A dust-mote among all the personal rearrangements we’re are all having to suck up, given the bigger things going on right now, is that today Beret and I were scheduled to embark on a seven-week pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, walking 500 miles across northern Spain.
I’m not Catholic, or even much of a Christian, but pilgrimage has always held a romantic appeal for me. Beret and I met in college in a literature class on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The class was tedious; we spent almost the entire semester laboriously dissecting small piece of the text. But I remember fondly Chaucer’s Middle English wit and cadence, chronicling the ancient ritual of travelers taking to the road as March turns to April, seeking the “holy blissful martyr” who “holpen them when they were seeke.” And along the way, they rested at inns, passing the time by telling each other tales.
Few of us are on any physical roads at present, but we are nevertheless on a kind of journey. So to pass the time, I’ll tell you a tale of Mexico, the place I first learned to love.
In 1982, upon graduating into the Colorado oil recession, I headed down to El Paso and walked across the border. I arrived a brittle young man, spouting Marx and Joyce but underneath it all afraid of my own shadow. Mexico broke me open. I first found my way to Tulum, in those days an empty stretch of beach with a few thatched huts clustered around a soapy communal well, next to a Mayan village just beginning to cater to the trickle of tourists arriving by bus from the barely-opened new resort of Cancún, a hundred miles up the coast. I stayed there two weeks, sleeping in a hammock. Once a Mexican policeman patrolling the beach caught my friend sunbathing nude – he had to pay a $7 bribe from a wallet he’d buried in the sand. Only then would the cop let him put his swimsuit back on. But otherwise we felt utterly safe. I spent the next four months wandering the ruins in Yucatán and Chiapas, knocking around bookstores and cafes in Mexico City, taking an ancient Pullman train from Mazatlán to the border, and sleeping in the desert south of Mexicali before crossing back at Calexico. I’d spent less than $1000, learned basic Spanish, kept parental expectations at bay, and let Mexico work its medicine on my gringo soul.
But the next year was when the charm truly took hold, when Beret and I were first in Guadalajara together. Of course falling in love is intoxicating. But Mexico smelled of everything my world did not. Cinnamon and tortillas, diesel smoke and newspaper, shoeshine and forgiveness. You could walk all evening on the cobbled and cloistered streets until the rats gorged on your footsteps. And the city’s great public buildings featured, not the old cloistered portraits of Catholicism, but the towering murals of Orozco.
Mexico has always celebrated “mixture” — of food, of races, of cultures, of ideas – but that word does no justice to the actual process. To truly “mix” the heart is to break apart, to surrender one’s self to the stone and slab of greater forces, and to emerge as someone else. Mexico has been ground, like a good chocolate mole, from indigenous, Spanish, French, and gringo influences for hundreds of years, into one of the world’s richest cultures. We who disrespect – even fear – Mexico have no concept of our loss.
Still, when you’re in in love like I was, that March in Guadalajara 36 years ago, you don’t really grind. You burn. Every time I looked out my balcony window overlooking the old square and saw Beret come around the corner in her sky blue blouse, watched her cross the cobbled street, heard her voice echo in the stone entryway below, I burned. Like Orozco’s “Man on Fire”, below. I burned.
