Oaxaca Journal

by Oliver Sacks, M. D.

  In Teotitlán del Valle, we visit the house of Don Isaac Vásquez, a master weaver whose carpets and blankets, and use of natural dyes, have become famous outside Mexico. He lives and works with his extended family—such families are the norm here among the artisans; there is almost a hereditary artisan class. The children will be trained in weaving and dyeing from an early age. They will be surrounded by it, imbibe it, consciously or unconsciously, every minute of their lives. Their skills, their identities, will be shaped from the start, and not just by the family situation but by the whole village, the local tradition, in which they grow up.

  Seeing Don Isaac at work, and his old mother, who cards the wool, and his wife, his brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews, the half-dozen children in the backyard; seeing them all work—totally engrossed, employed, in different aspects of the business, I have a sense of wistfulness, and of slight disquiet, too. All of them know who they are, have their identities, their places, their destinies, in the world; they are the Vásquezes, the oldest and most distinguished weavers in Teotitlán del Valle, the living embodiments of an ancient and noble tradition. Their lives are predestined, almost programmed, from birth—lives useful and creative, an integral part of the culture about them. They belong. Virtually everyone in Teotitlán del Valle has a deep and detailed knowledge of weaving and dyeing, and all that goes with it—carding, combing the wool, spinning the yarn, raising the insects on their favorite cacti, picking the right indigo plants. A total knowledge is located, embodied in the individuals, the families of this village. No “experts” need to be called in, no external knowledge which is not already in the village. Every aspect of the expertise is located right here.

  How different this is from our own, more “advanced” culture, where nobody knows how to do or make anything for themselves. A pen, a pencil—how are these made? Could we make one for ourselves, if we had to? I fear for the survival of this village, and the many like it, which have survived for a thousand years or more. Will they disappear in our super-specialized, mass-market world?

  There is something so sweet and stable about this village of artisans, and its set, fixed place in the culture around it—such villages remain little changed with the passage of time: the sons succeeding their fathers, and in turn succeeded, centuries passing without either development or disruption. A nostalgia for this timelessness, this medieval life, grips me.

  And yet, I wonder, suppose one of the young Vásquezes were to have great mathematical ability? Or an impulse to write? Or paint, or compose music? Or just a desire to get out, to see the world, do something different—what then? What conflicts would occur, what pressures brought to bear?

  We watch the carding, the combing, the looming of the wool, the weavers at work amid their great wooden looms, but our interests, mine at least, are more in the dyes. Only natural dyes are used, dyes used for millennia before the conquest—most of them are vegetable, and each day a different dye is used. But today is a red day, a day for cochineal.

  When the Spaniards first saw cochineal they were amazed—there existed no dye in the Old World of such a rich redness and fullness, and so colorfast, so stable, so impervious to change. Cochineal, along with gold and silver, became one of the great prizes of New Spain, and weight for weight, indeed, was more precious than gold. It takes seventy thousand of the insects, Don Isaac tells us, to produce a pound of dry material. The cochineal insects (only the females are used) are to be found only on certain cacti native to Mexico and Central America—this was why cochineal was unknown to the Old World. Outside Don Isaac’s place are prickly pears sedulously sown with the insect which form little hard white waxy cocoons—somewhat like scale—that one can split with a knife (sometimes a fingernail). The insects, extracted, have to be de-waxed, and then crushed—and several of Don Isaac’s children are doing this with rollers, crushing the dry powder so it becomes finer and finer—assuming a deep magenta or carmine tint as it does so.

  Some 10 percent of this powder, I am told, is carminic acid; I am curious to know the structural formula of this, and how readily it can be synthesized. (After the trip I looked this up and realized that carminic acid would in fact be quite easy to synthesize. But synthesizing it would throw thousands of Mexicans out of work, undermine a traditional industry and artisanship which has been part of Mexico’s history for thousands of years.)

  This deep magenta or carmine was still not the brilliant color which had captivated the Spaniards, the brave scarlet color that would strike terror into their foes, and that later was used to dye the coats of the Redcoats. Such a bright red only appears when the cochineal is acidified—done here by pouring quarts of lemon juice into it. The sudden change of color is very startling. I dab some of the now-brilliant cochineal on my finger, and am tempted to lick it. This would be fine, Don Isaac says; it is sometimes used in red drinks and lipstick, as well as in the finest red ink. Scarlet ink—ink of cochineal! And, it comes to me, a memory of fifty years ago, that we used cochineal as a stain in our biology days—it had been partly replaced by synthetic scarlet stains, but there was still, in the 1940s, no synthetic quite as brilliant.*

  The ground-up powder—almost a pound of it (I hardly dare think of its cost, the sheer human cost of raising seventy thousand insects, picking them off the cacti by hand, rendering them down, drying them, grinding and grinding them)—is tipped into a huge urn of steaming water, heated over a wood fire in the yard, and stirred and stirred till the water becomes blood red, and then the raw wool, in great hanks, is lowered into it. It will take two or three hours to absorb the dye fully. Looking at the gorgeous reds around me I grow wistful, covetous—Would it be possible, I ask, for my T-shirt to be dyed red? I give them my gray cotton NYBG T-shirt, and within minutes it has become a delicate pink. I wonder how deep the color will become, but I am told that cotton, as opposed to wool, does not absorb the dye too well. But soon I will have, I think with excitement, the only cochineal T-shirt in the world!

  I make a blood red smear of cochineal in my notebook, like the smears of chemicals I used to (consciously or accidentally) get on my chemistry books in my school days.

  * Grasshoppers, by a special biblical dispensation, are kosher, unlike most invertebrates. (Did not John the Baptist live on locusts and wild honey?) This always seemed to me a reasonable, even necessary, dispensation, for life in ancient Israel was quite chancy, and locusts, like manna, were a godsend in lean times. And locusts could come in uncountable millions, wiping out the always precarious harvests of the time. So it seemed only just, a poetic and nutritional justice, that some of these voracious eaters be eaten themselves.

  Yet I was outraged, as well as amused, when I visited the Pantanal in Brazil a couple of years ago, to find that the capybaras there, giant aquatic guinea pigs—sweet, herbivorous animals minding their own business—were at one point almost wiped out because of a special papal dispensation which decreed that, for purposes of Lent, these mammals could be regarded as “fish,” and thus eaten. Not only a monstrous sophistry, but one that drove the gentle capybara almost to extinction. (Beavers in North America, Robbin tells me, were also classified as “fish” for the same reason.)

  * James Lovelock, in his autobiography, Homage to Gaia, tells of his excitement, as a young apprentice in a dye-works, preparing carmine from cochineal beetles. The quantities involved were heroic—a 112-pound sack of the beetles had to be ladled into a huge copper vat filled with boiling acetic acid (“it looked like the pictures I had seen of equipment in an alchemist’s laboratory”), and after four hours of simmering, the dark red-brown liquor had to be decanted and treated with alum, then ammonia. Adding the ammonia precipitated the carmine lake, which he had to filter, wash, and dry. Now, at last, he had the pure carmine powder, and this, he writes, had “a pure red colour so intense that it seemed to draw the sense of colour through my eyes from my brain. What a joy to participate in the transmutation of dried beetles into immaculate carmine! I felt … like the sorcerer’s a
pprentice.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FRIDAY

  Last night there was a magical ending to the day, in the form of a spectacular total lunar eclipse. A group of us walked up the steep path by the hotel, to the observatory which tops the hills (no longer ideal, I would think, with the glow of city lights). We disposed ourselves on the rocks and ground, some of us with binoculars and spyglasses (I had my monocular), and bottles of mescal, and turned our gaze to the full moon above us. The night was cloudless, the viewing perfect. Robbin poured out mescal all round, and, looking up, warmed by the liquor, we howled and bayed at the full moon, wondering how wolves, other animals, might feel as the moon, their moon, was stolen from them. We wondered too how such eclipses were understood or regarded by the Zapotec and the Aztec—and whether the power of their priests, the awe in which they were held, might have derived in part from their ability to predict such events.

  Later I left the group and found another place to watch when about half of the moon was gone, because I wanted to see “finality” by myself—that strange moment (actually five minutes or so) when there is only the narrowest crescent of light, and this seems to transilluminate the rest of the moon, so that it looks like a dimly lit glass ball, a huge luminous sphere of glass in the sky, with crack lines one never normally sees, and all suffused with that strange reddish penumbra which one always sees with such intensity at finality in an eclipse.

  Today we go to the grand ruins at Monte Albán, and in preparation I have been reading a bit about it in my guidebook, about how it was founded in Olmec times, around 600 B.C.—more or less at the same time as Rome; how it had rapidly become a center of Zapotec culture, the political and commercial center of the region, its power extending for two hundred kilometers in every direction from the vantage point of its unique mountain plateau. The leveling of a mountaintop to create this plateau was in itself an astonishing feat of engineering, to say nothing of providing irrigation, food, and sanitation for a population estimated at more than forty thousand. This city housed slaves and artisans, vendors and traders, warriors and athletes, master builders and astronomer-priests, and it was the center of a network of trade relations spreading throughout Mesoamerica, a great market for obsidian, jade, quetzal feathers, jaguar skins, and seashells from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Mysteriously, still seemingly at the apex of its influence and power, it was rather suddenly abandoned around A.D. 800, after fifteen hundred years of life. Monte Albán, though much older than Mitla or Yagul, was regarded by the Zapotec as sacred, and they managed to conceal it, apparently, from the conquistadors, so that much of it remains, even now, almost as it was the day it was built.

  On the outskirts of Monte Albán we see little mounds of pyramidal shape, tombs and little terraces, dotting the hills. These old hills are suffused with human history, a history long preceding that of Oaxaca city itself, which is only seven centuries old. My first impression of Monte Albán is quite overwhelming, and unexpected. The city itself is spacious and immense, an immensity perhaps exaggerated by its uncanny emptiness. From the high plateau one has an aerial view of Oaxaca, a patchwork spread out in the valley below. Here are ruins on a scale as monumental as those of Rome or Athens—temples, marketplaces, patios, palaces—but high up on a mountaintop, against the brilliant blue of a Mesoamerican sky, and utterly different in character. The city is still suffused with a sense of the divine, for it was once a city of God, like Jerusalem—but now it is desolate, deserted. The gods have flown, along with the people, but one can feel that they were once here.

  Luis himself is in a sort of trance, which lends a hypnotic quality to his voice as he speaks about Monte Albán, and how the immense platforms and patios of the city echo the contours of the hills and valleys round it, the whole city a model of its natural surroundings. Not just internally harmonious, but in harmony with the land, the land forms, all around.

  There is one building that startles me, because it is set at a violent angle to everything else, revolts against the symmetry of the rest. It has a strange pentagonal shape that makes me think of a ship, a spaceship, an enormous one which has crashed here on the airstrip-like top of Monte Albán—or, perhaps, is about to launch itself to the stars. Its official name is Building J, but it is more informally called the Observatory, for its odd angle seems to have been designed to allow the best possible observation of the transits of Venus and its occasional alignments with other planets.

  The astronomer-priests of Monte Albán, Luis was saying, devised an intricate double calendar which was soon to become universal throughout Mesoamerica. There was a secular, terrestrial calendar of 365 days (the Aztec later calculated the solar year to be 365.2420 days) and a sacred calendar of 260 days, every day of which had a unique symbolic significance. The two calendars would coincide once every 18,980 days, roughly fifty-two solar years, marking the end of an era—and this was a time of great terror and despondency, marked by a fear that the sun might never rise again. The final night of this cycle was filled with attempts to avert the dread event by solemn religious ceremonies, penances, and (later, with the Aztec) human sacrifices, and a desperate scouring of the heavens to see which ways the stars, the gods, would go.

  Anthony F. Aveni, an expert on Mesoamerican astronomy and archaeoastronomy, writes that the Aztec

  … saw in the heavens the sustainers of life—the gods they sought to repay, with the blood of sacrifice, for bringing favorable rains, for keeping the earth from quaking, for spurring them on in battle. Among the gods was Black Tezcatlipoca, who ruled the night from his abode in the north, with its wheel (the Big Dipper). He presided over the cosmic ball court (Gemini) where the gods played a game to set the fate of humankind. He lit the fire sticks (Orion’s belt) that brought warmth to the hearth. And at the end of every fifty-two-year calendrical cycle, Black Tezcatlipoca timed the rattlesnake’s tail (the Pleiades) so that it passed overhead at midnight—a guarantee that the world would not come to an end but that humanity would be granted another epoch of life.

  The Aztec priests, in their skywatcher’s temple at Tenochtitlán, were doing what the Zapotec astronomer-priests had been doing in Monte Albán a thousand years earlier.

  The Aztec were more superstitious, more ridden with a sort of cosmic fatalism than the Zapotec. One can easily work out, from observations in a rare surviving Aztec codex, that the Aztec saw a partial solar eclipse on the afternoon of August 8, 1496, and this, perhaps combined with shooting stars and malign or equivocal conjunctions of the planets, would have filled them with apprehension. It was these apocalyptic fears, no less than the political divisions among them, and their inability to match the steel armor and arms of the Spaniards, Luis felt, that led to their almost fatalistic collapse before the apparition of Cortés and his small band of conquistadors.

  All these thoughts crowd into my mind as I gaze at the Observatory, and find myself reflecting on the strange interpenetrations of superstition and science, the mixture of incredible sophistication and naive animistic beliefs that the Mesoamericans embraced. And how much of this we still have in ourselves. All of Mesoamerican life must have been suffused and dominated by a sense of the supernatural no less than the natural—from the great gods who ruled in the heavens and the underworld to the local gods of maize, of earthquakes, of war.

  Wandering around Monte Albán, I find myself continually reminded of ancient Egypt—seeing the temples, the raised platforms, the grand bases for pyramids, the whole grand architecture of outwardness and open spaces. Luis speaks of a sense of the sacred, no less than an aesthetic, at work here—a religion of natural forces and forms, which gives shape to the city’s spaces as well as its structures. This seems to have been a gentle, reverent, open-air religion (though tied by elaborate synchronicities to the planets, the stars, the whole cosmos)—a religion which had no use for the violences, the human sacrifices, the horrors, of the Aztec. So, at least, Luis affirms.

  There was veneration of ancestors here in Monte Albán, as
in ancient Egypt, with grand tombs, mausoleums, around the edge of the city; it is a city of the dead, a necropolis, no less than a metropolis. There are also humbler tombs: the narrow graves of parents and grandparents buried in their own houses, so that their spirits could remain with their descendants. One such grave has been laid open in the Monte Albán museum and shows, beneath a glass cover, a seventy-five-year-old woman, shrunken, with decalcified teeth, osteoporosis, and osteoarthritic knees from a lifetime of hard work—kneeling and grinding maize, perhaps. It seems an indignity to be exposed in this way—and yet it gives the place a human reality. What, one wonders, was her life, her inner life, really like?

  It is easy to close one’s eyes and imagine the vast central plaza of Monte Albán packed with people—twenty thousand people would easily fit here—packed, perhaps, for the weekly market day, such a market as Bernal Díaz saw in Tenochtitlán. Thousands of bodies would be jostling in the plaza, traders and vendors from all over hawking their wares.