Oaxaca Journal

by Oliver Sacks

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MONDAY

  An early morning walk near our hotel with Dick Rauh and his wife went astray this morning. We got lost, and almost killed, trying to cross the Pan American Highway. We saw open sewers, children with infected eyes and sores. Fearful poverty, filth. We were almost asphyxiated by diesel fumes; we were almost bitten by a ferocious, perhaps rabid dog. This is the other side of Oaxaca, a modern city, full of traffic, with a rush hour, and poverty, like any other. Perhaps it is salutary for me to see this other side, before I get too lyrical about this Eden.

  I have wanted to see the famous Tule tree, El Gigante, the colossal bald cypress in the churchyard of Santa María del Tule, for fifty or more years, ever since seeing an old photo of it in Strasburger’s Textbook of Botany in my biology days at school, and reading that Alexander von Humboldt, who visited it in 1803, thought it might be four thousand years old. The notion that Humboldt himself made a special journey to see it, that I am now standing, almost two hundred years later, where he might have stood, adds a special dimension. Humboldt is a great hero of mine, and has been since I was fourteen or fifteen. I love his enormous, insatiable curiosity, his sensitivity and boldness—he was the first European to climb Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest Andean peak, and thought nothing, in his late sixties, of embarking on a wild journey through Siberia, collecting minerals and plants, making meteorological observations. Not only did he have this manifest feeling for the natural world, but he was also, it seemed (this is not so of all naturalists or even anthropologists) unusually sensitive to the different cultures and peoples he encountered.

  Though we are still on the outskirts of the city of Oaxaca, in Humboldt’s day, I imagine, this church and its tree were very isolated. One sees this plainly in the old photo, where the church is surrounded by open countryside, whereas now there is a bustling village all around it—indeed, it has almost been absorbed into the city itself.

  The tree is too big for the eye to take in fully. It must have seemed even more extraordinary before the mission and town were built. It dwarfs the mission, makes it look like a toy. Not just its height (a mere 150 feet), but its girth (almost 200 feet around the trunk), and the far huger foliage, which, mushroomlike, tops the monstrous trunk.

  A world of birds fly in and out—they have their residences, their apartments, in the tree. Scott pulls out his hand lens and camera, carefully examines and photographs the cones—the female ones at eye-level, the males higher up.

  Takashi Hoshizaki, lean and agile for all his seventy-five years, and wearing a badge-filled green felt hat, compares the Tule tree with the bristlecones in California, said to be six thousand years old. I mention the famous Dragon Tree of Laguna in the Canary Islands, also reputed to be six thousand years old, a tree which led Humboldt to such lyrical extravagances that Darwin himself was deeply disappointed when, due to a quarantine, he was unable to see it. Two thousand years ago, Takashi tells me, this whole area was lush, embedded in a swamp; now it is arid, semidesert for much of the year, and only the Tule tree, with its vast roots and great age, survives to tell the tale. What else, I wonder, has El Gigante seen? The rise and fall of half a dozen civilizations, the coming of the Spaniards, the whole human history of Oaxaca.

  Luis is telling us the prehistory of Oaxaca, stimulated, perhaps, by the great age of the Tule tree: Asian peoples crossing the Bering Strait around 15,000 B.C., in the last ice age, then moving down through North America—hunting game, fishing, and gathering. Then, a few thousand years later, the woolly mammoths, the mastodons, the great mammals die. Did human hunting play a part here? Was it natural disaster, or climatic change? The hunter-gatherers, perforce, sought other modes of survival, and learned to cultivate maize, beans, squash, chilies, and avocados (still, today, the basic crops of Oaxaca). By 2000 B.C., as one historian writes, “Mesoamerica was a farmer’s world, with agricultural villages scattered through the highlands and the lowlands.”

  Luis speaks of the establishment of permanent village settlements, clustered in areas of prime agricultural land—villages distinguished, very early, by particular customs, skills, and tongues. We know what the villagers ate, he continued, from the remains—corns and beans, avocados, chilies, supplemented by a certain amount of deer and peccary, wild turkey, and other birds. We know that dogs were domesticated, but nonetheless eaten. We know that the men wore loincloths and sandals, the women cloth or fiber skirts. We know that travel and trade was established very early (villages in Oaxaca had obsidian from central Mexico or Guatemala, hundreds of kilometers away, perhaps as early as 5000 B.C.), and that religion and ritual played a major part in their lives.

  Between 1000 and 500 B.C., the first large cities were established, with a monumental architecture, and a new level of art and ritual, of social complexity, of writing. The largest of these cities was Monte Albán, which we would see for ourselves on Friday. It was under the Zapotec that Monte Albán reached its highest development, ruling a large region and prospering for fifteen hundred years. For unknown reasons, this great city was suddenly abandoned around A.D. 800, and there arose in its stead a series of smaller, provincial capitals. Yagul, which we were on our way to see, had been such a capital; Mitla, which we would see on Thursday, was another. These smaller centers carried on the Zapotec culture, variously enriched by other cultures in turn: the Mixtec, from western Oaxaca, around A.D. 1100, then the Aztec, from the north, around 1400. A hundred years later, Luis concluded, the Spanish came, and did all they could to obliterate everything which had gone before them.

  As we approach Yagul, Luis points out a cliff face with a huge pictograph painted in white over a red background, an abstract design; and above it, a giant stick figure, a man. It looks remarkably fresh, almost new—who would guess it was a thousand years old? I wonder what the image means: Was it an icon, a religious symbol of some kind? A warning to evil spirits, or invaders, to keep away? A giant road sign, perhaps, to orient travelers on their way to Yagul? Or a pure, for-the-love-of-it pictographic doodle, a prehistoric piece of graffiti?

  Entering Yagul, I see nothing at first, except grassy mounds and piled-up stones, vague, blurred, meaningless, flat—but bit by bit, as I look and listen to Luis, it starts to come into focus. Robbin picks up a broken potsherd, and wonders how old it is. These gentle ruins do not seem too dramatic at first—it takes a special eye, an archaeological eye, a knowledge of history, to clothe them with the significance they have, to imagine the past cultures which lived and built here. One can see a central grassy courtyard with central altar and platform around it, oriented, Luis tells us, northwest to southeast. Did the Zapotec have compasses, or did they reckon from the sun?

  Four grass-covered mounds surround the altar; one of them has been opened to give access to the tomb below. I descend fearfully—it is surprisingly chilly, almost icy, ten feet down, and a fear of being buried alive suddenly seizes me. Listening to Luis, I have a vision of young men, captured warriors, being sacrificed on the altar, their torsos sliced open with obsidian knives, their hearts torn out and offered to the gods. Reemerging, dazzled, into the midday sun, I can now see the remnants of what was once a great palace, with labyrinthine passages and patios and little rooms—at least, the ground plan of a palace, for most of the stones have disappeared.

  I am starting to get a sense of a life, a culture, profoundly different from my own. The feelings are similar, in some ways, to those one has in Rome or Athens, but quite different in other ways, because this culture is so different: so completely sun-oriented, sky-oriented, wind- and weather-oriented, as a start. The buildings face outward, life faces outward, whereas in Greece and Rome the focus is inward: the atrium, the inner rooms, the tabernacles, the hearth. What sort of poems and epics did these Mesoamerican civilizations produce? Were they ever recorded, or did they remain spoken only?

  Yagul is our first intimation of what Mesoamerica might have been like, the cultures that lived here a thousand, two thousand years ago. But this, Lui
s says, is only a prelude; we will see much more spectacular ruins later in the week.

  A lethargic dog lies on a step in the shade. I sit down next to it—it opens a lazy eye and scans me, then, seeing I am no menace, indeed a sort of brother, it closes it and we sit together in peace. I feel our rapport, the flow of feeling between us. It is resting, but, at the same time, ready—like a lion with half-closed eyes on the veldt; or a crocodile, motionless, awaiting unwary prey, able to explode into full activity in an instant. What is the physiology of this resting-ready state, and do we, human beings, employ it as well?

  Yagul having been dutifully traversed, our botanists scatter in the fields outside and climb up the hill overlooking Yagul, looking at the dried-up ferns of this bone-dry terrain. Dried-up, but far from dead (although to me, to an ignorant eye, the ferns look as withered, as dead as any plants are likely to be)—in this state, their metabolism is almost zero. But let them get a night of rain, John Mickel tells us, or put them overnight in water, and the next morning they will have expanded and come alive, beautifully fresh and green.

  The most fascinating to me is the so-called resurrection fern (actually a fern ally), Selaginella lepidophylla, which, I now remember, I had seen as tight brown rosettes in the market. We gather some rosettes to put in water overnight.

  It takes a practiced eye to see dried-up, withered, and contracted ferns, to pick them out from the brown earth about them, but most of the group have had experience with this, and now, lenses in hand, careless of their clothes, they are crawling all over the ground, climbing the slopes, picking out new ferns every second. “Notholaena galeottii!” someone cries. “Astrolepis sinuata!” cries another, and there are no fewer than five species of Cheilanthes. These, however, are the most difficult to find because they have shed their fronds to minimize water loss, and are reduced to an almost featureless brown stalk. The stalks look dead, but will come to, John says, within hours of the first rainfall in spring. Like the resurrection fern, these plants have adapted brilliantly to life in the desert—in this case with a special abscission layer on the stem which allows the plant to quickly shed its fronds to reduce evaporation.

  Almost the only green in this parched landscape comes from the bunches of mistletoe tapped into the vascular systems of some of the trees—unwilling hosts (I imagine), for though the mistletoe provides some of its own nourishment through photosynthesis (it is only a “semiparasite,” Robbin tells me), it seems to rob its host of both water and nutrients—the branches distal to them look thin and attenuated. These monstrous bunches of mistletoe make me shudder inside, as I think of them settling on, draining, killing, their host trees. I think of other forms of parasites, and of psychological parasites—and how people can live on, parasitize, and ultimately kill others.

  I strike up a conversation with David Emory, a great enthusiast (always the first to leap out of the bus for all his unwieldy-seeming bulk, to lie flat on the ground, bend double, scramble up slopes, to find plants). David was a chemistry teacher in his youth (now he teaches biology), and we begin swapping chemical stories and memories—his memory of a mercury hammer (the mercury frozen in alcohol and dry ice), and of putting ferric chloride on both sides of a hand, then adding X to one side, and Y to the other, which then turned them red and blue. What are X and Y, he asks me? Y, I say, is potassium ferrocyanide, turning the ferric chloride to Prussian blue. I hesitate about the red—it is potassium thiocyanate, he tells me. “Of course!” I say, angry with myself, and the cherry-red of ferric thiocyanate instantly comes back to me.

  David liked my New Yorker piece, my memories of “a chemical boyhood,” liked my reference to orpiment and realgar, the euphonious sulfides of arsenic, and says that his favorite arsenic sulfide was the strangely named “mispickel,” which his students always took for the name of a sour maiden lady, Miss Pickle. Thereafter, whenever David and I meet, we have a three-part greeting consisting of these sulfides. He says “Orpiment,” to which I retort, “Realgar,” and he caps the trio with “Mispickel!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TUESDAY

  7 a.m.: Sunrise over the hills. I sit here alone, the hotel dining room strangely empty and silent. The group left at five o’clock this morning for a sixteen-hour trip over the mountains, over the 10,000-foot pass, to the Atlantic slope with its unique ferns—its tree-ferns!—on the other side. With mixed feelings I excused myself from this—ten hours in a jolting bus would excruciate my back. The walking, the plant-hunting, the sense of exploration I love, but long sitting in a bus, anywhere, becomes an ordeal. So I will take a quiet day off for myself—lounge, read, swim, ponder what I am doing, what it all comes down to. I will spend a few hours in the central plaza in town, the zócalo—we had just a glimpse of it on Saturday, and it filled me with longing.

  I have found a little table at an outdoor cafe in the zócalo. The cathedral, noble, dilapidated, is to my left, and this charming, alive plaza is full of handsome young people and cafés. In front of me old Indian women in serapes and straw hats sell religious icons and trinkets by the cathedral. The trees (Indian laurels, so-called, though they are a species of fig) are verdant, and the sky and air springlike. Huge clusters of balloons, helium-filled, strain upward on their leashes—some look big enough to carry a child away. Some have broken free and have lodged in the branches of trees above the square. (Some, too, it occurs to me, ascending to an immense height, may enter the intakes of jet engines and bring them flaming to the ground—I have a sudden vivid image of this, but it is an absurd thought.)

  Tourists, pale-faced, awkward, uncouthly dressed, instantly stand out from the graceful indigenes. I am offered a souvenir, a wooden comb, as I sit, my own tourist pallor, and alienness, no doubt equally conspicuous.

  Writing, like this, at a café table, in a sweet outdoor square … this is la dolce vita. It evokes images of Hemingway and Joyce, expatriate writers at tables in Havana and Paris. Auden, by contrast, would always write in a secluded, darkened room, curtained against the outside world and its distractions. (A young man with a placard parades in front of me: Confess Your Sins! Or Jesus Cannot Save!) I am the opposite. I love to write in an open sunny place, the windows admitting every sight and sound and smell of the outside world. I like to write at café tables, where I can see (though at a distance) society before me.

  I find eating, and movement, most conducive to writing. My favorite environment, perhaps, is a dining car on a train. It was in such a dining car, supposedly, that the physicist Hans Bethe conceived the thermonuclear cycle of the sun.

  The balloon seller, holding her gigantic mass of balloons, crosses the cobbles in front of me to put something in a trash can. Her gait is extraordinarily light, almost floating. Is she, in fact, half-levitated by the helium?

  A charming gazebo with a cupola and dome, and delicate metal fretwork, stands in the middle of the square. (Later, to my surprise, I found I could descend beneath the cupola, to half a dozen subterranean, polygonal shops—a beehive of hexagonal units.) It looks, actually, a bit like a spaceship—like the alien ships in the film version of The War of the Worlds.

  I love these little sketches, impressions. I am tired of the labor, the endlessness, of my chemical book! Perhaps I should stick to little narratives and essays, feuilletons, footnotes, asides, aperçus.…

  I am left alone, even treated (I fancy) with a certain respect, perhaps with my bulk, my incessant pen, and my beard, I am seen as a sort of Papa Hemingway figure.

  A man, hung with a frame containing tiny cages of birds.

  Children come up to me as I write. “Peso, peso …” Alas, (or perhaps fortunately), I have none, at least no coins. I spent my last five pesos on a loaf of bread at the market—a penny loaf. It was much larger than I realized, though beautifully light. It took me a sustained twenty minutes to eat it.

  It is one o’clock now—the day, quite chilly at seven a.m., has become rather warm. When I came to this square a few hours ago, everyone avoided the shade and sat huddle
d in the sun, warming themselves like lizards in its rays; now the pattern is reversed—the sun-baked cafés and benches are deserted, while those in the cool shade are packed. And then, in the late afternoon, they trek back to catch the sun’s last rays. It would be nice to have a time-lapse film of this diurnal migration. A frame every thirty seconds, a thousand in eight hours, would give a delightful minute-long summary of this cycle.

  The young evangelist, with his placards from Corinthians 5:7, stands where he was before, impervious to the outer world, these secular fluctuations. His mind is fixed on the Kingdom of Heaven.

  An armored car sits by the side of the plaza opposite the bus stop. A heavy bag (of bullion?) is transferred from hand to hand into the truck by two uniformed guards. Another officer covers the guards with a very efficient-looking automatic. It is all over within thirty seconds.

  The hotel bus shuttles me back, along with a cigar-smoking man and his wife, who are speaking Swiss German. The conjunction of hotel shuttle and language takes me back, suddenly, to 1946—the war had just ended, and my parents decided to visit Europe’s only “unspoiled” country, Switzerland. The Schweizerhof in Lucerne had a tall, silent electric brougham which had been running quietly and beautifully since it was made, forty years earlier. A sudden half-sweet, half-painful memory comes up of my thirteen-year-old self on the verge of adolescence. The freshness and sharpness of all my perceptions then. And my parents—young, vigorous, just fifty. Would I have wanted, had it been offered to me, a foreknowledge of the future?

  When I arrive back at the hotel, I see the participants of an International Conference on Low-Dimensional Physics—they too are here in the hotel, having their formal meetings every morning. What do they talk about, I wonder? Flat explosions, a Flatland world? There has been no contact between us and them—the world we call “real,” our pteridological world, is doubtless too coarse for them, and theirs, perhaps, too subtle for us. Yesterday I overheard someone say “You mean to tell me these ordinary-looking people are theoretical physicists!” (Theoretical physicists, I once read, lead all scientists in intelligence, with an average IQ in excess of 160.) Observing some of them today, I am not sure they do look “ordinary.” I see (or imagine) piercing intelligence animating their voices and gestures, but I could well be mistaken. I am not sure whether the super-intelligent scientists I know exhibit any external signs of their great gifts. And I remember contemporary descriptions of Hume—that he resembled “a turtle-eating alderman,” that his own mother thought him “weak-minded,” and that the salons of Paris were bewildered, and intrigued, by the total disparity of inner and outer man. There are similar descriptions of Coleridge’s face: pudding-like, jowly, inexpressive, much of the time, but transformed, transfigured, by the vitality of his mind.