Oaxaca Journal (16 page)

The ball game, if sublime in its symbolism, was intensely physical too, with teams of five or six players using every part of the body
except
the feet and hands. Players used their shoulders, their elbows, but especially their hips, which were girded with a basketlike arrangement that helped them project and guide
the ball. For the ball itself, larger than a basketball, was made of solid rubber and was bruisingly heavy, ten pounds or more. The Aztec version, at least, unlike Luis’s vision of the Zapotec form, was a competitive game, and lethal—for the losing (or, sometimes, the winning) captain would be ritually sacrificed and eaten.

But discussion, in our botanical group, moves to the ball, and how the native peoples of Mesoamerica discovered how to extract the latex from indigenous trees, centuries or even millennia before the Spaniards arrived. The Spanish, indeed, were amazed by their first sight of rubber balls: “When they hit the ground, they bounce back in the air with great speed,” one astonished explorer wrote in the sixteenth century. “How can this be?” Some explorers thought the balls must be alive; such elasticity, such bounce, had never been seen in the Old World. They had seen the elasticity of a compressed spring, or a stretched bow, perhaps, but had never dreamt of a substance which was intrinsically elastic.

Many plants have a sticky, milky sap, or latex. Left alone, this will dry to a brittle and fragile solid. It must be treated to coagulate the microscopic globules of rubber it contains, yielding a doughy mass which, as it dries, becomes the elastic solid we know as rubber. There is no single rubber tree, but trees in several different families give a suitable latex, and many of these were discovered by the Mesoamericans. The Maya found that they could cut down the
Castilloa elastica
tree, collect the sticky latex in a trough, and then treat it with the acid juice of morning-glory sap (this was peculiarly convenient, since the
Castilloa
tree was often encircled by morning-glory
vines). The rubber they made was used not only for the huge balls used in the game, but for little rubber balls which children played with, and for making religious images and figurines, and rubber-soled sandals, and for binding the heads of axes to their shafts.

Unlike chocolate and tobacco, which were brought to Spain by the early explorers and immediately taken up, rubber was slow to make it to Europe. When it did, it was rubber from the Amazonian tree
Hevea
, and it is this which is extensively cultivated now. The first sheets of rolled rubber were brought to France only in the 1770s, where they aroused great interest. Charles Macintosh, in Scotland, saw how rubber could be used to waterproof fabrics, to make “mackintosh,” and Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, discovered how it could be used to erase pencil marks, as a “rubber.” (Only then did the word rubber come into the language—but I think I prefer the wild-sounding French word,
caoutchouc
, with its echoes of the Quechua original.)

It was only in the nineteenth century that the further discovery was made by Charles Goodyear that if one treated the crude gum with sulphur and heated it, a highly pliable, elastic form of rubber could be made. Goodyear, in this sense, “invented” rubber—except that the same invention had been made by the Maya millennia before. (Only very recently was it found that the morning glory contains sulphur compounds which, as in Goodyear’s process, are capable of cross-linking the latex polymers and introducing rigid segments into their chains—chains that entangle and interact with one another, producing the elasticity of rubber.)

Half-listening, half-dreaming, I imagine the ball court as it must have been fifteen hundred years ago, in the heyday of Monte Albán, the jostling players using their hips and buttocks with a graceful yet desperate energy, moving the heavy, almost alive ball this way and that, feeling that they mirrored the ball game in the heavens, and that their own movements, their patterns, the constellations they made, were balancing the actions of the cosmos, the lords of death and life.

I am interrupted in these lofty thoughts by the sight of John Mickel swooping on Tomb 105. “
Astrolepis beitelii!
” he shouts in excitement (an
Astrolepis
not previously in our list). The pteridological passion in him is in full force. And indeed, I see, as the rest of us
are exploring Monte Albán, exclaiming over its wonders, three tiny figures are to be seen, in a field, far below: J.D., David, and Scott, all bent double, or crouching, or lying on their faces, examining the minute flora of the region with their hand lenses. With them the ultimate sacrifice is made—the monumental splendor, the sublimity, the mystery of Monte Albán—sacrificed to the humble but peremptory call of cryptogamic botany.

O
n our way now to Boone’s place, in Ixtlán. Woken from a semi-slumber (slumped in the bus, having visions of pyramids, terraces, the ball court, my cortex replaying Monte Albán) by J.D.’s ejaculation, “Birds!” I open my eyes, and see him alert, tense, scanning the scene with eager, expert eyes.

In the slanting golden early-morning light, I see a cabin just off the road with a burro and a crowded yard—but I cannot grab my camera in time. Just as yesterday, at Monte Albán, I saw a lean, beautifully muscled youth, almost naked, standing on a projecting rock above the great arena. He could have been one of the original inhabitants—a young warrior-priest, perhaps, offering himself to the sun. The beauty of the human figure against the splendor of the backdrop made me reach for the camera. I would have “got” him, got the whole scene, but at that
very moment someone asked me a question, and when I had dealt with this, the youth, the moment, had gone.

I think about the botanical richness we have seen here, not just of ferns, but all sorts of other things which we take for granted. The conquistadors had lusted for silver and gold, and robbed their victims blind to get these—but these were not the real gifts they brought back. The real gifts, unknown to the Europeans before the conquest, were tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, gourds, chilies, peppers, maize, to say nothing of rubber, chewing gum, exotic hallucinogens, and cochineal.…

“A Kodak moment!” John Mickel announces, as the bus stops for a few minutes—we are on a high mountain ridge now, and smaller peaks stretch like a forested ocean beneath us. But everyone else has seized on minutiae, particulars, bestowing only a perfunctory glance at the breathtaking vista. Dick, right in front of me, has got a tiny flower, a
Lobelia
, he thinks, which he is examining minutely with his lens, exclaiming at its beauty and anatomizing it at the same time. Is it the artist or the scientist in him which is aroused by the
Lobelia?
Both, clearly, and they are utterly fused.

It is similar with Robbin who, in the same brief break from the bus, finds a giant pinecone and is now (using my red and green pens) marking out the way its scales are arranged in orderly spirals about the cone, and arranged in fixed numerical series. “If you don’t know about Fibonacci series, how can you truly appreciate a pinecone?” he says. (He had
earlier made a similar comment about the logarithmic spirals of fern croziers or fiddleheads.)

“Neat,” says Nancy Bristow, examining the cone. Nancy is a mathematician and math teacher by profession, but a botanist and a bird-watcher by avocation. I ask her what she means by “neat.”

“Elegant … perfectly organized … symmetrical … complete … the aesthetic and the mathematical combined.” She searches for different words, different concepts—now that I have forced her to examine her exclamation “Neat!”

“Is the Goldbach conjecture neat?” I ask. “Is Fermat’s last theorem?”

“Well,” Nancy says, “its proof is messy in the extreme.”

“What about the periodic table?” I ask.

“That,” says Nancy, “is particularly neat, as neat as a pinecone, with the sort of neatness that only God, or genius, can construct—divinely economical, the realization of the simplest mathematical laws.” Nancy and I both fall silent, surprised at the sudden exploration forced on us by the simple word “neat.”

A sudden cry of “Birders!” to alert the birders in the bus to black vultures flying overhead. I mishear this as “Murders!” and am amazed it should be shouted in so exuberant a fashion. Everyone laughs at my mistake, especially when I dramatize it: “Wow! Look at all the corpses! There’s a great one there—and gee, look there.…”

A little past Ixtlán, approaching Boone’s house, we are stopped. A jeep with a machine gun is very visible by the
road, to the left. A young man in camouflage pants and a T-shirt marked “Policia Judicial” gets on the bus. Now a real soldier, in khakis, with a netted helmet, boots, puttees. Absurdly young-looking—he looks sixteen—like a boy playing at soldiers. He handles his pen awkwardly. He smiles charmingly, very white teeth in his smooth, dark face—but all this time the machine gun is trained on us. John produces papers, identifies us, shows we’re kosher—the charming smile stays, and we are allowed to go on. But it could, quite easily, have worked out differently. These boys, with their machine guns, shoot first and ask questions later (one suspects) if there is any serious challenge or ambiguity, for there is a civil war, a revolt, in the state of Chiapas, quite close by, and the army is jittery, trigger-happy, suspicious. I want to photograph the policeman and soldier, but this, I fear, might be seen as an affront, or a challenge.

The stopping (and often searching) of vehicles, and far-from-gentle questioning and searching of passengers, Luis tells us, is increasingly common in Oaxaca. Indeed, we have seen army roadblocks and search squads everywhere, though this is the first time we ourselves have been stopped by one. They are looking for contraband, especially smuggled arms, but also (Luis says) for people with “religious or political agendas,” missionaries, insurrectionaries, who intend to stir up trouble—students, too, with “insufficient documentation.” No one is above suspicion in times like these.

John, picking up on this, said that our religion was “Botanica,” and showed a NYBG badge (they could have used my now cochineal-pink NYBG T-shirt!).