Oaxaca Journal (15 page)

L
ast night there was a magical ending to the day, in the form of a spectacular total lunar eclipse. A group of us walked up the steep path by the hotel, to the observatory which tops the hills (no longer ideal, I would think, with the glow of city lights). We disposed ourselves on the rocks and ground, some of us with binoculars and spyglasses (I had my monocular), and bottles of mescal, and turned our gaze to the full moon above us. The night was cloudless, the viewing perfect. Robbin poured out mescal all round, and, looking up, warmed by the liquor, we howled and bayed at the full moon, wondering how wolves, other animals, might feel as the moon, their moon, was stolen from them. We wondered too how such eclipses were understood or regarded by the Zapotec and the Aztec—and whether the power of their priests, the awe in which they were held, might have derived in part from their ability to predict such events.

Later I left the group and found another place to watch when about half of the moon was gone, because I wanted to see “finality” by myself—that strange moment (actually five minutes or so) when there is only the narrowest crescent of light, and this seems to transilluminate the rest of the moon, so that it looks like a dimly lit glass ball, a huge luminous sphere of glass in the sky, with crack lines one never normally sees, and all suffused with that strange reddish penumbra which one always sees with such intensity at finality in an eclipse.

Today we go to the grand ruins at Monte Albán, and in preparation I have been reading a bit about it in my guidebook, about how it was founded in Olmec times, around 600
B.C.
—more or less at the same time as Rome; how it had rapidly become a center of Zapotec culture, the political and commercial center of the region, its power extending for two hundred kilometers in every direction from the vantage point of its unique mountain plateau. The leveling of a mountaintop to create this plateau was in itself an astonishing feat of engineering, to say nothing of providing irrigation, food, and sanitation for a population estimated at more than forty thousand. This city housed slaves and artisans, vendors and traders, warriors and athletes, master builders and astronomer-priests, and it was the center of a network of trade relations spreading throughout Mesoamerica, a great market for obsidian, jade, quetzal feathers, jaguar skins, and seashells from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Mysteriously, still seemingly at the apex of its influence and power, it was rather suddenly abandoned around
A.D.
800,
after fifteen hundred years of life. Monte Albán, though much older than Mitla or Yagul, was regarded by the Zapotec as sacred, and they managed to conceal it, apparently, from the conquistadors, so that much of it remains, even now, almost as it was the day it was built.

On the outskirts of Monte Albán we see little mounds of pyramidal shape, tombs and little terraces, dotting the hills. These old hills are suffused with human history, a history long preceding that of Oaxaca city itself, which is only seven centuries old. My first impression of Monte Albán is quite overwhelming, and unexpected. The city itself is spacious and immense, an immensity perhaps exaggerated by its uncanny emptiness. From the high plateau one has an aerial view of Oaxaca, a patchwork spread out in the valley below. Here are ruins on a scale as monumental as those of Rome or Athens—temples, marketplaces, patios, palaces—but high up on a mountaintop, against the brilliant blue of a Mesoamerican sky, and utterly different in character. The city is still suffused with a sense of the divine, for it was once a city of God, like Jerusalem—but now it is desolate, deserted. The gods have flown, along with the people, but one can feel that they were once here.

Luis himself is in a sort of trance, which lends a hypnotic quality to his voice as he speaks about Monte Albán, and how the immense platforms and patios of the city echo the contours of the hills and valleys round it, the whole city a model of its natural surroundings. Not just internally harmonious, but in harmony with the land, the land forms, all around.

There is one building that startles me, because it is set at a violent angle to everything else, revolts against the symmetry
of the rest. It has a strange pentagonal shape that makes me think of a ship, a spaceship, an enormous one which has crashed here on the airstrip-like top of Monte Albán—or, perhaps, is about to launch itself to the stars. Its official name is Building J, but it is more informally called the Observatory, for its odd angle seems to have been designed to allow the best possible observation of the transits of Venus and its occasional alignments with other planets.

The astronomer-priests of Monte Albán, Luis was saying, devised an intricate double calendar which was soon to become universal throughout Mesoamerica. There was a secular, terrestrial calendar of 365 days (the Aztec later calculated the solar year to be 365.2420 days) and a sacred calendar of 260 days, every day of which had a unique symbolic significance. The two calendars would coincide once every 18,980 days, roughly fifty-two solar years, marking the end of an era—and this was a time of great terror and despondency, marked by a fear that the sun might never rise again. The final night of this cycle was filled with attempts to avert the dread event by solemn religious ceremonies, penances, and (later, with the Aztec) human sacrifices, and a desperate scouring of the heavens to see which ways the stars, the gods, would go.

Anthony F. Aveni, an expert on Mesoamerican astronomy and archaeoastronomy, writes that the Aztec

The Aztec priests, in their skywatcher’s temple at Tenochtitlán, were doing what the Zapotec astronomer-priests had been doing in Monte Albán a thousand years earlier.

The Aztec were more superstitious, more ridden with a sort of cosmic fatalism than the Zapotec. One can easily work out, from observations in a rare surviving Aztec codex, that the Aztec saw a partial solar eclipse on the afternoon of August 8, 1496, and this, perhaps combined with shooting stars and malign or equivocal conjunctions of the planets, would have filled them with apprehension. It was these apocalyptic fears, no less than the political divisions among them, and their inability to match the steel armor and arms of the Spaniards, Luis felt, that led to their almost fatalistic collapse before the apparition of Cortés and his small band of conquistadors.

All these thoughts crowd into my mind as I gaze at the Observatory, and find myself reflecting on the strange interpenetrations of superstition and science, the mixture of
incredible sophistication and naive animistic beliefs that the Mesoamericans embraced. And how much of this we still have in ourselves. All of Mesoamerican life must have been suffused and dominated by a sense of the supernatural no less than the natural—from the great gods who ruled in the heavens and the underworld to the local gods of maize, of earthquakes, of war.

Wandering around Monte Albán, I find myself continually reminded of ancient Egypt—seeing the temples, the raised platforms, the grand bases for pyramids, the whole grand architecture of outwardness and open spaces. Luis speaks of a sense of the sacred, no less than an aesthetic, at work here—a religion of natural forces and forms, which gives shape to the city’s spaces as well as its structures. This seems to have been a gentle, reverent, open-air religion (though tied by elaborate synchronicities to the planets, the stars, the whole cosmos)—a religion which had no use for the violences, the human sacrifices, the horrors, of the Aztec. So, at least, Luis affirms.

There was veneration of ancestors here in Monte Albán, as in ancient Egypt, with grand tombs, mausoleums, around the edge of the city; it is a city of the dead, a necropolis, no less than a metropolis. There are also humbler tombs: the narrow graves of parents and grandparents buried in their own houses, so that their spirits could remain with their descendants. One such grave has been laid open in the Monte Albán museum and shows, beneath a glass cover, a seventy-five-year-old woman, shrunken, with decalcified teeth, osteoporosis, and osteoarthritic knees from a lifetime of hard work—kneeling and grinding maize, perhaps. It seems an indignity to be exposed in this
way—and yet it gives the place a human reality. What, one wonders, was her life, her inner life, really like?

It is easy to close one’s eyes and imagine the vast central plaza of Monte Albán packed with people—twenty thousand people would easily fit here—packed, perhaps, for the weekly market day, such a market as Bernal Díaz saw in Tenochtitlán. Thousands of bodies would be jostling in the plaza, traders and vendors from all over hawking their wares.

My memory suddenly jolts, goes back to the market in Oaxaca, not the vendors and traders, but the beggars outside, poverty-stricken, demoralized. Like them, the man selling oranges to tourists at the entrance of Monte Albán could be a direct descendant of the men who built this place—or of the conquistadors, perhaps of both. The enormity of our crime, the tragedy, overwhelms me. One sees why Columbus and Cortés are execrated, by some, as villains.

Can one reconstruct an identity which was so ruthlessly, so systematically, undermined and destroyed? And what would it mean to even try? The old pre-Columbian languages still exist and are widely spoken, perhaps by a fifth of the population. The basic foods are unchanged—it is still maize, squashes, peppers, beans, as it was five thousand years ago. There are many cultural survivals. Christianity, one has the sense, for all its long history, is still in some ways only a thin veneer. The art and architecture of the past is everywhere visible.

Standing in one of the vast central open spaces in Monte Albán, I imagine the groundswell of an enormous crowd,
voices calling in a dozen tongues, temples packed with worshippers, their prayers rising to the sky, while the silent astronomers work in their spaceship-shaped building. I imagine the roar of the throng, perhaps the entire population of Monte Albán, as they crowd into the ball court to watch the sacred game.

It is this, the ball court, and the centrality of the ball game, which seems unique to Mesoamerica, for there were no ball courts in the Old World, either in their cities or their skies. No ball games, and no balls—how can one have a ball game without a decent ball? But this was not a connection I made at first.

The ball court is very beautiful, restored now to its pristine state, an immense oblong of grass with huge “steps” of granite rising high, pyramidally, to either side. Very little is known about the rules or significance of the games which were played here. The Zapotec version of the ball game, Luis says (as opposed to the later, “degenerate” version of the Aztec—but perhaps Luis, as a Zapotec, is biased) was not about rivalry, but was more akin to a ballet, an endless, never-resolved movement between light and dark, life and death, sun and moon, male and female—the endless fight, the dynamic, of the cosmos. There were no winners, no losers, no goals, in such a game.