SURREAL MEXICO 2: LAS POZAS

I shouldn’t have entered the jungle that late. It was already near twilight, and there was a light rain. I was stiff and tired from driving since dawn, and you can’t always judge time well in the jungle’s permanent shade. But I wanted to get at least a glimpse of what I’d come far to see. 

Passing the steep turnoff to the town of Xilitla, I crossed a small bridge, turned at a roadside refresco stand, and bumped the rented VW over mud, stone and gravel. Humid forest closed in around me. Coming in view of a tall, decorated iron gate flanked by cement columns shaped like clusters of bamboo, I pulled over and turned off the engine.

I paid ten pesos to a small, quiet man in a sombrero sitting beneath a palapa just inside the gate. He didn’t have change for my twenty peso note. I told him to keep it but he insisted on going to find cambio and disappeared. Enveloped in the cool shadows of the jungle floor, waiting for the honorable attendant to return, I began to notice sounds - squawking birds, whirring insects, a running stream somewhere below. Odd, barely discernible structures peeked through dense foliage on the sloping mountain above me. 

I’d let many years pass before coming to Las Pozas. A surrealist “art park” built by a wealthy English eccentric in this remote Huasteca region of the Sierra Gorda, far above the Gulf Coast, wasn’t high on my list of Mexican must-sees. From what I’d heard, Edward James’s unfinished fantasy had fallen into disrepair and disuse since his death in 1984. The idea of a rich man pouring millions into a personal art folie didn’t seem all that indulgent in an era of athletes’ ballooning salaries, instant internet billionaires, and obscene payouts to corporate bosses. But I expected to be disappointed.

In truth, it was another mad builder of the Sierra Gorda who held equal interest to me, enough for me to finally undertake the twisting, vertiginous journey into these high tropical mountains. Two hundred years before Edward James, a Mallorcan mystic and monk had come here and built his first five missions in the Americas - I’d spent the day visiting three of them - before moving north to construct nineteen larger, simpler ones, becoming a figure every Californian knows and a controversial nominee for sainthood, the Franciscan brother Junipero Serra. So these two unusual men, one an aesthete, one a friar, had found expression in this distant corner of Mexico. 

Edward James, poetaster and art patron, had been a genuine figure in modernist art milieus - collaborator and collector of Dalí, Magritte, and Picasso, sponsor and participant in Mexico’s mid century surrealism. I knew a few survivors of the era, among them an elderly British expatriate writer who’d briefly been James’s secretary until he insisted she work in the nude. Then the year before, by sheer coincidence, I’d attended a conference at West Dean, James’s former estate in Sussex, now an art college. One damp afternoon, out walking the wide green downs, I’d come across his spare headstone in a shaded bower. It said simply, touchingly: EDWARD JAMES. POET. I’d decided it was time to visit Las Pozas.

Eventually the man in the sombrero returned with my change and pointed me back down the road. Bearing a small movie camera I’d brought, I walked in the spreading dusk toward a pair of ovoid steel doors. As I passed through them, the common world fell away. An entry path of laid stone ascended between tall rows of mosaic-encrusted serpents, ending at an overhanging cement platform where Edward James’s personal palanquin, once borne by workers transporting the old man about Las Pozas, was stored: a yellow chair with a gold silhouette in the shape of a head where his would have rested. A sharp turn upward took me past a pair of waist-high human hands of stone, palms open, planted like flowers beside the path. I heard the chatter of wild parrots, the drip of moisture on fronds, falling water somewhere. There didn’t seem to be anyone else in Las Pozas but me. 

The climb grew steeper, the shade deeper. I came to a little lotus-shaped platform on which Isadora Duncan might have danced, or Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar sat smoking his hookah. I glimpsed, through dense green foliage, twisting polyp-like shapes, fluted columns that looked like giant giraffe legs or organ pipes - whether they were nature’s or James’s was hard to tell in the advancing darkness. I had no idea when Las Pozas closed, if it closed. But I knew I should turn back soon.

An ascending spiral staircase ended abruptly, leaving me gaping dizzily into space, clutching a fistful of rusted rebars extruding from the unfinished structure like weird tentacles. There was still a little light over the valley below, and I could just see beyond to the town of Xilitla, where already lights were coming on. A giant black butterfly landed on the back of my hand gripping the rebars, fluttered, then glided off towards the valley.

I passed a slatted shed crammed with deserted animal and bird cages, remnants of James’s futile dream of a great Noah-like menagerie at Las Pozas. The last thing I remember being able to make out before gloom erased the landscape was a cluster of wooden molds James had used to shape his fantasies, sculptures in their own right.

The drizzle was thickening into rain. I turned back, no longer sure which path I’d taken to get here. I’d dropped down Alice’s rabbit hole. I didn’t feel afraid - not yet, at least - only lost. A promising fork that led down only turned back up, deeper into jungle. I crossed a bridge over rushing water. Then a slippery descent on stones brought me to a breathless view, through trees, of a waterfall. Silvery light from an unseen source lit the pool at its base. I raised the camera to shoot it.

Then I was on my back, staring up into trees, my head pounding, my spine throbbing. I lay there feeling faint, trying to grasp how I’d fallen, wondering what was damaged. The camera was still in my hand, running. With difficulty I raised my head and looked down the length of my body. My elbows and forearms were badly skinned and starting to bleed. I must have broken my fall with them or my head would have smashed on the stones.

In Mexico your raptures are your own, not prepackaged or branded. The same when things go badly; you’re left to your own devices. Nobody to sue, point the accusing finger at; nobody to hold accountable but yourself. I’m comfortable with that view, with its implication that you are, in the deepest sense, responsible for what befalls you. Besides, to pin blame on human or official malfeasance for the pothole you just stepped into in a country like Mexico, where civic matters are a morass and justice unreliable, is an empty exercise. It is easier, perhaps richer, to regard events as guided by something larger, more random; to allow that fate, or chance, routinely intervene in human affairs; and to recognize that they respond only slightly and occasionally to the imposition of our will. Ojalá, people say, meaning the same as the Arabic word from which it is derived, inshallah, “God willing.” Here in the darkening jungle, I couldn’t hold the little man in the sombrero, or the ghost of Edwarrd James, or the town of Xilitla responsible for my having slipped on wet, mossy stones. It was I who had chosen to enter the rainy jungle too late in the day. No signs, no map, no brochure, no disclaimers. I could die here, and that would be that. The teeming jungle would make quick work of my remains.   

Dazed and nauseous, I hauled myself up. Nothing seemed broken, though my coccyx ached and both legs were sore and wobbly. My forearms, bleeding heavily now, stung. Stepping forward, I almost slipped again. I realized the tread on my old sneakers had worn down completely, offering no traction on the wet stones, causing my fall. I took them off, then my socks, and proceeded unsteadily down the path barefoot, which wasn’t much better. 

A random turn dropped me abruptly out onto the access road, further from the entry gate of Las Pozas. I could just make out the shape of my car up ahead. Drenched and dizzy, my spine pulsing and sore, I opened the car trunk and fished from my luggage some dry clothes and an old T-shirt to wipe my bleeding arms. After I’d changed, I sat in the car for a while, trembling, listening to the rising din of night creatures outside, Then I started up the engine, wheeled, and drove back down the muddy road, the headlights flipping up with each bump, sweeping the forest canopy above. At the main road I crossed back over the bridge toward Xilitla, where I planned to spend the night.

Excerpted from Mexican Days (Random House)