You Ask a Lot of Questions 1

“If the day should ever come when we (the Nazis) must go, if some day we are
  compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the
  universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.”
                                                                                        Joseph Goebbels




I squeezed a little more lime on my skewers of fried grasshopper chillied chapulines. I had heard good things about Oaxacan dining, but my budget would keep me close to the bottom of the food chain. The autumnal colours of the seven mole sauces decorated the Posada Marguerita, but that’s as close as I was going to get to haute cuisine. I checked in to meet John, an old Rhodesian Selous Scout from Holland, and his Belgian girlfriend, Marlene. We took a bus to the Zapotec ruins of Monte Alban. It was wonderfully peaceful, except for the genital mutilation of the captured and tortured war prisoners on the walls, whose sacrifices were sculpted in pain. They were called Danzantes (dancers). You bet. From there we went to the market, and used our aroma navigation skills to weave through a psychedelic labyrinth of known and novel meats and cheeses, tomatoes, avocados, chocolate, nuts, new fruits (guanabana, chilacayote, and zapote), medicines, and cochineal, carmine dye insects, hand-collected with deer tails, that had once become Mexico’s second largest colonial export, after silver.
Back at the Posada, we met two exchange students, Yoshi, from Japan and Yutte, an Austrian. It was September 16, Independence Day, and there was a fiesta in the Zocalo. The plaza was mobbed with marimba bands, choirs, and Guelaguetza folk dancers. Long Live Our Lady of Guadeloupe!  The music and noise, flags, lights, and fireworks, stole all your senses simultaneously. We drank Negro Modelo, and wondered where the earth and sky had gone. By the end of it, several hours later, Yutte and I had lost John and Marlene. And Yoshi.
There was only one other guest, besides me, left in Posada Marguerita next morning. His name was Raf. I flicked a scorpion off his shoulder in the courtyard. Fair trade, he offered to repair my shoes.  Raf was an American. He told me his wife was poisoned. Bit not as much as he was. He might have noticed the scorpion, if it hadn’t been for the mezcal. The worm in the bottle of maguey juice had spoken to him. ‘Para todo mal, mezcal y para todo bien también.’ For everything bad, mezcal, and for everything good too. I took a slow, hot, Independence Day shower, and ate a slower warm breakfast of huevos, frijoles and café con leche. The day picked up at the Oaxacan Regional Museum, and the dazzling gold leaf ornamentation in the Church of Santo Domingo de Guzman. I got to play with the beautiful machine that was a suit of conquistador armour, and marveled at the turquoise, aquamarine, gold, bone, silver, shell and jade artifacts from Monte Alban’s Tomb 7, in the museum there. After some more bread and beans in the market, I watched a little orphan, in worn-out sandals, whip a pod of chubby rich kids with designer sneakers, in a road race through the Zocalo. Mercury rising over Jupiter. I returned to Raf and my own repaired footwear, and gave back the book he had loaned me, Your Friend, the USA. They had been told about the one in Jesus, too.