Surreal Inspiration in
Mexico's Back Woods
by Nicholas Travers
The best feeling for any traveler is discovery, stumbling upon a
truly wonderful place that you hadn’t prepared to fall in love
with. The area around Tantoyuca, Veracruz, ten hours northeast of
Mexico City, frankly offered little in the way of this kind of
inspiration. As teachers, Lisa and I grew to love the small
ranching community. As travelers, though, it didn’t take long to
run out of places to visit. We strolled through local markets,
awkwardly “helped out” on friends’ ranches, sprawled upon 2-star
beaches next to oil refineries, or drank beers in a bar with a
famous cursing parrot. Mexico’s splendid resorts and ruins were
hundreds of miles away, and we were obliged to readjust our
expectations.
The one bright prospect seemed to be Xilitla (“he’ll-eat-la”).
Some of our Tantoyucan friends rated it no better than beer and
profanity with the parrot, but others raved about it. Something
about a mad English duke who lived there—oh, and a nice pool in
the jungle to swim in. It was close as the crow flies, but high in
the Eastern Sierra Madre and tricky to reach overland. Interested,
I consulted Lonely Planet for more information. But in a thousand
and ten pages devoted to the best of Mexico, this travelers’ bible
set aside only half a dozen lines for Xilitla, highlighting “a
16th century church and mission, a temperate climate, and lots of
rain.” Not exactly euphoria. On the other hand, we simply wanted a
break, in my case from chasing around 6 to 13-year-olds who didn’t
understand me, though they sometimes found me entertaining. In
addition, we needed respite from a monotonous heat that seemed to
be draining our very life force. In these circumstances, Xilitla
hovered in my imagination like a hill station high above the heat
and troubles of the plains, waiting to cleanse and revitalize us.
Our friends insisted we take a circuitous route out to the coastal
city of Tampico, and then back towards the mountains. They flatly
rejected the idea we could negotiate the back roads without
trouble. After all, we spoke patchy Spanish. No doubt we would get
lost, or ripped off, or mugged, or raped, or all the above, all at
once, by banditos lurking in the hills, if we took the 3rd-class
buses to Xilitla.
 As
a result we spent most of the day on an air-conditioned coach,
humming across the wide flood plains that fan out from the Rio
Panuca. Staring vacantly out the window, I counted hundreds of
bats sleeping upside-down along the wires. We changed buses in a
town called Ciudad Valles, and then continued across a featureless
landscape, as stubbornly thorny and dry as Tantoyuca. We didn’t
seem to be getting anywhere.
In Mexico, however, you have to expect the unexpected. It’s a
cliché, but as savvy as you think you’ve become, the country
always catches you off-guard. In this case, our third bus was
gradually drifting towards the only anomaly in the tired scenery
around us: an abrupt and seemingly insurmountable shelf of stone
to the west. It was like a giant curb against the horizon. Then,
out of nowhere, the plains folded up into compact, furry
mountains, crowding the bus on all sides. Moments before, the
plains had stretched for miles; now there was no trace of them.
The old bus floated past tidy white missions and schoolhouses,
signs that we were entering the predominantly aboriginal heart of
the Huasteca. At the side of the road, Indian women tended
overflowing citrus stands. Their white dresses, in traditional
style, were embroidered across the shoulders with flowers and
animals, and stood out vividly in the sunshine. Only minutes above
the sun-dried plains, the rainbow selection of green limes, sweet
lemons and oranges dazzled my eyes. And it seemed that with every
mountain we swept around, a larger, more colorful and more
tantalizing selection of fruit awaited us on the other side. It
was heating up outside, and the sun was beating down on the few
vehicles passing through the mountains. None could resist the
white-frocked temptresses and their wares. Intoxicated passengers
began to plead with our driver to pull over, which he was only too
happy to do. Once we’d started up again, the few passengers who
hadn’t filled their shirts with oranges watched like hungry dogs
while the rest of us licked at the juice trickling down our chins.
The driver had no choice but to stop again, a few turns ahead, or
I think he would have been assaulted by his deliriously thirsty
contingent.
We turned onto a narrow road and began the last climb up a steep
valley. Imposing mountains now surrounded us. Tucked against the
mountainside, simple white crosses with dried garlands of flowers
marked the road’s casualties. We held on with white knuckles.
Every time the driver dropped the clutch and began fumbling for
the next gear, the bus slowed, hung, then gave us the ‘hear we go’
feeling of falling back toward the guard rail -- was there a guard
rail? -- until at the last possible moment (when the blood had
completely drained from my face), the engine caught with a
whiplash, and we grumbled up to the next corner.
Xilitla is as high as the road and the valley goes. 3000 feet up,
it perches regally across the top of a small mountain. More peaks
overlap in all directions, including the famous la Silleta,
slicing into the sky like a shark’s tooth. We were all grateful to
be on two feet again after a long day of travel, and coming from
the cauldron of Tantoyuca, we couldn’t get enough of a cool breeze
that played amongst the buildings. We climbed a bumpy old street,
which doubles as the weekend market, to the town’s centre. The
shopping was mellowing out along with the afternoon, but the
street was still lined with kiosks impossibly full of tools, or
candy, or stationary. On dusty blankets, equally dusty artisans
sat behind clay dishes and rich-smelling leather bags, whips and
other horse gear. A decrepit wrought-iron stage crowned the centre
of the town square alongside a bust of Juarez, looking stern. A
few low, stone cervecerias on the side of the road warned women
not to bother coming inside. Machismo was not in short supply. A
cowboy swaggered past, wearing a silver buckle the size of a side
plate. His shirt was unbuttoned to his navel, and his snakeskin
boots still had the vipers’ heads rearing out of the uppers, fangs
bared.
~~~
As we turned a corner,
we were given a taste of what distinguishes Xilitla from other
mountain towns. Below us was a tall, white building, more elegant
than other buildings we’d seen, with three floors of columns and
arches and a garden of palms and bougainvillea that climbed the
walls and spilled over the fences. It turned out to be the best
guest house in town, El Castillo, where we would happily
have stayed if our budget had permitted. But our eyes were riveted
to two bizarre structures on the roof. One appeared to be a
glassed-in sunroom perched on six powder-blue and pink candy
sticks. The other, connected to the sunroom by a narrow catwalk,
looked like an enormous triangular party hat, supported at the
corners by three more pink and blue columns, and crowned with a
large, pink-tipped flower that must literally weigh a ton. Jutting
up through the centre of the flower was a television antenna.
Whether people could pop out of the flower to look around was
unclear, but a spiral staircase swept up into the centre of the
hat and then disappeared.
It’s hard to convey how incongruous it felt to be confronted with
a building like that in as traditional a place as Xilitla. It was
like meeting a flamingo in Greenland. Yet there it was, a first
glimpse of the indelible impression that Mr. Edward James has left
on this tiny mountain community. An extremely wealthy English
aristocrat, James was at the centre of the surrealist movement and
friend and patron to Salvador Dali, René Magritte and many others.
James himself was also as eccentric as they come. On a postcard,
he looks like a cross between Moses and the Ancient Mariner, with
a flowing white beard tucked into his poncho. As a student at
Oxford, he lined the walls of his room with silk and ran his
errands in a Rolls Royce. He painted one of his English mansions
fuscia pink. Wooden moldings like upside-down curtains hung
beneath the windows. He answered phone calls with a Salvador
Dali-designed lobster telephone. Yet by some strange twist of
fate, it was Xilitla, buried in the mountains a world away, which
would enchant him. Traveling across Mexico in the late 1940s with
a friend and guide, he fell under the spell of this mountain
hamlet, and acquired some 80 acres of mountain forest just outside
of town.
Soon after, he began to build, though it goes without saying that
Edward James was not the sort of man to lay down a wooden cabin
and call it a day. El Castillo, the guest house that first
caught our attention, is conservative compared to some of the
things we saw the next day. Far removed from his peers, hidden in
the jungle just outside of Xilitla, James built las Pozas,
surely one of the world’s great surrealist masterpieces. Working
around the stream that cascaded through his land, he and a team of
workers poured their imaginations into unbelievable wooden molds,
from which a delightful garden emerged. In the decades that
followed, las Pozas was added to again and again, until
dozens of impressive buildings and countless sculptures were
scattered through his mountain forest.
 The
following day, Lisa and I went to see for ourselves. We were
directed out of town on a little-used track. Kids froze mid-play
in the dirt to stare at us. Chickens and hideous turkeys pecked
among the trash beside the road. Around a bend in the path we saw
a rusted-out truck strangely nested in the branches of a tree,
about a hundred feet below the driveway where it used to live. On
the cliffs above us were box-like houses that had been enlarged to
precarious proportions. They clung to their slender foundations
for dear life. Last night’s cool breeze was forgotten; despite the
altitude, the sky was azure blue, and the sun was a fierce
whiteness directly above us. Black vultures soared overhead,
burning up and disappearing into the dazzling white and then
cutting black sharply against the blue. We passed a bush alive
with a thousand eyes. They were butterflies, winking at us from
circles that ornamented orange, violet and yellow wings.
When our trail wandered into the trees, we entered a fantasy
world. Roughly cut stones paved our way as we walked between a
gauntlet of rearing stone snakes, tongues outstretched. Crowding
behind, the forest itself was bursting at the seams, with greenery
growing up and out, and out of other things growing in other
directions. Layer upon layer of this tropical forest climbed
towards the sky, which was reduced to faint blue windows. We
couldn’t find a map, or anyone to pay an admission fee to. I’m
sure if we’d looked hard enough someone would have shown us
around, but on our afternoon at las Pozas we only saw a scattering
of people. We had that wonderful feeling of happening upon a
secret, magical garden, and in that frame of mind the more lost we
were the better.
We veered onto narrow paths that felt like the right way to go.
With every turn more concrete things emerged, but it was hard to
believe they were made of the same material as curbs, bricks and
roadblocks. In one place two hands were sticking up out of the
soil, disturbingly detailed, a network of veins fanning out from
wrinkly knuckles. Elsewhere vibrant flowers (yes, made of stone),
big and beautifully crafted, wide and fleshy, soaked up the
sunshine. And the man-made stone flora didn’t end there; we passed
cacti and even whole stands of bamboo. Many other objects, though
sinuous and vaguely plant-like, nonetheless defied description.
They belonged to the world of dreams.
Sections of much larger structures emerged up the hillsides, half
hidden amongst the greenery-like fantasy tree houses. Like kids we
said, “Wow!” and scrambled up rough paths to get to them. Two
promising, balanced spiral staircases climbed elegantly upwards.
Neither reached a second floor, though they should have, and it
didn’t look like a floor had simply collapsed. There just wasn’t
one. They reminded me of the stairs at airports that stand
uselessly in the middle of the tarmac until a plane arrives. These
steps reached, or became, as they twisted, two concrete flowers,
similar to the chunky blossom atop the El Castillo guest
house.
Many constructions seemed to be half-built houses abandoned to the
jungle. The mind refused to accept that these buildings were
finished, perhaps because living there would be like living in one
of M.C. Escher’s fantastic palaces. Picture ten-metre diving
towers designed by Picasso. Fluted columns held up delicate floors
that hung in midair but also held up another floor, thirty or
forty feet off the ground, which in turn secured two more columns
shaped like nothing I’d seen before, reaching up towards the sky.
Naked staircases, climbing not straight but in waves, spiraled up
to meet these empty, exposed floors. The names of the buildings,
which I learned later, only seemed to be jokes: “The House with a
Roof like a Whale,” or “The House with Three Stories that Might be
Five.” In fact, these tags quite accurately described places that
just couldn’t be, but nonetheless were standing in front of you.
Perhaps most surprising was that the houses, for all their
weirdness, were apparently waiting for tenants. They were
structurally sound, and seemed to invite you to carry a table and
chair up to their naked ledges. Forget you’re thirty feet above
the forest floor. Have some more toast. Another cup of tea?
~~~
As the story goes,
Edward James was delighted by how well orchids grew in his new
forest. At one point, thousands of them were blooming amongst the
trees. Painfully, however, a single bitterly cold winter wiped
them out. Grieved by this loss, James at the same moment found
artistic inspiration, deciding to replace those ephemeral blossoms
with flora that could withstand the seasons. The first stone
orchid unleashed a creative fervor that, for decades, never really
abated. The stream falling through his land to the valley below
was redirected to create dramatic waterfalls and a stairway of
eight pools. The numerous buildings we had been checking out were
painstakingly raised towards the sky. Apparently James’
imagination had no bounds, and money was not an issue. Naked rods,
jutting up out of many of the structures we came across, reminded
us that this garden was meant by its maker to be even bigger. If
you climb up to the precarious “rooms” in his houses, you’ll see
they are wired for electricity, the result of his dream to
illuminate his creation at night. During peak production, las
Pozas employed 150 people, and by Edward James’s death in 1984 it
must have swallowed millions of dollars.
 The
bass line roar of the water had been serenading us all afternoon
without us really noticing it. But with sweat pouring down, we
could no longer resist its call, and went looking for the pools
that this garden is named for. We soon found one under a
waterfall, surrounded by a chimney of trees, the sun dancing on
the rocks under the surface. A small Grecian temple stood
poolside, bright red bougainvillea reaching down from its roof.
For me, a pool under a waterfall is about as good as it gets. But
this spot, surrounded by trees, with birds diving and butterflies
tumbling like leaves, was simply perfection. The clear green color
of the pool was bliss in itself, but I have no words for the
pleasure I felt when I finally sank into the water. I wished time
would melt like a Dali clock and allow my serenity to linger for
ages. Looking up, I could see a natural bowl where there must have
been another pool, and even further up the mountainside the
largest waterfall fell from a groove in the rocks. But this one
was enough. The tranquilizing sound of the water gurgling down the
rocks, the deeper pounding of the waterfalls, and the cool fingers
of the stream against my body swept away my students’ shrill
voices and left me totally revitalized. I let myself sink under
the water, where I could only see a swimming blur of blue, green
and white light above me.
~~~
The most surreal
aspect of las Pozas is its impossible presence in a heartland of
very different traditions, which stretch back before the arrival
of Cortes. To the Xilitlans chatting on market days Edward James’s
undertaking must have seemed like madness. Yet the eccentric
Englishman has left behind a legacy that continues to enthrall the
travelers that go out of their way to find it. While a lot of
surrealist works are desolate and unapproachable in their
absurdity, las Pozas remains accessible. In Dali’s wastelands,
human aspirations stand out in naked absurdity. James’s creations
are also strange sights. However, the function the artist upended
in his houses is righted by the odd dance of joy they enact with
the forest. No imagination is going to top, for example, the more
than 300 varieties of birds native to these mountain forests, or
the feeling of being dwarfed by the vegetation. Jurassic-sized
ferns grow well above walkways that are themselves often 10 feet
above the forest floor. Even the weirdest thinkers are humbled by
nature’s magic, and in that sense the structures we beheld
expressed an imagination always marveling at the beauty of its
surroundings.
Finally, like all artists, James clearly hoped others would
appreciate what he’d done. He always encouraged the locals to come
and cool off in his pools. His Canadian guests were overwhelmingly
appreciative. We’d wanted cool and escape, and we’d found both, of
course, but also profound inspiration, a gift that was going to
keep us sane through many hot days of work to come. We had
discovered a real gem off the beaten track. Submerged in a
turquoise pool with a big smile on my face, I gave thanks to Mr.
James for his act of generosity.
© Nicholas Travers 2004
|
