Pulque: 400 Rabbits (All those feelings, all of them different, and all inspired by)

At the Pulquería La Antigua Roma the crowd was thoroughly red-faced, and as we pushed through the swinging wooden doors each head at its five tables swiveled in synchronized fashion to scrutinize us. We stood out painfully, me with my light blonde hair and thin metal eyeglasses that did not look very Mexican, and my Mexican friend who had never set foot in the place before. La Antigua Roma (Ancient Rome), a hole in the wall in one of Mexico City's oldest and seediest downtown districts, specializes in pulque (PUL-ka), a pre-Columbian drink fermented from aguamiel, literally "honey water," a liquid extracted from maguey, a desert plant of dagger-shaped leaves. We had hoped to get some pulque at the Plaza Garibaldi, one of Mexico City's most charming squares, but the pulquería there was closed and we needed some of that drink that tastes like nothing else. People sometimes compare the milky, gooey drink to beer, but the comparison is tenuous.

Ask anyone who's ever drunk pulque and they'll tell you no description is sufficient preparation for its taste. Some travel books say it is frothy or foamy, but that's not much help. Pulque has become associated with a rustic, traditional culture that many Mexicans hold in high esteem, especially since it is usually brewed on old rural haciendas and must be drunk soon after fermentation ends. But as the nation becomes more industrialized the drink has been pushed out of the mainstream of middle-class neighborhoods, and beer and tequila have taken over. Pulque taxes once provided the Spanish Crown with half its revenue from Mexico, and in the late 18th century the people of Mexico City consumed an average of 187 gallons of pulque each year. During colonial times, Mexico City had one pulquería for every 56 adult inhabitants. For today's population that would be more than 300,000 pulquerías. Instead, there are fewer than 350.

One table of older men was getting drunk from blue and red plastic buckets of pulque and a liter bottle of clear tequila. They were loud and slapped each other on the back and cracked jokes with the waitress. Attached to a wall above their heads hung an altar to the Virgen de Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint, with a red satin veil, little red neon lights and plastic roses. At another table the men were younger, and a grim air hung over their inebriation. A corner table had a mix of men and women — masculine-looking women with short hair and black aviator sunglasses. They rose weary and clumsy to dance from time to time to the cumbias and merengues that were piped out of an old juke box.

In pre-Columbian Mexico, one of the names used for pulque was centzontotochtin, a mouthful that translates as 400 rabbits and points to the belief that there are at least 400 different emotional states induced by alcohol. Some people get angry when they drink. Others grow downcast, boisterous, sleepy or jealous. Some get loud, joking, chatty, obnoxious. Some get quiet and hateful and make you wonder what you could have done to anger them. The ancient Mexicans held that all those moods, and more, were a number of rabbits whose emotions were crystallized by the catalyst of pulque.

Benches were pushed tight against the wall in another corner and we made our way across the room. My friend, José Manuel, stepped boldly through the pulquería to a corner table, and the waitress took our order. Her face was pudgy, red and sweaty. The room was warm and a trickle of sweat ran down my own chest. She wore a black mini-skirt hiked up, showing quivering, fat-dimpled legs. We asked for two glasses of pulque, but she said it was strictly served by the bucket, only to correct herself instantly and say, yes, we could order a single glass or two. José Manuel ordered pulque flavored with guava and I ordered unflavored white pulque. Pulque flavored by fruits is popular and the drink is renowned for being a good source of vitamins. One might start to think of it as a health drink. One might miss the point.

After our waitress brought the goods, she stood by our table and rubbed it with a dirty gray rag, making suggestive eyes at my friend and me. She sidled up next to me and lay an arm around my shoulder. I leaned away from her and twisted on the bench, shaking my shoulders, doing all I could to get her hand off of me, short of pushing it away with my own hand. In pre-Columbian Aztec law, being drunk was a punishable offense. Not so at La Antigua Roma.

Ancient Mexicans knew one of the moods, one of the rabbits, that could scurry into a person's behavior with pulque was lust. Pulque itself was often associated with fertility, as are rabbits in many cultures, and early Mexicans frequently made a connection between pulque and the soil, the Earth itself. Some indigenous names for pulque could be translated as Earth-wine. The waitress was under the influence of the horny rabbit.

The older men started asking if we'd take a drink of their tequila. They were mixing it into their pulque from a bottle with no label. Pulque, although out of fashion with many Mexicans, is still the nation's cheapest form of alcohol.

Mixing cheap tequila with it can intensify its effects. The waitress disappeared and I felt like I could start to enjoy the place. We declined and a large man with a puffy face stepped to our table and asked José Manuel if he spoke Spanish. He ignored me. This man said he was a native of Tepito, the infamous neighborhood we happened to be in, and said he could get us whatever we wanted; Tepito has the reputation of being the most important black market for smuggled and stolen goods in Mexico City. Microwaves, electric shoe polishers, silverware, designer jeans, guns, stoplights, headlights, tires, cocaine.

He introduced himself as Durazo and said he was the son of the famously corrupt former Mexico City police chief Arturo "El Negro" Durazo. I guessed that he was putting us on. He started speaking a thickly drunk, unintelligible language. In truth, it would be an exaggeration to say he was unintelligible; I was able to pick out something that sounded like "40" during a monologue that included heartfelt gestures toward me, my friend, his chest and the rest of the pulquería. José Manuel asked Durazo if he was speaking Nahuatl, one of Mexico's most important indigenous languages, because, José Manuel said, he thought he picked up a few Nahuatl words. The man acted offended and said, no, he'd been speaking English.

The younger guys at the other table looked as though they might be scheming a deal: their faces seemed more focused than the rest of the drinkers in the place. One of them bore a long white scar across the lower edge of his jaw, like something from a knife fight, but I had trouble believing my eyes. The scar seemed to be a cliché from a gangster film. I thought the pulque was starting to play tricks on me so I turned away. But when I turned back to get a second look, the scar was still there. He caught me staring and slammed me with a "What the hell are you looking at?" that was, again, worthy of a crime film. Tepito is also famous for its tough, working class society. Many of Mexico's most famous boxers came from Tepito, and its roughness is often credited with their success. That table was full of tough rabbits.

The man who called himself Durazo returned to his buddies at the next table but then he came back and filled our glasses with pulque from his bright red bucket.

"Just something to keep you from going thirsty," he said and stumbled away. And the waitress slipped back to my side. One of the older guys shouted at her to leave me alone and put his finger over his mouth, to say no. The bossy rabbit.

"Cállate, gordo.," ("Shut up, fatso"), she shouted at him in a raspy voice.

A thin string of sticky white pulque ran from the corner of his mouth down to his chin, where it continued its way toward the ground and dangled above his chest. He leaned back and the wet glob stuck to his shirt but the string remained intact, linking chin to chest. Durazo poured us another glass of pulque from his bucket when our glasses were empty again. We drank most of it and then got back out into the city night, feeling the pulque make our limbs heavy and distant.

By Lowry McAllen

Publicado originalmente en "Mexico Business".