle on each side. The goatherd was nowhere to be se
en.
“God bless you!” a woman cried.
Dizzy from mezcal, the strangers sighed in relief at the greeting, glad to be half done, the church at the end of the road much closer—close enough to see that it was a ruin, the sort of hollowed-out, roofless building they’d seen elsewhere, an old convent, open to the elements, just walls and broken buttresses and symmetrical stonework, arched openings where there had been windows and doors, and no worshipers—a broken church, a wall around it, melancholy in its vastness and abandonment.
“Who sent you?” a man at the next house asked, and then, just as quickly, chuckled, saying, “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m happy to tell you,” the first stranger said, and peering closer, added, “I see your family’s at home,” and looked past the man to a woman seated at a table. She kept her face in profile, not looking at them. Something about her was so familiar, the stranger said, “Atalia?”
The woman laughed in a chattering, teasing way, and the strangers waved. To them, these small, dark villagers looked alike, so it might not have been the woman from up the road, that first house.
“Welcome,” the man in the doorway said. “How can I help you?”
“To tell you the truth,” the second stranger said, raising his voice against the music, “this isn’t easy. All we need are some simple answers.”
The man spoke with urgency. “You’ve come this far—the church is just up the road. You’re almost there.”
And the strangers looked toward the church, where some villagers had begun to gather at the perimeter wall, and their presence seemed to vitalize the ruin, their veneration—if that’s what it was—giving it a purpose.
