An impulsive decision to visit a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, on market day led to a naked, sweating matriarch beating a naked, sweating me with branches.
After several months of teaching English in the mountainous Mixtec region of Oaxaca, I was ready to venture outside the town I was based in to explore. ‘I’ve never felt safer’, I assured relatives back in the US when they asked how I liked living in a remote, impoverished village only a state away from guerrilla fighting. Although I attracted attention as the only young blonde woman in town, my skinny body and chunky baby cheeks inspired people to treat me protectively, as a daughter or sister.
At 4.30am, I was waiting alone in the dark on the deserted roadside a few blocks from my apartment. I was fully clothed at that point, with a bulging wallet in my shoulder bag. The day before, a student had mentioned the market in Tlaxiaco that drew people from surrounding indigenous villages. Envisioning women in traditional red woven tunics and long braids selling dried chillies, I decided to go. My student instructed me to wait before dawn for a third-class bus called a micro, and in no time, he said, I’d be immersed in Tlaxiaco’s colourful market scene.
As it grew lighter, the taco vendor set up her stand, the tamale guy bicycled past, and the matronly bakery owner washed her windows. When I asked each of them when the micro would arrive, they said, ‘Ahorita, güera, ahorita.’ Any second now, white girl. Any second.
Two hours later, the micro pulled up, a white box balanced on four wheels. Next to the driver’s seat perched an altar to the golden Virgin of Oaxaca, and behind her, on the window, a sticker of a well-endowed naked woman throwing her hair back in sexual abandon. I squeezed onto a torn plastic seat, with my knees wedged against the metal in front of me. I’m a small person, so this truly was a micro bus. Other passengers trickled in, and after half an hour the driver closed the doors, crossed himself, and kissed his grease-stained hand. The micro lurched to a rattling start.
We bounced along, stopping every few minutes to pick up people toting bundles of firewood, live chickens and giant sacks of corn.
A chubby teenaged boy in a shiny basketball outfit struck up conversation. ‘Señorita! Excuse me!’ he yelled over the blaring ranchera music. ‘What are you doing all the way out here?’
‘Going to the market. And you?’
He was studying nursing in a nearby town and heading home for the weekend. His name was Luís and he was seventeen, six years younger than me, young enough for him to seem like a child. Yet he treated me with a flirtatious deference, hoping, it seemed, that I wasn’t too old for him.
‘Mind if I sit next to you, señorita? It is miss, right?’
I nodded and he scooted onto the seat next to me. For three hours, as the landscape grew greener and lusher, with pines and fertile fields replacing cacti, he told me stories about nearby Mixtec temple ruins and about his friends who had gone to Florida to pick tomatoes. We began to pass more houses, of wood, adobe and concrete, and soon the micro pulled into a dirt parking lot in Tlaxiaco. Luís and I shook hands and he pointed me in the direction of the market, down a hill, where blue awnings filled the street.
The market didn’t fit my rustic fantasy. Teenaged boys congregated by speakers booming salsa music from bootlegged tapes. They looked like gang members in their super-baggy jeans, gold chains and headcloths. ‘Pssss. Güera’, they called. Further on was the household goods section, packed with bowls and lime squeezers and spoons and colanders – all made of plastic. Where were the carved gourds I’d dreamed of?
Just then a woman knocked into me. Once I regained my balance, I saw that my leather purse, which had rested on top of the sweatshirt in my bag, was gone. I hadn’t even caught what the woman looked like.
The purse contained about five hundred pesos – fifty US dollars – which I’d planned to spend on hand-woven shawls, pottery and carved gourds. I tried to calm myself down. Really, the fifty dollars wouldn’t hurt me economically; I had enough savings. What bothered me was the idea that someone would steal from me. Up to now, all my interactions with local people had been incredibly honest. In my town, vendors at the market threw in free mangoes and invited me into their homes for lunch. If I left without taking my two pesos change they’d call after me, ‘Güera! White girl! Your change!’ Well, the thief could have been a really poor person who needed food for her hungry children.
But then the reality hit me. I had no money. No back-up money in my pockets or sock, no money belt, nothing, not even any jewellery I could hock. Not to mention the fact that I felt light-headed with hunger. And I had to find a toilet quite urgently.
That’s when I spotted Luís. I ran over to him and blubbered out my story. He sympathetically handed me a banana from his bag, and I devoured it while we went over my options. The only bank in town was closed for the weekend, he said, so even if I made a pathetic phone call to my parents, they couldn’t wire any money until Monday. I ate a second banana.
‘You’re still hungry, aren’t you?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘Come to my house. Eat lunch with my family.’
As I thanked him, I wondered what he’d expect in return. My faith in humanity had, after all, just been shot.
Luís lived on the outskirts of town, in a neighbourhood that smelt of sweet pine and burning trash. Like most of the other buildings, his house was a half-finished and unpainted concrete structure. Scrawny puppies greeted us, and Luis kicked them away with his foot. We walked through the doorway into a kind of roofless courtyard/living room, with squash plants creeping along the beams overhead, and passed a gold-framed picture of Jesus looking blond and radiant and holding up a finger, as if to say, Just wait and see what you’re in for, güera.
We ducked through a hobbit-sized doorway into a cave-like kitchen, where a stout woman was stirring something bubbling on the stove with a long wooden spoon. Her black braids were streaked with grey, and an apron was tied over her comfortable rolls of fat. She threw her arms up in surprise and hugged her son. Then she looked at me, and back at Luís, her face amused and full of questions. She shook my hand lightly, barely touching it, as indigenous Mixtec people do, and I explained my situation in flustered broken Spanish.
She shook her head. ‘Some people are bad’, she said. ‘There are some good people and some bad people. Uh-HUNH.’ She spoke Spanish with the choppiness of native Mixtec speakers, punctuating her speech with the characteristic ‘uh-HUNH’.
I agreed and then excused myself, located the bathroom, and peed for a full minute. After I dumped a bucket of water into the toilet to flush it, I emerged to find a guy my age, two young girls and an older man waiting to meet me. It was the rest of Luís’s family, and I repeated my story to them.
Soon Doña Donaciana called us to the table and served us home-made tortillas and sopa de panza, which roughly translates as ‘gut soup’. In this case, I think it was cow gut, because it reminded me of deli-sliced roast beef that’s been left in the fridge three weeks too long. I discreetly spat some of the more unidentifiable chunks of internal organs into my napkin.
As we ate, they asked me what on earth I was doing working here when everybody and his brother were sneaking across the border to work in the US. When they found out I was single, they wanted to set me up with Eleuterio, Luís’s twenty-two-year-old brother (Luís scowled at that). I might not have minded – he was pretty cute, with a dimpled smile and sexy eyes. But then Doña Donaciana informed me that Eleuterio’s girlfriend had just had a baby, and I shrugged, ‘Oh well. Too bad.’
‘Eso no importa! That doesn’t matter!’ Eleuterio insisted, winking. ‘She won’t care!’
Maybe I could be the godmother of the baby, Doña Donaciana suggested. Then I’d be their comadre – co-mother, part of the family. This thought provoked rowdy laughter. I suspected it wasn’t just the idea of a güera daughter-in-law or comadre that was so hilarious, more the idea of a güera with rudimentary knowledge of Spanish wandering around small Mixtec towns getting herself in
to trouble.
By late afternoon, just when I was wondering if I’d be sleeping there for the night, sandwiched between the two girls, Ixtli and Fany, Luís disappeared into a bedroom and came back with a handful of pesos.
‘For your bus fare back’, he said shyly. ‘The last micro leaves soon.’
Doña Donaciana said, ‘Güera, come back next Saturday for lunch. You will pay my son back then.’
I gushed thanks, my faith in humanity restored.
Next Saturday I took the micro back to Tlaxiaco, this time as a seasoned expert. Luís greeted me and led me into the kitchen. Slouched in a kitchen chair sat a young woman, her eyes outlined in eyeliner and mascara, lips coated with pink gloss. This must be Eleuterio’s girlfriend. She wasn’t particularly friendly to me – maybe she’d caught wind of the family joking about her boyfriend marrying the güera. Doña Donaciana stood next to her, holding a very tiny baby in one arm and rolling a whole egg over his body with her hand.
The girlfriend mumbled her name, Teresa. I shook her hand lightly, then greeted Doña Donaciana and asked, ‘What are you doing with that egg?’
‘Oh, nothing’, she said breezily, and asked me how my trip was. She set the egg down and handed me the baby. Ixtli and Fany bounced inside, breathless from playing basketball, and kissed me hello like old friends. Then it was time to eat.
This time Doña Donaciana served us each a thin strip of very salty, very chewy beef. She explained that it had been salted raw and hung on a clothesline to dry for a while, and then fried in oil. Uh-HUNH. Beans and rice and tortillas were served on the side, and this time I didn’t have to spit anything out. Enough grease and salt work magic.
After lunch, Doña Donaciana announced she was going to give Teresa a steambath, which she called a baño de temazcal.
‘You want to do it with us, güera?’ she asked eagerly.
What luck! I’d stumbled across a peaceful little spa oasis. Who would have guessed?
‘Yes! Sounds great!’
The girls giggled and looked wide-eyed at each other. A devilish grin crept over Teresa’s face. Luís and Eleuterio and their father just raised their eyebrows, smiling at some secret, while Doña Donaciana threw back her head and laughed a full belly laugh, wiping her eyes. ‘Imagínense, a güera in a temazcal!’
I wondered what was so funny. I turned to Luís uncertainly. ‘Are you doing it?’
He shook his head without hesitation. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s for women.’
‘And?’ I pushed.
‘And it’s too hot in there. It’s like getting burned alive.’ Then he ran outside to play basketball. Eleuterio and their father, carrying the baby, ran after him.
‘Don’t be scared, güera’, Doña Donaciana said. ‘It’s good for you. My daughters are doing it, right?’ She glanced at them, and on cue, they nodded nervously. I wondered if the female-bonding aspect and the chance to see a güera being tortured outweighed any pain they’d suffer.
So we women gathered in a small room off the kitchen made of pine planks with a tortilla-making hearth in the corner. The room smelt of burnt wood and ash. In the centre of the room, on the hard-packed dirt floor, sat the baño de temazcal – a wooden frame, the size of a low one-person tent, half-covered with woollen blankets. A pile of leafy branches sat next to it, along with a clay bowl filled with herbs soaking in water. Woven palm mats were spread out beside a stack of folded sheets.
I peeked inside the temazcal. At one end was a dish of glowing red-hot rocks. I wondered if it was too late to change my mind.
‘Take off your clothes, güera’, Doña Donaciana ordered. She and Teresa and the girls started undressing. I stripped off my tank top and trousers self-consciously, aware of how their smooth, even brown skin compared to my pale limbs, with their blotches and blue veins. My body seemed flimsy and bony next to their ample rolls of flesh. ‘You can keep your panties on’, Doña Donaciana said, handing me a sheet, which I quickly wrapped around myself. ‘But take off your bra.’
Teresa crawled in first and Doña Donaciana followed with the bowl and a bunch of leafy branches. Once inside, she let down the blankets to seal in the steam.
We heard a loud hissss followed by a scream. My stomach clenched. Soon the scream tapered off into moans and squeals. With every subsequent hiss, the moans and squeals escalated into screams again. ‘Ay ay ay ay AY AYYY!’ It sounded like either a fabulous orgasm or… severe pain. Soon Teresa’s head poked out of the entrance and she gasped for air. Sweat was rolling down her pink face, and her eyes were closed tight in deep concentration. At Doña Donaciana’s command, Teresa flipped onto her back, and a few minutes later, on another command, she took a deep breath and disappeared into the temazcal. After another minute, she crawled out, glistening, wrapped herself in a sheet and lay down.
Now it was my turn. From under the blankets, Doña Donaciana’s face emerged, flushed and sweating and exuberant. ‘Come in, güera! Come in!’
I dropped my sheet and crawled in, utterly terrified. Doña Donaciana threw a cupful of water on the rocks, and hissssss, a suffocating cloud of steam filled the air. It felt like being dropped into a pot of boiling water. I was sure that second- and third-degree burns were springing up all over my body.
‘Lie down’, Doña Donaciana ordered. I obeyed, and stuck my face outside into the wonderfully cool air, while my body boiled inside.
She began beating me with the leaves, starting on the soles of my feet. If I’d thought it was hot before, now, with the moisture of the leaves sizzling on my skin, it was downright infernal. ‘Ah ah ah AH AHHH!’
‘Are you okay, güera?’
‘Um… I mean…’ I struggled to find the part of my brain that could form words in Spanish. ‘Um, is it supposed to be this hot?’
‘Yes!’
But then I lost the connection with the human language part of my brain and just let out animal sounds of pure agony as she beat the back of my calves, my thighs, my rear, my back and my neck.
‘¿Si aguanta, güera?’ I had no idea what she was asking. I was thinking, in a panic, that I knew nothing about this sadistic woman. I’d just met her son on a bus.
Doña Donaciana instructed me to move my head inside, where she brushed the leaves around in my hair. I couldn’t see anything except for the glowing rocks. ‘Turn over’, she said. ‘You can put your head back out.’
As I sucked in the cool outside air, she beat the leaves over the front of my body, and then mercifully asked if I wanted more or was ready to get out.
‘Out’, I creaked.
A strange thing happened after I crawled out.
I wrapped myself in a sheet and lay next to Teresa against a pile of rolled-up palm mats, watching her face, her eyelids half-closed in a kind of relaxed ecstasy. A deep peace washed over me, and I stayed in that wordless place. It felt delicious now. I dissolved into the smell of wood smoke and just lay there, breathing and existing. Somewhere in my mind passed the thought, Oh good, my skin is still here.
After the girls finished in the baño, we lounged around in our sheets like Greek goddesses and sipped warm Coronas together, which were apparently part of the ritual. Later, as we floated up and got dressed, I felt close to these women, as though they were my sisters. The colour of our skin didn’t matter because it was essentially the same – flushed and sweaty and burned. Our bodies moaned and screamed and relaxed. I noticed that they no longer addressed me formally; I was close enough to be tú.
Before I left to catch the micro back home, I asked Doña Donaciana, ‘What were you doing to the baby with that egg?’
She smiled. ‘It’s our custom. It takes away the evil eye. You see, babies can catch it easily. So we rub our babies with an egg to cure them every now and then. Uh-HUNH.’
For Doña Donaciana to trust me with this information was significant, I realised. I had passed some kind of test, undergone a female initiation rite.
She bundled me up for the bus ri
de home. ‘Your pores are open’, she said. ‘No bathing in cold water and no cold drinks for three days.’ She wrapped a scarf around my neck and lent me a baseball cap and a cardigan, and I walked into the eighty-degree afternoon, accompanied by Ixtli and Fany. At the micro parking lot, they hugged me goodbye and made me promise to come back next Saturday.
I later learned that since pre-Hispanic times, the temazcal ritual has symbolised birth and rebirth. For me, this was the birth of an enlightening friendship and a fascination with Oaxacan healing practices. Stripped of money and naked as a newborn, you simply throw open your arms and embrace the strange and fantastic opportunities that life offers.
THE GARDEN KITCHEN
HOLLY ERICKSON
As a young woman, San Francisco native and resident Holly Erickson ate her way across Europe, sampling the likes of reindeer stroganoff and poached whale – and much delicious food as well. She then studied literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and cooking at the California Culinary Academy. The owner of Mrs Dalloway’s Catering service, she is also writing Lights! Camera! Cuisine!, a cookbook based on cinematic food scenes, and The Devil Sends Cooks, a book about private chefs and their clients, from which ‘The Garden Kitchen’ is excerpted.
Friends of my family had bought a rambling old house in South London. They were an affable young British couple, who thought that their three-storey renovator’s delight was too big to waste on two and so had taken in lodgers. After I graduated from college, but before I’d been to culinary school, they hired me to cook. I would be given one of the vacant rooms and in return would cook for the lodgers and the food-loving couple themselves.
By the Seat of My Pants Page 18