Tales of a Female Nomad (4 page)

I have brought no dresses or skirts, only pants, pants that I will have to lower below my knees in order to pee, and even then, walking away with dry feet and pants is pretty unlikely. All the women I’ve seen are wearing skirts. They just have to hike them up a bit and they can pee unobserved. They probably don’t wear underpants.

“Each morning,” says Margarita in broken Spanish as we walk back to the house, “I will bring you a pail of water to wash with.” Then she drops me off at my cement block and goes back to her house. I decide to go for a walk.

The village is almost totally vertical, steep ups and equally steep downs. There is only one car-size road that goes from the main road to the square. The rest of the village is for walking. As I walk down each gravel- and rock-filled hill, I place my feet on the ground carefully, slowly, making sure I have secure footing before I lift my other foot. I am halfway down one of the hills when a man walks by. No, he runs by. And so does everyone else. The villagers point themselves downhill and sort of fall, letting gravity take them down. Their legs paddle beneath their moving torsos and keep them standing upright. If the gravel or rocks slip under their feet, it doesn’t matter, because they don’t wait to be secure, they’re already on to the next bit of rock and gravel. For the whole time I live here I try to walk the hills the way they do. I succeed on the lesser hills and on the steep ones that are mostly grassy. But on the rocky ones, I continue to go down inch by inch, securing each foot as it touches the ground.

The first children I see are playing marbles. Two are squatting, getting ready to shoot. Four others are standing and watching. I am more than ten yards away when I’m spotted. Someone squeals and shouts something. I don’t understand what he says, but suddenly the game stops and they run in all directions. Only one boy stays long enough to gather up the marbles. Then he disappears like the others. As I walk on, little heads peek at me from behind bushes.

The women are not any friendlier. Some rush into the nearest house until I pass. Some hide, like the children, behind a tree or bush. No one returns my smile or my
“Buenos días.”
Only the men in the plaza talk to me, and most of them are drunk most of the time. It is the dry season, they tell me, as they touch my arm, my shoulder, my neck. Their work is farming and they cannot farm, so they drink.

I return to my cell and study Spanish. Margarita comes with lunch: two hard-boiled eggs, two pieces of white bread, and coffee. She places the tray on a small table in front of my house and leaves. During the month that I live there, she never sits with me; nor am I ever invited into her house to eat with her family. Meals for me are always solitary. I feel like an object to be served, never a friend.

For four days I continue to disperse crowds of children. When I stand at a distance and try to watch them playing soccer, they stop the game. Except for Margarita and a raving old woman, not a single woman talks to me. I continue to smile at them all, but my smile is getting weaker and phonier. I have read that there are many cultures that consider blue eyes witchy. Not only are my eyes blue, but my hair is blond (they all have dark hair) and my skin is pale (theirs is a rich light brown). One day I put on sunglasses to hide my blue eyes, but no one else is wearing them and I feel as though I am putting even more of a wall between us.

The men, on the other hand, gather round me whenever I come near them, usually trapping me in the middle. They ask questions, they tell me stories, and they touch me. After the second day, I avoid the plaza hangout of the drunk male population.

Usually I spend my days wandering around with a notebook, pretending I have something to do. Every once in a while I take notes or draw a diagram. Sometimes I sit and read. With no one to talk to and nothing to do, I am bored and lonely.

My meals are always the same. A hard-boiled egg, a slice of white bread, and coffee for breakfast. Two hard-boiled eggs and two slices of white bread with coffee for lunch. And a cup of stew with beans and a few bits of chicken and more white bread for dinner.

My concrete house is cool, and I like it, even though I have to share it with hundreds, no thousands, of daddy-long-leg spiders—the breathing blob in the corner of the ceiling. They are very discreet. When they are a black blob, they are sleeping. When they wake up, they seem to have places to go. I know they live there, but they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them.

Going to “the toilet” is just as I expected. I walk to the dry riverbed and take down my pants. Then I get into position facing uphill and leaning forward, feet wide apart, behind sticking up so that the squirt will go downhill and not onto my shoes or pants. I carry a little piece of toilet paper and bury it when I’m finished. I try not to think about the audience that I’m sure is out there. Fortunately, they are discreet enough not to laugh out loud.

When I wander through the village, none of the women talks to me. After four days, the only woman I have had a conversation with is Margarita, and she treats me as though she’s my maid. I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it. I keep reminding myself that I have vowed to spend a month here. But there’s another little voice that tells me I’m free to leave whenever I choose.

Then, on day five, a young woman and her three-year-old child stop me on the top of a hill. She is wearing the traditional dress of the village: a full skirt of heavy woven fabric, a sash around her waist, and a handwoven blouse.

“Hello, my name is Juanita. Where are you from?”

I introduce myself and tell her I’m from Los Angeles.

She doesn’t say anything for several seconds. During the silence, her eyes fill with tears. Then she can’t stop talking. Her Spanish is excellent, unlike Margarita’s.

Juanita is a twenty-year-old widow, an elementary school teacher. Her husband, Roberto, went to the United States two years ago and got work washing dishes and busing in a Greek restaurant in Santa Monica, California. I have actually eaten in the restaurant. For one year he sent her money every month. Then, a few months ago, she got a telegram. There had been a fire in the kitchen and he was dead from smoke inhalation. They sent him home in a box. Shortly after that, the restaurant owner sent Juanita one hundred dollars. In the accompanying note, he promised to send more, but she never heard from him again.

Now
my
eyes fill with tears and I tentatively put my arm around her and tell her how sorry I am. She snuggles into my shoulder and I hug her. (Two weeks later another young man from the village returns from Los Angeles in a pine box. He’d been shot on the street. I go to the funeral.)

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Juanita asks that first day as we stand on the hill. I can’t believe it. I’m actually being invited into someone’s home!

She takes me into her two-room house. It is simple and clean and nicely furnished. She’d bought the furniture to surprise Roberto. He never saw it. As we are drinking our coffee, Juanita studies me, one of those head-to-toe perusals.

“Would you do me a favor?” she asks.

Uh oh, I think. She’s going to ask for money.

But she surprises me. “Will you try on my clothes?”

She opens a trunk and takes out a skirt that matches the ones all the women are wearing. It is woven with thick cotton threads into a heavy striped fabric. I step into it.

“Hold this end,” she says as she starts to wind a five-inch-thick sash around my waist. I grow fatter and fatter as she winds.

She goes around four or five times, then secures the end with a safety pin. I am already feeling like a hippopotamus when she takes a huge woven blouse out of the trunk and puts it over my head. My width has doubled. I am dressed in a bottom layer of khaki pants and a T-shirt, then the thick blanket-layer of skirt, a mile of sash, and a tentlike blouse. Juanita is finished. She steps back, turns me around, and exclaims, “You look beautiful! I will lend you these clothes while you are in my village.”

I walk toward the door, wondering whether my expanse will fit through. Two women are passing by as I emerge. They look at me and smile and nod their heads. Then they giggle. And so do the other women I meet. Suddenly, I am not so strange. My eyes, my hair, my skin are the same; but now I am wearing the traditional clothes of the village. They are willing to accept me.

From that point on, I am one of them. Each morning I go to Juanita’s house, greeting women by name when we pass on the path. Juanita always checks me out when I walk in. Sometimes she removes my waist scarf and does it up again. Wrapping a mile-long scarf around your waist alone is not that easy and I don’t do it very well.

During my second visit I write a letter to the restaurant owner who sent Juanita the money. I introduce myself as a journalist from L.A. and ask about the additional money he promised. I describe José’s child and wife and say that I hope he will send her more money. I tell him that I will stop by when I return to Los Angeles. (When I visit the restaurant several months later, I am told that it has changed ownership. I don’t know if Juanita received any response to my letter.)

On the third day Juanita gives me my first lesson in the Zapotec language. Soon I can say good morning, how are you, and how many children do you have. And I can answer the same questions and a few more. Now the mothers begin to talk to me. The children show me their favorite marbles and let me scrunch down and watch them shoot. Some of the kids point to things like trees and houses and tell me the words in Zapotec. And they take my hand and bring me to their soccer games.

And, not least of all, with my skirt on, I can pee without mooning the world. (I do not wear underpants.)

One morning, about three weeks into my visit, Margarita tells me that there is going to be a festival in our yard. The whole neighborhood is coming. She and José have been in charge of the neighborhood church organization (Catholic) for the past year and there is about to be a change of leadership, which means a big party.

I go with her to buy the turkey, to a part of the village where I’ve never been. She climbs over a fence into a pen. The turkeys are running loose. One after another, Margarita picks up a turkey’s leg and pokes and pinches while the turkey squawks. Finally she finds a nice fat bird. We carry it home alive.

That night our yard fills with people and preparations. Men are fixing the fireplace, carrying in chairs and tables, setting up speakers on the roof, and drinking. Women are bringing utensils and food and getting ready for tomorrow’s cooking.

Once the speakers are in place, they blast with the joys of romance and the whines of unrequited love. The same songs play over and over again.

I try to be useful, but no one wants my help. All evening and long into the night, the preparations go on. Finally I say good night and go to bed. I study Zapotec for a few minutes and turn out the light. The people noise diminishes, though the speakers are still going at full volume; and finally, there is nothing but music.

I fall asleep for maybe half an hour. Then I’m jolted awake by a woman’s scream. I sit up and listen. I hear a slap, then more, and screams, and a man swearing. It is happening just outside my room. I move the chair to the opening above the door and climb up. It is dark inside so I am able to look without being seen. José is beating Margarita, slapping her, punching her. She is crying. He doesn’t stop. I am watching and shaking.

I continue to watch from my blind, knowing that I will interfere if I think she is in danger. After four years of anthropological training, which teaches that we must not project our own values onto another culture, that professionally we must remain in the nonjudgmental role of “participant-observer,” I realize that, in this situation at least, I am more an individual than I am a professional. If I have to, I will step in.

Fortunately, he stops before she is in serious trouble. I’m sure this isn’t the first time he has beaten her and I’m just as sure it isn’t the last. I also suspect that in this small village, wife beating is common. And no one else’s business but the husband’s.

I am unable to sleep. All night my mind replays the beating, and I cry.

The next morning Margarita brings my breakfast. Her eyes, both of them, are black. Margarita knows I have seen her shame. She tells me she is afraid of her husband, but she cannot leave. “Where would I go? How would I feed the children?” she asks.

I give her a hug, but I say nothing. This village, this marriage, this life are her destiny.

In the early afternoon, the women begin arriving and the cooking begins. The turkey is killed, dipped in boiling water to loosen the feathers, and plucked. Then the bird is chopped up. Body parts, head, feet, and innards are boiled in a giant terracotta pot with garlic and onions and salt. When the turkey is cooked, it is taken out of the broth.

I position myself in the middle of the action, helping to remove parts from the pot, washing utensils as they are used, stirring, and copying what everyone else is doing. I am thrilled to be working with the women. I love the bonding that takes place in the kitchen, even when the kitchen is in the yard. It is no different here than it is in a Thanksgiving kitchen in New England. Women working together, talking, laughing, telling secrets. Some of the most meaningful and touching moments of my years as a nomad will happen over cookfires.

Huge pots are sending out the smells of turkey and cloves and cinnamon and herbs. Everyone is busy. When I can find a space to stand, I chop or slice or peel something. The women smile at my participation, surprised that I am able to peel an onion or cut up a garlic. If I ask what I can do, I get no answer; it’s OK to step in on my own, but they are not going to give me an assignment.

Finally, one of the women takes the stems of oregano from a little girl who is stripping off the leaves. Understanding my need to be needed, the woman dismisses the girl and hands me a stem. The child sulks off; I have stolen her job. But I am happy as I pull off tiny leaf after tiny leaf and put them into a bowl. Meanwhile, the
mole
ingredients are getting toasted and blended and sautéed. Three different kinds of
chiles,
charred and chopped, are tossed into a blender with mounds of grilled tomatoes. There are peanuts and almonds and sesame seeds, chocolate and raisins and onions and garlic, oregano, cloves,
mole
paste, and, I suspect, a whole lot more that I miss.