Oaxaca Journal (5 page)

Myth and legend seem to cluster round the history of cocoa. Legend asserts that Montezuma drank forty or fifty cups of the foaming chocolate daily, and that it was an aphrodisiac for him. Other legends claim that when Montezuma offered Cortés a cup of chocolate, Cortés was made dizzy by the bitter, chili-hot drink, but not so dizzy that he failed to notice that the cup was made of solid gold, and that Mexico must therefore be full of gold for the taking—or that the bitter drink, if sweetened, could enchant all of Europe, and constitute a profitable monopoly for Spain. The first cacao plantations, it is said, were planned by Cortés himself.

In the cacao shop, we are offered steaming cups of chocolate sweetened and spiced with almonds and cinnamon, the Oaxacan way. It is similar to the drink developed in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, who kept its complex refining process a secret for more than fifty years. But eventually the secret was out, and by the 1650s there were chocolate houses in Amsterdam and London, and soon throughout Europe (indeed, these preceded both teahouses and coffeehouses). The chocolate drink was a special hit at the French court, where its aphrodisiac qualities were highly
esteemed—Madame de Pompadour mixed it with ambergris, Madame du Barry gave it to her lovers, and Goethe would travel nowhere without his own chocolate pot.

For Proust, a madeleine opened the gate of memory, evoking a world of private meanings and memories. But here, in this Oaxacan chocolate factory, the opposite has happened, in a sense: The gathered knowledge of chocolate—coming partly from my own reading, partly from Robbin, and partly from the proprietor himself—seems to pour itself into the cup of hot cocoa I am drinking, to give it a special dimension and depth.

But why, I wonder, should chocolate be so intensely and so universally desired? Why did it spread so rapidly over Europe, once the secret was out? Why is chocolate sold now on every street corner, included in army rations, taken to Antarctica and outer space? Why are there chocoholics in every culture? Is it the unique, special texture, the “mouth-feel” of chocolate, which melts at body temperature? Is it because of the mild stimulants, caffeine and theobromine, it contains? The cola nut and the guarana have more. Is it the phenylethylamine, mildly analeptic, euphoriant, supposedly aphrodisiac, which chocolate contains? Cheese and salami contain more of this. Is it because chocolate, with its anandamide, stimulates the brain’s cannabinoid receptors? Or is it perhaps something quite other, something as yet unknown, which could provide vital clues to new aspects of brain chemistry, to say nothing of the esthetics of taste?

We return to our bus laden with chocolate and spices, and begin the journey back to our hotel. Since it is Saturday, a
market day, we pause for a final stop at the main market, an entire city block filled with a warren of leather, textile, and clothing stalls.

Our group, of course, dallies by the fruits and vegetables, sampling them mentally and physically, moving from recondite botanical identifications and comparisons to ecstatic sighs (or occasional
eugghs!
) at their varied tastes. There are bananas with a huge range of colors and sizes—a tiny green one, unexpectedly, has the sweetest taste of all. There are oranges, limes, tangerines, and lemons, as well as pomelos, or shaddocks—the uncouth, pear-shaped wild ancestors of the grapefruit (its seeds, one of our group remarks, were originally brought back from Barbados by a Captain Shaddock in the seventeenth century). There are manzanitas, which look like loquats, but are not—Scott says they grow on a
Crataegus
, the Mexican hawthorn; he will point one out to me on one of our excursions.

There are sapotes, tennis-ball sized with shiny greenish-black skins. These are called date plums, says someone, and grow on a “marmalade tree.” Wondering if I am having my leg pulled, I sink my teeth into the black flesh and find it as slimy as a persimmon, but with a taste nothing like dates, or plums, or marmalade, or persimmon. There are guavas and passion fruit and papayas, also juicy red cactus fruits of different sorts—some from the organ-pipe cactus, some from the prickly pear. The inside of the passion fruit looks like frog spawn or salamander eggs, but is, to my mind, the most delicious of all.

Vegetables too are immensely varied, with more varieties of beans than I have ever imagined, bringing home to me
that beans, along with corn, are still the basic Mesoamerican food, as they have been since the dawn of agriculture here eight thousand years ago. Rich in protein, with amino acids complementary to those of corn—the two of them, together, supply all the amino acids one needs. We see chunks of white, chalky limestone everywhere, used for grinding with the corn, which makes its amino acids more digestible.
^*
There are jicamas, with enormous, conical taproots that taste like water chestnuts and sweet peas. There are tomatoes of all sorts, but even more popular, tomatillos, husk-tomatoes, with green flesh and papery husks, used in making
salsa verde
. Tomatoes and tomatillos, I reflect, like “Indian corn,” potatoes too, were also gifts of the New World to Europe. Nothing like them had ever been seen before. (Tomatoes, indeed, were regarded for many years with great suspicion, before people were persuaded that they were not poisonous. Like potatoes, they are in the Solanaceae family, a family full of particularly deadly plants, including the thorn apple and henbane. The tomato and potato are in fact members of the same genus as the deadly nightshade, and so, perhaps, some hesitation was understandable.)

And of course, being fern people, we cannot fail to notice certain ferns being sold for medicinal purposes—dried horsetails, used for treating blood diseases and as a diuretic; the rhizomes of rabbit’s-foot ferns,
Phlebodium;
and the dried-up
rosettes of the resurrection fern, which David had told me about in the airport—though what one did with these, no one seemed to know.

The beautiful white onions, the bananas, the flayed chickens, the hung meat … the sandals, the hats (I buy one, a splendid straw hat, a sombrero, for a dollar), the pottery, and mats. Above all, the human wonder. This market is so rich, so various, that, reluctantly, I put my notebook away. It would need more talent, more energy than I have, to begin to do justice to the phantasmagoric scenes here. And I hesitate to give offense, to seem an insensitive tourist.

I long for my camera, though photographing might be even more offensive (offense
has
been caused by outsiders, who will wander through the market buying nothing, but snapping whatever, whomever, they think cute or picturesque).

Back in the bus once again, I make a few brief notes: Pigs, of all sizes, tethered by their hind legs. Sheep, goats, flayed carcasses—stink! Goats by the dried-up river. Charcoal and wood sellers.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo marched with Cortés, and in his
True History of the Discovery and Conquest of New Spain
(which he wrote much later, as an old man), he described the great market near Tenochtitlán as he saw it in 1519. His list of its riches goes on for several pages, including in his “classes of merchandise” everything from stone knives to human slaves:

Díaz interrupts himself again and again to add something new, the scene of more than fifty years earlier still vivid in the mind of the now almost blind, old man in his eighties:

T
oday we will go on a botanical foray, over the mountains to the Llano de las Flores—“the meadow of flowers”—though now, in January, we are in the middle of the dry season, and there will be no flowers. The central hills and valley, indeed, are bone-dry, desertlike, brown. (It is difficult to imagine them otherwise, but I must return, I think, in the rainy season, when it is carpeted with
Rigidella
, an iris with brilliant scarlet flowers.)

We gather outside the hotel with gear of all shapes and sizes, for our high-altitude, perhaps wet trip—we will soon be at 9,000 feet or more. We have layered clothing, which we will doff, then don again, layer by layer, as we go from the tropical valley to near-freezing winter rain forest. We also bring collecting gear—mostly plastic bags for plant specimens (how different from the tin vasculums of my youth!)—as well
as lenses, cameras, binoculars strung around necks. Several of us carry “the bible,” the
Pteridophyte Flora of Oaxaca, Mexico
.

One young woman (she is from the local botanical garden) is carrying a plant press, and the sight of this raises questions about what one is allowed to collect. Collecting spores, we are assured, is fine. John speaks of ways of folding paper to enclose the spores—ways which are “seamless and seemly.” “Don’t use Scotch tape—the spores will stick to it!” he adds. But there are strict regulations about collecting anything else, and we do not have a license to bring plants back to the States. We may collect isolated fronds but no plants or seedlings, and we are encouraged to document everything photographically. (Almost everyone has macro lenses: I, foolishly, left mine in New York, but what I do have with me, which no one else has, is a stereo camera.)

And there is Dick Rauh, a botanical illustrator and teacher at the New York Botanical Garden, who will draw everything of interest—both the actual-size views and his beautiful, detailed enlargements, ten or fifteen times life-size. He carries sketch pad, pens, pencils, a medley of high-power lenses, and a pocket microscope.

Dick became a botanical illustrator only after retiring from a long, successful career as a designer of film credits, and is now nearing completion of a Ph.D. in botany, so he is quite knowledgeable about the plants he is drawing. I am fascinated by the relation of knowledge to perception, and ask him about this. I tell him of the amazing plant drawings I have seen by autistic savants—drawings based purely on perception, without any botanical knowledge. Dick, however, insists that
knowledge and understanding only sharpen his perceptions, do not compromise them, so he now sees plants as more interesting and more beautiful, more miraculous, than ever before, and he can convey this, emphasize one aspect or another in a way which would be impossible in a literal drawing or in a photograph, impossible without knowledge and intention.