Oaxaca

We`ve been in Oaxaca for five days. It`s a gentle, beautiful city. After Mexico City, it`s been a huge relief. There`s obviously something bewitching about the pace of life, or the vivacious, familial atmosphere. Maybe they put something in the tlayudas, the pizza-like tortilla meals you get here - delicious and cheap. Some people say if you eat a few chapulines, or chilli grasshoppers, a local speciality, you`ll lose your heart to the city. We haven´t tried them yet. We`ve heard so many stories of people who came for a week and stayed for six months, people who come back year after year. It`s a big hit with aged Americans, deeply proprietorial and sniffy about backpackers, and Californians in particular who come a little further south than over the border to escape their winter. If we weren`t running out of money, I`d stay here for a while. We could take Spanish lessons in the morning, read or write in our hotel courtyard in the heat of the afternoon, and mooch around the town in the evening, eating prickly pear ice cream. We`re leaving tomorrow. But I want to come back already.


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My Spanish is experiencing some technical difficulties. I still automatically add Italian prepositions and exclamations to the confusion of everyone. I can`t remember much in the way of verb conjugation, although I´m good with grammatical terminolgy which seems important to me but infuriates Dan. We`ve had a few heated discussions about it and he puts it down to years of formal language learning on my part which has made me inflexible and precious about grammar. He is mostly right. Lecturing Dan on the uses of the preterite and subjunctive tenses might make me feel clever but it doesn`t allow the lady in the local laundry to understand me when I`m making basic, polite inquiries about my washed knickers.

My most sophisticated conversation so far has been with a man in the the Museo de las culturas de Oaxaca. He accosted me in a corridor and embarked on an intense discussion about the richness of Mexican history and culture. I was cornered, but I launched a few randomly remembered preterites and a good deal of Italian vocab at him and we sustained an odd little verbal battle for about 40 minutes.

He spoke minimal English and I spoke minimal Spanish and yet we managed to cover some heavy topics such as comparisons between the ancient Maya and Aztec civilisations and the Romans and the Greeks. But do you have anything like this where you are from, he kept asking me, sweeping his arms to indicate just about everything and anything that enfolded us. The craftmanship and the great cities and the civilasations, I suppose this is what he meant, although he wasn`t specific. He wasn`t satisfied until I`d expressed my incredulity at Mexico`s general fabulousness. No we don`t have anything like this at home. I´ve never seen a zapotec death mask encrusted with a million mosaic pieces of mother and pearl and jade. The civilisations of ancient Britain didn`t, as a general rule, sacrifice hundreds of specially prepared men, women and children to appease their gods, until the steps of the temples and the streets ran red, until the cities stank of death, as London stinks of the tube or drains. We don`t, in short, have Mexico at home. But it`s what you can`t say in those situations that kills you. No, I`ve never seen any of this, but what I have seen and what I do know and all those stories of where I come from, you cannot begin to imagine as I cannot to begin to imagine yours. And so he was the proud Mexican and I was the incredulous foreigner.

He was wearing his work clothes, with the word Bimbo embroidered above his breast pocket. This was distracting. He had a warm, if unsettling smile. I wondered vaguely about his motives in talking to this clearly incoherant foreign woman, trying to give hime the benefit of the doubt. I didn´t want to believe he was just another man interested in my fair skin. So I tried a few times to talk about mi marido to draw some boundaries, Dan having been permanently elevated for the duration of our Mexican stay to the position of husband. This didn´t seem to register, even when I prefaced ever scentence with `mi marido` like some demented stepford wife. Even when Dan crept about in the background, eyeing me pointedly, he carried on with his questioning. But did you ever see the like, do you have all this where you are from? Well, no. This unending, disconcerting, but intriguing form of social interaction, no, I don`t often get the pleasure of this at home.

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Yesterday, the teachers marched in the centre of town. This was the cause of much trepidation for citizens and for tourists alike. Ever since we decided to come here, last year, we`ve been following the local political situation closely. In the way that we seem to be jinxing every place we visit on this trip (leaving variously, several typhoons, a bush fire, a city riot, two coups, great floods, and even a bombing in our wake) Oaxaca descended into civil unrest shortly after we decided to visit last May. The annual teachers strike coincided with contested national elections and led to several months of barricades and protests and riots with a few molotv cocktails thrown in. It was an unfortunate situation, a tragic situation when you come and fall in love with Oaxaca, and almost impossible to imagine walking these lovely streets full of strolling families. If you look past the prettily painted houses of the centre, you see the town is covered in graffiti, hastily painted over here and there. The night before the demo, handmade posters appeared near the zocalo - Think of Oaxaca, don`t destroy her - Long Live Liberty - the anarchist A. A group of women had been seen carrying placards urging demonstrators to be gentle with the city. We decided to visit the local ruinas the day of the march, to avoid any trouble. When we got back to town, we saw the same strolling families, eating ice cream, cakes, nothing much going in. The march had been and gone. A crowd had mustered and a few men with megaphones had urged them to sing and shout a little but nothing much materialised. A little shuffling of feet, a few half-hearted choruses of a rousing hymn. The cops and the military personnel hidden in side streets so as not to frighted the people. They spent the morning lazing in their open backed trucks in the sun, eating yoghurt, chatting. No big stories to tell of being trapped in a warring provincial city. A huge relief for us, obviously, but then we often think we`re the centre of the universe, when in fact we have no business doing so. A bigger relief for Oaxaca.