Winter quarters here in southern Sonora are a small casita inside the walled grounds of a larger villa, which sounds exactly as comfortable and peaceful as it is. The back wall of the casita forms a length of the wall surrounding the property and abuts the street along the property front. In fact, all the residences along Durango are similarly walled from the street in a continuous and varied stucco and brick parapet, save for a large tract of vacant, scrubby ground immediately across the street, the holding of an old tequila factory (now a residence in its own right). The street, with its stretch of unoccupied ground, stretches about 100 meters, up to the corner where it makes an ell and continues along another outside tract of trees and cactus.
I mention all of these particulars because in Mexico such places are known as "Tailgate Heaven: An Amazing Free Party Venue." The ell at the corner, with vacant space on the outside of the bend in both directions, forms a comfortable nook for six or eight vehicles, many of them cumbered with the sound capabilities of a national soccer stadium or the Nuremburg Platz in its heyday.
The ell tends to draw a crowd after about 9:00 p.m. ("gringo midnight") on any holiday. And holidays are frequent here - the "Twelve Days of Christmas" is more than a harmless if cloying Christmas carol, it is a confirmed and pernicious custom, something to be taken literally. According to some perverse gloss on the gospel account, it took the three wise men exactly twelve days to track down the young spawn of a miscreant deity, and to offload their cargo of luxury items (which have apparently been subsequently absorbed into the Vatican treasury). As a consequence, the Nativity in Mexico stretches on for an interminable span, culminating on the twelfth day, when every good child gets to explode its gift of fireworks in the street outside my window.
The generous disbursal of holidays throughout the calendar offers an instructive lesson in the cultural relativity of time, both as a general concept and as an arena within which people conduct their daily comings and goings. Time in Mexico is not (yet) the same as money. Time is a flexible, ever-slowing and quickening stream, an arena in which the tempo changes according as the gods may pipe the dance. The clock has little say in the matter, and the calendar, as I say, is studded with the lacunae we call Navidad, the Day of the Magi, the Day of the Dead, the feast of one or other of the vast necropolis of saints, angels, Benito Juarezes and other fathers of the nation.
Winter is a slow time as I have just explained. In winter also comes the Day of the Dead, another quasi-religious celebration. (Mexico is somewhat encumbered by its religion, though blessedly little with theology.) On my first visit to Alamos, nearly a decade ago, I spent a month in a camping park that abuts the local cemetario, its own village of sarcophagi in which a bevy of tearful angels vie with Blessed Virgins of Guadelupe for majority. The resident dead, you'd expect, would be quiet sorts, and so they were until the weekends when, each Friday and Saturday night, the locals would invade the peace of the graves and roister well into the next day. The old caretaker at the trailer park, Firmin, was a regular at these Tecate-cum-tequila bouts, and would often appear at his post late the following day, looking and moving more like an honoree than a participant in the weekly Dia de las Muertes.
The stereotypical picture of a Mexican holiday used to be the lazy tourista lulled into siesta time by the strains of a gentle guitar quartet serenading below the balcony. Maybe a mariachi group strolling amongst the tables in a cantena. Not that I'd particularly look forward to that, but I can imagine the all-inclusive-resort-and-cruise crowd thinking it was quaint. Back at the ell the music and the party go on until someone calls the police, who obligingly move the revelers on. And perhaps the noise would be less objectionable if it were not car radios pumping out Mexican rap and tech-Mex pop and the dreaded ballads with a section of horns and oompah-pah tubas.
These are merely cultural observations, you understand. I'm not really complaining, I hope. Still, I never thought I'd ever say the words, "Give me a high school band playing Sousa." I haven't said it. Yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment