Oaxaca Journal (9 page)

A
n early morning walk near our hotel with Dick Rauh and his wife went astray this morning. We got lost, and almost killed, trying to cross the Pan American Highway. We saw open sewers, children with infected eyes and sores. Fearful poverty, filth. We were almost asphyxiated by diesel fumes; we were almost bitten by a ferocious, perhaps rabid dog. This is the other side of Oaxaca, a modern city, full of traffic, with a rush hour, and poverty, like any other. Perhaps it is salutary for me to see this other side, before I get too lyrical about this Eden.

I have wanted to see the famous Tule tree, El Gigante, the colossal bald cypress in the churchyard of Santa María del Tule, for fifty or more years, ever since seeing an old photo of it in Strasburger’s
Textbook of Botany
in my biology days at school,
and reading that Alexander von Humboldt, who visited it in 1803, thought it might be four thousand years old. The notion that Humboldt himself made a special journey to see it, that I am now standing, almost two hundred years later, where he might have stood, adds a special dimension. Humboldt is a great hero of mine, and has been since I was fourteen or fifteen. I love his enormous, insatiable curiosity, his sensitivity and boldness—he was the first European to climb Chimborazo, Ecuador’s highest Andean peak, and thought nothing, in his
late sixties, of embarking on a wild journey through Siberia, collecting minerals and plants, making meteorological observations. Not only did he have this manifest feeling for the natural world, but he was also, it seemed (this is not so of all naturalists or even anthropologists) unusually sensitive to the different cultures and peoples he encountered.

Though we are still on the outskirts of the city of Oaxaca, in Humboldt’s day, I imagine, this church and its tree were very isolated. One sees this plainly in the old photo, where the church is surrounded by open countryside, whereas now there is a bustling village all around it—indeed, it has almost been absorbed into the city itself.

The tree is too big for the eye to take in fully. It must have seemed even more extraordinary before the mission and town were built. It dwarfs the mission, makes it look like a toy. Not just its height (a mere 150 feet), but its girth (almost 200 feet around the trunk), and the far huger foliage, which, mushroomlike, tops the monstrous trunk.

A world of birds fly in and out—they have their residences, their apartments, in the tree. Scott pulls out his hand lens and camera, carefully examines and photographs the cones—the female ones at eye-level, the males higher up.

Takashi Hoshizaki, lean and agile for all his seventy-five years, and wearing a badge-filled green felt hat, compares the Tule tree with the bristlecones in California, said to be six thousand years old. I mention the famous Dragon Tree of Laguna in the Canary Islands, also reputed to be six thousand years old, a tree which led Humboldt to such lyrical extravagances that Darwin himself was deeply disappointed when, due to a
quarantine, he was unable to see it. Two thousand years ago, Takashi tells me, this whole area was lush, embedded in a swamp; now it is arid, semidesert for much of the year, and only the Tule tree, with its vast roots and great age, survives to tell the tale. What else, I wonder, has El Gigante seen? The rise and fall of half a dozen civilizations, the coming of the Spaniards, the whole human history of Oaxaca.

Luis is telling us the prehistory of Oaxaca, stimulated, perhaps, by the great age of the Tule tree: Asian peoples crossing the Bering Strait around 15,000
B.C.
, in the last ice age, then moving down through North America—hunting game, fishing, and gathering. Then, a few thousand years later, the woolly mammoths, the mastodons, the great mammals die. Did human hunting play a part here? Was it natural disaster, or climatic change? The hunter-gatherers, perforce, sought other modes of survival, and learned to cultivate maize, beans, squash, chilies, and avocados (still, today, the basic crops of Oaxaca). By 2000
B.C.
, as one historian writes, “Mesoamerica was a farmer’s world, with agricultural villages scattered through the highlands and the lowlands.”

Luis speaks of the establishment of permanent village settlements, clustered in areas of prime agricultural land—villages distinguished, very early, by particular customs, skills, and tongues. We know what the villagers ate, he continued, from the remains—corns and beans, avocados, chilies, supplemented by a certain amount of deer and peccary, wild turkey, and other birds. We know that dogs were
domesticated, but nonetheless eaten. We know that the men wore loincloths and sandals, the women cloth or fiber skirts. We know that travel and trade was established very early (villages in Oaxaca had obsidian from central Mexico or Guatemala, hundreds of kilometers away, perhaps as early as 5000
B.C.
), and that religion and ritual played a major part in their lives.

Between 1000 and 500
B.C.
, the first large cities were established, with a monumental architecture, and a new level of art and ritual, of social complexity, of writing. The largest of these cities was Monte Albán, which we would see for ourselves on Friday. It was under the Zapotec that Monte Albán reached its highest development, ruling a large region and prospering for fifteen hundred years. For unknown reasons, this great city was suddenly abandoned around
A.D
. 800, and there arose in its stead a series of smaller, provincial capitals. Yagul, which we were on our way to see, had been such a capital; Mitla, which we would see on Thursday, was another. These smaller centers carried on the Zapotec culture, variously enriched by other cultures in turn: the Mixtec, from western Oaxaca, around
A.D
. 1100, then the Aztec, from the north, around 1400. A hundred years later, Luis concluded, the Spanish came, and did all they could to obliterate everything which had gone before them.

As we approach Yagul, Luis points out a cliff face with a huge pictograph painted in white over a red background, an abstract design; and above it, a giant stick figure, a man. It looks remarkably fresh, almost new—who would guess it was a thousand years old? I wonder what the image means: Was it an
icon, a religious symbol of some kind? A warning to evil spirits, or invaders, to keep away? A giant road sign, perhaps, to orient travelers on their way to Yagul? Or a pure, for-the-love-of-it pictographic doodle, a prehistoric piece of graffiti?

Entering Yagul, I see nothing at first, except grassy mounds and piled-up stones, vague, blurred, meaningless, flat—but bit by bit, as I look and listen to Luis, it starts to come into focus. Robbin picks up a broken potsherd, and wonders how old it is. These gentle ruins do not seem too dramatic at first—it takes a special eye, an archaeological eye, a knowledge of history, to clothe them with the significance they have, to imagine the past cultures which lived and built here. One can see a central grassy courtyard with central altar and platform around it, oriented, Luis tells us, northwest to southeast. Did the Zapotec have compasses, or did they reckon from the sun?

Four grass-covered mounds surround the altar; one of them has been opened to give access to the tomb below. I descend fearfully—it is surprisingly chilly, almost icy, ten feet down, and a fear of being buried alive suddenly seizes me. Listening to Luis, I have a vision of young men, captured warriors, being sacrificed on the altar, their torsos sliced open with obsidian knives, their hearts torn out and offered to the gods. Reemerging, dazzled, into the midday sun, I can now see the remnants of what was once a great palace, with labyrinthine passages and patios and little rooms—at least, the ground plan of a palace, for most of the stones have disappeared.

I am starting to get a sense of a life, a culture, profoundly different from my own. The feelings are similar, in some ways, to those one has in Rome or Athens, but quite different in other
ways, because this culture is so different: so completely sun-oriented, sky-oriented, wind- and weather-oriented, as a start. The buildings face outward, life faces outward, whereas in Greece and Rome the focus is inward: the atrium, the inner rooms, the tabernacles, the hearth. What sort of poems and epics did these Mesoamerican civilizations produce? Were they ever recorded, or did they remain spoken only?

Yagul is our first intimation of what Mesoamerica might have been like, the cultures that lived here a thousand, two thousand years ago. But this, Luis says, is only a prelude; we will see much more spectacular ruins later in the week.

A lethargic dog lies on a step in the shade. I sit down next to it—it opens a lazy eye and scans me, then, seeing I am no menace, indeed a sort of brother, it closes it and we sit together in peace. I feel our rapport, the flow of feeling between us. It is resting, but, at the same time, ready—like a lion with half-closed eyes on the veldt; or a crocodile, motionless, awaiting unwary prey, able to explode into full activity in an instant. What is the physiology of this resting-ready state, and do we, human beings, employ it as well?