Oaxaca Journal (10 page)

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!”

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 huddled 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?