Into the Hearts of the Amazons: In Search of a Modern Matriarchy

Green Mangos

h Green Mangos José and Rita’s house was shuttered and dark when we arrived, but Cristina knocked anyway. A clever-looking woman with fast eyes and black hair answered the door. Her husband, whose glasses had slid halfway down his nose, stood behind her, peering over her shoulder at the late-night intruders. Cristina introduced us, and we followed Rita into a sparsely furnished dining room and sat down at what appeared to be José’s end of the dinner table. Cristina explained what I was after, and Rita left for the kitchen to make coffee. In her absence, we sat in silence until I turned to José and asked to hear the story of his marriage with Rita. “I met my wife while visiting with friends in Mexico City,” José said, “and from that meeting, our love at first sight was born.” José spoke in flowery, halting Spanish, and by the time he’d finished this first sentence , I began to doubt he had abducted anyone. He was a bookish man with a weak chin and a kind heart whose prize possession was a bookcase that read like a who’s who of Western philosophy. The Fundamental ’s of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy leaned against Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and next to it was Pico’s Modernity and Post-Modernity. But José was more than a collector of books. He planned to write them, too. His first would be about Juchitán’s gunfighters, his second a history of Juchitán’s leading homosexuals. And under the glass that protected the table, José had inserted an article by French philosopher Michel Foucault, no doubt to keep his mind busy while he ate. “We didn’t dawdle with our romance,” José continued. “Within fifteen days we proposed marriage.” 223 “Seriously?” Cristina said. “I didn’t know about this.” Then she turned her head toward the kitchen and called out, half jokingly, “You’d better get out here Rita, your husband has been trying to deceive us.” José paused, and we waited for his wife to return. At Rita’s end of the table was a cupboard with glass doors roughly the same width and height as José’s bookshelf. Everything feminine about the room seemed to congregate in and around this cupboard. On the shelves inside were crystal goblets and champagne flutes and porcelain dinnerware and a handful of photos of Rita and her two daughters hugging each other in the vivid colors of traditional Zapotec dress. On the third shelf, leaned up against the legs of a doll from Rita’s childhood , was the only image of José in the room: a three-by-five, blackand -white photo of a younger, skinnier José, handsome for the last time in his life. Directly to the left of the cupboard, and above all else in the room, was a life-size portrait of Rita as reigning queen of Vela San Vicente . The portrait depicted a teenage Rita wearing a cut-glass tiara and matching choker. The stiff white collar of her cape extended six inches in front of her chin and an inch or two over her ears. She was not smiling but looked contented as she surveyed the contents of the room. When Rita returned with the coffee and took a seat next to Cristina, José continued telling the story, now more cautiously and in a voice so low I had to lean forward to hear him. “It’s true that my wife and I have known each other since we were children. But we didn’t begin our love life until we crossed paths as adults.” At the time, José was a thirtythree -year-old unemployed university student. Rita was thirty, making a decent living selling jewelry, still hopeful she would marry and have children. Not long after their chance meeting in Mexico City, José and Rita returned to Juchitán for a vacation with their families. José wanted to buy Rita a gift but lacked money. So, one morning, he climbed his mother’s mango tree and cut off a large cluster of mangos with a machete. He put on his best clothes and tied a red handkerchief around his neck, which was the fashion in those days with the leftwing political party he favored. The mangos were still green, but he delivered them to Rita anyway. Later that night, José and Rita attended a festival. They saw each other the next night as well...