MONTAGE

THE PAINTED WALL

The Mexican wall is an enigma. It keeps things out (people, animals, dust, floodwater), and in (secrets, possessions, people, animals). It divides but doesn’t conquer. It separates while uniting.

The wall is like clothing - a layer or barrier demarcating public and private space. Combining three formal cultures, it guards the interior, the Mexican “labyrinth of solitude,” in Octavio Paz’s famed phrase. The urge to see behind, over or through it creates mystery and interest.

The Mexican wall may be of adobe (mud and straw) stone, brick, or wood. It may be covered with a layer of cement (aplanado) or not. Traditionally, the surface is painted with a slaked lime whitewash known as cal, then simply left white or mixed with colors.

Though some regions favor certain colors (Michoacan’s white upper walls with red borders below) or certain tones (Guanajuato’s pink or pistachio green limestone from local quarries), walls tend to be as variously (and richly) colored as the tastes or expressions of their owners.

Life happens to the wall. Dogs use it. Sellers squat against it. Teenagers embrace in the shadows it casts. Plants affix themselves to it. The seasons etch their message across its face. The wall is repainted - again and again - laying new color over old, further embedding its secrets.

***

OLD TOWN/NEW TOWN

In Heisenberg’s physics, we alter a phenomenon by the act of our regard. In writing about this country, this town, this house I love, I sacrifice part of it. There is ecotourism but no equivalent restraint on cultural tourism. Inevitably, historical sites like this will be preserved as “living museums.” We will visit a place called “China,” in quotation marks, or go out into “nature.” We will visit “Florence” in situ, once the site of a Renaissance city of the same name. What was formerly the town proper becomes the “old town,” surrounded by the “new town.” Over the hill east of here, just beyond the highest view from the roof, a new shopping center grows to accommodate the housing developments erupting around it; while down here in the old town center - an inordinately pretty, quiet town of cowboys, shopkeepers, and refugees from Mexico City and parts more distant - things are the same but not. The romance of the Other dims: In California I speak more Spanish, here, more English. My two environments cross, come to resemble each other. Last week I went to a fiesta where there were more gringos than there used to be in the entire town. Sometimes I wonder: Will a plague of my own kind drive me on?  

***

AZULEJOS

Skilled ceramists arrived from Spain soon after the conquest of Mexico, bringing Arabic and European enamel glazing techniques and the potter’s wheel. They settled in the town of Puebla, and soon a flowering of tile work and ceramics began. 

At first only European patterns were copied, using the Talavera technique (named after the Spanish town of Talavera de la Reina where the style originated), employing a tin-glazed white clay mixture. Hand painted blue and white azulejo tiles predominated, though other colors were used. Tile work spread rapidly throughout colonial Mexico in public structures and in homes. Church domes, private gardens and stairways, patios, kitchens, bathrooms - few surfaces were without the bright, decorative Puebla tiles.

The Talavera tradition continues today, a theme with many variations (so much so that since March 17, 1995, the date of an official declaration, only ceramics following the strict sixteenth-century formulas have the right to use the term “Talavera”). The azulejos’s square still poses a compositional challenge Mexican artisans respond to with endless innovation. The town of Dolores Hidalgo in Mexico’s bajio region has come to rival Puebla as a major ceramics manufacturing center. 

Though its origins lie in the distant past - in Persia, the Arab world, Delft, Italy, Spain, China - Mexican tile work is today considered unique to the country: a “chosen skin,” as the writer Alberto Ruy-Sánchez Lacy puts it.

***

YOUR OWN BACK YARD

Shutting the front door behind me, I hear a voice say, in English, “Hold it right there.”

A camera goes off.

“Thanks. Loved your book.”

Across the street, a figure dashes away. Instinctively I mutter after him an unheard “Thank you.”

I stood in the twilight, feeling vaguely assaulted. A book I’d written about my life here had incited a gamut of local reactions from pleasure that someone had finally gotten the place right to accusations that I’d despoiled the town - though this seemed a silly charge as it had been appearing on travel magazines’ top ten list for some years. A few people had thought they recognized themselves in the book and were either flattered or upset; this had taken a while to settle out. I used to skulk around the town unshaven and unnoticed; now I never knew when an importuning stranger would ambush me with chat or a camera or a book to sign. Some days I’d answer a knock on my door to find someone unknown to me wanting to come in and look around, as if the house were some kind of museum and not the place where we lived and worked. Still, I knew it was part of the problem I decried - I’d written about that too - and could hardly blame anyone but myself. As a friend put it bluntly one evening, “This is what happens when you shit in your own backyard.”

***

FUGUE

“What was mere romance to us has now become real memory.” - V.S. Pritchett

Moving through time and space, we invent fictions to propel ourselves into fact. The reasons for things often turn out to be other than they first appeared. A journey - and what isn’t a journey? - picks up a narrative of its own. The map we set out with turns out to have been a figment, a fraud, a useless scrap of paper. 

The fact was that I no longer knew why I was out there traveling. I was out there because I was out there.

In the grips of a pleasurable indefinition, floating in a brine of uncertainty, all notions of family, nation and work had become fluid, conditional. That seemed to me an entirely appropriate state, matching reality. I felt like I could carry on like this endlessly, moving from place to place. If there was some pathology at play (or at work), it struck me more as a solution than a problem. “Episodes of sudden, unexpected and purposeful travel from home,” in the words of the Merck medical manual. If “dissociative fugue” was flight away from, this felt more like flight towards some ever receding horizon. I felt no guilt; I was, after all, subsidizing my travels with my writing. My wanderlust had picked up a momentum I couldn’t seem to arrest, and I didn’t care.

 I could only think of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s lines, in which he counsels Homer’s Odysseus:

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca

Then pray that the road is long  

Excerpted from Mexicolor, Mexican Days, and On Mexican Time