The woman who doesn't dream
La Mujer Que No Soñé
After work on Friday, I amble into the Ex Convent of Santo Domingo, a beautiful colonial building from the 16th century. I don’t have an agenda. I see a stray light from the corner of my eye and follow it. I am led to a set of open double doors, framed with a romantic Baroque patterning.
Through the doors I see a delightful scene: locals sprawled with books on the earthen colored stones, a set of long layered terraces filled with dark red earth. The color of Coloradito. This was, as my Mexican friend told me on a hike, the name of a particular type of rust-red often found in the mountain ranges of Sierra de Madre. I remembered being equally breathless among the red rocks of Colorado. Coloradito is also the name of my favorite of the eight traditional moles of Oaxaca.
I find a patch of unoccupied terrace structure to sit. I notice how the rust-red of the earth matches the evening sky’s blush and the skin-pink building across the street. A man is walking by selling sombreros. A teenager with shrub-thick locks of hair is juggling, whistling animatedly every time he catches a ball. As the last glimmers of light give way to the street lamps, a saxophonist starts playing a smoother jazz number, the notes lingering wistfully before dropping into abeyance. Next to me, in one of the terrace steps, a girl melts in her partner’s arms. I take in the landscape of the array of colored houses, their colors still vibrant in the dusk. Royal blue, sea foam green, tangerine, daffodil, magenta. In this cinematic universe my brain imagines a fourth wall, the camera panning out on the entire town of Oaxaca heaving a sigh of relief as it slouches into the weekend.
I find it easier to witness the magic of a new city when I am traveling alone. This is my third time working remotely in Mexico, but my first time doing so with a partner. I notice that when traveling with someone else, two things happen: I am less likely to engage with the city, and the city is less likely to engage with me. This leads to an experience where I am physically present in Oaxaca but emotionally unavailable with it. Perhaps it’s autistic to ask for a relationship with the city you travel to, but I’ve become so used to finding resonance in the places I travel to that I’m disappointed by its absence.
In the first two weeks in Oaxaca, I felt nothing but a sense of inconvenience at the city. D and I, getting set up for our month here, were looking for our favorite healthy staples: tofu and protein powder for him, non-fat Greek yogurt and chicken breast for me. We spent hours circling the center for these, sweatily prowling through markets that only sold vats of brown liquid with cloudy dregs floating on the surface called Tejate, soursop, guava, links of chorizo, and other very Mexican items. When we finally found a health foods store that sold tofu, they were twice as expensive as that in Trader Joe’s. We sighed, chalked it up to the import prices, and waited for the cashier to ring us up, who glared at us while reluctantly hanging up a phone chat with who I imagined to be a chismosa. It took three times as long as checking out at Trader Joe’s. By the time we had to stop by three different bodegas to separately buy toiletries, dairy, and fresh vegetables, I was fuming with the inefficiency of the city.
I see now that the annoyance had nothing to do with Oaxaca itself, but my inability to observe it. I had arrived not with curiosity but with a predetermined idea of it, set in my own habits and needs that I willed the city to fulfill. I wanted to live my life more or less as I had lived it before, treating the city as simply a nascent sketch against which I could color in my pace and ways of living.
“This is what happens when you’re in Mexico but you’re unwilling to eat like one,” I joke to D as we finally walk out of the health store, sorely disappointed by how much we spent for a few blocks of tofu and olive oil.
“Protein powder for 50 USD?” he balks, “And it would have been twice as much if I ordered the sugar-free version.”
There’s a quote somewhere about how loving someone requires fixing a curious, attentive gaze on them, and then maintaining an observant repose as if you didn’t know them. I think there are two main reasons for this: the initial curious gaze allows you to come closer to understanding them, and the halting assumption that you still don’t fully apprehend them allows them to grow beyond who they are today. The moment you’re set in the image of them, the relationship is on a slow and impending march to its deathbed.
When D tells me that he doesn’t particularly like Oaxaca, I can’t help but wonder: how could he? How could I?
I never felt a sense of emotional resonance with the city because I never bestowed on it the careful, attentive, curious gaze needed for a chance for resonance to be formed. In it I imprinted only my needs and a demand for it to immediately meet them, as if Oaxaca were a wife whose sole needs were to meet my domestic and physical needs. I am reminded of husbands who look for a domestic partner / tradwife to do the chores and clean the house and then complain they lack in them an emotional soulmate and intellectual partner. We treated Oaxaca as simply a backdrop for us to live out pre-existing notions, as if we were actors on a disposable stage. But if it’s true that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” then as actors who have been placed in this particular set, it would be foolish to live as if we were still on the previous one.
As I get up to leave the Santo Domingo square, a local says to me, “it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I nod, ask him for his name, and we end up talking for long enough for the sun to retire. His name is Magdeleno. He tells me about San Felipe del Agua, the nearby town he’s from, and how it’s the first year there’s been so little water that their wells can no longer supply their water demands. He’s building his own home-grown farm system, and is here for the week taking an ethnobotany1 pop-up course at the Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca. He tells me about Jazmín de Cielo, a white flower that is used to bury the dead. “Its scientific name,” he adds, “contains the word funeralis.” He pauses with portentous effect. Funeral! An example of how traditions shape taxonomy. Of how names reveal hints of connection between nature and human heritage if one looks closely enough. He also tells me about how in Zapotec culture, butterflies represent the souls of warriors, and they will eat their body to connect with their ancestors. They avoid the wings though, since they are poisonous due to the equally poisonous milkweed that butterflies alone are able to ingest. He speaks to me in a stream-of-consciousness way, moving fluidly across seemingly disparate topics strung together by the relationship of flora, fauna, and heritage.
“Here, I want to show you something!” He leads me through Santo Domingo church, pointing out things I had never noticed: A gold-plated tree of life snaking across the ceiling, golden grapes hidden in the elbows of its branches, three painted ladies each holding an anchor, a cross, and two babies. They represent hope, faith, and fertility. “Aren’t hope and faith the same thing?” I ask, inadvertently revealing my religious affinity. He looks confused.
We step out on the other side of the church, flanked by two planters of agave plants. There used to be tall trees here, he reminisces about coming here as a child, before the government decided they were blocking the view of the church and cleared them.
He asks me to spot the difference between the left and right sides of the church, after the right side was reconstructed post the 1897 earthquake (can you spot the difference?). We see the familiar carts of Tejate, the drink I saw so often circling markets in search of chicken breast, and I suddenly have an urge to try some. I buy two cups for us, cool brown liquid with white dredges of the mamey fruit floating at the top. He is delighted, sharing that his grandmother used to make this drink for his grandfather after a long morning plowing the fields.
I said earlier that it’s easier to fall in love with a city when traveling alone, but I think what I really mean is that it takes presence and curiosity to love something. It’s easier to fall in love with a city when we are on vacation, for example, because vacations, or the temporary relegation of responsibilities, are an assignment in presence. I think people like traveling less so for what it gives — lots of exhausting movement — than what it frees us from. Travel, or vacation broadly, allows us to take in beauty without risk of being intercepted, giving us the permission to move into a rarefied state of mind that is particularly susceptible to what is beautiful in the world.
Traveling alone, even while not on vacation, is just another way of finding presence. And what I’ve found is that every time I engage with the city in this way, the city unfailingly reciprocates. My encounter with Magdeleno becomes the first of many times a friendly local joins me in conversation while we appreciate the beauty of their city. True presence between the traveler and the country is rare. All too often the travelers have a competing relationship — a couple more preoccupied up with each other than their surroundings, a college student happily blazed with their fraternity during spring break, or even a solo traveler who is so self-conscious of their singleness that they spend most of their time eyeing their surroundings nervously or fretting on their phone — that when it’s truly just a single traveler observing and engaging with their surroundings, locals take notice.
In the next few weeks, I run into Magdeleno a few more times, each as spontaneous as the first. The last time, I ran into him busking with his guitar at the same plaza of the Ex Covenant of Santo Domingo. He plays me La Mujer que no Soñé, a song that his grandfather would often play for his abuela. It translates to “The woman who does not dream.”
If dreams are the best sublimation of life, fusing the poignant pieces of our everyday into a chimera we recognize in spirit but not form, then travel is a close second. It can draw out the intrinsic qualities of the every day, creating a dream-like state, but only if we permit ourselves to slacken our hold on everyday routines.
Ethnobotany is the study of the relationship between plants and people.
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