ten days in oaxaca has offered me fodder for stories enough to fill a book with everything that i have seen that has moved me in some way, or made me think (think, re-think, think about my thinking, think again). i´ve characters galore - my bubbly aussie girls rachel and lia with whom i spent a day decorating a giant grapefruit with thier pink nailpolish and black eyeliner; shella, the hostel´s resident yellow lab and new mother of eleven, with her swollen, dragging titties and her feed-me stare; gilberto, my sexy oaxaqueño who really, really was the most beautiful man i´ve seen up close, who liked to talk about the surreal nature of this city, where it seems that there´s never any waiting, it´s all just passingtime, where sometimes when you turn a faucet, nothing comes out. nothing at all.
and surreal it´s been.
it´s los dias de muertos and the city is fragrant with marigolds, incense and roasted chicken. the plazas are littered with skeleton dolls big and small, candy coffins, gold dust, thrown-out plastic bottles, smashed bundles of white flowers, names and prayers and chocolate. for three days the children wander the streets in a sort of ongoing and disorganized game of trick-or-treat, where they wear rubber ghoul masks and hold out their little jack-o-lantern pails for pesos. the streets pulse with life: brass bands and teenagers on stilts, viejitos in their button up shirts and cowboy hats swinging their dressed up old ladies to the music, balloons, candy apples, champurrada, the names of the dead, and the mezcal. the mezcal just keeps on flowing into everyone´s glass...the blood of everyone here, and everyone lost.
and now, the most unusual, brilliant halloween of my life.
my friend sam´s been in mexico city, falling so much in love with the place that he´s decided to scrap the rest of his trip for now and find work in d.f., an apartment, a year. but on wednesday night he showed up in oaxaca and met me at my little bar of bars, "fandango", a hip little spot with comfy sofas, magazine-collaged walls and a batman themed deck of UNO. but as cheap as the beers are there, we soon found ourselves three blocks down, crammed into a guitar bar having our minds blown by the talented paco and pico (paco is paco, pico is the name i´ve given to the one whose name escapes me) and their wild set...made me want to stand up and show off my sevillanas.
after a fuse blew and the microphones were rendered useless, we all moved to the patio, where the music threatened to continue, acoustic, but was drowned out by jokes and a few boisterous characters and a conversation which moved far too fast for me in spanish. but with sam´s spanish as good as it is we were invited over to the apartment of a guy called german...we took a rickety old grey pickup truck, which would only start when all of us, crammed into the backseat, were completely silent - we held our fingers to our mouths, giggled, and the engine rumbled to a start.
cheetos, red wine, smooth, smooth weed and before we knew it the clock read 5 o´clock...at this point it would have been pure defeat to take a taxi home and go to bed. so sam and i walked, for hours, through the quietest and most blue-lit city streets, we stood on top of a grand, dried out fountain in the center of a plaza like proud conquistadors pointing in the direction of home, even though home was not what we were looking for. we were chased by a pair of fluffy little doggies, shouted back at them, and laughed hysterically at our intrusion.
when we found the botanic gardens, we´d found santo domingo cathedral. through a huge window in the complex´s fortress walls, behind the cathedral´s museum, we observed a paradise from above...maguey and palm trees, sleeping flowers, abstract shadows and shapes in the moonlight, more still and quiet than any place i´ve seen. and the cathedral itself gave me vertigo when we approached it. by this time the sun was beginning its ascent, though still invisible, and had turned the sky a drowned, corduroy teal. maybe it was my eyes adjusting to the light but the cathedral facade appeared painted in the same shade of blue-green, and in my nine days in oaxaca living just a block away, i´d never seen it so clearly, it never seemed so enormous and magnificent.
the street sweepers were out, and sam borrowed one sweeper´s bmx bike and did tricks in front of the cathedral steps.
and for sunrise, we went to the zocalo. the emptiness of the city at this hour is difficult for me to describe. it was like walking on a movie set, like seeing a picture map of the city right before my eyes. the quiet was almost scary...i could hear my footsteps and, if i listened close enough, my heartbeat. even the soft tick of a changing streetlight was quieter than my shuffling feet, and when people slowly, slowly began to stir, their sounds resonated like testing-testing-one-two-three. the creak of a street vendor´s cart wheels, a taxi whooshing past on cobbled streets, sam´s rubber sneaker soles slipping against bark as he climbed the massive tree in front of the main cathedral. "there´s a bird´s nest in here!" he called down to me.
two steaming hot cups of chocolate atole later, and i moved into a narrow strip of sunlight. it was as if i´d forgotten that morning would actually come. i couldn't´t believe it.
it was as if oaxaca had conjured my image from darkness, thought me up, exhausted and dirty, still not wanting to sleep.
thursday i did sleep, though. for hours and hours, listening to the sounds of the hostel, of the girls in my dorm waking up to another day of sightseeing and eating and drinking. but since i´d just packed in a week´s worth of city-going on foot, i surrendered and let myself dream away eight blissful hours in my dark cave of a bottom bunk.
tonight is the last night of los dias. the altars are being lit right now. i´m off to an opening of mexican painters...and see what my last oaxacan night has in store.
