TALE OF A TUB

Back in the saddle. Will debut with this re-post…

The town of Santa Clara del Cobre lies in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Its real name is Salvador Escalante but nobody calls it that. Set in the mountains near a small, pretty lake called Zirahuen, it can be reached by way of a winding road leading up from the picturesque town of Pátzcuaro. Santa Clara is home to around 40,000 people, most of whom work in the town’s signature industry, copper (in Spanish, cobre), and as you traverse the main street you hear the steady sound of hammers ringing out.

Most citizens of Santa Clara del Cobre are ethnically Purépecha, people of the region who have been working with copper since before the Spaniards arrived. The copper once came from nearby, but today the thousands of tons arriving each week come from recycled copper wire and cable from electric and telephone companies in Mexico and abroad.

A decade ago, in the adjacent state of Guanajuato, S and I had just completed work on the second floor of a small casita - an open, loft-like room with a breathtaking view of our town - when she mentioned that she’d always wanted a copper bathtub and that the new space would be an ideal spot for one. What’s more, she said, it would complement an antique iron bed, imported many years earlier from a Paris flea market, that a departed friend had bequeathed us.

She wanted to go to Santa Clara del Cobre and buy a copper tub. That year, narco wars were raging across the state of Michoacán with such intensity that tourists and travelers were staying away. Roadblocks, kidnappings, executions, bodies hung from overpasses. State Department advisories warned travelers to avoid going there. Hotels, restaurants and highways were deserted. Still, S wanted to go.

She arrived by bus in Pátzcuaro to find it a ghost town. She checked into a hotel we knew. There was only one other guest, a journalist holed up there writing about the conflict. Fixtures were broken; the owners were raising chickens in the courtyard, which drew rats.

The next day, S took a taxi up the mountain to Santa Clara del Cobre. It was all but deserted, the workshops empty of customers. She had the run of the place, and eventually she settled upon a copper bathtub. A trucking company would bring it to our town in a matter of days.

She got safely back to Pátzcuaro and, to my relief, home.

A few days later, we got a call from the trucking company. They had arrived with the bathtub and were parked some distance away, as no car or truck can access the steep, narrow, winding alley (known as a callejon) leading to our casita. I explained to them how to get here, and after a while they called again. They were at the foot of the callejon with the tub. We, along with a man who was there to help us that day, went down to meet them.

It was a huge copper tub, big enough to bathe a family of four, I thought. It wouldn’t begin to fit through the gate to the house, let alone the narrow stairs leading up to the casita. The two drivers, drenched in sweat and breathing heavily, had taken a look at the thirty alley steps leading up to the entrance and now refused to go further.

This left us with the tub at the foot of the callejon. Desperate, we began enlisting help: a passing neighbor, a young student, a hardy campesino. (It is times like these when Mexico shows its generosity of heart.) We must have corralled a half dozen strangers to help us muscle the tub up the alley steps. Then with the aid of ropes and ladders, we hoisted it up and over the high garden wall. From there, we floated it on up to the entry. It wouldn’t remotely fit through the front door, let alone up the winding caracol stairs to the second floor. Earlier we had installed a pair of double doors in the exterior facade to accommodate the French flea market bed, and now we managed to levitate the tub to the second floor and lift it through.

It had taken hours, and the collective effort of some seven or eight people. But now it was in its place, and the next day plumbers came and installed drains and fixtures. The tub from Santa Clara del Cobre was ready.

Or so we thought. When we tried the tub, it flooded the downstairs kitchen and bathroom. The plumbers returned and made some corrections. We soon discovered that a tank of hot water just filled it halfway. When cracks began to appear in the blue cement floor from the weight of the tub, we simply patched them and carried on.

Over time, the tub has turned out to be as much a conversation piece as a bathing site. Recently I ran into a woman, a magazine editor, who had seen the casita once when we were renting it out for a while.

“The place with that big copper tub, right?”

“That’s the one,” I said.