Oaxaca Journal (4 page)

M
ost of the thirty people on this tour to Oaxaca are members of the AFS, but drawn from different parts of the country—New York, Los Angeles, Montana, Atlanta. Today, on our first morning in Oaxaca, we are beginning to get acquainted over breakfast, and looking forward to getting our first glimpse at the town itself, an old colonial capital surrounded by a modern city of 400,000 people or so.

As we wind down the steep road from the hotel above the city, on our little tour bus, we stop and get out to enjoy a panoramic view of the city. Luis—our tour guide for the next week—points out the innumerable churches and the confines of the old colonial city. No one pays the least attention. John Mickel instantly scans the roadside for ferns, but John D. Mitchell, his near namesake and fellow botanist at the New York Botanical Garden, has an eye out for birds as
well. The near identity of the two names, John Mickel and John Mitchell, is causing amusement and confusion among us, as indeed it does at the NYBG, where they both work, and where phone calls and mail for one are constantly misdirected to the other. Many of us begin to refer to John Mitchell as J.D., to distinguish him from John Mickel. Not that there is any similarity except in name. John Mickel is sixty-something, clean-shaven, lean and wiry, with tufted gray eyebrows and blue eyes; he goes bareheaded in all weather. J.D. is a younger and much larger man, and sports a huge beard. His massive head in a broad-brimmed hat, and binoculars invariably around his neck, he somewhat resembles Professor Challenger in
The Lost World
. Botanist he may be, but my first experience of J.D., today, is of a passionate, lyrical bird-watcher. He spots a bird and points it out excitedly.

“That’s a dusky, a dusky hummingbird, going out of the
Ipomoea
,” he whispers. “Isn’t that neat? … Uh-oh! That’s a yellow-rumped warbler roughing around there, going after insects.”

Scott Mori (who, I learn later, is also from the NYBG, and president this year of the Torrey Botanical Society) scrambles down a precipice to get a wild tobacco plant. He examines it and murmurs,
“Nicotiana glauca.”
Though there is a
Nicotiana africana
, Scott says, the use of
Nicotiana
as tobacco came wholly from the New World, and goes back at least two thousand years.

As we pile back on the bus to continue into town, Scott reminds us of the early history of tobacco. Tobacco was nearly everywhere in the Americas, it is thought, by the time of Christ. An eleventh-century pottery vessel shows a Mayan man smoking a roll of tobacco leaves tied with a string—the Mayan term for
smoking was
sik’ar
(to think that I have enjoyed cigars for years, and never realized the word was of Mayan origin!).

This gives rise to a general discussion of the history of tobacco. Columbus was given a gift of fruit and “certain dried leaves which gave off a distinct fragrance” by the natives when he first set foot in the New World. He ate the fruit, but having no idea of the leaves’ use, he had them thrown overboard. A few years later, visiting Cuba and seeing the natives smoking, another explorer, Rodrigo de Jerez, brought the custom back to Spain—when his neighbors saw smoke billowing from his nose and mouth, they were so alarmed they called in the Inquisition, and Jerez was imprisoned for seven years. By the time he got out of prison, smoking had become a Spanish craze.

Then, of course, there were the stories we all learned as schoolchildren in England—of Sir Walter Raleigh introducing smoking in England (his alarmed servant, thinking his master was on fire, doused him with a jug of water); of tobacco getting honorable mention in
The Faerie Queene;
of the Elizabethans, with their pithiness, calling it sot-weed; and of Queen Elizabeth herself being inducted into smoking, as an old lady, in 1600. And then, in rapid succession, smoking was denounced in
Worke of Chimney Sweepers
(1601), defended in
A Defense of Tobacco
(1603), and reattacked (
A Counterblaste
…) by no less than King James himself. But despite royal disapproval and tariffs, by 1614 there were “7000 shops in and about London, that doth vent Tobacco.” This gift from the New World was quickly adopted all over the Old.

By now we have arrived in the center of old Oaxaca, where the streets still run in the simple north-south grid laid out in the sixteenth century. Some of the streets, we notice, are named after political figures, like Porfirio Díaz Street, but others, to our pleasure, after various naturalists. I spot a Humboldt Street—Alexander von Humboldt, the great naturalist, visited Oaxaca in 1803 and described his experiences in his
Personal Narrative
. John Mickel points out a Conzatti Park. Conzatti, he says, was not a professional botanist—he was a school teacher and administrator who lived in Oaxaca during the 1920s and 1930s—but he was an amateur botanist, the first pteridologist in Mexico, who in 1939 documented more than six hundred Mexican fern species.

J.D., in the meantime, has spotted a tanager on a mango, and adds this to the list he is keeping.

We stop in the great colonial church of Santo Domingo. The church is enormous, dazzling, overwhelming in its baroque magnificence, not an inch free of gilt. A sense of power and wealth exudes from every inch of this church, a statement of the occupier’s power and wealth. How much of the gold, I wonder, was mined by slaves, how much melted down from Aztec treasures by the conquistadors? How much misery, slavery, rage, death, went into the making of this magnificent church? And yet the statuary portrays smallish figures with dark complexions, as opposed to the idealized, enlarged statues of the Greeks. Clearly local models were used, and religious imagery adapted to local needs and forms. A giant golden tree emblazoned on the ceiling holds both court and ecclesiastical nobles in its branches—church and state mixed, as one.

A painting of the Virgin, gilded, ornate, blazes in the middle of the darkened, soaring nave (“Oh, my God,” whispers J.D., “look at that!”). Below it a black-robed woman, perhaps a nun, is kneeling; she raises her voice intermittently in a loud, guttural song or invocation. She is in a state of ecstasy, adoration. I have the feeling of something theatrical, histrionic. If she wants to pray, I feel, let her do so discreetly, not make such a racket. Others, however, find her beautiful, moving.

Just outside the church, the street is lining with vendors selling hammocks, necklaces, wooden knives, paintings. I buy a many-colored hammock and a slender wooden knife. Scott does, too (“just to spread money around,” he says). There are tiny shops across the street, and among them I notice Gastenterolia Endoscopica. I wonder, absurdly, why one should seek a colonoscopy, a gastroscopy, a sigmoidoscopy, in these holy confines?

Luis, our guide, is still plying us with information: “Here is the ‘house of Cortés.’ Cortés was never here, but he
would
have stayed here, lived here, had he ever visited Oaxaca. It is his
official
house.” Next to the house, in the street, there is a truck full of gasoline, with Milleania Gas painted on the outside.

And in front of the church, this beautiful piece of architecture, is an unaccountably ugly garden—two large squares of reddish earth entirely planted with a treelike succulent,
Echeveria
—bizarre, spooky plants which look like triffids—
Echeveria
, and nothing else. There used to be a pleasant, variegated garden here, apparently, and then, by some perverseness, it was removed and replaced by this uncanny, red-earthed Martian plantscape.

A few blocks from Santo Domingo, we stop at a tiny but wonderful, aromatic spice shop. My botanical companions are fascinated, gastronomically, botanically. Scott tells me that there were at least a hundred and fifty plants domesticated before Columbus. We identify everything by its Latin name and its common name; everything is sniffed, olfactory nuances identified. Many of my companions buy exotic spices to take home; I content myself, timidly, with some pistachios and raisins.

There are huge, compacted towers of chilies, like bales, or castles—bright green, yellow, orange, scarlet, these seem very characteristic of Oaxaca. There are at least twenty types of chilies in common use—
chile de agua, chile poblano
, and
chile serrano
are the commonest fresh ones; there are also
chile amarillo, chile ancho, chile de arbol, chile chipotle, chile costeno, chile guajillo, chile morita, chile mulato, chile pasilla de Oaxaca, chile piquín
and a whole family of chilies going under the name of
chilhuacle
. I wonder whether these are all separate species, or varieties produced by domestication. All of them, presumably, differ in taste, in texture, in hotness, in complexity, in a dozen other dimensions to which the Oaxacan palate is sensitive—in New York I just have a bottle labeled Powdered Chili, and that has been the extent of my own sophistication so far.

Just across from the spice shop is a chocolate factory. We could smell it, the smell of roasting chocolate beans mixed with the scents of chilies and cinnamon, almonds, cloves, a block away. The factory has a tiny frontage on the street, but then one enters, from the dazzling sun, past the sacks of cocoa beans
half-blocking the entrance, to an astonishingly deep and commodious space inside. One of my companions, Robbin Moran, begins to tell me of his experiences with cacao trees. A shy, unassuming man with horn-rimmed glasses who looks like a post-doc in his late twenties or thirties, Robbin is in fact a youthful forty-four, and like John, he is a curator of ferns at the NYBG.

Cacao trees have large glossy leaves, and their little flowers and great purplish pods grow directly from the stem. One can break open a pod to reveal the seeds, embedded in a white pulp. The seeds themselves, the cacao beans, are cream-colored when the pod is opened, but with exposure to air may turn lavender or purple. The pulp, though, has almost the consistency of ice cream, Robbin says, and a delicious, sweet taste. “Finding some cacao trees is one of the treats of being out collecting,” he remarks. “You don’t find a disused chocolate plantation every day, but there are plenty of them here in Mexico, in Ecuador and Venezuela, too.” The sweet, mucilaginous pulp attracts wild animals, he adds. They eat the sweet pulp and discard the bitter seeds, which can then grow into new seedlings. Indeed, the tough pods do not open spontaneously, and would never be able to release their seeds, were it not for the animals attracted to their pulp. Early humans must have watched animals and then imitated them, Robbin speculates, opening the pods and enjoying the sweet pulp, as he does, whenever he comes across a cacao tree.

Over thousands of years, perhaps, early Mesoamericans had learned to value the beans as well, discovering that if they were scooped out of the pod with some pulp still attached, and left this way for a week or so, they would become less bitter as fermentation occurred. Then they could be dried and roasted
to bring out the full chocolate flavor, much as we were seeing and smelling now.

The roasted beans, now a rich brown, are shelled and moved to a grinder—and here the final miracle happens, for what comes out of the grinder is not a powder, but a warm liquid, for the friction liquefies the cocoa butter, producing a rich chocolate liquor.

Attractive though it looks and smells, this liquor is scarcely drinkable, being intensely bitter. The Maya made a somewhat different version—their
choco haa
(bitter water) was a thick, cold, bitter liquid, for sugar was unknown to them—fortified with spices, corn meal, and sometimes chili. The Aztec, who called it
cacahuatl
, considered it to be the most nourishing and fortifying of drinks, one reserved for nobles and kings. They saw it as a food of the gods, and believed that the cacao tree originally grew only in Paradise, but was stolen and brought to mankind by their god Quetzalcoatl, who descended from heaven on a beam of the morning star, carrying a cacao tree. (In reality, Robbin says, it probably originated in the Amazon, like so many species; but we still remember this myth in the Latin name of the tree,
Theobroma
, “food of the gods.”) The tree was rare at best, and now, he tells me, like the date palm and the avocado, it may be almost extinct in the wild.
^*
It has been cultivated in Mexico, though, for more than two thousand years, and not only as a source of the divine drink—cacao pods served as symbols of fertility, often portrayed in sculptures and carvings, as well as a convenient currency (four cacao beans would buy a rabbit, ten a prostitute, one hundred a slave). Thus Columbus had brought cacao beans back to Ferdinand and Isabella as a curiosity, but had no idea of its special qualities as a drink.