The Shaman who gave us his blessing repeated, again and again, "For health, for wealth, for mind, for heart, for the next generation...". He said, "You must stay together always," and he beat his man-made bird's wing on our bodies, blew resin smoke in our faces, shoved mats of lemongrass under our feet, and in each of our hands placed an offering (to our collective soul, I suppose).
If today I discovered that I were pregnant, I'd blame my immaculate conception on this absolutely tiny man, whose bare chest glistened true bronze, who smelled of bark and stale fruit. Because in this moment, when he beat beat beat upon my belly with the feather bundle, and with the fiery red beans pressed in my palm (as if i had bled them), and standing on a sidewalk beneath which were once the depths of Lake Texcoco, I experienced for the first time a sensation of the dual emptiness and fullness of my yet never-occupied womb...in it's anticipation phase (biologically speaking), it is both, at once.
And of beating. There is something frightening about the sea's power on the Costa Chica in Oaxaca, Mexico: her slow, deliberate upward push and suck as a wave is formed, only to beat down on the shore with a force that seems meant to kill. In spite of this display, it's clear that her intent is not to destroy or to instill fear, at least not the lasting kind -- no, this abundant strength, these wave-crests like white teeth bared upon beach, is necessary only to break a person open, to peel back a hardened outer layer, to prepare a body to witness the magic that resides in Mazunte, and on Playa Mermejita just over the ridge to the Northteast.
Here we lived, perched between the two playas. Above the cemetery and below Punta Cometa (where it's prophesized that a comet will strike on the eve of 2012). And here there never was a greater band of wide-eyed, curious, sarcastic, playful seekers than the six of us, and we discovered soon enough that each, Kat, Charlie, Daniel, Eric, Nacho and myself would be content for weeks on end with no more than the following:
Tacos, three for ten pesos.
Mosquito nets.
Beer, most conveniently caguamas (which double as rolling pins, ashtrays, flower pots, cold-compresses, teddy bears).
Flip flops, when convenient.
Tlayudas.
Kittens.
The beatles.
Dreams like we'd never dreamed.
Rolling papers.
Drinkable yogurt.
Playing cards.
Sand, in every crevice, always.
Doña Macrena.
La luna nueva.
Sunset. (when the earth rolls out its last hot coal of light, and it burns for our spectacle neon pink, emanates a halo of purple, blue, green, grey, then disappears with a sizzle on the horizon).
Spell-casting.
Dreams that scared us, flying dreams, in-love dreams, and some that took us all morning to wake from.
Stories.
Hammocks.
Mystery.
We carried on like this for nearly a month. And in the course of this time, no more than three unusual events offered, for me, personal evidence of what can only be described as Mazunte´s magic, which ushered me, indeed, into a new phase of understanding: 1. The Tejón; 2. The Phosphorescents; and 3. The Mango.
I've seen the elusive tejón only in a dream, and the story of the Mermejita tejón, as beautifully told by Daniel (the most wise, lucid storyteller i have ever met), exemplifies the fragile and very real nature-centric spirituality of the people on the coast.
(The tejón is essentially a giant badger. Macrena and her family are the proprietors of the only business on Playa Mermejita, a tiny set of campgrounds and bungalows, and a kitchen where, without electricity, she serves beers on ice and the occasional quesadilla.)
As the story goes, only five weeks before our arrival on the playa, a resident pack of dogs had attacked a family of tejónes, which Macrena and her family witnessed, leaving one surviving tejón who escaped by climbing a tree. The family then observed that this mysterious survivor reversed his luck and became the leader of the pack of dogs, using his ability to find food to gain the allegiance of the dogs. In fact, the tejón proved himself an expert iguana and crab hunter. In daniel's words (and in his Chilango accent, honey-colored like his eyes), "Now, this fucker knows where is all the good shit!"
The tejón was not only the leader of the local muts, but he appeared to take a special liking to Macrena's family. The tejón began to shower the family with gifts...milk, eggs, fruits, and bread, all delivered personally by the tejón, all to the family's dining room table.
The family also reported that the tejón began to take his position of power very seriously, once attacking a member of the pack, tearing the dog apart and leaving its mangled remains on the beach...
Though the family were enjoying the gifts, it came to their attention that their neighbors had become the victims of almost daily kitchen burglaries, and of course, the tejón was to blame. The neighbors in turn banded together and struck the animal with the evil eye, and days later the Mermejita tejón was found dead, and the matter solved, at least for the neighbors.
Macrena's place is perched at the base of a collection of craggy dark rocks at the south end of the beach, and from this spot stretches deep and scorching hot black sand, which turns gray and then white as it edges toward the water and toward the "ventanilla" at the north end of the beach. (The ventanilla is a rock formation that extends into the water and contains a tiny window in the center, though from Macrena's the whole thing looked more to me like Tin-Tin wearing a fireman's hat with angel wings).
The story of the phosphorescents really belongs to Kat and Nacho, and the quiet love affair they first imagined for themselves. After days of a subtle little courtship that consisted mostly of Kat and I deliberately walking past Nacho's house, and she often being too embarrassed to look over; of smoking joints together, the two of them batting eyelashes at one another and laughing at each other's words even when his soft, slurred Spanish slipped past her; and by the time they were alone for the first time, Kat said that she could feel the heat between them, radiating two inches off their bodies, energy pulling and sucking like that dangerous ocean undercurrent...
...days later when Kat and I descended on to the beach at night for a walk and a caguama of beer, she kicked the sand around and squinted her eyes. She ran over to a spot close to the path and dug her feet in. "What the hell?" she asked. "Where are the phosphorescents?"
These days later Kat and Nacho had already emerged as an item and had begun the kind of puppy-love pda that would make anyone cringe with isn't-that-cute, but when she and Nachito had spent a night out there before, they had been awestruck with the quality of the sand, which glowed surreal, like a field of diamond shards, where they'd bounced about, kicking up fountains of silver-glowing powder.
Each time we visited the beach at night, under many different moons and at varying hours, we searched for traces of the phosphorescent sand, and found none...
And if the glowing sand seemed to disappear with the absence of a first night's passion, a smooth, ripe mango appeared without explanation and came to symbolize the Mazunte Family's collective rebirth along this stretch of beach. On our way home from tacos one night, Eric shook one of the mango trees that line the main road, and had managed to collect one for each of us for dessert. With our mangoes in hand we pitched ourselves on Nacho's front porch for a night of drinking and playing cards. Eric peeled my mango for me, pulling its skin down calculatedly in three equal parts, like a banana. I ate my mango, and the others downed theirs. We agreed they were some of the best mangoes we had ever tasted, and i deposited the empty skin and pit on the concrete bench a few inches from where i was sitting...
Nacho's little house is completely enclosed, and as none of us, Charlie, Kat, Daniel, Nacho, Eric or i moved from our spots during the next hour, let alone heard any sort of commotion or saw anyone inside the fence. It was the quietest and most peaceful of evenings. We couldn't quite believe it when, i looked down and saw that my discarded mango skin was no longer beside me, but rather there sat a fresh new mango, identical in size and color to the first one, completely intact and radiating a sort of supple flawlessness. "Come on, Daniel," I said, "I know you did that..." and, "are there monkeys around here?" to which the boys just laughed, and after we'd thought about it for a while, we had no choice but to agree that it was strange...no, stranger than just strange. "What's that word?" asked Daniel, "is it 'eerie'?"
The following morning we thanked the mango for offering us yet another moment that felt more dream than waking, and we ate it, without admitting to each other that perhaps we each hoped it would infuse our bodies with a bit of Mazunte magic.
Out there at night, Mermejita was a portal of sorts, an energetic field in which the wide, resplendent full moon was its tap. Out there, pure energy leaked from the sky and saturated us all, pale-faced and reverent, awed by the unearthly sensation it produced.
I left Mazunte with a thumb out to the road, headed for dead center, Mexico City. I was picked up mostly in fancy cars, air conditioned and smooth on the road. Exhausted and again excited for what would certainly be found in the biggest city in the world, barefoot no more, I felt as if the beach was a world or two away and already a part of the distant past. But between then and now I've had a soft and almost pleasant aching in the pit of my stomach, like my heart's migrated down there and begun to beat gently like the memory of the waves, and I see now that the Mazunte magic was already there, well before I ingested the mango's sticky wet flesh, that each member of my Mazunte family had arrived on the beach, drawn by some indescribable longing for the Oaxaca coast, the same week of the same month of the same year, a time and place ripe for a meeting of wild little hearts and clear little minds and, well, blessed little blessings.
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