Oaxaca Journal (18 page)

We pile out at one point, a point John has marked and borne in mind from his many previous trips to Oaxaca. Here it is, he says, as we get out:
Llavea cordifolia
—you may never see it again. It is confined to southern Mexico and Guatemala. John had spotted this rare endemic the first time he came to Oaxaca, scanning the banks along the road.

I look at the
Llavea
. Just another damn fern, I think (but this is not a thought I would dare express with this group!).
^*
At the same time I see, out of the corner of my eye, something infinitely stranger and (to me) more interesting—
Pinguicula
, the butterwort, a carnivorous plant. Its leaves are
oval and mucilaginous—I touch them gingerly—little insects get stuck in the mucilage and are gradually digested.

Llavea
is not all that rare. But supposing, I ask Robbin, there are only twenty or thirty plants altogether, all in one spot and nowhere else? Would the location be published and divulged? Robbin and Judith Jones, who sits next to him, agree that, in such circumstances, it would not. I mention an exotic cycad, a species of
Ceratozamia
, of which only twenty or so plants were found in Panama—and how the entire population was removed by a collector, rendering the species extinct in the wild. Judith, who runs a fern nursery in the Pacific Northwest, mentions a botanist, Carl English, who claimed to have discovered a new maidenhair fern, a dwarf
Adiantum
, in the 1950s, but would not say where. He was, in consequence, disbelieved—or told he had a “sport,” of no special interest. Thirty years later, after his death, a second isolate was found—so, posthumously, he was vindicated. But why had he concealed its location in the first place? His motivation was not commercial—he made no profit, he distributed the spores freely, all around the world; it was, perhaps, partly professional, the desire to establish scientific priority (though undermined, in this case, because no one believed him), and partly protective, to keep the little patch of plants from being destroyed by collectors. Or perhaps, as Judith thinks, he was simply by nature a secretive man.

This leads us, as the bus wends its way through the high mountains, still high above Oaxaca, to a long discussion of openness and secrecy in science, the questions of priority, of piracy, of patents, and of plagiarism. I say that I am happy for my patients to be seen by other colleagues, I welcome any genuine interest in
them or their states, but that I have some colleagues who feel very differently, colleagues who would not let me (or anyone else) see their patients, even briefly, because they are afraid they might be “scooped,” and whose correspondence is similarly uninformative and guarded. I mention Lavoisier, who was at pains to make careful notes on all his own discoveries, and to place these, sealed, with the Academy of Sciences, so that there could never be any contesting of his priority; but who, on the other hand, shamelessly, or shamefully, appropriated the discoveries of others.

We shake our heads over the complexity of it all.

Coming back from Boone’s, exhilarated, exhausted, Robbin and I decide to spend a last night on the town—a final stroll around the zócalo, a final meal in one of its sidewalk cafes. But first we will go to the cultural museum in town, a vast collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts, housed in an enormous seventeenth-century convent. The richness, the range, of the last few days has bewildered us, and we need to see a summary, a synthesis, everything ordered and catalogued before us.

We stop first in the museum’s
biblioteca
, a long, long room, and high, stacked up to the ceiling with incunabula and early calf-bound books. There is a sense here of great learning, of tranquillity, of the immensity of history, and of the fragility of books and paper. It was this fragility that made it possible for the Spanish to destroy the written records of the Maya and the Aztec and preceding civilizations almost completely. Their exquisite, delicate, manuscript books of bark had no chance of surviving the conquistadors’ autos-da-fé, and they were destroyed
by the thousands—barely half a dozen remain. The writings and glyphs inscribed on the statues and temples and tablets and tombs were somewhat less vulnerable, but many of these are still indecipherable to us, or largely so, despite a century of work. Gazing at the fragile books in this library, I think of the great library of Alexandria, with its hundreds of thousands of unique, uncopied scrolls, whose burning lost forever much of the knowledge of the ancient world.

We had learned, in Monte Albán, about Tomb 7, where a fabulous treasure had been discovered, the Mesoamerican equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The treasure itself, now displayed in the museum, is relatively late, for the original eighth-century contents of the tomb had been removed, and the tomb reused in the fourteenth century to bury a Mixtec nobleman and his servants, along with a hoard of gold and silver and precious stones. There are great funerary urns, such as we had seen all over Monte Albán. And exquisite jewelry and ornaments made of metal—gold, silver, copper, and alloys of these—and of jade, turquoise, alabaster, quartz, opal, obsidian,
azabache
(whatever this was), and amber. Gold was not valued by the pre-Columbians as such, as stuff, but only for the ways in which it could be used to make objects of beauty. The Spanish found this unintelligible, and in their greed melted down thousands, perhaps millions, of gold artifacts, in order to fill their coffers with the metal. The horror of this comes upon me as I gaze at the few artifacts of gold which had been preserved, through a rare chance, in Tomb 7. In this sense, at least, the conquistadors had showed themselves to be far baser, far less civilized, than the culture they overthrew.

One display case is devoted to the pre-Hispanic cultures’ cosmology, with all their gods of sun, of war, of “atmospheric forces in general,” of maize, of earthquakes, of the underworld, of animals and ancestors (an interesting conjunction), of dreams, of love, and of luxury.

In another case we find small mirrors made of pyrite and magnetite. How is it that while these Mesoamerican cultures appreciated magnetite for its luster and beauty, they did not discover the fact that it was magnetic, and that, if floated in water, it might act as a compass? Nor the fact that, if smelted with charcoal, it would yield metallic iron?

How strange that these brilliant and complex cultures, so sophisticated in mathematics and astronomy, in engineering and architecture, so rich in art and culture, so profound in their cosmological understanding and ritual—were still in a pre-wheel, pre-compass, pre-alphabet, pre-iron age. How could they be so “advanced” in some ways, so “primitive” in others? Or were such terms completely inapplicable?

If we compare Mesoamerica to Rome and Athens, I was beginning to realize, or to Babylon and Egypt, or to China and India, we find the disjuncture bewildering. But there is no scale, no linearity, in such matters. How can one evaluate a society, a culture? We can only ask whether there were the relationships and activities, the practices and skills, the beliefs and goals, the ideas and dreams, that make for a fully human life.

This has turned out to be a visit to a very other culture and place, a visit, in a profound sense, to another time. I had imagined,
ignorantly, that civilization started in the Middle East. But I have learned that the New World, equally, was a cradle of civilization. The power and grandeur of what I have seen has shocked me, and altered my view of what it means to be human. Monte Albán, above all, has overturned a lifetime of presuppositions, shown me possibilities I never dreamed of. I will read Bernal Díaz and Prescott’s 1843
Conquest of Mexico
again, but with a different perspective, now that I have seen some of it myself. I will brood on the experience, I will read more, and I will surely come again.

T
oday, on this final trip, we are traveling south of Oaxaca toward the city of Sola de Vega. For our last collecting we go to a limestone area, to see lime-loving, calciphilic ferns and other plants. I have a certain feeling of exhaustion, at least of narrative exhaustion, but there is no exhaustion of the others’ enthusiasm—it is as if they are seeing all these ferns afresh, for the first time. I too enjoy the ferns—and the others’ enthusiasm—but with a sense perhaps of the trip’s imminent ending, content myself with the making of a list:
Cheilanthes longipila; Cheiloplecton rigidum; Astrolepis beitelii; Argyrochosma formosa; Notholaena galeottii; Adiantum braunii; Anemia adiantifolia;
two species of
Selaginella;
as well as lichens, mosses, tiny agaves, mimosas, and innumerable DYCs.

After ferning we backtrack to El Vado—the ford—to have a final brunch under the bald cypresses by the river.
Magnificent trees, not as large as El Tule, but still wonderful to see them clustered along this thin watercourse (a watercourse which expands and flows over the road in the rainy season, but is still substantial, even in the middle of the dry season now). Little girls, no more than five, are doing laundry in the river. And we are attended by the village dogs, a dozen or more, strikingly different in size, breed, and color—not like the homogenized dingo-like dogs we have seen in other places. They are attracted (as we are, even my quasivegetarian self) by the delicious smell of beef cooking on a wood fire, and we are happy to feed them as we eat. They are curiously polite, for three or four of them will sit or stand around one, patiently at the ready, but fully accepting of being fed in serial order; 1, 2, 3, 4 … 1, 2, 3, 4. No dog tries to butt in, or take the other’s meat—we are very impressed by this social sense, this sense of equity—or is it just hierarchy and dominance? How is it with wild dogs or hyenas, faced with a kill?