Another for my collection of bad Spanish interpretations.
I'm on a guided tour of the Diego Rivera murals at the Palacio Nacional. They depict an amazing array of Mexican history, and our guide is terrific. He gets to one panel and says that it has some of the "más hónicos" elements in the mural. My brain freezes because I don't have a clue what "hónico" means. By the time I re-focus, he's talking abut a pyramid floating in the sky, and it reminds me of the symbol on Grandpa George's masonic mug.
Finally, several minutes later, I realize that the guide didn't say "más hónicos," but "masónicos." (They're not shown in these pics, by the way, which show another part of the mural. That trampy woman kissing a priest is part of the Capitalism panel.)
I’ve been in Mexico City for 8 days now. After much hemming and hawing, I’ve finally decided to take time off from the city’s endless cultural sites (everything from pyramids through colonial masterpieces to modern murals) to visit the monarch butterflies, who are about 4 hours west of here. Every year, they travel 2,500 miles from Canada to a winter in the mountains of Michoacán.
The trip to Angangueo is a breeze. I get up early and make quick subway connections to the bus terminal (though the Mexico City subway is crowded even at 7:45 on a Sunday morning). Hop on a bus to Zitácuaro, which is speedy. The long distance buses play movies, whether you want them to or not. So my first views of the desert hills and mountains are accompanied by Hillary Swank’s tough-girl draw melting Clint Eastwood’s scabby old heartstrings in Million Dollar Baby. I change in Zitácuaro for Angangueo, a much more local bus, which seems to stop every hundred yards or so for something or other. I ask the fare collector to let me know when we reach my hotel, but he forgets, so I overshoot my hotel by a bit. I’m walking back toward the center of town when a guy on the street asks me if I want to visit a butterfly sanctuary. I do indeed. His name's Enrique and he offers to drive me around all afternoon for a very reasonable fee. So I hop in his big red truck and he takes me to my hotel. I drop off my stuff and off we go. It's a beautiful drive up a narrow winding road to the El Rosario sanctuary.
Great sunny views of the city nestled into its valley along the way. Once at the sanctuary, Enrique sets me up with a guide named David. He's a skinny kid who might be as old as 20. His idea of guiding turns out to be sprinting ahead of me as fast as he can go. Now this is a steep climb up stairs and rocky roads. The sanctuary entrance is at abut 10,000 feet and you have to climb another 1,000 to reach the monarch’s preferred altitude. So I'm panting away, trying my best to keep up with David. Near the top. he points to a tree. I see nothing. He mentions that it’s cloudy, which I’ve just noticed myself. It’s been a beautiful sunny day, but indeed, it started to cloud over while I was trudging up the trail. And I know that the butterflies won’t fly unless it’s sunny. So I give David a tip and send him back downhill, saying I'm going to hang out by myself and wait for the sun to come out.
Just as I reach the top it starts to rain. I finally notice that what David was pointing at was the dark brown clumps in the trees. It’s the monarchs, huddled together in huge, tight, dark colonies.
Then I’m distracted from this impressive sight when heavy hard pellets of hail start to pelt me from above. The skies open up and a torrent of surprisingly annoying hailstones are bouncing off my head (ouch) and ears (worse). I stop looking up because my nose is particularly vulnerable. In just a few moments, the path is covered in pelleted ice. The only butterflies we see are the few poor slobs that are shot down by hail bullets. A guard walks by, picking up the bodies and placing them discretely n the woods so that the path will look a bit less like the runway of butterfly death it has become.
Regardless, I convince myself that it will clear up and the butterflies will fly, so I sit there in the cold wet hail for an hour. An hour. I'm only wearing a T-shirt. I stop taking pictures because a) there's nothing to take pictures of and b) the focus will suck because my hands are shaking and my teeth are chattering.
I finally give up and trudge my way back down. It clears up about 10 minutes later, while I'm having a couple of quesadillas and trying to keep my legs from shaking.
We drive back down to town and Enrique gives me a nice tour and we gab. He was in the Mexican army, but didn’t care for it, so then went to Tennessee, where he worked for a year and a half in a Chinese restaurant. He earned $250 a week and worked every day he was in the States except for the 4th of July, when the restaurant was closed.
We stop at his house and his son joins us for the rest of our town tour. Enrique has a regular job at an electric plant, but he drives on Sundays for his father, who's got a fleet of 3 trucks. So tomorrow Ernesto, the father, will take me to a different sanctuary where hopefully my luck will be better.
I comfort myself by taking lots of pictures of the streets of Angangueo. There's no TV (or heat) in my hotel room, so never mind the Oscars.
Monday, February 23
Ernesto picks me up at 8:00. It’s a beautiful sunny morning, a bit cool, but not a cloud in the deep blue sky. Very promising. We’re off in a different big red truck to Sierra Chincua, a reserve on the other side of Angangueo.
We’re the first visitors to arrive. This reserve feels much more wild than El Rosario. The butterflies return to the mountain every year, but to a slightly different spot. Ernesto hasn’t been inside the park recently, so he chats with some men tending horses at the entrance and finds out where the butterflies are at the moment. At El Rosario, you hike up to reach the butterflies, but here at Sierra Chincua you hike down. It’s a long hike, so I have a chance to find out a lot about Ernesto. Like many Mexicans, he's cobbled together a diverified portfolio of professions. In addition to the mini-fleet of trucks, he has a ranch (corn and feed grain) and a fish stall at the local market. He drives into Mexico City twice a week to buy fish. I also learn that he has ten children, though only three still live at home (and they’re all adults).
After an hour and a half of hiking, I’m beginning to wonder if we know where we or the butterflies are. The trail has long since turned to an increasingly vague set of possibilities.
But then we find them a bit after 10:00. Yesterday’s sad brown clumps have opened up and now sparkle a deep orange in the sun.
Thousands of butterflies are flying about skittishly. As the day warms up, the air becomes quite thick with them. Butterflies as a weather condition. It’s exciting and peaceful at the same time. We walk down a ravine, deep into their chosen ground. After about half an hour, Ernesto tells me that we’re lucky to be there early, because we are now well into the habitat itself, which is off-limits to visitors. We step right up to a fallen branch that's covered with butterflies that are just waking up as the sun hits it.
He tells me about the platforms he helped a film crew install when making a documentary last year. I lie down and gaze upwards, watching the flickering and listening to the soft breeze. Then I realize it’s not the wind, but the flapping of butterfly wings I hear.
My poetic wispiness shatters when both Ernesto and me hear voices. He looks alarmed and we both have to dash uphill about 50 yards or so to get out of the forbidden zone. Running uphill at 11,000 feet is something I do not recommend to anyone used to living at sea level. After two or three strides, my heart starts to pound. By the time we reach what feels like safety, it’s going so fast I can't feel the space between beats.
False alarm. Turns out it wasn’t park guides, but just another private driver and two Canadians. So we loll in a different, equally delightful clearing for another hour, gabbing and watching the butterflies. By noon, the sun has warmed more of the colonies and the air is oranger than ever. At last a guide comes by and shoos us out of our cozy clearing, which was apparently still beyond the limit.
The hike back is long and hard—it’s uphill in this direction and we have to stop many times to catch our breath. We also pass the day’s tourist lode coming the other way. There aren’t tons of them, but I’m extremely grateful that Ernesto got me there before anyone else. He tells me that in March when the butterflies leave, they fly right through town. It must be quite a sight, though I’m quite satisfied with what I’ve seen today.
Winds to the north pushed the toxic smoke cloud out of Buenos Aires and into the north. Good for us, bad for Rosario. Here's the view of the Obelisk from my corner on Saturday and on Sunday. (By the way, depending on your browser, you should be able to click on photos here to make them a bit bigger.)
Feeling quite well, I took a trip to the Botanic Garden and sat there reading for a while. Martha gave me some extra books including one that she taught in a book group at the Cervantes years ago. So far it's fine--a very readable account of a powerful newspaper editor who controls every aspect of his life strictly except for his obsessive voyeurism of a woman half his age. But the best part is Martha's annotations, which are plentiful, explaining (in Spanish, natch) many phrases she thought might be unfamiliar to her students (she was usually right). So it's like reading with Martha sitting there beside me, which is lovely.
Here's a street scene of the sort I like.
And finally, lest I seem too ready to forgo my refunfuñando, I'll add that I was strolling past one of my favorite signs in the city, for a hardware store not too far from my apartment. I found it about two years ago and sometimes walk a block out of my way just to see it. Well, I hadn't been by that corner this year and...well, here's the sickening evidence.
Yup. Ripped out the beautiful old neon sign and replaced it with an anonymous metal rectangle. I know I shouldn't get too attached to these things, but this one hurts.
So while I was busy being deathly ill, the city has been submerged in a steadily growing smoke caused by intentional fires that got out of control in the north. It was supposed to be a managed method of pasture control, but the fires spread to areas that are hard to reach and they can't really do anything about them. Meanwhile, the current wind patterns are bringing all of the smoke into town, where it's messing up traffic and breathing and such.
They've shut down some roads, one of the subway lines, and cancelled many flights. They say the smoke itself is harmless, but that's what they always say, isn't it? When you first smell it, it's almost OK, like a neighbor's got a nice grill going, but then on second whiff, it's darker and mustier, slightly rotten. And, of course, it's everywhere. It's worse today than it was yesterday, with visibility noticibly decreasing by the end of the block in front of you.
If it's not one thing (relentless pain), it's another (creeping toxic fog).
Being sick is generally lousy. Being sick when you’re alone in a foreign country is even less fun than that. Tuesday morning I woke up violently unwell with fever, chills, stomach woes, headache, etc. Felt godawful, but figured it would be the sort of thing that at least passes quickly. Wednesday I felt a teeny bit better, but by the evening started having agonizing stomach cramps. I decided to see a doctor the next day, but then around 5:30 in the morning, the pain was relentless enough that I changed my mind and headed off to an emergency room listed in one of my travel guides.
The cabby left me off at the Faculty of Medicine building by mistake, so I had to walk a slow block to the hospital. I get to the front desk and a sleepy-headed guy looks up and explains to me that “due to a problem with the team” there are no doctors attending just now. No doctors! In an emergency room! His attitude suggested there was nothing particularly unusual about this. He gave me the name of another hospital and directions to the bathroom. But when I got to the latter at the end of a long corridor, it was a scene Poe would have admired, with dripping walls and scrapings of rust everywhere. Worse, inside each stall was one of those awful squat-blocks in the floor instead of a toilet. Plus, not a scrap of toilet paper. So I left and didn’t feel up to trying another hospital, so I got a cab and came home.
Got a doctor’s appointment for 10:45. He gave me a rather cursory once over, listened to my stomach with his stethoscope, and took my blood pressure. His verdict: stomach infection. So I’m on antibiotics. They sure don’t go in for non-essential testing here. No blood test or samples or even temperature. Still, he seemed quite certain. I hope he’s right.
It would be quite possible (and I’m sure it’s been done) to assemble a photo book that makes Buenos Aires look just like Paris. The city’s chock full of pretty vistas like this one, that mix the rugged South American aloe-plant with the European cupid and exquisite mansards.
The thing is, almost nowhere in the city actually looks like that, because when you turn around, here’s what you see.
The crappy modern is inextricable from the elegant past, and you have assume a pretty selection point of view to find a postcard-perfect city. I’ve come to the point that I actually prefer it this way because with every shift of your head, you get a new view, another chance to figure out what the hell this city is really like.
Saturday night I decided I’d go to the independent film festival here, the BAFICI. Although I’m not usually drawn to them, I found two hour-long documentaries that seemed appealing. Plus there were tickets available (lots of shows sell out in advance.) One was set in Cleveland and the other was a French film-maker’s view of Buenos Aires. So I got tickets to both (they were timed just right.)
The first film is called The Golden Age of Fish. It focuses on an African-American geologist in Cleveland, the camera following her around through various daily chores, and also recording a fake public service announcement. This is interspersed with found footage of mostly two varieties: news coverage of murder/suicide stories in Cleveland’s black community in the 70s, and sports footage. It’s done in an experimental style, so the narrative is well submerged, but the found clips are extremely interesting and the geologist (who turns out to be an actress playing the part) is very likable. By the end, I was quite drawn into the director’s poking at layers of history and the traces they leave today.
So I decided to get over my usual shyness and introduce myself to the director, Kevin Jerome Everson, using our Cleveland connection as an excuse. He was extremely friendly, and we’re immediately gabbing away about the flats, Hough, Mansfield and the Browns (I faked the last part by nodding at what I hope were appropriate moments.) For an experimental film director, he’s extremely accessible and free from artsy mannerisms.
Turns out he’s got a ticket for the next movie, too, so we go together. Despues de la Revolucion was a poetic analysis of video footage that the director took of Buenos Aires during his first visit here four years ago when he was presenting another film at BAFICI. A literally naked self-portrait, as it includes the director’s hotel room sex with a guy he’d been corresponding with by e-mail, as well as his use of cocaine. The narration was Frenchy/philosophical, which contrasted nicely with the images, which were rough and non-poetic or touristic.
Kevin invited me to a BAFICI after-party at a club (Palacio Alsina) and even though the techno music was dreary, it was a very nice night out. I met Kevin again yesterday to show him around town a bit. Here he is in the Recoleta cemetery.
He turns out to be quite prominent on the festival/museum circuit, and his work is included in this year’s Whitney Biennial and he’s been shown at MOMA. I fessed up yesterday that I hated this year’s Biennial and we had a pretty good talk about it. He gave me two disks of his movies and I gave him a copy of Great Estimations for his daughter.
Now, when I go to festivals or plays or concerts, I often fantasize about going up to the director or actor or singer afterwards and hitting it off and going to after parties. Of course, I don’t usually do it and when I do, it usually ends with a friendly smile and a wave. So this was pretty swell. The lesson here is either that a) good things happen when you make yourself open to them or b) people from Cleveland are nicer than other people.
