Part 3 (1/2)

We watch the carding, the combing, the looming of the wool, the weavers at work amid their great wooden looms, but our interests, mine at least, are more in the dyes. Only natural dyes are used, dyes used for millennia before the conquest-most of them are vegetable, and each day a different dye is used. But today is a red day, a day for cochineal.

When the Spaniards first saw cochineal they were amazed-there existed no dye in the Old World of such a rich redness and fullness, and so colorfast, so stable, so impervious to change. Cochineal, along with gold and silver, became one of the great prizes of New Spain, and weight for weight, indeed, was more precious than gold. It takes seventy thousand of the insects, Don Isaac tells us, to produce a pound of dry material. The cochineal insects (only the females are used) are to be found only on certain cacti native to Mexico and Central America-this was why cochineal was unknown to the Old World. Outside Don Isaac's place are p.r.i.c.kly pears sedulously sown with the insect which form little hard white waxy coc.o.o.ns-somewhat like scale-that one can split with a knife (sometimes a fingernail). The insects, extracted, have to be de-waxed, and then crushed-and several of Don Isaac's children are doing this with rollers, crus.h.i.+ng the dry powder so it becomes finer and finer-a.s.suming a deep magenta or carmine tint as it does so.

Some 10 percent of this powder, I am told, is carminic acid; I am curious to know the structural formula of this, and how readily it can be synthesized. (After the trip I looked this up and realized that carminic acid would in fact be quite easy to synthesize. But synthesizing it would throw thousands of Mexicans out of work, undermine a traditional industry and artisans.h.i.+p which has been part of Mexico's history for thousands of years.) This deep magenta or carmine was still not the brilliant color which had captivated the Spaniards, the brave scarlet color that would strike terror into their foes, and that later was used to dye the coats of the Redcoats. Such a bright red only appears when the cochineal is acidified-done here by pouring quarts of lemon juice into it. The sudden change of color is very startling. I dab some of the now-brilliant cochineal on my finger, and am tempted to lick it. This would be fine, Don Isaac says; it is sometimes used in red drinks and lipstick, as well as in the finest red ink. Scarlet ink-ink of cochineal! And, it comes to me, a memory of fifty years ago, that we used cochineal as a stain in our biology days-it had been partly replaced by synthetic scarlet stains, but there was still, in the 1940s, no synthetic quite as brilliant.*

The ground-up powder-almost a pound of it (I hardly dare think of its cost, the sheer human cost of raising seventy thousand insects, picking them off the cacti by hand, rendering them down, drying them, grinding and grinding them)-is tipped into a huge urn of steaming water, heated over a wood fire in the yard, and stirred and stirred till the water becomes blood red, and then the raw wool, in great hanks, is lowered into it. It will take two or three hours to absorb the dye fully. Looking at the gorgeous reds around me I grow wistful, covetous-Would it be possible, I ask, for my T-s.h.i.+rt to be dyed red? I give them my gray cotton NYBG T-s.h.i.+rt, and within minutes it has become a delicate pink. I wonder how deep the color will become, but I am told that cotton, as opposed to wool, does not absorb the dye too well. But soon I will have, I think with excitement, the only cochineal T-s.h.i.+rt in the world!

I make a blood red smear of cochineal in my notebook, like the smears of chemicals I used to (consciously or accidentally) get on my chemistry books in my school days.

* Gra.s.shoppers, by a special biblical dispensation, are kosher, unlike most invertebrates. (Did not John the Baptist live on locusts and wild honey?) This always seemed to me a reasonable, even necessary, dispensation, for life in ancient Israel was quite chancy, and locusts, like manna, were a G.o.dsend in lean times. And locusts could come in uncountable millions, wiping out the always precarious harvests of the time. So it seemed only just, a poetic and nutritional justice, that some of these voracious eaters be eaten themselves.

Yet I was outraged, as well as amused, when I visited the Panta.n.a.l in Brazil a couple of years ago, to find that the capybaras there, giant aquatic guinea pigs-sweet, herbivorous animals minding their own business-were at one point almost wiped out because of a special papal dispensation which decreed that, for purposes of Lent, these mammals could be regarded as ”fish,” and thus eaten. Not only a monstrous sophistry, but one that drove the gentle capybara almost to extinction. (Beavers in North America, Robbin tells me, were also cla.s.sified as ”fish” for the same reason.)

* James Lovelock, in his autobiography, Homage to Gaia, tells of his excitement, as a young apprentice in a dye-works, preparing carmine from cochineal beetles. The quant.i.ties involved were heroic-a 112-pound sack of the beetles had to be ladled into a huge copper vat filled with boiling acetic acid (”it looked like the pictures I had seen of equipment in an alchemist's laboratory”), and after four hours of simmering, the dark red-brown liquor had to be decanted and treated with alum, then ammonia. Adding the ammonia precipitated the carmine lake, which he had to filter, wash, and dry. Now, at last, he had the pure carmine powder, and this, he writes, had ”a pure red colour so intense that it seemed to draw the sense of colour through my eyes from my brain. What a joy to partic.i.p.ate in the trans.m.u.tation of dried beetles into immaculate carmine! I felt ... like the sorcerer's apprentice.”

CHAPTER EIGHT.

FRIDAY.

Last 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 spygla.s.ses (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 gla.s.s ball, a huge luminous sphere of gla.s.s 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 Albn, 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 seash.e.l.ls 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 Albn, 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 Albn 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 Albn is quite overwhelming, and unexpected. The city itself is s.p.a.cious 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 G.o.d, like Jerusalem-but now it is desolate, deserted. The G.o.ds 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 Albn, 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 s.h.i.+p, a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, an enormous one which has crashed here on the airstrip-like top of Monte Albn-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 Albn, 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 G.o.ds, would go.

Anthony F. Aveni, an expert on Mesoamerican astronomy and archaeoastronomy, writes that the Aztec ... saw in the heavens the sustainers of life-the G.o.ds they sought to repay, with the blood of sacrifice, for bringing favorable rains, for keeping the earth from quaking, for spurring them on in battle. Among the G.o.ds was Black Tezcatlipoca, who ruled the night from his abode in the north, with its wheel (the Big Dipper). He presided over the cosmic ball court (Gemini) where the G.o.ds played a game to set the fate of humankind. He lit the fire sticks (Orion's belt) that brought warmth to the hearth. And at the end of every fifty-two-year calendrical cycle, Black Tezcatlipoca timed the rattlesnake's tail (the Pleiades) so that it pa.s.sed overhead at midnight-a guarantee that the world would not come to an end but that humanity would be granted another epoch of life.

The Aztec priests, in their skywatcher's temple at Tenocht.i.tln, were doing what the Zapotec astronomer-priests had been doing in Monte Albn a thousand years earlier.

The Aztec were more superst.i.tious, 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 Cortes 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 superst.i.tion 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 G.o.ds who ruled in the heavens and the underworld to the local G.o.ds of maize, of earthquakes, of war.

Wandering around Monte Albn, 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 s.p.a.ces 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 Albn, 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 Albn museum and shows, beneath a gla.s.s 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 Albn packed with people-twenty thousand people would easily fit here-packed, perhaps, for the weekly market day, such a market as Bernal Daz saw in Tenocht.i.tln. 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 Albn 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 Cortes are execrated, by some, as villains.

Can one reconstruct an ident.i.ty 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 s.p.a.ces in Monte Albn, I imagine the groundswell of an enormous crowd, voices calling in a dozen tongues, temples packed with wors.h.i.+ppers, their prayers rising to the sky, while the silent astronomers work in their s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p-shaped building. I imagine the roar of the throng, perhaps the entire population of Monte Albn, 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 b.a.l.l.s-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 gra.s.s 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.

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 compet.i.tive 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 b.a.l.l.s: ”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 b.a.l.l.s 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 ma.s.s 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 b.a.l.l.s used in the game, but for little rubber b.a.l.l.s 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 Albn, the jostling players using their hips and b.u.t.tocks 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 pa.s.sion in him is in full force. And indeed, I see, as the rest of us are exploring Monte Albn, 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 Albn-sacrificed to the humble but peremptory call of cryptogamic botany.

CHAPTER NINE.

SAt.u.r.dAY.

On our way now to Boone's place, in Ixtln. Woken from a semi-slumber (slumped in the bus, having visions of pyramids, terraces, the ball court, my cortex replaying Monte Albn) by J.D.'s e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, ”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 Albn, 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 l.u.s.ted 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. d.i.c.k, 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!”