December 31, 2013
When I was in my last year in law school and dating Bill, I accepted an invitation from my cousins in Mexico City and Puebla to visit them over the holidays. Bill was deep in work during a particularly arduous December for trust and estate lawyers trying to meet clients' demands before December 31. While Bill had never been to Mexico, he dealt with many Mexican clients and was eager to know the country. So we agreed that after Christmas, we would leave for Mexico, I arriving before him in Puebla, spending a few days in the area and ending in Mexico City.
My Mexican relatives are products of the diaspora of refugees from the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. My mother's first cousin, Andrès Garcia Gabin, had fought for the ill-fated Spanish Republic and, fleeing over the French border when Franco's armies swept all before them in the last weeks of the war, found himself in a French internment camp. The French were not eager to take in Spanish refugee soldiers as my cousin told it, but Mexico accepted 60,000 refugee Spaniards. My cousin was shipped to Mexico's hinterlands, where he found himself on what was a virtual chain gang, and from which he ran away to Puebla.
In Puebla he met Sira Vélez, a golden-eyed mestiza from a more or less middle-class family from Cholula. The Spanish bloodline was reinforced, and their children: Maruja, Andrés Jr., and Jorge were strongly identified with Spain. Andrés came to visit my parents while I was in law school and invited me to visit him in Mexico City, known as the "D.F." ("Federal District") for short. I spent the post-Christmas holidays that year with Andrés and his partner, Luis Antonio Morales, a young man from a Puerto Rican family whose father had worked for the U.S. State Department all over Latin America.
Andrés and Luis had been a couple for fifteen years at least by the time I first visited them. Andrés was an architect who took private commissions as well as working under contract for Volkswagen, trying to bridge the cultural differences between the Mexicans and the Germans.
The Mexicans, migrants from small villages, would return to their villages for all the local feasts, not returning to work until Tuesday or Wednesday, which drove the Volkswagen managers wild. Only by offering the latest large appliances to employees with the best attendance records, was the problem brought under control. If the Mexican worker was nursing a hangover on Monday, the human resources manager would call the home. When the wife answered and explained her husband was too ill to go to work, the manager would tell her he was sorry to hear that, as that meant her family would be disqualified from a chance at the latest refrigerator-freezer. Five minutes after the call ended, the man was dressing for work.
Andrés and Luis lived in an affluent colonia, a suburb known as Lomas de Tarango. The house had been designed by Andrés in the style of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, with broad, brightly-colored wall planes inside and out. The two men also owned a mountain getaway about an hour from the D.F., in Villalpina, a favorite spot for professional rock climbers to settle.
Maruja, the eldest of the three siblings, lived a rather conventional life in Puebla with her husband and three children. She was an accountant, who worked for her parents' business, which manufactured curtain tassels, a surprisingly profitable business run out of Andrés and Sira's home at 1714-A Calle Cinco Poniente (West Fifth Street).
Jorge, the youngest of the children, had at one time been a semi-professional soccer player. He was engaged to Betty, the daughter of a gasoline station owner in the Sierra, a prosperous businessman in Tetziutlán. It was to Jorge that Bill and I were first entrusted when we made our way to Puebla.
Jorge had planned that we would go to the rancho belonging to Betty's family for two nights, December 30 and December 31, returning to Puebla on New Year's Day. He had also made noises about our going to the beach at Veracruz, to which Bill was very much looking forward. However, once I arrived in Puebla, it became obvious that Jorge's plans for us had been organized to suit Jorge and not with us in mind.
When Bill arrived he was happy to see my mother's cousins and eager to go to the beach to start what he thought would be a last weekend of the year by the Gulf of Mexico the next day. Instead, Jorge took us to Tetziutlán by way of a very odd seafood restaurant in the mountains.
The restaurant was not odd because it was in the mountains and served seafood, although that was curious. The restaurant was odd because in one of the private rooms was an enormous oil painting of Adolf Hitler standing at the head of the table where his Cabinet met in the Reichstag, the members of the Cabinet surrounding him. I was reminded of the pro-Nazi figures in Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, which our trip was beginning to resemble.
When we got to Tetziutlán, we smelled it before we saw it. Betty's father was not only the owner of the gasoline concessions, he was also a dealer in new and used tires. The used tires were burned to some purpose outside Tetziutlán, and the odor could be picked up several miles away. (The same is true with regard to the smell of industrial chicken processing in Fayettevillle, Arkansas, but that's another story.) We drove up to the house belonging to Betty's family and were escorted in.
The family consisted of Betty's father and mother and numerous aunts, all dressed in funereal black, none speaking a word of English. The only person who spoke any English at all was Betty's brother, who had been on a buying trip to Akron, Ohio. The conversational potential of that event was limited, even for someone usually as good at small talk as Bill was. After the meet and greet was over, we were taken to a hotel in the town. As we were not yet married, there was no question of Betty's family housing us.
The hotel was a windowless blockhouse with a central atrium and no windows to the outside. When we walked around the town looking for somewhere to eat, all we could find were pulquerías, low-class bars selling a cheap spirit made of cactus, pulque. (It is said to be inebriating but nutritious.)
We found a simple parrillada, a no frills restaurant featuring only grilled goat and beef, and went back to the hotel to confer.
We quickly came to agreement that we would leave Tetziutlán the next day, first thing in the morning after taking our leave of Jorge and Betty. We had figured out that we could take three buses back to Puebla and that it would be an adventure. We would meet Jorge and Betty in the zócalo, the central plaza in Puebla and return to Andrés and Sira's house, with them none the wiser. We made a reservation at the Hotel San Vicente, next to Puebla's cathedral and a dinner reservation at Carlos and Charlie's, a chain restaurant in Puebla.
The next morning I took Jorge aside and explained Bill was unhappy and that I had to leave with him so that we would spend the night in Puebla, meeting up with Jorge and Betty on New Year's Day. After an initial reservation, Jorge realized the plan was foolproof and he would be free of any responsibility for entertaining us, and that was that. We boarded the first bus and the happy couple waved us away.
What followed was a magical mystery tour through the Mexico few tourists see. At each stop, the bus --which was traveling in the early morning-- picked up one more young Mexicana dressed in a glitzy mini-dress, more-or-less matching shoes and earrings. The little transistor radio blared ranchera music raucously. As the bus swayed along the non-barricaded mountain roads, the Christmas ornaments dangling from the rearview mirror swung in time with its swerves. It took us three or four hours to make it to Puebla on the rickety yellow schoolbuses turned into public transport , but the experience was unforgettably Mexican and worthwhile.
We checked into the Hotel San Vicente, and I called my mother. I had called her for advice from Tetziutlán, asking how best to handle the situation from the point of view of her first cousin and his wife, with whom she was close. To her credit, she strongly advised us to get out of there and confirmed my sense that her cousin would be unhappy to know Jorge had put his pleasure before his guests'. Once settled in the San Vicente, we could relax and contemplate New Year's Eve there.
We couldn't find anywhere that looked any more appetizing to spend New Year's Eve in than Carlos and Charlie's. There's a large Lebanese population in Puebla, which has its own Centro Libanés, a large catering hall. Anyone who could pay the cost of the evening could enjoy a New Year's Eve celebration inside, but the cultural cocktail offered was a bridge too far. We decided to keep our reservation at Carlos and Charlie's.
The evening went as might be predicted: all Carlos and Charlie's offer young hostesses wearing banderillas, gun cartridge holders large enough to cram with shot glasses for tequila. The menu features tourist-style Mexican food and there are mariachis. Mariachi music is so loud, it reminds me of the old joke about the Salvation Army: First they tell you about hell, then they tell you what it sounds like. Eating our meal to the noise of mariachis playing at full volume beside our chairs was not our idea of a good time --although the mariachis seemed to think that we thought it was.
The point was, we had escaped what would have no doubt been a still more hair-raising New Year's Eve in Tetziutlán. The next day we met Jorge and Betty (who married not too much later) and. asked by Sira and Andrés how we liked Tetziutlán and the Sierra, said only the nicest things.
January 2 we returned to the D.F., where Andrés and Luis became our hosts for the next few days. We were treated to true Mexican hospitality: meals cooked by their maid and served in the beautiful formal dining room of their house, with its beautiful 18th century portrait of Christ bearing a crown of thorns and other fine works of art, visits to Mexico City's great museums, and most unexpected of all, the Epiphany Evening party at the María Isabel Hilton, in the "Pink Zone", Mexico City's Fifth Avenue. At the dinner all the contestants from Latin America for the "Miss World" title were the guests of honor. Luis, who ran the state of Texas' office in Mexico City squired that year's Miss Texas, Laura Haring who went on to win the "Miss World." title and go on to make movies ("Mulholland Drive" and "Lambada", notably). She autographed for Bill a photo taken of the group at the table . He always smiled when he told this part of the story and I still have the photo, with its autograph "Love, Laura Haring".
Earlier, told of what had happened to us at the hands of his brother, my cousin Andrés rolled his eyes and snorted, "My brother! Tetziutlán is the armpit of Mexico!"
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