Part 3 (2/2)

”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 G.o.d, 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 Ixtln, 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 doc.u.mentation.” 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-s.h.i.+rt!).

”Hanging Polypodia on the rocks,” announces John, who, having dealt very coolly with the military, is now back to his botanical self. ”We are going,” he adds, ”to see the genus Llavea.” I like the name, with its Welsh-looking double ”l.” No, not Welsh, John corrects me; Llavea was named in 1816 in honor of Pablo de la Llave, who traveled and botanized in Mexico two hundred years ago.

Arriving at the gate to Boone's property, we are disgorged from the bus, and start to trek quite steeply upward. We are quite high again, over 7,000 feet, and with the addition now of a slightly fluey bronchitis (several of us have contracted this), I find myself a little short of breath. Boone comes out to meet us-broad-shouldered, compact, not in the least short of breath (but he lives at this alt.i.tude, so it is normal for him)-tough, agile, for all his seventy-five-odd years. He is unsurprised to hear about our encounter with the army. He speaks of the current political situation in Mexico, and then immediately asks, ”Have you read Locke?” and goes on to speak of Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Agriculture, genetics, politics, philosophy: all are admixed in Boone's s.p.a.cious mind, and his often sudden transitions from one subject to another are natural a.s.sociations for a mind of this sort. There will be a period in the middle of the day when some of the group will go trekking in the forest, and others, like myself, can stay in the casita-then, I promise myself, I will have a real talk with Boone, who fascinates me more and more, and whom I want to know better. But this wish is frustrated: Two young soil botanists appear-they have just arrived from Norway, and are making a special pilgrimage to see Boone. Boone greets them, welcomes them, in fluent Norwegian-how many languages, for G.o.d's sake, does the man know?-and then disappears, closeted somewhere with them.

The casita itself is both dilapidated and charming-ideal for a dedicated visiting scientist, intolerable, perhaps, for anyone else. But then it is not meant for anyone else. There are tangled plants everywhere, there is a lizard in the sink, and there are six bunklike beds almost on top of each other in the bedroom. There is a fine central table for having a conference, and a large covered area outside for the preparation of specimens. There is a stove and a refrigerator, electricity, hot running water. What else should the visiting botanist desire?

What he truly desires is outside, all around him-for the casita is set in rich and varied forest, with sixty-odd species of ferns within a kilometer of the house and more than two hundred within a radius of fifteen kilometers. The dry central valley and city of Oaxaca lie an hour and a half to the south, and the lush rain forest is only two or three hours to the north. There is, in addition, Boone's small farm, where he still grows corn and much else, and his personal garden with everything from grapefruits to rhododendrons, to say nothing of fish ponds and antique statues.

Carol Gracie has picked a pa.s.sionflower, Pa.s.siflora, and now gives us an impromptu talk on how it was used symbolically by the Jesuits. The three stigmas stood for the three nails of the Cross; the five stamens stood for the five wounds of Jesus; the ten tepals for the ten Apostles at the crucifixion; the corona for the crown of thorns placed on Jesus's head; and the tendrils for the whips with which he was beaten as he carried the Cross to Calvary. If the good Fathers had a microscope, I thought, they could have found another dozen structures and symmetries which they could have interpreted as symbols of the crucifixion, embedded by G.o.d in the very cells of the plant.

I wander out with Scott, Nancy, and J.D. to a grove of pa.s.sionflowers, an ideal spot for watching the hummingbirds and b.u.t.terflies and for botanizing in the dense surround. We have barely settled ourselves before J.D. cries out, ”A hummer! In the Cryptomeria. He's got a band of iridescent green, like emerald.”

J.D. and Nancy keep spotting more and more birds-they must have identified more than twenty species in the course of an hour-and exclaiming in wonder as they do so. I look, and see nothing whatsoever. Or, rather, I see some hawks, and some vultures, nothing else-and the tiny stuff they are exclaiming about I miss completely. It's my eyes, I apologize, poor visual acuity. But my acuity is fine-it is the brain that is defective. The eye must be educated, trained-one develops a birdwatcher's, or geologist's, or pteridologist's eye (as I myself have a ”clinical” eye).

Scott, meanwhile, with his eye honed to observe animal-plant interactions, identifies ripped flowers in the Pa.s.siflora; other flowers, seemingly intact, he bisects with his knife, and finds depleted of nectar. ”Illegal entry,” he says darkly. Bees, most likely, have preempted the hummingbirds, ignored the ants, and stolen the nectar, often damaging the flowers as they did so.

As I admire the neat way Scott bisects the flowers, I hear J.D.'s voice. ”Oh, my G.o.d, it's a kestrel. It's magnificent.” Nancy, hearing me confuse hawks and vultures, tells me of the aerodynamic differences between them, how vultures, as opposed to hawks, hold their wings at a dihedral angle and then rock ... so. She brings a different point of view (a mathematician's and engineer's point of view) to birds and their flight, whereas J.D. is primarily a taxonomist and ecologist. Nancy's interest in birds and plants only started a few years ago, and she brings her mathematician's mind with her into the field. I am excited to see this, to see how her abstract-mathematical and naturalist's pa.s.sions are not in separate compartments of her mind, but can join, interact, fertilize each other, as I see now.

David, the jolly chemist-botanist, bellows, ”Mispickel!” whenever he sees me.

I answer, ”Orpiment!”

”Realgar!” he retorts.

This, like the smacking of hands, high-fiving, is our jovial, a.r.s.enical greeting.

I have seen my first giant horsetails in the wild-Equisetum myriochaetum-topping my head. John says it can grow to fifteen feet tall. But how big is the stem, I ask? He makes an O with his thumb and forefinger-one and a half centimeters diameter, maximum. I am deeply disappointed. I had hoped he might say like a slender tree trunk, as thick as a young Calamites.

David, overhearing, nods. ”You really are an old fossil man.” (I had told him, earlier, of my interest, my initiation, in paleobotany.) Robbin recounts the story of how Richard Spruce, the great botanical explorer, coming upon a stand of giant horsetails in Ecuador in the early 1860s, spoke of them as having stems nearly as thick as his wrist, as resembling a forest of young larches. ”I could also fancy myself,” he wrote, ”in some primeval forest of Calamites.” Could Spruce, we wonder, in fact have come across a population of miraculously surviving Calamites, the truly treelike giant horsetails which flourished in the Paleozoic, but extinct for 250 million years?

It would seem very unlikely, and yet ... not completely impossible. Perhaps he did find them, perhaps they are still there, a secret enclave, in some lost world of Amazonia. This, says Robbin, is a fantasy he sometimes has (”in my more irrational, romantic moments”), and such a thought is one I sometimes have, too. Stranger things have happened, after all: the discovery in 1938 of the coelacanth, a fish supposedly long extinct. The discovery in the 1950s of an entire cla.s.s of molluscs thought to have been extinct for nearly 400 million years. The discovery of the dawn redwood, Metasequoia, or, most recently, of the Wollemi pine in Australia. Robbin speaks of the isolated high plateaus in Venezuela, with rock walls so sheer one has to helicopter to the top. All of these have endemic species, unique plants of their own, plants seen nowhere else in the world.

We regroup in the casita, spread our specimens out. The giant horsetail (though no Calamites) outs.h.i.+nes all the others in splendor, to my mind. Boone comes by now-he has been with the Norwegian soil scientists all this while-and takes us out to show us the perennial corn, Zea diploperennis, he has grown from seed. It was discovered, a tiny patch of it, about fifteen years ago, in Jalisco, and Boone, among others, realized the agricultural potential it had-both as a plant in its own right, and as one whose corn-s.m.u.t-resistant genes could be transferred to other varieties of corn. It comes to me, as we stand about him, that there is something different about Boone. With his extraordinary technical ingenuity and originality, his immense range of reading and reference, his pa.s.sionate, lifelong dedication to restoring the self-respect and autonomy of the impoverished farmers of Oaxaca, he is, intellectually and morally, a being of another order. Boone stands beside the high corn, his strong figure casting a diagonal shadow in the afternoon sun, and bids us goodbye. I have the sense of a rare, a heroic and extraordinary figure-the tall corn, the strong sun, the old man, become one. This is one of those moments, indescribable, when there is a sense of intense reality, an almost preternatural reality-and then we are descending the trail to the gate, reboarding the bus, all in a sort of trance or daze, as if we had had a sudden vision of the sacred, but were now back in the secular, everyday world.

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 d.a.m.n 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 b.u.t.terwort, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 zcalo, 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, ma.n.u.script books of bark had no chance of surviving the conquistadors' autos-da-fe, 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 Albn, 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 n.o.bleman and his servants, along with a h.o.a.rd of gold and silver and precious stones. There are great funerary urns, such as we had seen all over Monte Albn. 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 G.o.ds 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 magnet.i.te. How is it that while these Mesoamerican cultures appreciated magnet.i.te for its l.u.s.ter and beauty, they did not discover the fact that it was magnetic, and that, if floated in water, it might act as a compa.s.s? 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-compa.s.s, 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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 Albn, above all, has overturned a lifetime of presuppositions, shown me possibilities I never dreamed of. I will read Bernal Daz 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.

* When I did say this to Robbin later he was quite indignant. Llavea was extraordinary, he said, for it bore its reproductive organs, its fertile pinnae, on the same leaf as its sterile pinnae, and the two had completely different shapes. Wild! And its rarity and restricted range made it doubly fascinating. ”Not just any fern has these qualities!” he exclaimed.

CHAPTER TEN.

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