Tales of a Female Nomad Read Free

while,
cilantro
dominates the air, until I pass a table full of oregano. Seconds later, I stop next to a table covered with yellow squash blossoms and wonder what they taste like.
    There are children in the booths, babies swinging in tiny hammocks, nine-year-olds wooing customers, “Señora, buy my watermelon. Good taste. Sweet.”
    The music streaming through the fruits and vegetables is a whiney, unrequited love song that I know from the Mexican radio stations in Los Angeles. It’s called
ranchero
music. Though the music is sad, my body is light. My fears of the night before have turned into excitement.
    I pass through mountains of green and red and brown and rust-colored pastes, three feet high, the essence of
mole
sauces, redolent of cloves and garlic, oregano and cinnamon. Nothing is wrapped in plastic or sealed in containers. It is all out there to be smelled and seen and tasted and bought. I am surrounded by the colors, the smells, the sounds of a culture that lives life full out.
    In meats, fifty little butcher shops compete for the shoppers’ business. There are brains and stomachs and kidneys and tongues, feet and tails and intestines. Butchers are slapping and smashing meat on huge wooden blocks, beating red blobs into tenderness. They are scissoring and chopping up yellow chickens that have been fed marigolds so their skin and flesh are gold. Heads here, feet there. Innards sorted.
    The butchers are mincing beef and hacking pork, sharpening knives and chopping slabs. Cleaving, slapping, scissoring, beating. It’s a spectacular percussion band, with its own peculiar instruments.
    The shoppers, thick in the aisles, are carrying string and plastic and cloth bags full of newspaper-wrapped packages of their purchases. I walk among them, enjoying the touch of our bodies.
    I wriggle through the crowd to peer into waist-high vats of thick white cream and barrels of white ground-corn dough called
masa.
I cannot stop smiling at the explosion of joy I have felt since I passed under the canopy of
piñatas.
It’s exciting to be exploring a world I know nothing about, discovering new smells, and moving through a scene where I am a barely noticed minority of one, swallowed up by the crowd.
    I follow my nose to the eating area of the market. Sausages are frying, soups are bubbling,
chiles
are toasting. I sit at a picnic table and eat and smile, surrounded by Spanish-speaking women. I bite into my
quesadilla
stuffed with stretchy Oaxaca cheese and strips of sweet, green
chiles.
    “Muy sabrosa.”
Delicious, I say to the woman sitting on my right. She asks me where I am from. I answer some simple questions and ask her name. When our conversation runs out of words, I move to another table and try a
sopa de flor de calabaza,
squash blossom soup with garlic and onion, zucchini, corn kernels, green leaves, and bright yellow squash blossoms . . . with strips of sweet
chiles
on top. The blend of flavors, the texture of the different vegetables, the thickness of the broth are like the Mexican people, filled with spice and spirit.
    Then, at about twelve o’clock, after nearly five hours in the market, I head off to the anthropology museum. I have never been big on museums or churches or most tourist attractions. As I wander through, I am thinking that I want to move into the enclosed tableaux, to live with these people, to celebrate with them, to cook and eat with the families. I want to experience their lives, not look at them through glass.
    Many of the exhibits represent cultures that no longer exist; but there are plenty of living, breathing indigenous people in Mexico today. How I wish I could live amongst them.
    Then it hits me for the first time . . . during these two months, I do not need anyone’s permission to do what I want to do. I am free to make my own decisions, follow my whims, and take whatever risks I choose. For me, these two months are not about dating or being with other men; they are about doing the things that