Oaxaca Journal

by Oliver Sacks

  I myself may be the only single person here, but I have been single, a singleton, all my life. Yet here this does not matter in the least, either. I have a strong feeling of being one of the group, of belonging, of communal affection—a feeling that is extremely rare in my life, and may be in part a cause of a strange “symptom” I have had, an odd feeling in the last day or so, which I was hard put to diagnose, and first ascribed to the altitude. It was, I suddenly realized, a feeling of joy, a feeling so unusual I was slow to recognize it. There are many causes for this joyousness, I suspect—the plants, the ruins, the people of Oaxaca—but the sense of this sweet community, belonging, is surely a part of it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THURSDAY

  Today I pay more attention to the vegetation of the valley as we drive through it—the serried, upright organ-pipe cactus and the prickly-pear, nopal cactus. These cacti form an integral part of the culture—the nopal pads are sliced and cooked (I have had them as a vegetable with almost every meal), and their strawberry-like fruits make very sweet, tasty jelly or jam. The ancient pictographs are full of cacti. An eagle perched on a nopal eating a snake, for example, which the Aztec saw as the sign from the gods that they had arrived, found a place to settle, in 1325. We saw such an image a few days ago, as a giant painting on the face of a cliff near Yagul. In pre-Hispanic days, Luis tells us, seems almost to recollect—at times he seems to contain the entire history of his people in himself—snakes were sacred symbols, earth symbols; they changed their skins as the Earth changed seasons. But in Christian tradition, the serpent became evil, the tempter. Snakes, once revered, were deliberately killed after the Spaniards came.

  Then there are the spiky agaves and yuccas. There are acacias, lots of them. John Mickel warns us to treat them with respect, for some of them host colonies of symbiotic ants, and these will furiously attack anyone who messes with their home. There is a fine tall grass, Arundo donax, with spear-shaped blades, some of which are eight feet high or more. This may be used for thatching, or roofs, perhaps for carpets, mats, too. Then there is the dangerous bad woman (Mala mujer)—Cnidoscolus, a nightmare plant of the euphorbia family covered with poisonous hairs. I had heard this spoken of, its use by pranksters, by my neighbor in the plane, but John warns us solemnly against even the slightest accidental touch.

  Lime trees, pomegranates, hedges of organ-pipe. Most families have small holdings with a few goats, burros, corn, agave, prickly pears. Most? Or just a few. A burro, Luis says, may be (relatively) more costly than a car is in the States. Poverty is everywhere evident here.

  The garbage in the streets, the negligent filth in the hills, Luis says, are moral residues of colonialism, reflecting the people’s sense that the streets, the cities, the lands, are no longer theirs. He goes on to speak of the state as huge, inefficient, corrupt. How the police are paid so little that it is natural they should accept fifty or a hundred pesos for overlooking an infraction at a red light, for this is as much, or more than, their daily pay. He speaks of drug mafias as being in cahoots with the police. The police, he says, are as much feared as the criminals.

  Higher, higher, now—a mountain valley filled with palms, fields of agave.

  Near Mitla, Luis tells us as we drive through the valley, there are a few small villages with relatively pure-blooded Indians. There are only three groups of truly pure-blooded Indians left: one in the rain forests of Chiapas, one in Oaxaca in the cloud forest, and one in the north of Mexico. There are no roads to these villages, and they are remote, a one- or two-day trek through the mountains. Their ancestors fled at the time of the Conquest, and they had survived only through isolation; for them, at least, there was dignity, autonomy, whereas if they had stayed in Oaxaca, they would have been slaves.

  Within fifty years of the conquistadors’ arrival, Luis continued, the native population was decimated. Disease, murder, demoralization—entire peoples committed suicide in order to avoid enslavement, regarded death as preferable. Most of those remaining intermarried with the Spaniards, so that almost all Mexicans today are mestizos. But the mestizos were not recognized legally by the colonial governors—they had no rights, and their property could not be inherited by their children, but instead reverted to the state.

  Life under Spanish rule was becoming intolerable, and revolt, revolution, was becoming inevitable. In 1810 it started, on September 16, the date still celebrated as Mexico’s independence day. The revolution was started, Luis said, by a parish priest, who rang the church bell to rally his villagers, shouting “Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government! Death to the Spaniards!” But it was eleven years before independence was finally achieved in 1821, only to usher in several decades of chaos, under a succession of ineffective rulers, during which time Mexico lost half its territory—Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico—to the United States.

  Then a brief halcyon period, just five years, between 1867 and 1872, under the benign rule of Benito Juárez. Like his contemporary, Abraham Lincoln, Juárez had a moral grandeur—his guiding principle was “Respect for the rights of others means peace”—and he fought for democracy as well as independence from European rule.

  A few years after the death of Juárez came the accession of Porfirio Díaz, a despot who ruled Mexico for thirty-five years. Díaz, Luis explained, was a deeply ambiguous figure: a general, a dictator, ruthless, paranoid, who nonetheless organized roads and industries, bridges, buildings. The country grew more productive, moved into step with the rest of the modernized world, but at a terrible human cost: There was virtual enslavement in factories and on haciendas, huge corruption and profiteering.

  Entering the village of Mitla, we see a dog running through the streets, with one leg tied to a goat. We find ourselves surrounded by dogs, as everywhere in Mexico. One of them has a broken leg—I wonder how this happened, how it will survive. Children hold out their hands and call “¡Peso, peso!” as we pass. Suddenly, we have to brake heavily. There is a religious procession just ahead, making its slow way to the church. I get off the bus, several of us do, and join the procession. People are holding votive candles, flowers, palm fronds. They move slowly, dogs, babies, and cripples among them, to the church, which peals its welcome loudly as they enter. Rockets are set off, dogs bark suddenly, startled; I, too, wince.

  Luis, though himself a pious Catholic, murmurs darkly about these processions. “Bread and circuses,” he says, “to distract the masses.” The church here, he feels, is without courage or power. It offers bread and circuses—processions—to pacify the people, but otherwise passively supports a corrupt government. “I say this,” concludes Luis, “even though I am a Catholic—I believe in my religion, but I am heartbroken and angry about our Church here.”

  It is not the ruins of Mitla that immediately capture our attention, but the piled trunks of organ-pipe cacti outside the site. Such trunks are often uprooted to make fencing, and once “planted,” they may reroot and proliferate. (I am reminded of how, in New Zealand, the stems of tree ferns are used as fencing in this way, and how these too shoot out fronds, becoming a rich living hedge.) An impromptu conference on the subject of living fences—the archaeological wonders of Mitla will have to wait.

  Building with plants having received an exhaustive discussion, we now raise our eyes to the church before us—a church built by the Spanish upon the older site and using stones from the buildings they destroyed. Mitla was still active, Luis is saying, when the Spaniards came. The conquistadors tended to raze entire cities, symbolically building their own churches on top of the original foundations. Mitla was partly spared, but a new Mitla had been built on top of the old one, using, cannibalizing, the original stones. Succeeding generations have continued to cannibalize, to exploit, their own past.

  But where Yagul—at least all that is now left of it—has been largely destroyed, leaving only its ground plan and some low, half-crumbled structures, here at Mitla there are the remains of an entire palace still standing, with gigantic,
yard-high steps leading up to it. It has dozens of interconnecting rooms, and must have seemed incredible when archaeologists first discovered its labyrinthine entirety.

  The walls of the palace are composed of adobe—sticky clay mixed with stalks of corn, animal stools, all fermented together—and conical stones pressed into it, so as to form an elastic base—the stones can move independently in their matrix of adobe, absorbing, dispersing, the force of an earthquake. I am fascinated by this, and draw a diagram in my notebook: the discovery of composites for added strength, for resisting shock, millennia ago. Since nothing so singular can be passed over by the group, a vigorous discussion at once breaks out about composites in nature—the interweaving, at a microscopic level, of two different materials, one crystalline or amorphous, perhaps, and one fibrous, in order to get something harder, tougher, yet more elastic than either component alone. Nature has employed composites in all sorts of biological structures: horses’ hooves, abalone shells, bone, the cell walls of plants. We use the same principle for reinforced concrete, and new synthetic ceramics or reinforced plastics; the Zapotec used it for adobe.

  The huge stone crosspiece above the palace door weighs at least fifteen tons—it was cut locally, but how was it brought here? There were no domestic animals, there was no use of the wheel (except, curiously, for toys)—presumably they used rollers, as the Egyptians did for the pyramids. But how did the Zapotec cut and shape these stones with such fineness? They had no iron, no bronze, no smelting—only native metals, silver, gold, copper, all too soft to cut stone. But the great Mesoamerican equivalent for metal was volcanic glass, obsidian. It was with obsidian blades, presumably, that they did all their surgery, and the Aztec their grisly human sacrifices, too. I buy a cruel-looking, sharp-edged shard of obsidian as we go out—black, translucent at its thinnest, with the conchoidal fracture characteristic of all glasses.

  The doorways between the palace rooms are low (and made lower by the steel braces which have been inserted to support them). But the ceilings, the tops of the walls, have exquisite, complex, geometrical figures—I copy some of these into my notebook—tessellations, ramparts, like the visual “fortification” patterns one may get during a migraine, and complex hexagonal and pentagonal patterns. I am reminded of patterns in Navajo rugs, or Moorish arabesques. Normally one of the more silent members of the group—who am I to speak up in so erudite a group?—I am stimulated by the geometric figures around us to speak of neurological form-constants, the geometrical hallucinations of honeycombs, spiderwebs, latticeworks, spirals, or funnels which can appear in starvation, sensory deprivation or intoxications, as well as migraine. Were psilocybin mushrooms used to induce such hallucinations? Or the morning glory seeds common in Oaxaca? People are startled by my sudden loquacity, but intrigued by the notion of universal hallucinatory form-constants, a possible neurological foundation for the geometrical art of so many cultures.

  But there is, as always, a limit—and after twenty minutes of traversing the rooms, admiring the achievements of pre-Columbian art and architecture, the group is eager to go outside, to look at what really matters—the vegetation. Indeed the professionals—Scott, with his camera and notebook, David Emory in his brightly colored suspenders, with his “third” eye, his hand lens—have avoided entering the palace in the first place, and devoted themselves to botanizing outside it. Scott again points out wild nicotine, a non-indigenous grass (Tricholaena rosea) introduced from Africa, some goosefoot, a prickly poppy with a delicate yellow color—and a parasitic wasp of enormous size. Robbin points out a little yellow star-shaped flower, one of the Zygophyllaceae—its four-pointed fruit resembles a caltrops. One point is always sticking up, he shows me, and will pierce the footpad of a passing animal (like the medieval weapon), and so be transported elsewhere. I am delighted to hear the word “caltrops” still in use—it is a word I am rather fond of, partly because it is a singular noun ending in “s,” like Cacops and Eryops, my favorite fossil amphibians.

  We return to the bus. It has become very hot now, in the middle of the day, and as we bus back I see two boys with bikes, talking together under the shade of a tree. I reach for my camera, but it is too late. It would have made a charming picture.

  We have now driven from Mitla to Matatlán, a village full of backyard mescal makers. The agave—maguey—is to Central Americans what the palm is to Polynesians. Its very name (our name), agave, means “admirable.” Carlos V’s envoy extolled it in 1519: “Surely nature has never combined in one plant so central, so revered, so enthralled by everybody,” and Humboldt described it in equally lyrical terms three centuries later. For the maguey not only provides fiber for ropes and coarse fabrics, and thorns for sewing, but sweet, odorous pulp for fermentation. Distillation was unknown before the Spaniards, and thus there was only pulque, a freshly fermented brew from the maguey (and one which could not be kept, but had to be drunk immediately after fermentation). As we drive from Mitla, we pass fields of maguey, some on waterless slopes which would not support any other crop.

  Some of the magueys have tall flower stalks with greenish or cream-colored flowers. A few have bulbils instead of flowers, and these can grow directly into new plants. John tells us how the vegetative buds are planted in a nursery for two years, then transferred to the field for another eight years. At harvest, all the leaves are removed and the stem is cut at ground level. The stems—piñas—often contain maguey worms, and these are removed and put in the mescal as a special delicacy.

  Of the many new foods I have eaten in the past days, the grasshoppers have pleased me especially—crunchy, nutty, tasty, and nutritious; they are usually fried and spiced.* After getting used to these, I am ready to try a maguey worm—we see baskets of these, writhing, when we go to the distillery. They look something like the live Klingon worms eaten on Star Trek.

  Why stop at grasshoppers and worms, I wonder? A quarter of the earth’s animal mass consists of ants. This is a menace (since they produce a great deal of methane, which enlarges the ozone hole), but it is also, potentially, a huge source of food. If they could be divested of their formic acid or whatever, they could feed the starving masses. Ant larvae, I am told, are in fact a delicacy in expensive Mexico City restaurants.

  (One insect, however, is not to be eaten. One must not swallow a firefly. Swallow three fireflies, it is said, and you’re a goner. They contain a substance with digitalis-like actions, but intensely potent, not to be trifled with.)

  There are at least a score of mescal distillers in Matatlán alone, most small backyard operators. A heavy smell of fermenting maguey perfumes the entire village—one could get high by merely breathing the air. We visit one distiller whose gaily colored awning fronts the main road. Here we see the piñas, the maguey stems, covered with gunnysacks and earth in a pit in his front yard; a fire is built here, and the piñas are cooked for three days. This converts their starch to sugar—they are delicious to eat now, and are eaten, especially by children, like sugarcane. The cooked stems are ground on a round stone platform with a millstone—a mule is used to pull it. Then the mash is put into large vats to ferment. It bubbles, heavy bubbles of carbon dioxide, and starts to become alcoholic—the bubbly mass is then cooked in a large copper kettle for three hours, and the distillate collected below. The particular distiller we are visiting makes “straight mescal” (which is 98 proof, almost 50 percent alcohol), and pechuga, mescal flavored by raw chicken breasts. This is more delicate in taste, and highly esteemed—but the idea of raw chicken breasts disturbs me here, a mixing of categories, as would the notion, for example, of fish-flavored gin. There are also more liqueurlike forms flavored with plum, pineapple, pear, and mango. We are given liberal samples of all these to try—and the effect on our empty stomachs is immediate and strong. A strange joviality overcomes everyone—we smile at each other, we laugh at nothing. We spend two hours tippling (and buying absurd trinkets) in the middle of the day. This is the first time I have seen our somewhat austere and intellectually dedica
ted group let themselves go, relax, giggle, be silly.

  Heated with alcohol, tipsy, famished, we drive on to La Escondida, a famous restaurant where there is an enormous buffet of more than a hundred different dishes to choose from, some of them visually intriguing, surreal, and almost none of them recognizable. I have almost the sense of being on another planet. Should I concentrate on one dish, or half a dozen, or try them all? I decide I want to try them all, but after twenty or so I realize it is beyond me. One would have to come here once a week for a year and sample a different selection each time. I know Oaxaca has the richest flora in Mexico. I see now it has the richest, most varied foods as well. I think I am beginning to fall in love with the place.

  Sated, swollen, half-drunk as well, I have a strong desire to lie down and sleep. Outside the restaurant I do see a man asleep at the wheel in his car—a physician, I note, from a plate in the windshield. He is frighteningly motionless and looks to me pale—is he just having a snooze, asleep, or is he in coma, even dead? Should I go over to the car, tap him on the shoulder? Perhaps the tap might show him unwakeable, topple his now inanimate body from the wheel. But perhaps he would be furious at being woken like this. What would I say? Just checking, just wanted to make sure you were not dead—ha, ha, with a nervous, apologetic laugh. Knowing no Spanish I do nothing—but as the bus draws out a few minutes later, I cast a long, last glance at him. He is still lying, motionless, against the wheel in his baking car.

  The entire village of Matatlán is dedicated to the distilling of mescal, and this sort of specialization is common; this mosaic of specialized villages, this economic organization, is pre-Columbian in origin. Thus everyone in Arrazola carves wood; everyone in Teotitlán del Valle is a weaver, and everyone in San Bartolo Coyotepec, where we have now arrived, makes the black pottery which Oaxaca is justly famous for. We watch a young man create a jug, without using a potter’s wheel—a pre-Columbian technique. He attaches a handle and then, with a gesture at once deft and light, suddenly pulls the lip into a beak. The clay needs three weeks to dry. There is no glazing, but rather a sort of polishing, with what looks like a lump of quartz, then the pottery is fired at 800°F in a closed oven, which restricts the oxygen available. This causes the metallic oxides within the clay to convert to their metallic form, and the pottery will take on a brilliant sheen with this. The ores in the area are especially rich in iron and uranium—I will be interested, when I return home, to see if these pots are magnetic, and to test them for radioactivity with a Geiger counter.