Yesterday David and I took a stroll around town. We walked
the ten or so blocks from our house, across the very busy street Periférico (whose name I mention because
it’s so sing-songy to say) to the Zócalo,
the city’s main plaza.
For me it’s a very intimate experience to walk through the
streets here. The sense of space is much smaller. You brush up against people. You
brush up against the old walls of cantera, a greenish stone, its quarries now
exhausted. It distinguishes Oaxaca’s oldest buildings. You brush up against the
telephone poles and the corrugated tin gates as you try to go with the flow of
people, stepping into the street to pass a couple, smooth-stepping to avoid the
careening motorcyclists. You smell the people: smoky, sweet, grungy, fruity.
You smell their goods, their produce, their fresh fruit juices and their slivers
of mangos in plastic cups.
A man drives by on a bicycle with a large rack on the front. He’s
selling botes, giant 5 gallon jugs of
water. A young man with a beard, wearing a poncho, rides by with a basket on
the back of his bike, full of blankets. The wind catches it and you see the
heaping mountain of meat beneath the blanket. A flatbed truck toting canisters
of natural gas circles the block blaring the recording of a bellowing cow.
Somewhere it sounds as if a train whistle blows. It’s a vendor with his
portable oven, roasting sweet potatoes and bananas, the steam escaping his oven,
whistling. You hear a firework go off. You
stumble , forgetting for a moment how atrociously uneven the sidewalks can be. Is it more from the earthquakes or lack of
maintenance? A boy peddles by with his tamale oven, he calls tamales, tamales, tamales through his
megaphone.
You pass the papelería – a shop that specializes in paper, making copies,
selling notebooks, pencils, etc. Maybe 15 by 5 feet in size. You pass the
carcinería – the butcher shop where you see wide folds of meaty skin hanging
from a bar above the refrigerated case. You pass the miscelánea, a convenience store more or less. 12 by 12 feet the
patrons crowd in to get a 1.5L bottle of water, a banana, credit for the
cellphone, a small bag of chips.
Beneath your feet there are puddles of soap suds from a
woman cleaning the sidewalk in front of her shop. She throws out another pail
of water, perilously close, as you pass. There’s dog shit. There are meat
scraps that someone puts out for the dogs, in the same spot beneath the
lightpole halfway down Xochitl street
almost every day. Xochitl, you ask
yourself, How the hell am I supposed to
pronounce that? There are ripe pomegranates lying busted in the shade, ants
scavenging them.
People are always talking, to one another, to themselves, to
you. Men cry out from bus stations, letting passersby know the destinations
being departed for. You hear a firework go off. Men whistle. Incredibly short
women, indigenous?, try to get you to buy wooden mixing spoons, bookmarks, necklaces, plastic roses painted all colors of
the rainbow. Vendor tents and stalls are on every corner and along every block
near the city center. Doughnuts fried on the spot, any type of candy imaginable,
corn cobs roasted and coated in salt, lime and salsa, popsicles, warm, sweet cinnamon drinks made of corn, fruit –
so much fruit.
Children run and scream and laugh and try to get you to give
them a peso by making a human pyramid. An old man plays jazzy eighties music
from the same bench every day. His brown saxophone bag, all dusty and worn - like
an old shoe, gapes open for tips. You hear a firework go off.
