January 12, early Sunday morning in San Pablo Etla.
Reyes is behind us and presumably the Three Kings have
returned to wherever they hang out when they are not delivering gifts to Latin
American children. Nobody knows exactly how they get here: there are no camel tracks
in the dust on the dirt roads, only prints of goat, sheep, horse, burro, and
cow. Mercifully this morning the sky is filled only with stars. The Baby Jesus
really, really likes to wake up to fireworks, so on his birthday and every one
of the twelve days following that fill out the official Christmas season, it is
customary to give him what he really, really likes. And of course on December
31, la Noche Vieja, we are treated to
a triple dose of booms. I suspect that after Reyes morning the supply of
rockets has been exhausted, or maybe there have been no neighborhood birthdays
or local saints to fête. Anyway, this morning I wake up to almost quiet, with
only the complaints of a hungry burro and the boasting of the rooster two
houses down the road to let me know that in a half hour or so it will be dawn.
I make coffee, toast a slice of Judith’s delicious black
pepper and cheese bread, drizzle on a little honey, check my email, and by the
t
ime it is light enough to see to put the key in the lock on the front gate, I head
out into the street. The road on the south side of El Huajal is paved with
concrete, so except for the speed bumps it is a good place for the neighborhood
kids to exercise the new bicycles that the Reyes have brought them. I wish each
a Buenos días as they speed past, a Qué bonita bicicleta as they come back
around, and the same to the proud parents escorting the toddlers on their
tricycles.
I walk up the hill path toward Bill’s house for the morning
birding, keeping one eye on the ground for snakes. Since I saw the dead coral
snake in the road a few weeks ago my awareness of where I am stepping seems to
have intensified. A little further along I overtake the old woodcutter with no
teeth who is leading his three pack burros up the mountain to gather firewood
to sell. In the States his axe would be in a museum of pioneer tools. I offer a
Buenos días and he gums me back the
same.
An hour’s birding yields a satisfactory tally, including all
five of the local hummingbirds and a varied bunting. By 9:15 I am back home.
Linda is up and dressing. We exchange hugs; reports; and pour coffee. It is
almost time to leave for the Sunday Morning Main Event at the Mercadito.
I pull the CRV out onto the street, Linda locks the swinging
gate, and we drive past the pre-school up to the street that hugs the ridge top
just to our north. At the intersection is a nacimiento,
a large community crèche with a miniature Baby Jesus, shepherds, angels, and a
trio of those camels that don’t leave footprints. The nacimiento appeared the day before Christmas and since it is still
there, I expect it will remain until Candelaria, on February 2, which
officially closes the holiday season. Or as officially as anything in the
festival calendar seems to be in Mexico. Over the center of the intersection,
suspended from the electric wires, is a Santa Claus piñata. We turn right past
the white house that has the cast iron urns on top and drive across the next
arroyo to the ridge on which sits San Pablo’s village center: a church, a
school, the municipal office building, a basketball court, a water-purification
facility, an abarrotes (convience)
store, and the Mercadito.


We pull off into a field and park in a line of cars. Behind
us is a long, low, open-sided shed filled with tables and chairs. On each side
of the shed are food stands: folding tables, braziers heated by smoldering
firewood, cast iron and pottery grills (comales)
for cooking tortillas or frying onions and sundry meats and sausages. At our
favorite stand (we come almost every Sunday) in a row of pottery ollas simmer the morning stews: Pork
ribs in green cilantro sauce flavored with hoja
de conejo (rabbit leaf – your guess is as good as ours) and little
dumplings. Red coloradito sauce for
transmuting the stack of chicken-filled rolled-up tortillas into enchiladas
that are then covered with grated farmers’ cheese (queso fresco), sprinkled with cilantro, and topped with a dab of
clotted cream. Black mole, also for
simmering the enchiladas, and another olla
of green sauce. There is a plate of stuffed chile
peppers, not the small hot ones, but smoky with something that hints of chilpotle. Another olla of black beans.
Roasting on the comal are memelas, small tortillas smeared with
stewed beans and topped with tomato, salad, cheese, chicken, whatever else is at
hand. Next to the comal, on another
brazier, are ollas of hot chocolate,
flavored with cinnamon, and café de olla,
sweet cinnamon-flavored coffee. Both drinks are served not in cups but in
bowls, lifted to the mouth with both hands and slurped to the last drop. One
stand on the other side of the shed offers drinking bowls of atole, a thin, flavored, cream of wheat
(or sometimes corn), a favorite street-corner morning breakfast all over
Mexico. If you mix chocolate into it, it becomes a champurrada.

We order our breakfasts and choose a table. The first time
we went to the mercadito Sunday
breakfast we sat at a small table by ourselves. But besides the delicious food,
what is the fun in that? Now our habit is to pick an almost filled table that
has two empty chairs. We ask permission to sit, which after a brief perplexed
look is always granted with a smile. Mexican San Pablo-ites tend to sit down in
family groups— grandmas and daughters, young couples with kids—or with three or
four old friends. We are obviously newcomers and gringos, which means that we
are a little weird and can be forgiven for doing the unexpected, and for not
being constrained by local customs of etiquette that we cannot be expected to
know about. This gives us a great deal of freedom and we are determined to use
it during our season of newness.
Last week we met a dentist from Oaxaca city, Doctora Ruiz, a
woman of near our age who comes up to spend the weekend in a little house she
has in San Pablo. A fascinating woman, who in addition to her practice—almost
everyone we meet has two or three jobs, or a main job and a couple of little
sidelines—runs a small B&B in the city near the Parque Llano. We enjoyed
sharing B&B experiences and life stories with her for an hour. When we
arrive today we see she is already seated at a full table, so we choose
another, but as soon as we sit down the Doctora comes over to give us a hug and
ask us how we are doing.
Today’s table has a couple of farm folks at one end, men who
look like they have just come in from hacking at corn stubble with their
machetes, and two women, one in her forties, we’d guess, and one in her
sixties. The older of them lives in Oaxaca. The younger has a real-estate
business here in the Etlas. We tell them we are historians, and, surprisingly,
the younger woman is an avid reader of history and has acquired a remarkable
grasp of late medieval Europe. Before we have finished our first enchiladas she
is asking us about the Dominican crusade against the Albigensians in southern
France. Go figure! We exchange cards, we tell her about the kinds of places we
are looking for here in San Pablo, she promises to keep in touch, we say
goodbye to Doctora Ruiz, and drive back to our house, El Huajal.
We are full, and it has been a full day. And it is only
noon!

If we have strength, maybe this
evening we’ll go to the 1-tent circus that has set up in the lot in front of
doña Concha’s abarrotes store.