Oaxaca Journal Part 2

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 pa.s.s, 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 zcalo-we had just a glimpse of it on Sat.u.r.day, and it filled me with longing.

I have found a little table at an outdoor cafe in the zcalo. The cathedral, n.o.ble, dilapidated, is to my left, and this charming, alive plaza is full of handsome young people and cafes. 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ceship-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, apercus....

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 huddled in the sun, warming themselves like lizards in its rays; now the pattern is reversed-the sun-baked cafes 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 partic.i.p.ants 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 coa.r.s.e 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.

I sometimes think I have rather a stupid face myself, though most people seem to feel it is a kindly one. This, too, is my own impression when (as happens not infrequently) I fail to recognize myself in unexpected mirrors and windows and think, "Who is that amiable, kindly old fool?" But I have also caught looks of intense concentration, sudden animations of joy or inspiration, and looks of piercing sorrow and desolation, rage too, so it cannot be as pudding-like, as inexpressive, as I fancy.

I swim after my day sitting and walking in the city. The hotel has a beautiful pool, but I cannot sprint-swim very far at this alt.i.tude. Now a meal in the restaurant by myself-the place is almost empty, for our group is still on its daylong trip, and the high-IQ physicists are having a two-dimensional meal, no doubt, somewhere in town.

I find myself thinking of Scott, who told me yesterday that his true desire is to produce a beautiful botany book with rich, comprehensive texts and lovely, accurate ill.u.s.trations. He hopes that the atlas he has been working on for ten years-of all the vascular plants of central French Guiana, the flowers, all their forms, colors, aromas-will be a book of such value and beauty. He is ambitious, he allows, for a beautiful botany book, but he has no sense of professional rivalry or compet.i.tion. When I relayed these comments to a colleague, he was surprised. But perhaps he knows only the outer Scott, the administrator, the head of a busy department. For while Scott may be, may have to be, "a tough nut" outside, in order to keep his department going at a time when field botany is giving way to genomics and lab science-there must be another Scott as well, more inward, more lyrical, more concerned with the Ideal, and it is this Scott who dreams of "a beautiful book."

The fern tour is turning out to be much more than a fern tour. It is a visit to another, a very other, culture and place; and (so saturated is everything, everyone, here in the past) it is as much a visit, in a profound sense, to another time. The fusion of cultures. .h.i.ts one everywhere-in the faces, in the language, in the art and pottery, the mixed, colorful styles of architecture and dress, the complex doubleness of the "colonial" at every point. Luis, our guide, though Hispanic in many ways, also has the dark skin, the powerful build, the high cheekbones of a Zapotec. His ancestors, some of them, crossed the Bering Strait in the last ice age; B.C., for these people, means Before Cortes, the absolute divide between the pre-Conquest, the pre-Hispanic-and what happened later.

CHAPTER SIX.

WEDNESDAY.

I more and more regret that I did not go on yesterday's marathon trip to the rain forest, for everyone is telling me of its wonders, and some of these will be displayed at a show-and-tell this afternoon. How could I have sacrificed this to the ba.n.a.lity of a slipped disk? After yesterday's long and exhausting day, today is one for "optional activities," and the most attractive one of these, to my mineral-loving mind, is a visit to the Hierve el Agua mineral springs.

The area itself is fairly arid, only two hours away from Oaxaca city, and we will be able to see some unusual stunted palms (they grow in cl.u.s.ters, resembling, says my Oaxaca Handbook, in an unusual burst of imagery, "regiments of desert dwarfs"). We will see more xerophytic ferns, adapted to the dryness-these never cease to fascinate me, because I always used to think of ferns as water-loving, shade-loving, delicate, vulnerable; and here one sees ferns able to survive blistering sun and prolonged dryness almost as well as euphorbs or cacti. And, I am told, there is a great variety of other plants-and birds-too, and it is this which animates J.D., who has also come along.

J.D. gets extremely excited at seeing a rare specimen which he has never seen before. Though he works at the New York Botanical Garden, he is not primarily a fern man, like John and Robbin-his special interest is in the Anacardiaceae, a family of flowering plants with oily resins, and he has studied these all over the world. Poison ivy, Toxicodendron, is the best known one. But many others in this family can cause toxic reactions too-the cashew-nut tree, the mango tree, the Brazilian pepper tree, the j.a.panese wax tree, the Chinese lacquer tree (I had never been sure where lacquer came from, and in Mexico, I heard, it was made from an insect). Many of their resins, J.D. tells me, have industrial or medical uses, like the dhobi or marking-nut tree, whose liquid is used as an indelible ink to mark laundry. And cashew-nut sh.e.l.l liquid is used to control mosquito larvae and as an antimicrobial agent. "A wonderful family!" J.D. exclaims, in conclusion.

But now his attention comes back to the plant in front of him. "This is the greatest thrill for me-I never thought I would see Pseudosmodingium, actually see it growing." He goes on to speak of a toxin it has. "It's horrible. Never been a.n.a.lyzed. You get a terrible rash, internal troubles too, ulcers. Poison ivy is nothing compared to it. I should have had my rubber gloves with me." He specifically brought thick rubber gloves for such an eventuality, and today-of all days!-he forgot to bring them. "Would you imagine there was such an exciting thing?" he goes on. He will see if he can return here, tomorrow, take a taxi, no matter what it costs-bringing the rubber gloves with him.

The spring percolates through a whole mountain of limestone before it bubbles out from the side of the mountain into a huge basin, and from here it tracks downward, depositing lime and other minerals as it goes, until it makes its final drop from a semicircle of cliffs. But by this time, with evaporation and absorption, the water is so saturated with minerals that it crystallizes, turns to stone, as it falls-thus the "petrified waterfall." It is an amazing simulacrum of a waterfall, consisting not of water but of the mineral calcite, yellowish-white, hanging in vast rippling sheets from the cliffs above. There are pools of the warm, mineral-rich water at the summit. I long to immerse myself, at least paddle, in this concentrated water. But I fear to intrude my dirty, alien germs in this innocent, pristine habitat. John Mickel bestows a brief glance at this unique natural spectacle, the only such (someone says) in the entire world, and then attends to the varied ferns at the top. He finds some new (at least new to me, to us) xerophytic ferns on the rock-a very handsome silvery Argyrochosma (I misheard this as "Argyrocosmos," and thought of a silver universe) and an Astrolepis integerrima, both desiccated, but alive, next to each other on the blue-gray rock.

What fascinates me equally are the mosses and the tiny heart-shaped liverworts adhering to these bone-dry rocks. I would not have thought such things possible, for one thinks of these (liverworts above all) as quintessentially moist and moisture-loving plants, among the first plants to make it onto land, but having (one would think) no way of conserving water or otherwise protecting themselves, for they have such thin and delicate tissues. But they are evidently able to survive the dry season, apparently quite as well as the xerophytic ferns. The question is-must ask John-whether flowering plants can do as well as these "primitives" in this sort of suspended animation.

On the way back from the falls, I join J.D. again, who is all excited at seeing a Mexican pistachio, Pistacia vera, which, he says, hails from Central Asia. This too belongs to "his" family, the Anacardiaceae. "This is so exciting," he murmurs. "No Anacardiaceae till today-and now two!"

Between identifying these plants (and many others, including a beautiful blue Wigandia, a member of the waterleaf family), J.D. continually spots different birds, is preternaturally skilled at seeing and following them-often tiny hummingbirds, hundreds of yards away-whereas I can see nothing smaller than hawks or vultures.

As the bus heads back to Oaxaca I gaze idly out the window-fields of agaves; old women in dark shawls, moving in the fields, checking the agaves; thatched cottages shaped like beehives. Some of the roofs on the larger ones are reinforced with cornstalks-this (I am told) insulates them better. In one field there is a satellite dish rising from the cornstalks-a surreal twenty-first-century thing, cheek by jowl with a natural form of roofing, unchanged for thousands of years. I try to photograph this, but, missing-we are going too fast-attempt a tiny sketch in my notebook.

We arrive back at the hotel in midafternoon, ready to share all of our botanical findings with one another in a sort of show-and-tell.

We sometimes do this at our Sat.u.r.day AFS meetings back in New York, but here we have so many riches that it will take hours to show them all.

Some of the dried-up, seemingly dead ferns gathered the day before have been left in water overnight: the Astrolepis, the Notholaena, a Cheilanthes, and, of course, the resurrection fern-all of these, after a good soaking, have miraculously turned green, expanded and uncurled like Chinese water flowers.

Robbin has brought some segments of tree fern trunks all the way from New York, in order to bring out a point. We had all seen such segments in the market and elsewhere; they are widely sold throughout Mexico, as containers for orchids, and professional orchid growers in Mexico and the U.S. use them by the thousand. But this, of course, involves the destruction of the plant itself, and tree ferns in Mexico are now endangered by the practice. The tree fern trunks he has brought are very beautiful in cross-section, because six or seven vascular bundles run up the stem, their black sheaths in dramatic contrast with the white pith and cortex around them.

Many treasures have been brought back from the Atlantic slope expedition, which I missed yesterday. Robbin had looked by my room the previous evening-exhausted, but elated, having been on the road for sixteen hours-with a beautiful, giant frond of Pteris podophylla, and a Psilotum which he had seen growing on a tree fern, one fern growing on another. Now I see these and many more specimens, carefully laid out on a table.

John Mickel shows us a frond from a rare Elaphoglossum-he risked his life, apparently, crawling far out on a tree limb to get it; the tree limb cracked under his weight, almost precipitating him below. These enthusiasts think nothing of risking their limbs and lives for ferns-and they are astoundingly agile. Here is John, in his mid-sixties, leaping brooks, scrambling up cliffs, climbing trees, like a boy-and this is so for almost all the party, including some who are ten years his senior.

There are several species of Botrychium, including one never before described. If only I had been there, been at the discovery! Discovering a new species is the high point of a field botanist's life, almost the equivalent of a chemist discovering a new element. Perhaps the new species of Botrychium, if it is a new species, and not merely a variant, will be named for Herb Wagner-a teacher of John's and Robbin's, and a long-standing and much loved member of the AFS, who died earlier this month. Or perhaps after our beloved Eth Williams.

Eth Williams has been very much on my mind, on all our minds, for she too died, at ninety-five, just a few days before we left, and we are, all of us, bereft. The fern society meetings will never be the same now that she is gone. Eth and her husband, Vic, were there at the first meeting of the New York chapter, and she became its president in 1975. She would come to every meeting, bringing along dozens of little ferns that she had raised from spores in her greenhouse-beautiful, and sometimes quite rare, ferns which she sold or auctioned for a nominal dollar or two. She had the greenest thumb of anyone I ever met: She would sow the spores on sterilized peat pellets, keep them in a humidity chamber until they sprouted, and then p.r.i.c.k the tiny sporelings into little pots. She could coax spores into growing where no one else succeeded, and she was responsible for providing not only the ferns at our meetings, but all the spore-grown ferns in the New York Botanical Garden's collection for the past twenty-five years, working at first by herself, and then with a devoted group of five volunteers, the "Spore Corps."

A great hiker in her younger days, Eth had started using a stick at the age of ninety, but remained upright and very active, with a dry, charming humor and total clarity of mind to the last. She knew all of us by name, and was for all of us, I suspect, a sort of ideal aunt, or great-aunt, the quiet center of every meeting. She and Vic had married in the 1950s and were both avid field botanists. When a new Peruvian species of Elaphoglossum (she was particularly fond of these) was found in 1991, John named it E. williamsiorum in honor of them both.

Someone else exhibits some filmy ferns which she found in the Oaxacan rain forest. Eth, I cannot help thinking, would have loved these delicate things: Only one cell thick, these ferns require nearly constant 100 percent humidity, so they cannot grow anywhere except in a rain forest (I have seen them in Pohnpei, and in Guam, too). There are at least ten species of these lovely, diaphanous, infinitely delicate Hymenophyllum growing in the Oaxaca rain forest.

A whole banquet of Polypodium, the "many-footed" fern, have been collected-martensii, plebeium, longepinnulatum-but, John says, there are more than fifty species here if one is really looking, not just the nineteen noted in our list.

d.i.c.k Rauh shows us the beautiful fern drawings he has been doing-thirty or more, each a few inches square, on a long zigzag of paper which folds up like a concertina. I am especially enchanted by his drawing of the resurrection fern, and by a drawing of the dramatic scene I missed the previous day, of John Mickel outstretched on a high branch, risking his life to get his Elaphoglossum.

Scott and Carol have prepared an exhibit of local fruit and vegetables and other foods. They also have some castor "beans," which look like bloated ticks, the seeds of the euphorb Ricinus communis. Though the castor bean hails from Africa, they tell us, it is now cultivated in large amounts in Mexico, too, for the oil has innumerable uses: as a lubricant in engines (including the racing oil, Castrol), as a quick-drying oil used in paints and varnishes, as a water-resistant coating for fabrics, a raw material in the production of nylon, a lamp oil, and not least, as a gentle purgative (I am reminded of childhood, and the doses of castor oil I was sometimes forced to swallow). But while the oil is benign, the seed itself is lethal, because it contains ricin, thousands of times more toxic than cobra venom or hydrogen cyanide. This stirs memories, and we all reminisce about the mysterious death in 1978 of Georgi Markov, a dissident Bulgarian journalist, in a London street. Markov died an agonizing death three days after being jabbed in the leg at a bus stop with the sharp ferrule of an umbrella. Scotland Yard later established that the umbrella jab, far from being accidental, had delivered a pellet the size of a pinhead containing ricin.

While Scott is primarily a plant systematist and Carol is primarily a plant photographer, both are very knowledgeable about the economic uses and natural history of plants. It is lovely to see their complementary enthusiasms and interests. I have a special feeling for these botanical couples who are both spouses and working partners; they seem much more romantic to me than medical couples, like my parents. I find myself wondering how these couples met, and at what point their shared botanical enthusiasm became enthusiasm for each other. I am especially touched by Barbara Joe and Takashi Hoshizaki, who are now, I guess, both in their seventies, having spent a half-century or more of inseparably mixed botanical and married life together. Takashi is j.a.panese-American, born in California, and he tells frightening stories of how he and his family, most of his neighbors, were forced to live in internment camps during World War II. Barbara Joe, also a California native, is a Chinese-American, and such mixed marriages, in their generation, were rare. They met as students in Los Angeles, and when they married, Takashi designed a house for Barbara Joe which would accommodate her ferns-from any spot inside the house, she can look out onto lush, ferny plantscapes, and there is a greenhouse for the delicate ones. While both of them are primarily interested in ferns, Barbara Joe is above all drawn to the description and cla.s.sification of ferns, their filiation and taxonomic relationships. She is the national president of the American Fern Society, and the author of a beautiful and encyclopedic book called Fern Grower's Manual (she is currently working on a new edition of this with Robbin). Takashi is more drawn to plant physiology, but he has other, unexpected interests as well. He worked for many years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, and is an expert in the mechanisms of flight. A genius with models and simulations, he once made an artificial condor which was so realistic that when he set it on long flights around Los Angeles, there were puzzled reports about giant condors in the area. The Hoshizakis have pressed me to visit them in Los Angeles, where, they promise, I will be shown the magic fern garden they have created around their house.

I have also observed-I was a little slow to see it-two lesbian couples, and one gay couple, in our group. Very stable, long-term, as-if-married relationships, solidified, stabilized, by a shared love of botany. There is an easy, unselfconscious mixing here of all the couples-straight, lesbian, gay-all the potential intolerances and rejections and suspicions and alienations transcended completely in the shared botanical enthusiasm, the togetherness of the group.

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 alt.i.tude. 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 p.r.i.c.kly-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 G.o.ds 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 gra.s.s, 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, p.r.i.c.kly 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 Jurez. Like his contemporary, Abraham Lincoln, Jurez 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 Jurez came the accession of Porfirio Daz, a despot who ruled Mexico for thirty-five years. Daz, 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 pa.s.s. 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 ma.s.ses." The church here, he feels, is without courage or power. It offers bread and circuses-processions-to pacify the people, but otherwise pa.s.sively 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.ses.

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 gra.s.s (Tricholaena rosea) introduced from Africa, some goosefoot, a p.r.i.c.kly 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 pa.s.sing 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 Matatln, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.s 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-pias-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 gra.s.shoppers 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 gra.s.shoppers and worms, I wonder? A quarter of the earth's animal ma.s.s 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 ma.s.ses. 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 Matatln 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 pias, the maguey stems, covered with gunnysacks and earth in a pit in his front yard; a fire is built here, and the pias 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 ma.s.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s. This is more delicate in taste, and highly esteemed-but the idea of raw chicken b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 dedicated 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 Matatln 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 Teot.i.tln 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 800F 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.

In Teot.i.tln del Valle, we visit the house of Don Isaac Vsquez, 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 cla.s.s. 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 ident.i.ties, 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 ident.i.ties, their places, their destinies, in the world; they are the Vsquezes, the oldest and most distinguished weavers in Teot.i.tln del Valle, the living embodiments of an ancient and n.o.ble 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 Teot.i.tln 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 n.o.body 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, ma.s.s-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 pa.s.sage of time: the sons succeeding their fathers, and in turn succeeded, centuries pa.s.sing without either development or disruption. A nostalgia for this timelessness, this medieval life, grips me.

And yet, I wonder, suppose one of the young Vsquezes 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?