Tales of a Female Nomad Read Online Free PDF Page B

me.
    “Buenos días,”
I say. “Please, may I speak to the head of your village.”
    One of them approaches. “
Hola,
Señora.
I am very sorry. The head of our village is in Mexico City. He will be back the day after tomorrow. Please come back then.”
    Shit.
    I tell them that I would like to stay in the village for a month and that I will return in three days. “Oh, yes,” they tell me. “The
alcalde
will be here then.”
    “Do you think he will give me permission to stay?”
    The men shrug at each other. One speaks. “If he can find a place for you to live.” Then they all start to talk in Zapotec, presumably about places where I could live. I don’t understand a word.
    “I would be very happy if you would tell the mayor about me.”
    “Por supuesto, Señora.”
Of course.
    The thought of turning around and going back to Oaxaca doesn’t appeal to me. But no one has suggested I can stay, even for one night.
    I buy a cold Coke. “Can I walk around a little before I leave?”
    “Por favor,”
they say. Please.
    None of the men walks with me as I walk up the gravelly paths and down. It is a village built on hills. The up part isn’t too bad, but I keep slipping on the down.
    There are women in the village, but none of them greets me when I pass by, smiling and nodding. In fact, they run. Every once in a while I catch someone looking out a window or peering from behind a tree.
    There are children playing. As soon as they see me, they take off, like a flock of birds. It is clear that I am not welcome. I feel like a disease that must be kept at a distance. I walk around the village for about ten minutes. Then I go back to Oaxaca.
    Turns out there is a bus that goes back and forth to Oaxaca. I find out by accident. As I’m walking, it just appears and stops. No one in the village bothered to tell me.
    When I arrive three days later, the same men are standing in the same place. This time it is ten in the morning. They are all, once again, holding beer bottles.
    “Buenos días, Señora,”
they call as I walk toward them.
    The head of the village welcomes me. “We are pleased that you wish to visit us for a month. José has a room for you in his yard.”
    José is a small, muscular man with a mustache and wavy black hair. His wife will take good care of me, he says. The small house where I will be living is very safe, he tells me as we walk. It is made of concrete and there is a strong lock on a heavy metal door. I wonder why his first words are about security.
    He tells me that he would like to give me the house for nothing, but it is the dry season and he has no money. He asks me for seven dollars a day for the room and food. It will help him feed his family. I’m sure it’s a fortune to him, and I’m also sure that everyone in the village thinks that he’s ripping me off. I don’t try to bargain.
    My house is a one-room concrete shed about forty feet behind the house where José, his wife, and his three children live. It is clean except for a big black mass of something in one corner of the ceiling. The bed, a piece of foam rubber on a board, turns out to be firm and comfortable. The only openings in the room are the door and a two-foot by one-foot barred window above the door.
    Margarita, José’s wife, arrives with coffee, trailed by three children under four. The children don’t speak Spanish; their mother speaks just enough to get by. (The language they speak is Zapotec.) I ask her to sit while I drink. She is twenty years old. She was born in this village and she has been to Oaxaca only once when her mother was in the hospital there.
    When I finish the coffee, I ask about a toilet. She walks with me out the gate, across a dry, rocky field, and down a little hill to the cracked riverbed. The toilet. There are a couple of trees to squat behind, but I am wider than both of them. The rest of the foliage is mostly low and practically leafless. I decide to hold it in for a while longer.
    I have brought no