Chapter 18
They sat outside the laundromat in metal chairs, sunning themselves. Zoe closed her eyes and remembered. She began to talk to Antonio, in a lullabye tone, in a sweet soft chant, as if he were right there with them:
In Oaxaca everything is lost. Direction, connection to body. The soul, with its head suspended, hovers like a crucifix near the golden doorway of Santo Domingo Cathedral.
We are safe here, drones the old curandera in her lisping Zapotec chant. I disembody into dirt floors stained brown with old blood. My knees sink into the past, my arms fold in a familiar gesture. Say a prayer, she insists, but I cannot ride my words out of here, they buck and sway. A woman with my profile kneels before the altar of a saint whose feet are stained with blood. She turns to tell me something, to lean close, to whisper. Mother of God. The words corral in my heart, wild horses circling in a fitful intuition of storm.
The night we arrived to the hotel Los Golondrinas from Mexico City you could not sleep. “I saw the Angel of Oaxaca,” you said, “She is brilliant as a sapphire. She is a star of blue light blessing the city. But no one sees her. They have forgotten she is here.”
We go looking for the Angel of Oaxaca early the next evening, following Calle de Hidalgo, Macedonia Alcala and Garcia Vigil as they narrow under shadows centuries old. We find the clever skeletons of Antonio Guadalupe Posada posing in self-portraits of artists exhibiting at Le Mano Magica. Their inscrutable faces, their wicked laugh and rustling bones. Dozens of skeletons–on bicycles, wearing sombreros, toting guns, lifting the young woman from the death of sleep. We do not find the Angel of Oaxaca.
Later, sipping mescal margaritas in a balcony suspended above a gathering of revolucionarios on the zocola you say, “At the mercado in Mitla today, the women selling handmade dresses, hats and bags, they picked at our clothes, our forearms, their fingers pinching so softly.”
Yes, I recalled, they pinched, then the wings sprouted, and they began to peck and draw blood. They followed us past an old ruin surrounded by barbed wire, they followed us to the door of the church. Mister, Seniorita, they cajoled. I give you good price. Quanto Peso? Five dollar? No. $2.50. No. We tell them No. It is hard to say no. One of the birdwomen closes in. I give you good price. Shirts and baggy shorts gathered at the waist, thin white cotton blouses, she shoves them at us. We will suffocate, I think, in warm cotton, nostrils full of zigzag weaves of green and yellow and tiny embroidered dancers.
We are safe. We are turistas, suspended above this world. We have climbed up to the balcony in search of the Blue Angel of Oaxaca. We have gone into trance on mescal margaritas, but we have not met her yet. A man cries on the zocala, face down on his arms, belly in the dirt. His sandals are worn thin as his new soul. He has no food, no home. His wife lies beside him, face covered with a child’s soiled white t-shirt. Her huge stomach heaves, the new life inside curving against her heart. The man in the dirt cries loudly. In the next life he may be blind, or he may be a swimmer who tracks the shark beneath the darkest wave. In Oaxaca the karmic wheel budges slowly, so slowly we begin to stall in this momentary time-warp. And we begin to remember.
Next morning we ride a bus to the sacred site at Monte Alban, still looking for her. “I saw her,” you keep saying. “She is blue and incandescent. I want to try and bring her back from the dream.” I am afraid you will accost people on the street with your quest. That you will upset the woman selling mango, papaya and pineapple on Calle de Hidalgo. That you will ask the clerks at Bamby’s bakery where we buy the pastries we will have with our cappuchino at La Guernia Cafe. That you will wander everywhere in Oaxaca asking Donde est the Angel of Oaxaca, por favor?
The view from Monte Alban is hundreds of years old–and it has changed. Oaxaca is an apparition surfacing through fecal clouds that lift from Mexico City. Without pretending, now, I can see every lifetime that led to this moment. I remember the scars on my feet and the paper house, the mercado where chickens dangle in rows skinned as a stillborn breechbirth, the tiny limons like hard pale green hearts, the mysterious fragrance of remedios, the blood red bouganvilla blooming against the peeling paint, the dead stone, the soldiers with cocked guns and black coyote eye, the crying man in the dirt.
Travel is the only way to come home, I tell you. I don’t want to disappoint you, I whisper, but the Angel is not going to show her glistening face. She is not going to hold us in the large flat palm of her perfect hand. She is going to wait for us, over there in the dream, the sweet pink and blue dream that we die into every night, as we did centuries ago, as we do in our wishful hearts every day. She is going to wait.
