Color: A Natural History of the Palette (54 page)

On the third day we hired a white VW Beetle and set off into the interior. The coast may be where the dye is, but the dyers have often been from inland. In the old days, before there were buses, teams of men used to set off from their villages in the mountains every November to walk the 150 kilometers down to Puerto Angel. In their knapsacks there would be bleached cotton skeins entrusted to them by women in the surrounding area. The men would stay at the coast, slinging their hammocks between palm trees on the beach every night, until the rough early springtime weather made their search too perilous to continue. Every few years one or two dyers would die, swept out to sea by freak waves, but most would return home with their threads now permanently purple and reeking of sea garlic.

The first town we reached was Jamiltepec, about 60 kilometers from Puerto Escondido. According to my article it was there that Santiago de la Cruz, one of the last remaining dyers of Mexican purple, ran a small artisan shop. But when we asked, neither the shopkeepers nor the taxi-drivers had heard of Santiago or—more worryingly—of any handicrafts shops. Wondering whether we might have travelled halfway round the world for nothing, we ate lunch at a street-side
taquería
beside the Jamiltepec marketplace. News of our search had already travelled around the marketplace, and one of the many women crowding round to watch us eat said she knew someone who might have heard of Santiago. She called over an old man, who nodded and led us through the stalls until we reached a tiny shop. It was about the size of the Phoenician stalls I had seen in their ruined state in Byblos, although this one was concrete and wouldn’t last the centuries. There was a woman there who was, promisingly, surrounded by shawls with mauve tassels. She told us Santiago was at home, but he would be at the shop in the late afternoon. Her name was Ofelia, and she was his sister.

We spent the time going into Pinotepa Nacional, a market town that houses many of the 350,000 Mixtec people in Mexico. It has a large covered marketplace—and it was there that I found the clothes I was looking for: the same purple, red and blue striped skirts, or
posahuancos
, that had so attracted Nuttall’s admiration eighty-five years earlier. It was mainly the older women who were wearing them. Until recently Mixtec women used to go topless, but now they wear gaudy floral aprons to cover up. I asked an elderly onion seller whether I could take a photograph of her purple skirt. She shook her head, but then we both heard a chorus of disapproval from the butcher’s shop behind us. Two young women who were working there spoke teasingly to her: “Go on, don’t be a spoilsport,” they seemed to be urging in Mixtec. So she shrugged and smiled for the camera, after which her young friends cheered.

In the late afternoon we made our way back to Jamiltepec. Santiago was sitting in his chair, embroidering a white shirt. He glowed with pleasure when he heard that we had come from Hong Kong to find him. “You are lucky,” he said sternly. “I’m an old man. I could have been dead by now and then how would you find the
caracola
?” He was a young-looking fifty-one-year-old, but he had been ill with diabetes for the past eight years. “
Una tortilla per día
,”—just one tortilla a day—he groaned, shaking his head at the gastronomic tragedy. Santiago had become interested in the indigenous dyeing traditions sixteen years earlier, when he had first gone to find the mollusks, accompanying an old man who had once been one of the regular itinerant purple-collectors. Since then he had gone whenever he could. Local people thought he was eccentric, but he ignored them. He agreed to take us down to the purple coast the next day, although he warned we might have a problem getting a fishing boat to take us. “It is dangerous: we have to go with other people. One to find, and one to watch. People die doing this.”

We met him just after dawn, and set off to the coast. As we drove he told us of the three colors of the
caracola
dye—a curious echo of the Mexican flag, though with a seashell rather than an eagle at its center. “First it is white,” he said. “And then it becomes green, and then it finishes as purple or red, which we call
morado
.” Because of the white, the process is called milking. In 1983 a Japanese company that called itself Purpura Imperial was given a contract by the Mexican government to collect purple for kimonos, he said. But they killed the snails rather than preserving them as the Mixtecs did, and eventually, after several years of lobbying by environmentalists, the contract was retracted and the Mixtecs were given the exclusive rights to dye with
purpura
in Oaxaca.

Japan has a long history of celebrating purple: violet has traditionally been the color of victory in competitions, it is the color of the cloth used by Shinto priests to wrap the most precious objects of the temple, and it is the color of the costume and tassels of the highest-ranking sumo referee. They call it
murasaki
(which sounds astonishingly similar to “murex”), and this was the adopted name of the author of the great work of eighth-century literature,
The Tale of Genji
, who called herself Lady Murasaki or Lady Purple. The Japanese had their own purple-giving shellfish—
Rapana bezoar
—but it was very rare and most purple was made with a plant from the borage family called
murasaki-so
—in English, gromwell.
²⁴
It is hardly surprising, then, that they were willing to pay a fortune for Mexican purple. Although perhaps the company had not bargained for the diplomatic problems it would cause and clearly had not cared about the environmental ones.

At a police checkpoint we turned right, toward Zapotalito, where most inhabitants are the descendants of escaped African slaves who founded their own free communities on the Mexican Pacific. It is a dusty fishing village, lined with houses where pigs and chickens roam. Santiago stopped at one house, and came out a few minutes later, amazed at our luck. “There is never a spare boat,” he said, shaking his head, “but today we have
mucha suerte
. My friend has been painting his launch, so he didn’t go out fishing this morning. His son will takes us out after breakfast.” Santiago had been on about five purple expeditions with foreigners in the past decade. He remembered one couple who had accompanied him for the husband’s research. They had taken one look at a local restaurant in Zapotalito and walked out, noses wrinkling in spousely unison, announcing that they could not possibly eat there because of the wife’s delicate stomach. “Are your stomachs delicate?” he asked us. We assured him not, and we had a day of sampling excellent fresh fish—even for breakfast.

As soon as the tide was right we met the four boys who were to take us. They had green acrylic splashes on their bare feet from their boat-painting. We sped through the lagoon, past the fishing hamlet of Cerro Hermoso—Pretty Hill—and out into the open sea. Hold on tight, they said. The water was not rough, but I took hold of the seat politely. “No, really tight.” And then, as we bobbed in the waves and waited and then bobbed a little bit more, I suddenly understood. A big wave rose up behind us, Fabian the driver thrust the motor to maximum, and we surfed in on its crest, landing with a judder on the white sand of a deserted beach, distracting a flock of vultures from their lunch of giant turtle.

We headed toward the rocks, which fringed the coast for as far as we could see, and started looking, even though I was not very sure what I was looking for. Santiago was the first to find a
caracola
or sea snail: it was the size of a Matchbox toy car and, unlike the spiky Lebanese murexes, it was rounded and dark gray. He picked it up and blew on it. “Look,” he said, and as we all gathered round it started to weep as if with fury at being removed from its rock. The tears swiftly became milky white, and Santiago rubbed it gently against the skein of white thread he had wrapped loosely around his shoulder. It was a simple way of getting over the problem that purple was a pigment not a dye: strictly speaking, Santiago was not dyeing the cloth—he was painting it.

As he had promised, it made a stain that was fluorescent lime green, which within a few minutes turned yellow and then purple, like a bruise. The dye is a naturally light-sensitive compound—the purple appears in reaction to the sunshine, otherwise it stays green. It is curious to think that this natural chemical compound could, if anybody had ever found a way of fixing it, have been used to make the world’s first photographs. We could have inherited ancient photo-images of Aztec rituals or thousand-year-old baby pictures, all held in crazy hallucinogenic color contrasts with this organic dye. For a moment, as I took a picture of Santiago happily holding his little shell, I imagined the image developed as a violet wash, with lime-green spots where the shadows lay.

From our rock fortifications we could see a man with a snorkel far below us in the sea, diving down for what seemed ages. I was so impressed, I timed it: he averaged more than ninety seconds each time. I liked to think he was a pearl-fisher, following the traditions of his ancestors, although Fabian less romantically thought he was probably collecting lobsters. If the man looked up and spotted us through his foggy mask, we must have seemed a curious sight as well. Four boys, a man and two blonde women separating out among the spiny rocks, then clambering back to touch a piece of white cotton with a little shell, before moving away again. Occasionally a wave would drench us, and we would wipe the water from our faces as if crying.

We spread out along the rocks, enjoying the triumph of finding a particularly impressive specimen of
Purpura pansa
, of tugging the creature until it gave up its sunny bathing spot with a reluctant slurp, of blowing on it, then the wonder of watching the color turn on the thread. I wanted to take one, just one, home for my collection. “Here’s one,” said Santiago, holding an example at random. “You could put it back or take it.” Put it back, I said, thinking rather greedily that it wasn’t the biggest one. “That’s right: leave it to live another day,” he said approvingly. “The
caracola
are sacred: we believe it is bad luck to kill them,” he added. I had had so much good luck that day I didn’t want to risk it. I left them all.

With no skein over my own shoulder I instead set one
caracola
on my white nylon watch strap. It mottled quickly to bright purple, and smelled strongly of spring onions. For the next month I had to break the habit of thirty years and take my watch off at night, lest my dreams were too full of the sea. Even now, as I write six months later, I can still smell the garlic. Experts say that even with textiles a century old or more you can know if they were dyed with
caracola
—or murex depending on your continent—by rubbing them gently between the fingers and sniffing them. It is a funny thought that, even wafting clouds of jasmine and saffron perfumes, the emperors of Ancient Rome would probably have left a cloud of garlicky, fishy smells in their wake. Perhaps there were so many other smells in Rome that “eau de murex” was celebrated for its sophistication. Perhaps it was the scent of power.

I found a cave where the rocks were prettily stained with mauve: it must have represented millennia of snail trails. Suddenly I heard the brittle sound of shells cracking, and looked around. It was fifteen-year-old Rico, who, bored with searching, was throwing the used mollusks at the rocks. Santiago scolded the boy. Killing the
caracola
is what the Japanese people did—it is not the behavior of Mexicans, he said. “See how these people have come all the way from Hong Kong to see our purple: we have to value it.”

We slung the skein over the boat. It made a good photo: the lilac threads against the green boat, with the amateur dyeing team standing triumphant behind, holding out our stained hands. But this, I had already realized, was not the purple that Pliny described, the almost-black that in the right light provides a glimpse of another color that we don’t have a word for. This was mauve, lilac, lavender, whatever flower words one can summon. But it was not conceivably ox blood. Was there some mistake? Had we left out some critical step in the dyeing process (hardly impossible, as the dyeing process I had just witnessed must be one of the simplest ever devised)? In the eighteenth century the Ulloas had recorded that the cotton varied in weight and color according to the hour it was dyed—a finding that he had thought curious, but which had its echoes among the dyers of the Mediterranean. Perhaps, I thought, the ox-blood hour was later in the afternoon.

Back in Jamiltepec, Santiago invited us to see his home. It was a one-room building with a mud floor and two gray hammocks where he and his sister slept, separated by a curtain. The only pieces of furniture were a wooden chair and a sewing machine driven by foot pedals, with which he made artifacts for tourists. I promised to send him photographs, and a copy of this book. The other people who had come had always promised and never sent anything. “But it’s another world, isn’t it, for them,” he said, both wistfully and wisely.

The next day we visited a hill town called Pinotepa Don Luis. When we arrived after 40 kilometers of muddy driving it was like shifting back physically in time: the only thing modern, it seemed, was us. The whitewashed village square was full of men in white, women in purple, all moving around chatting and selling things to each other. We parked and walked back with our cameras. But in those five minutes, and as if by magic, everyone had vanished. The whole place was empty except for a man quietly painting the cast-iron benches white, and I really wondered whether I could have imagined the earlier scene.

The mystery was solved twenty minutes later, when we found a curious restaurant in a back street. It consisted of strong wooden trestle tables and benches laid out under a canopy that crossed the street. On one side women stirred great cauldrons of coffee and terrifyingly fatty beef stew (at last, I thought, I had found the ox-blood color), heated by wooden fires. On the other side, in a garden, a dozen women were busy making tortillas in the old-fashioned way, on ancient metal plates heated by wood fires. We were invited to join in, and everyone laughed when our tortillas were full of holes. The more gregarious women beckoned us to sit and placed bowls of fatty stew and coffee in front of us. We offered to pay and they shook their heads firmly.