XALAPA!

(Travel piece from this week last April, re-posted…)

“I don’t believe it’s true, what they say, that as you travel you become a different person. What happens is that you grow lighter, you shed your obligations and your past just as you reduce everything you possess to a few items you need for your luggage.” - Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad

City of coffee and orchids, the guidebooks like to say. Clambering stiffly off the bus, I thought for a moment I really did smell those orchids. As there’d been no arrangement, I didn’t expect anybody to meet me. I had only one name here - a friend of a friend in Mexico City, an architect named Servin. Still, I half-expected somebody to be standing there in the foggy evening. But there was only a small man with cropped hair in a blue uniform collecting my luggage from beneath the bus and beckoning me to follow him to a taxi.

As the little Toyota wended into the city, I tried to read shapes through the mist. Clumps of trees fell off below to my left, lights of hillocks beyond. To my right, buildings crowded down to the street, ample old colonials and contemporary hodge-podge. The hazy hills and drizzle reminded me somehow of central Japan. I knew that Xalapa, situated in the cool mountains above Vera Cruz, lay along an old trade route to Mexico City and that it was the provincial capital where the wealthy from the sweltering, insect-plagued Caribbean coast had once stored their families and their holdings.

“Our famous chipichipi,” the driver said, gesturing through the windshield. “It refreshes our City of Flowers every evening.” He laughed. “It drives some people a little nuts. But I tell you this, señor. Here in Xalapa you will feel safe.”

I knew a little of the region, with its Olmec ruins and thrumming son jarocho music, but it did bear an appeal both anthropological and romantic. A half-recollected carnival weekend in the city of Vera Cruz years ago - marimbas, mojitos, danzón - surfaced, its details lost.

Traffic slowed along an artery called Xalapeños Ilustres, a name so florid I almost expected the road to be lined with busts and statues. It seemed to be Jalapa with either a J or an X, as written on the front of the bus I’d taken from Mexico City to get here. The word itself, I’d read, was a Spanish brutalization of the Nahuatl term meaning “springs of sandy water.”

Lonely Planet described the Hotel Limón, with tiled walls and pleasant interior courtyard, as “an excellent bargain choice,” but my journalist friend Eduardo in Mexico City had mentioned another called the Hotel California. The idea of staying in a place enshrining a homegrown pop epic was too toothsome to pass up.

The taxi wheeled right at the corner of Primo Verdad - with street names like these, Xalapa was already getting on my good side - circled a tiny unlit plaza, and came to a halt. The hotel’s sign was unreadable in the dark, though as I passed beneath it I could just make out that it did really say HOTEL CALIFORNIA.

They sold soft drinks, shampoo, and condoms downstairs at the desk. At first I thought it might be a whorehouse. Was this a joke of Eduardo’s? But the second-floor room was high, white and silent, with pale green tile floors, a tall oval mirror, and a bare hanging bulb. A rattan chair, a wooden clothing rack, and two double beds completed the furnishings. Green wooden shutters opened onto a tiny balcony above the little plaza. I threw my bags onto one bed and lay down on the other, still in my clothes.

It had been a long day’s journey. An Aeromexico red-eye from L.A. had landed me in Mexico City just past dawn. For the length of a rattling morning ride across the clotted, smog-stung capital, I‘d listened to a taxi driver rain against that cabrón, el Presidente. Then the hot turning bus eastward through glaring sun and pale empty mountains, past gypsum digs and cactus farms, ever deeper into eastern Mexico, while cyborgs blew away the world on video monitors and the wide blue afternoon condensed into inscrutable fog.

I must have dozed off on the hotel bed for when I awoke a faint slice of moonlight was pooling onto the tiled floor through an open shutter. A church’s low soothing bell marked a time not coincident with the travel clock I’d placed on the bed table. I sat up, startled by the sudden feeling that somebody was asleep in the other bed, but it was just my own luggage piled there.

I walked to the wrought-iron balcony. Though it was just past ten, silence blanketed the deserted plaza. Distant heavy metal thumped from some club or bar. A half dozen crows wheeled out of the mist and swooped past, cawing. The aroma of burnt maize reached me. I could just make out the straw sombrero in the plaza below, a lone seller with his metal bucket full of roasted corn.

Suddenly Mexico flooded in, erupted behind my eyes, in my chest. ¡Mexico querido y lindo! Turning back to my room, I felt a wild, fugitive happiness I associated with earlier days in this soulful, benighted country, intimations of a life lived closer to the bone. Here in Xalapa you can feel safe, the taxi driver had said. I wanted to believe this, that I’d found a seam in the fraught world, respite from travels taken and those that lay ahead - a not unrestful place.