Oaxaca Journal (14 page)

(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 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 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.

In Teotitlán del Valle, we visit the house of Don Isaac Vásquez, 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 class. 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 identities, 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 identities, their places, their destinies, in the world; they are the Vásquezes, the oldest and most distinguished weavers in Teotitlán del Valle, the living embodiments of an ancient and noble 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 Teotitlán 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 nobody 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, mass-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 passage of time: the sons succeeding their fathers, and in turn succeeded, centuries passing without either development or disruption. A nostalgia for this timelessness, this medieval life, grips me.

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

We watch the carding, the combing, the looming of the wool, the weavers at work amid their great wooden looms, but our interests, mine at least, are more in the dyes. Only natural
dyes are used, dyes used for millennia before the conquest—most of them are vegetable, and each day a different dye is used. But today is a red day, a day for cochineal.

When the Spaniards first saw cochineal they were amazed—there existed no dye in the Old World of such a rich redness and fullness, and so colorfast, so stable, so impervious to change. Cochineal, along with gold and silver, became one of the great prizes of New Spain, and weight for weight, indeed, was more precious than gold. It takes seventy thousand of the insects, Don Isaac tells us, to produce a pound of dry material. The cochineal insects (only the females are used) are to be found only on certain cacti native to Mexico and Central America—this was why cochineal was unknown to the Old World. Outside Don Isaac’s place are prickly pears sedulously sown with the insect which form little hard white waxy cocoons—somewhat like scale—that one can split with a knife (sometimes a fingernail). The insects, extracted, have to be de-waxed, and then crushed—and several of Don Isaac’s children are doing this with rollers, crushing the dry powder so it becomes finer and finer—assuming a deep magenta or carmine tint as it does so.

Some 10 percent of this powder, I am told, is carminic acid; I am curious to know the structural formula of this, and how readily it can be synthesized. (After the trip I looked this up and realized that carminic acid would in fact be quite easy to synthesize. But synthesizing it would throw thousands of Mexicans out of work, undermine a traditional industry and artisanship which has been part of Mexico’s history for thousands of years.)

This deep magenta or carmine was still not the brilliant color which had captivated the Spaniards, the brave scarlet color that would strike terror into their foes, and that later was used to dye the coats of the Redcoats. Such a bright red only appears when the cochineal is acidified—done here by pouring quarts of lemon juice into it. The sudden change of color is very startling. I dab some of the now-brilliant cochineal on my finger, and am tempted to lick it. This would be fine, Don Isaac says; it is sometimes used in red drinks and lipstick, as well as in the finest red ink. Scarlet ink—ink of cochineal! And, it comes to me, a memory of fifty years ago, that we used cochineal as a stain in our biology days—it had been partly replaced by synthetic scarlet stains, but there was still, in the 1940s, no synthetic quite as brilliant.
^*

The ground-up powder—almost a pound of it (I hardly dare think of its cost, the sheer human cost of raising seventy thousand insects, picking them off the cacti by hand, rendering them down, drying them, grinding and grinding them)—is tipped into a huge urn of steaming water, heated over a wood fire in the yard, and stirred and stirred till the water becomes blood red, and then the raw wool, in great hanks, is
lowered into it. It will take two or three hours to absorb the dye fully. Looking at the gorgeous reds around me I grow wistful, covetous—Would it be possible, I ask, for my T-shirt to be dyed red? I give them my gray cotton NYBG T-shirt, and within minutes it has become a delicate pink. I wonder how deep the color will become, but I am told that cotton, as opposed to wool, does not absorb the dye too well. But soon I will have, I think with excitement, the only cochineal T-shirt in the world!

I make a blood red smear of cochineal in my notebook, like the smears of chemicals I used to (consciously or accidentally) get on my chemistry books in my school days.