Oaxaca Journal

by Oliver Sacks, M. D.

  My memory suddenly jolts, goes back to the market in Oaxaca, not the vendors and traders, but the beggars outside, poverty-stricken, demoralized. Like them, the man selling oranges to tourists at the entrance of Monte Albán could be a direct descendant of the men who built this place—or of the conquistadors, perhaps of both. The enormity of our crime, the tragedy, overwhelms me. One sees why Columbus and Cortés are execrated, by some, as villains.

  Can one reconstruct an identity which was so ruthlessly, so systematically, undermined and destroyed? And what would it mean to even try? The old pre-Columbian languages still exist and are widely spoken, perhaps by a fifth of the population. The basic foods are unchanged—it is still maize, squashes, peppers, beans, as it was five thousand years ago. There are many cultural survivals. Christianity, one has the sense, for all its long history, is still in some ways only a thin veneer. The art and architecture of the past is everywhere visible.

  Standing in one of the vast central open spaces in Monte Albán, I imagine the groundswell of an enormous crowd, voices calling in a dozen tongues, temples packed with worshippers, their prayers rising to the sky, while the silent astronomers work in their spaceship-shaped building. I imagine the roar of the throng, perhaps the entire population of Monte Albán, as they crowd into the ball court to watch the sacred game.

  It is this, the ball court, and the centrality of the ball game, which seems unique to Mesoamerica, for there were no ball courts in the Old World, either in their cities or their skies. No ball games, and no balls—how can one have a ball game without a decent ball? But this was not a connection I made at first.

  The ball court is very beautiful, restored now to its pristine state, an immense oblong of grass with huge “steps” of granite rising high, pyramidally, to either side. Very little is known about the rules or significance of the games which were played here. The Zapotec version of the ball game, Luis says (as opposed to the later, “degenerate” version of the Aztec—but perhaps Luis, as a Zapotec, is biased) was not about rivalry, but was more akin to a ballet, an endless, never-resolved movement between light and dark, life and death, sun and moon, male and female—the endless fight, the dynamic, of the cosmos. There were no winners, no losers, no goals, in such a game.

  The ball game, if sublime in its symbolism, was intensely physical too, with teams of five or six players using every part of the body except the feet and hands. Players used their shoulders, their elbows, but especially their hips, which were girded with a basketlike arrangement that helped them project and guide the ball. For the ball itself, larger than a basketball, was made of solid rubber and was bruisingly heavy, ten pounds or more. The Aztec version, at least, unlike Luis’s vision of the Zapotec form, was a competitive game, and lethal—for the losing (or, sometimes, the winning) captain would be ritually sacrificed and eaten.

  But discussion, in our botanical group, moves to the ball, and how the native peoples of Mesoamerica discovered how to extract the latex from indigenous trees, centuries or even millennia before the Spaniards arrived. The Spanish, indeed, were amazed by their first sight of rubber balls: “When they hit the ground, they bounce back in the air with great speed,” one astonished explorer wrote in the sixteenth century. “How can this be?” Some explorers thought the balls must be alive; such elasticity, such bounce, had never been seen in the Old World. They had seen the elasticity of a compressed spring, or a stretched bow, perhaps, but had never dreamt of a substance which was intrinsically elastic.

  Many plants have a sticky, milky sap, or latex. Left alone, this will dry to a brittle and fragile solid. It must be treated to coagulate the microscopic globules of rubber it contains, yielding a doughy mass which, as it dries, becomes the elastic solid we know as rubber. There is no single rubber tree, but trees in several different families give a suitable latex, and many of these were discovered by the Mesoamericans. The Maya found that they could cut down the Castilloa elastica tree, collect the sticky latex in a trough, and then treat it with the acid juice of morning-glory sap (this was peculiarly convenient, since the Castilloa tree was often encircled by morning-glory vines). The rubber they made was used not only for the huge balls used in the game, but for little rubber balls which children played with, and for making religious images and figurines, and rubber-soled sandals, and for binding the heads of axes to their shafts.

  Unlike chocolate and tobacco, which were brought to Spain by the early explorers and immediately taken up, rubber was slow to make it to Europe. When it did, it was rubber from the Amazonian tree Hevea, and it is this which is extensively cultivated now. The first sheets of rolled rubber were brought to France only in the 1770s, where they aroused great interest. Charles Macintosh, in Scotland, saw how rubber could be used to waterproof fabrics, to make “mackintosh,” and Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, discovered how it could be used to erase pencil marks, as a “rubber.” (Only then did the word rubber come into the language—but I think I prefer the wild-sounding French word, caoutchouc, with its echoes of the Quechua original.)

  It was only in the nineteenth century that the further discovery was made by Charles Goodyear that if one treated the crude gum with sulphur and heated it, a highly pliable, elastic form of rubber could be made. Goodyear, in this sense, “invented” rubber—except that the same invention had been made by the Maya millennia before. (Only very recently was it found that the morning glory contains sulphur compounds which, as in Goodyear’s process, are capable of cross-linking the latex polymers and introducing rigid segments into their chains—chains that entangle and interact with one another, producing the elasticity of rubber.)

  Half-listening, half-dreaming, I imagine the ball court as it must have been fifteen hundred years ago, in the heyday of Monte Albán, the jostling players using their hips and buttocks with a graceful yet desperate energy, moving the heavy, almost alive ball this way and that, feeling that they mirrored the ball game in the heavens, and that their own movements, their patterns, the constellations they made, were balancing the actions of the cosmos, the lords of death and life.

  I am interrupted in these lofty thoughts by the sight of John Mickel swooping on Tomb 105. “Astrolepis beitelii!” he shouts in excitement (an Astrolepis not previously in our list). The pteridological passion in him is in full force. And indeed, I see, as the rest of us are exploring Monte Albán, exclaiming over its wonders, three tiny figures are to be seen, in a field, far below: J.D., David, and Scott, all bent double, or crouching, or lying on their faces, examining the minute flora of the region with their hand lenses. With them the ultimate sacrifice is made—the monumental splendor, the sublimity, the mystery of Monte Albán—sacrificed to the humble but peremptory call of cryptogamic botany.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SATURDAY

  On our way now to Boone’s place, in Ixtlán. Woken from a semi-slumber (slumped in the bus, having visions of pyramids, terraces, the ball court, my cortex replaying Monte Albán) by J.D.’s ejaculation, “Birds!” I open my eyes, and see him alert, tense, scanning the scene with eager, expert eyes.

  In the slanting golden early-morning light, I see a cabin just off the road with a burro and a crowded yard—but I cannot grab my camera in time. Just as yesterday, at Monte Albán, I saw a lean, beautifully muscled youth, almost naked, standing on a projecting rock above the great arena. He could have been one of the original inhabitants—a young warrior-priest, perhaps, offering himself to the sun. The beauty of the human figure against the splendor of the backdrop made me reach for the camera. I would have “got” him, got the whole scene, but at that very moment someone asked me a question, and when I had dealt with this, the youth, the moment, had gone.

  I think about the botanical richness we have seen here, not just of ferns, but all sorts of other things which we take for granted. The conquistadors had lusted for silver and gold, and robbed their victims blind to get these—but these were not the real gifts they brought back. The real gifts, unknown to the Europeans before th
e conquest, were tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, gourds, chilies, peppers, maize, to say nothing of rubber, chewing gum, exotic hallucinogens, and cochineal.…

  “A Kodak moment!” John Mickel announces, as the bus stops for a few minutes—we are on a high mountain ridge now, and smaller peaks stretch like a forested ocean beneath us. But everyone else has seized on minutiae, particulars, bestowing only a perfunctory glance at the breathtaking vista. Dick, right in front of me, has got a tiny flower, a Lobelia, he thinks, which he is examining minutely with his lens, exclaiming at its beauty and anatomizing it at the same time. Is it the artist or the scientist in him which is aroused by the Lobelia? Both, clearly, and they are utterly fused.

  It is similar with Robbin who, in the same brief break from the bus, finds a giant pinecone and is now (using my red and green pens) marking out the way its scales are arranged in orderly spirals about the cone, and arranged in fixed numerical series. “If you don’t know about Fibonacci series, how can you truly appreciate a pinecone?” he says. (He had earlier made a similar comment about the logarithmic spirals of fern croziers or fiddleheads.)

  “Neat,” says Nancy Bristow, examining the cone. Nancy is a mathematician and math teacher by profession, but a botanist and a bird-watcher by avocation. I ask her what she means by “neat.”

  “Elegant … perfectly organized … symmetrical … complete … the aesthetic and the mathematical combined.” She searches for different words, different concepts—now that I have forced her to examine her exclamation “Neat!”

  “Is the Goldbach conjecture neat?” I ask. “Is Fermat’s last theorem?”

  “Well,” Nancy says, “its proof is messy in the extreme.”

  “What about the periodic table?” I ask.

  “That,” says Nancy, “is particularly neat, as neat as a pinecone, with the sort of neatness that only God, or genius, can construct—divinely economical, the realization of the simplest mathematical laws.” Nancy and I both fall silent, surprised at the sudden exploration forced on us by the simple word “neat.”

  A sudden cry of “Birders!” to alert the birders in the bus to black vultures flying overhead. I mishear this as “Murders!” and am amazed it should be shouted in so exuberant a fashion. Everyone laughs at my mistake, especially when I dramatize it: “Wow! Look at all the corpses! There’s a great one there—and gee, look there.…”

  A little past Ixtlán, approaching Boone’s house, we are stopped. A jeep with a machine gun is very visible by the road, to the left. A young man in camouflage pants and a T-shirt marked “Policia Judicial” gets on the bus. Now a real soldier, in khakis, with a netted helmet, boots, puttees. Absurdly young-looking—he looks sixteen—like a boy playing at soldiers. He handles his pen awkwardly. He smiles charmingly, very white teeth in his smooth, dark face—but all this time the machine gun is trained on us. John produces papers, identifies us, shows we’re kosher—the charming smile stays, and we are allowed to go on. But it could, quite easily, have worked out differently. These boys, with their machine guns, shoot first and ask questions later (one suspects) if there is any serious challenge or ambiguity, for there is a civil war, a revolt, in the state of Chiapas, quite close by, and the army is jittery, trigger-happy, suspicious. I want to photograph the policeman and soldier, but this, I fear, might be seen as an affront, or a challenge.

  The stopping (and often searching) of vehicles, and far-from-gentle questioning and searching of passengers, Luis tells us, is increasingly common in Oaxaca. Indeed, we have seen army roadblocks and search squads everywhere, though this is the first time we ourselves have been stopped by one. They are looking for contraband, especially smuggled arms, but also (Luis says) for people with “religious or political agendas,” missionaries, insurrectionaries, who intend to stir up trouble—students, too, with “insufficient documentation.” No one is above suspicion in times like these.

  John, picking up on this, said that our religion was “Botanica,” and showed a NYBG badge (they could have used my now cochineal-pink NYBG T-shirt!).

  “Hanging Polypodia on the rocks,” announces John, who, having dealt very coolly with the military, is now back to his botanical self. “We are going,” he adds, “to see the genus Llavea.” I like the name, with its Welsh-looking double “l.” No, not Welsh, John corrects me; Llavea was named in 1816 in honor of Pablo de la Llave, who traveled and botanized in Mexico two hundred years ago.

  Arriving at the gate to Boone’s property, we are disgorged from the bus, and start to trek quite steeply upward. We are quite high again, over 7,000 feet, and with the addition now of a slightly fluey bronchitis (several of us have contracted this), I find myself a little short of breath. Boone comes out to meet us—broad-shouldered, compact, not in the least short of breath (but he lives at this altitude, so it is normal for him)—tough, agile, for all his seventy-five-odd years. He is unsurprised to hear about our encounter with the army. He speaks of the current political situation in Mexico, and then immediately asks, “Have you read Locke?” and goes on to speak of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Agriculture, genetics, politics, philosophy: all are admixed in Boone’s spacious mind, and his often sudden transitions from one subject to another are natural associations for a mind of this sort. There will be a period in the middle of the day when some of the group will go trekking in the forest, and others, like myself, can stay in the casita—then, I promise myself, I will have a real talk with Boone, who fascinates me more and more, and whom I want to know better. But this wish is frustrated: Two young soil botanists appear—they have just arrived from Norway, and are making a special pilgrimage to see Boone. Boone greets them, welcomes them, in fluent Norwegian—how many languages, for God’s sake, does the man know?—and then disappears, closeted somewhere with them.

  The casita itself is both dilapidated and charming—ideal for a dedicated visiting scientist, intolerable, perhaps, for anyone else. But then it is not meant for anyone else. There are tangled plants everywhere, there is a lizard in the sink, and there are six bunklike beds almost on top of each other in the bedroom. There is a fine central table for having a conference, and a large covered area outside for the preparation of specimens. There is a stove and a refrigerator, electricity, hot running water. What else should the visiting botanist desire?

  What he truly desires is outside, all around him—for the casita is set in rich and varied forest, with sixty-odd species of ferns within a kilometer of the house and more than two hundred within a radius of fifteen kilometers. The dry central valley and city of Oaxaca lie an hour and a half to the south, and the lush rain forest is only two or three hours to the north. There is, in addition, Boone’s small farm, where he still grows corn and much else, and his personal garden with everything from grapefruits to rhododendrons, to say nothing of fish ponds and antique statues.

  Carol Gracie has picked a passionflower, Passiflora, and now gives us an impromptu talk on how it was used symbolically by the Jesuits. The three stigmas stood for the three nails of the Cross; the five stamens stood for the five wounds of Jesus; the ten tepals for the ten Apostles at the crucifixion; the corona for the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’s head; and the tendrils for the whips with which he was beaten as he carried the Cross to Calvary. If the good Fathers had a microscope, I thought, they could have found another dozen structures and symmetries which they could have interpreted as symbols of the crucifixion, embedded by God in the very cells of the plant.

  I wander out with Scott, Nancy, and J.D. to a grove of passionflowers, an ideal spot for watching the hummingbirds and butterflies and for botanizing in the dense surround. We have barely settled ourselves before J.D. cries out, “A hummer! In the Cryptomeria. He’s got a band of iridescent green, like emerald.”

  J.D. and Nancy keep spotting more and more birds—they must have identified more than twenty species in the course of an hour—and exclaiming in wonder as they do so. I look, and see nothing whatsoever. Or, rather, I see some hawks, and some vult
ures, nothing else—and the tiny stuff they are exclaiming about I miss completely. It’s my eyes, I apologize, poor visual acuity. But my acuity is fine—it is the brain that is defective. The eye must be educated, trained—one develops a birdwatcher’s, or geologist’s, or pteridologist’s eye (as I myself have a “clinical” eye).

  Scott, meanwhile, with his eye honed to observe animal-plant interactions, identifies ripped flowers in the Passiflora; other flowers, seemingly intact, he bisects with his knife, and finds depleted of nectar. “Illegal entry,” he says darkly. Bees, most likely, have preempted the hummingbirds, ignored the ants, and stolen the nectar, often damaging the flowers as they did so.

  As I admire the neat way Scott bisects the flowers, I hear J.D.’s voice. “Oh, my God, it’s a kestrel. It’s magnificent.” Nancy, hearing me confuse hawks and vultures, tells me of the aerodynamic differences between them, how vultures, as opposed to hawks, hold their wings at a dihedral angle and then rock … so. She brings a different point of view (a mathematician’s and engineer’s point of view) to birds and their flight, whereas J.D. is primarily a taxonomist and ecologist. Nancy’s interest in birds and plants only started a few years ago, and she brings her mathematician’s mind with her into the field. I am excited to see this, to see how her abstract-mathematical and naturalist’s passions are not in separate compartments of her mind, but can join, interact, fertilize each other, as I see now.

  David, the jolly chemist-botanist, bellows, “Mispickel!” whenever he sees me.

  I answer, “Orpiment!”

  “Realgar!” he retorts.