On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  From the slopes of red clay to the slopes of white clay, we turned east on the side road and came to the village of San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca, a vast abandoned sixteenth-century convent looming at its center. At the edge of the village we turned onto a stony road that led northeast across the bald hills—bald because, in the absence of trees, the topsoil had been scoured away by the wind.

  A woman in black was walking unsteadily, tottering on the lumpy road ahead of us. We slowed.

  “Do you want a ride?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She was elderly, black-shawled, her face pinkish from the raw wind. She climbed into the back seat—it was a crew cab—and she sighed in gratitude. Her face was stiff with shyness and cold.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Río Blanco.”

  “How far is it?”

  “One hour, walking.”

  “What about Santa María Ixcatlán?”

  “Very far. I don’t go there.”

  She was well wrapped up, a warm shawl, thick jacket, and long skirt; but her shoes were misshapen, one sole coming adrift. She had a dark, wrinkled face, deep furrows, and the determined set to her jaw made her look unflappable. She was a Mixtec, she said, and yes, she spoke the language all the time.

  As for her reason for what I took to be a ten-mile round trip to San Juan Bautista, it was, she said, a recado: “I am on an errand.”

  Most of the landscape was ghost white, blowing dust, infertile, nothing growing, only wind-whipped hollows and those odd scooped shapes you see in some smooth sand dunes.

  “And they wonder why people want to leave places like this,” Sledge said. “Nothing grows here.”

  But on other hills some pines had been planted, as a gesture to reforestation, obviously to hold the soil. They were planted in rows, some tenaciously rooted, others dead, brown and brittle and stark, having shed their needles.

  “They planted those five years ago,” the old woman said.

  “What do you grow here?”

  “Maize,” she said. “Beans. Wheat. Maguey.”

  “What do you eat?”

  “We eat meat—little goats. Red mole. Black mole. Beans.” She frowned and thought a moment. She might have been abashed at the simplicity of the menu. She said, “Pulque bread.”

  It was perhaps her way of reminding us that they observed festivals in Río Blanco, offering the traditional treat of pan de pulque, made with the fermented sap of the maguey plant.

  But our truck jounced so badly it was hard to hold a conversation with all the banging, the road more like a dry rocky riverbed than a thoroughfare for wheeled vehicles. Near a sudden creek, I saw geometric plots of land, in large rectangles, marked by low walls of football-sized stones.

  “Wheat fields,” the old woman said.

  She said she rarely went to Oaxaca—it was much too expensive. The first leg was a car or a truck to San Juan Bautista. Then a bus to Nochixtlán. Then another bus. Total, 600 pesos, or $29—prohibitive.

  We came to a little bridge, some stone huts beyond it.

  “Río Blanco,” the woman said, and thanked us and got out.

  More miles, of gravel and stones, of dry bouldery fields where nothing grew. The village of Río Poblano, some miles farther on, was a cluster of huts, a small chapel, a fifty-foot section of paved road, then the rocky road again. After a few hours, we descended into more sheltered hollows. What looked like twisted black claws scattered in the white dust were agave plants—not the cultivated agave but the wild variety of maguey they called criollo. And descending farther, now with a better view of the wide, greeny-brown valley, I could see the palm trees, fan palms, ten or fifteen feet high, many of them stripped of their fronds. These two plants—the agave and the palm—provided raw material for the artisans in the village, the agave for mezcal, the palms for baskets.

  Every community in this part of Mexico is approached through an archway, with its name and lettered word of welcome. We passed under SANTA MARíA IXCATLáN and BIENVENIDO, and, still on a high section of road, I could see the whole place: at the base of a rocky hillside, one long street of low, pale, flat-faced cement or adobe huts fronting the curb, at the far end a white church, on a rise to the left a municipal building. No trees visible in the village, no cars on the roads, no people—apparently a ghost town.

  On a side road, halfway down the narrow main street, there was a house propped over a ravine. The rooms were stark and cold, cement block walls, with that sour stink of damp concrete, a hard bed, a dirty floor, a bare bulb hanging from a cord—like a jail cell, but a bargain at $5 a night.

  “We are busy during the fiesta,” the owner, Juana, said. “Now it’s very quiet. But you will see some people celebrating the beginning of Lent at night these days. They are the townspeople. Some play music.”

  And she explained that the name of the town, Ixcatlán, in the Ixcateco language, meant Land of Wild Cotton; in Mixteco, the name was Xula.The place name is significant. Cotton was grown here and throughout Oaxaca for thousands of years, in the Mayan and Aztec empires, and continued well beyond the Spanish conquest. As Sven Beckert describes in his book Empire of Cotton, many Nahuatl settlements had the word “cotton” in their name, such as On the Hill of Cotton and On the Cotton Temple.

  I asked about the sacred image in the church, the Lord of the Three Falls.

  “There was a statue of Christ in Puebla about two hundred years ago,” Juana said. “All the villages wanted it. But when they tried to pick it up, they failed. Then a man from here tried. He lifted it easily and brought it to the church, where it is venerated.”

  The story was a bit more complicated than this, as I found out later.

  “But we have no priest,” she said. “That is, none in town. A priest comes now and then. He doesn’t live here—he lives in Teotitlán.” That was twenty miles away. “He charges us eight hundred pesos [$43] to say Mass.”

  There was no phone line to the town. The Wi-Fi signal was so weak it was not worth logging on. No bus stopped here. As the woman we’d picked up had said, it took a car and two bus rides to get to Oaxaca city.

  “At one time a train stopped at a town over the mountains—this was seventy or eighty years ago. Men waited with burros and brought the passengers and travelers to our town.”

  The town with the railway halt had an odd name. It was called Tecomavaca (something like Eat Your Cow); the railway line from Puebla—it was the freight line to Oaxaca city—was shown on my map.

  “Some people leave the town,” she said, “because they’re poor.”

  “What sort of work do people do here?”

  “They cut wood,” she said. “Or do palm weaving. There’s not enough water to grow crops. They gather maguey for mezcal.”

  Sledge suggested that we go to where the palm weavers were at work, in a hut, which was also a workshop. And in the hut next door to it we could get something to eat.

  We walked down the empty main street to the hut, where smoke was issuing from a tin chimney. The hut was made of adobe and the limestone they called bijarra. This was one room, half of it a kitchen, with wide gaps in the roof to let the smoke out. A wood fire was burning in a bricked corner under a comal, a clay basin where tortillas were being heated. A black iron pot held a bubbling stew of tripe and goat meat with carrots, beans, and zucchini, with lumps of fraying fat floating on the surface.

  Filiberta was the cook. Her two boys served us, and while she went on slapping tortillas, her husband and boys joined us at the table.

  Filiberta’s husband, José, said grace. After we began eating, I asked if the boys were at school.

  “Only junior high,” José said. “There is no high school here. He’d have to live in another town to go to high school. At the age of sixteen they have no further option, so they generally leave.”

  Listening, the older boy, Ignacio, who was twenty, said softly, “I’d like to leave, but I don’t know where to go.”

  “Have yo
u traveled in Mexico?”

  He said, “I was in Tehuacán once.”

  Filiberta said, “Not more than four people from here have gone to the USA. Three came back. One of them stayed.”

  “People from this town go to Mexico City,” José said. “They send money back. Recently some have gone to Querétaro, to work in a factory.”

  José himself made money building houses, using traditional materials, mostly adobe. This was not profitable—he earned the equivalent of $12 a day; but with Filiberta’s cooking and the palm weaving next door, they produced enough to live on.

  “This town is more than one thousand years old,” José said. “It was a kingdom.”

  I asked him a few more questions, about the town and the church and its sacred image, but José replied that he didn’t know much, and I realized I had embarrassed him by pressing him for details, as though testing him. He was not wrong in saying the town had existed for a thousand years—as a traditional community it was much older than that, and as an Ixcateco stronghold it was a cacicazgo—a fiefdom ruled by a cacique, a noble who was also the owner of the whole place.

  So we finished the food without saying much more, and it was like eating a meal in a cold village in Tibet, the same sort of tin-roofed hut and drafty room, clouded and thick with woodsmoke from the open fire, the same rough table and simple dishes, the same piety and patience, the stolidity of the people, their look of everlastingness, unreadable in their silence.

  When we were done, Filiberta said, “Come next door. Let’s see the weavers. And I have to resume weaving.”

  Palm Weavers

  Today they were sitting together in a small cold cinderblock room, malodorous from the damp and dusty cement walls, but they often sat together outside the house, crouched in a deep hole in the ground they called a cueva, a cave, knees bumping. The dampness in the cave moistened the palm and kept it pliable for weaving, and the cave was a refuge from the hot weather. There were six women weaving in the room, Filiberta, Crecencia, Roberta, Margarita, Yolanda, and Alicia. In their midst, one man, Jesús, who was twenty-three.

  “Our husbands also do weaving,” Crecencia said when I asked. “Men and women do it.”

  “We learned when we were five years old,” Roberta said. She was an older woman and might have been doing this for sixty years.

  “Our parents taught us,” Crecencia said.

  Each was at work on a different sort of basket, intent on slipping the strands of palm fiber through the weave, and they faced me, answering my questions, weaving without looking down, tugging the strand of fiber as someone sewing draws a thread to close a seam. They were making boxes of various sizes, some very small and tight, others large and rectangular and shallow, with lids that fit snugly over them.

  “For shirts, when the laundry is returned to the room at the hotel,” Alicia said of the box she was making. She was young, recently married, and was glad for the work. It took her a week to make a box with a lid, and for this she was paid 1,500 pesos, about $75, a good wage by local standards, and paid in real money.

  Besides the boxes, some of them were making mats—petates—big and small, and others fashioning cylindrical containers. They wove all the time, not only here and in the cave but in their spare time at home, listening to music, or sitting at meetings, or in the stands at basketball games. Basketball was popular in the village; there were hoops and a court near the Palacio Municipal, where the village president had an office.

  “In the 1700s people here were already weaving like this,” Filiberta said.

  In fact, long before that. A research student from Texas, Michael Hironymous, reported that the palm weaving in the village had been practiced since pre-Hispanic times, and that a survey carried out in 1579 under King Philip II, the Relaciones Geográficas, specifically mentioned palm weaving here as “the sole economic activity of the community”—more than four centuries of processing palm fronds, stripping and drying them, and making baskets, everyone in the village involved, including small children.

  The weavers in the cinderblock room were filling an order for a thousand pieces of different shapes, designed by Raúl Cabra, for a luxury hotel in Cabo San Lucas, in Baja. It was the largest order they’d ever had, and the best paid.

  “Has anyone here thought of going to the United States?” I asked.

  “There is no tradition for anyone here to go to the United States,” Crecencia said.

  “We don’t know anyone in the United States,” Roberta said.

  “My husband is in Mexico City,” Alicia said. “He said he’s going to come and get me. Then I’ll live there.”

  “Maybe he’ll send some burros to help you move,” Margarita said, teasing the younger woman.

  The others laughed and continued weaving, their fingers darting, pushing at palm fiber, tugging it, smoothing the weaving, darting again.

  Two of the women had been to Mexico City. Crecencia had been as far as Puebla, but preferred life here—a harder life, but the family was here, and they all did weaving together. Santa María Ixcatlán was by far a better place.

  I asked about weaving hats.

  “You can make five hats a day. That’s twenty-five pesos”—25 cents a hat. “We swap hats for food. All stores take hats in trade.”

  The village seemed so destitute and isolated, at the end of a bad road. The nearest river was twelve hours away, round-trip, on foot, which was the usual way of going. I asked them to tell me what they liked best about living here.

  “History,” Filiberta said. “Nature, too. The mountains. The birds.”

  “We are social here, families get together,” Crecencia said. “We eat together—red mole, goat meat, cow meat. Even when we are in the cave we are social, and we compete to see who can make a hat or a basket the fastest.”

  They laughed at this, and recalled the deftest weavers, and teased Jesús, the single male weaver, for lagging. Seeing him wince under the teasing, I asked whether there were any tensions in the village.

  “Sometimes,” Margarita said. “There can be tensions between goat herders and weavers, because the goats eat the small palms that grow wild. And we complain when some people cut the palms in a bad way, ruining the fronds. But we really don’t have any serious tensions.”

  “Land disputes,” Filiberta said.

  Yes, they all agreed, land disputes caused problems.

  “Customs and traditions, they are strong here,” Yolanda said—her first utterance, though she had been watching closely, weaving without looking down.

  “But we get along. We have fiestas here,” Crecencia said. “Tomorrow there is one—you will see it. Carnaval.”

  I had not realized: tomorrow was Shrove Tuesday, the next day Ash Wednesday, Miércoles de Ceniza, the first day of Lent.

  “There will be music and a procession and masks,” Crecencia said. “Una calenda. Mascaritas.”

  Carnaval in Santa María Ixcatlán

  It was a silent village of closed doors and windows curtained with cardboard, of empty streets where the only movement was a limping dog or a chicken pecking at ants. The main street was narrow and paved, but I never saw a car on it, or any vehicle except a cart pulled by a burro. On the side streets there were a few small shops, open-fronted, piled with canned goods, bottled beer, candy bars, toothpaste, and dried beans in fat sacks, yet the only person I saw in a shop was a man sitting sideways on a stool, his eyes glassy, holding a tumbler of mezcal, too drunk to hold a conversation.

  But on this cold night, just after dark, the music started—overblown trumpets and guitars and drums in the distance, blatting brass and plinking strings and the rattle of snare drums. The band ducked from one back street to another (not streets, really, but alleys), and when I finally found the musicians, they were standing beneath the dim streetlamps, to play under available light. But there were so few lamps in the village, the band did not travel far.

  They played in front of the shops, too, “Ghost Riders in the Sky” at one, p
rovoking the shop owner to distribute wrapped candy, which they tore open with their teeth, while still playing.

  Townsfolk in masks gathered around them, strutting and hopping—the calenda the weavers had promised, a procession of celebrants, a hundred of them masked or playing music, about two hundred people watching and following, more than half the village in the poorly lit streets. The masks were grotesque, but they were not the oddest aspect of it. What struck me as unusual was that none of the people were taller than about five feet, so the impression I had was of a village of dwarves, both adults and children, some of them masked, others watching in silence.

  The smallest of them I took to be children, though they could have been any age, and they wore monkey masks. One trudging boy in a hairy, toothy dog mask, swinging his arms and nodding, came at me, then veered off. Bearded men, witches and goblins, some made up as clowns, their faces gleaming with paint, girls in dresses wearing wolf masks, strolling in pairs, and all this time the trumpets blaring, the drums determining the pace of the procession.

  The women were not women; they were mascaritas, men dressed as women, in wigs and gowns, big-breasted, their chests stuffed, their masks depicting coquettes. And when one in a blond wig saw me making notes (Child in dog mask freaking me out . . .), I found myself embraced by strong unyielding arms, my face butted by the crimson everted lips on a mask of a woman’s face. My height, or perhaps it was my scribbling in an open notebook, made me conspicuous, so I became the object of the amative mascaritas. I was not startled; men dressed as women are common in Mexican processions. But I was fascinated by the small size of everyone in the street.

  The spectators, watching and following, were Ixcatecos, most of them impassive, a few laughing at the antics of the masked shufflers and the twanging and blatting of the bandsmen, all of them wrapped in blankets or shawls, the women holding babies. The procession moved from street to street, up and down the alleys, to the three shops in the village, until the sound died away and the place became silent once more, severe and Lenten.