#oaxaca

The smell hits you first — woodsmoke, dried chili, and something floral underneath that you can't quite name. I followed it down a narrow alley in Oaxaca's Barrio Jalatlaco just after seven this morning, past painted walls the color of marigolds and rust, until I found her: a woman in her sixties crouched over a clay comal, pressing masa with practiced indifference to the hour.

I ordered two tlayudas without knowing what I was getting. She looked at me the way people do when they've decided whether to like you before you've opened your mouth. I must have passed some test, because she pointed at a low wooden stool with her chin, and I sat.

The tlayuda arrived on a clay plate wider than my outstretched hands — crisp tortilla, black beans spread thick as paint, tasajo cured and charred at the edges, cheese that pulled and didn't apologize for it. I ate slowly. There's a discipline to eating slowly when you're alone and the food is this good, because your instinct is to rush before it ends.

The alleyway smelled of jasmine and grilled corn, an impossible combination that somehow made perfect sense in Oaxaca. I'd been following the sound of marimba music for three blocks, weaving through streets too narrow for cars, when I stumbled upon a courtyard I'd never find again.

An elderly woman sat on a plastic chair, shelling black beans into a metal bowl. The late afternoon sun slanted through bougainvillea, painting everything in shades of amber and magenta. She looked up, unsurprised, as if wandering strangers appeared in her courtyard every day at exactly this hour.

"¿Tienes hambre?" she asked.