Mexican Adventure
In June 1967, the Boyd family embarked on a grand adventure. We were going to live in Mexico, as my father had been granted a year’s sabbatical to study art at the Instituto Allende, an international school of fine arts. In our atlas, San Miguel de Allende was only a grey dot lost in the central plateau of Mexico. At first, it seemed unthinkable that we were actually planning to move there for an entire year, upsetting our normal schedules, abandoning our schools and friends, and leaving behind the familiarity that held our days together. My parents started to play mariachi records during the dinner hour, poring over highway maps and tossing out Spanish phrases to each other. Vivien and I looked forward to the exotic change of scenery, but we were unable to imagine how we could survive without the usual props that supported our daily routines. One of my greatest concerns was that we would be deprived of “our” music; after all, we were children of the sixties and the innovative pop and folk songs of the era were being indelibly etched into our teenage psyches.
During the week prior to leaving, I painstakingly taped all my favourite records: the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Gordon Lightfoot, Donovan, and of course, the master song craftsman of the decade, Bob Dylan. Beethoven, Mozart, Segovia, and Julian Bream took their places beside Mick Jagger’s “Goin’ Home” and “Lady Jane.”
When we reached the date on the calendar with the huge red circle, my family piled into the blue VW bus that was to carry us fifteen hundred miles south into the unknown, toward that remote dot in the atlas. In true sixties style, we had painted colourful flowers on the van’s interior and designed an ornate sign that read “Toronto to Mexico” for the back window, to share the adventure with fellow motorists. Our lumpy luggage, which was roped to the roof, included essentials for a year’s survival: blankets, canvases, paints, books, clothes, a Spanish dictionary, and a homemade butterfly net.
Damien, who had developed a keen interest in entomology, had been busily studying all the beetles, spiders, and butterflies he hoped to collect in the “land of the plumed serpent.” Every time we set up camp, he erected a white sheet and an ultraviolet spotlight to lure any nocturnal creepy crawly in the vicinity. Vivien and I grimaced at the gigantic bugs he plucked off the sheet, but I felt sorry for the fragile moths and butterflies that he “put to sleep” within his chloroform jar. They flapped helplessly inside my brother’s glass prison, as he rattled off their Latin names and made a dated entry in his log while assuring us they felt no pain. It was the beginning of an enormous collection he still treasures to this day.
We continued southward along endless, tidy highways through the undulating countryside of Missouri and Tennessee to the flat terrain of Texas, where the sky expanded to meet the horizon, until, after San Antonio, one solitary empty highway dissecting the parched desert led onward to the Rio Grande. We made camp under the stars to the deafening chorus of the night creatures: tree frogs and cicadas. As the fireflies danced around us, my father added a sense of drama, broadcasting his beloved tape of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. I felt adrift, adventure beckoning and destination unknown. My old world was beginning to crumble; the familiar was giving way to the new.
After several days of journeying, the skyline of Laredo appeared out of the dusty plain. Excitedly, we motored up to the customs area, where Mexicans waited patiently with bulging bundles and silent children. Order gave way to apparent disorder as officious immigration authorities with curling black moustaches dispensed visas with exaggerated authority. Then, with passports stamped, we were ready to enter another world.
Our trusty VW rumbled us across a hundred miles of scrubland, through the twisting mountain passes to Matehuala, where humanlike forms of the great Joshua trees beckoned us along empty desert roads to the state of Guanajuato. Approaching San Miguel after five days of travel, I became aware of a worried expression on my mother’s face. She had noticed the small homes of crumbling adobe. “How am I ever going to live in one of these dilapidated places for a year with John and the children?” I could almost hear her muttering to herself. We drove up and down bumpy cobblestone roads observing rebozo-wrapped women and sombreroed menfolk leading burros laden with chopped wood. How quaint and charming — most certainly different from Toronto — but where could we ever find a place to live? We motored into the central town square, or El Jardín, where people strolled or sat enjoying the afternoon sunshine. Vivien and I jumped out dressed in our miniskirts, which immediately elicited a fusillade of wolf whistles. Damien scurried around the flowerbeds of the Jardín looking for stray scorpions, while my parents searched for a one-legged man whom they had been told was the rental expert. Receiving inquisitive looks from the locals, my father resuscitated his Castilian Spanish and my mother tested her University of Toronto version.
Our initial impressions of the housing situation had been entirely wrong. Disintegrating adobe walls and cracked paint often hid exquisite homes with ornamental fountains, marble staircases, and tiled patios where pots of vermilion geraniums, exotic succulents, and magenta bougainvillea vines cascaded in riotous profusion. At the Instituto, a young American welcomed Vivien and me, pinning yellow sunflowers in our hair. We already sensed we were in for an exciting year.
Investigating the local market, we picked our way through piles of ripe bananas, papayas, avocados, mangos, and tomatoes. “A peso la pila!” the young vendors shouted, waving a sample of the produce and smiling effusively at my sister and me while women with tiny, silent babies squatted on straw mats amid the despined cactus leaves and maize tortillas. At the interior stalls, one could sit on wooden benches to eat hot stew ladled from copper cauldrons. “Señora,” a portly cook called to my mother as he scooped up a skinned sheep’s head complete with its grinning teeth from his boiling brew. “No gracias, señor,” she volunteered, thankful she had brought us up as vegetarians!
Strung across the road flapped a canvas banner advertising a classical guitar concert to be held that night. What incredible luck! Vivien and Damien opted out, but my parents and I arrived promptly at the Bellas Artes concert hall for an eight o’clock performance. We were the first comers; by nine o’clock, however, the little hall was filled to capacity. Now I appreciated the expression “Mexican time”! The Bellas Artes, an imposing colonial building dating from the previous century, housed a fine-arts school. Two-tiered arched stone cloisters enclosed a rectangular courtyard at whose centre obtruded a stone fountain shaded by the scented foliage of lime and orange trees — the perfect setting for a concert.
After the program, by one of Mexico’s top classical guitarists, Manuel López Ramos, we were invited by some American residents to a reception in a magnificent home on the hillside with a breathtaking view of the town. Parched, I gulped a drink, unsure of its alcohol content. Suddenly, the room slid out of focus as if viewed through the wrong prescription lenses. Too late I realized I had just swallowed a strong rum and Coke. With the high altitude intensifying the effect of the alcohol, and being an “impossible drinker,” I was doubly afflicted. My mother walked me around in the floodlit garden, encouraging me to take deep breaths, and ordered a cup of black coffee. Luckily, when the maestro wished to hear me play, my fingers found their frets for Sor’s Etude no. 11 and Torroba’s Suite Castellana, although my head was still swimming in the stratosphere. Borracha or not, I seemed to have made a favourable impression on López Ramos, who invited me to study with him.
A month later, after we had established residence in San Miguel, my mother and I took the three-hour bus trip to Mexico City, where Ramos proved a disappointment. “Which method did you study, my dear?” he asked. “Sor, Aguado, Carulli?” I replied that my teacher, Eli Kassner, used various method books from which he chose suitable pieces. “Nonsense, you need to learn a specific method so that you can pass it on to others. You students all imagine you are going to be performers, but you all end up as teachers — especially you girls. I shall prepare you to become a teacher.” Already playing an advanced repertoire, I definitely intended to perform rather than instruct, so after watching Ramos pencil three pages of simple exercises from one of his “method” books, I paid my three hundred pesos, vowing I could make better progress under my own tutelage.
Out of curiosity, I tracked down a local guitar teacher in San Miguel. He looked like a fairy-story troll; hunch-backed with limping gait aided by a walking stick, he had almond Asiatic eyes that smiled from a broad face generously sprinkled with moles and a fuzzy beard. The maestro, who had once studied with a student of Segovia, was the town’s only classical guitarist. With my parents, I visited his home, a subterranean “troll house” under a bridge, which he shared with many fertile felines. Hoping to impress, he played a rather uneven Bach gavotte as we sat in his musty room with its one small open window. Our polite applause led him to launch into an impassioned Bach prelude, but at regular intervals he cleared his throat and, aiming straight through the window, spat past my mother and me. We exchanged glances, her eyes threatening me not to giggle. Finally, it was my turn to play a couple of numbers, but he continued these distracting displays of marksmanship. The maestro was a sincere and kindly fellow, but he was not destined to be my teacher.
My father had rented a Mexican-style house with a small enclosed patio and rooftop terrace that looked out over the town toward the distant purple mountains. Only a five-minute walk to the main town square, up a steep cobbled road, Calle de Umarán 58 became our new home. Twice a week, Porfiria came to sweep and swish buckets of water over our tiled floor, disturbing, to Damien’s delight, stray insects that hid in dark corners. Within a few days, he had co-opted various gardeners at the Instituto to save him the most ferocious-looking specimens, which he proudly presented to us in jars at the dinner table. He persuaded my parents to buy a loquacious parrot, Loro, who rode around perched on his shoulders, squawking at the local blackbirds.
No industry was permitted in San Miguel de Allende, which preserved its sixteenth-century Spanish colonial style. The Mexicans treasured the town as a national monument — the birthplace of the 1810 revolution. The Jardín was dominated by an impressive European-style church, La Parroquia, built of pink sandstone whose rich hues changed with the sun’s rising and decline. In front of this baroque monument, the Jardín bustled with activity: shoeshine boys, urchins selling Chiclets, tortilla vendors, and country folk peddling their wares. I spent many an hour on the wrought-iron benches imbibing the clean mountain air under a daily blessing of blue skies. We discovered a quiet, treed area, El Chorro, where underground mountain streams provided the town’s water supply and chattering women gathered to wash clothes, laying them on the stone walls to dry. Across from El Chorro in the French Park, tall white lilies grew beside a redolent stream, boys played soccer in the dust, and young couples sat with their arms intertwined behind the gnarled trunks of eucalyptus trees. The night skies, adazzle because of the high altitude and pure air, flaunted millions of diamonds that twinkled down on us during nocturnal family walks through the winding, darkened streets. Never had the Milky Way appeared so brilliant! We were falling in love with this quaint hillside town, which was beginning to feel like home to the Boyd family.
In San Miguel, two thousand of the fifteen thousand inhabitants were non-Mexicans, who, like our artist friend Leonard Brooks, enriched the colourful local culture with such activities as string quartet recitals. It was with Leonard’s ensemble that I first sightread a Haydn quartet. The town boasted an English library, which enabled me to discover the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, James Joyce, Ayn Rand, and E.M. Forster. Many afternoons found me eagerly devouring Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet in the cool, shaded corners of El Chorro. The jovial doorman at the Bellas Artes, in return for the odd bottle of tequila, allowed me to stay on during the siesta time. The entire quiescent former convent was mine alone for two hours each afternoon. I played my guitar, listening to the rich reverberations from the old stone walls, to the accompaniment of the courtyard fountain, which splashed rainbows into a tiled pool. A delicate scent of citrus blossoms hung in the still, warm air as I learned Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Tárrega’s haunting tribute to another timeless palace.
Mischievously, I smuggled Bernardino, a piano-playing friend, into my secret retreat during siesta hour. After he had entranced me with a soulful Chopin nocturne, we clambered onto the roof through an old trapdoor I had accidentally discovered. Inching our way along the red slate tiles, we were able to peek down unseen into the adjacent gardens where Carmelite nuns spent their cloistered lives. Silently, we watched the girls pinning up sheets to dry and wondered how they could live severed from the rest of the world in this nunnery unchanged over the centuries. Discovering that our white pants were covered with rusty-red stains from sliding along the rooftop tiles, Bernardino and I tried in vain to disguise the incriminating evidence by rubbing in white chalk, which only turned them bright pink! After siesta, when the heavy wooden doors creaked open and people began to wander around, I sidled past the old doorman, hoping he did not notice how my pants had miraculously changed colour.
One sunny winter morning, while strolling to the Los Dragones restaurant for our habitual cup of café con leche, my family and I were approached by an animated Mexican prattling away in a mixture of English and Spanish. He beckoned us to follow him through the shadows of a narrow doorway.
“My name is Miguelito Malo,” he announced, an intense stare projecting from his Pekinese-like face. Suddenly we were standing in the most amazing archaeological museum, where ceramic bowls, pipes, and figures were displayed in rows of glass cases. What an unlikely place for such a cache of pre-Columbian art. Our eager host explained how this was the result of his years of archaeological excavation. We listened in fascination as he told us how his passion for archaeology had been born when, as a youngster, he had unearthed a clay artifact, which his Catholic mother had seized from him and flung far into the cacti. “Those things are the work of the devil and should never be touched by God’s children,” she scolded. Thus began his obsession with the ancient and mysterious gods from an earlier civilization.
As he grew older, Señor Malo secretly excavated these strange treasures that lay concealed beneath the desert’s dusty face, until he eventually possessed one of the most important collections in the country. A few years later, we learned the terrible fate that befell Miguelito Malo. Mexico City authorities demanded that he hand over the priceless collection to the National Museum of Anthropology and threatened to confiscate it all. Miguelito, who had devoted himself to the care of the relics of his Indian antecedents, in his frustration and despair took a hammer to his cherished artifacts, returning them to the dust from which they came. After destroying everything, he shot himself there among his broken dreams. It was one of the tragedies of the town.
We became acquainted with a family whose undernourished burro provided their sole source of survival. Every day they walked miles over arid scrubland carrying bundles of firewood on the back of their beast of burden. The husband used to take his few pesos profit and head off to drown his sorrows in the cantinas, while his patient, diminutive wife waited on the sidewalk, with baby in arms and ragged children clutching her long skirts. My parents bought them medicine and donated clothes gathered from our closets. It was our small effort to assist one family with the poverty that Mexico’s country folk endure. The sickly baby at her mother’s breast grew over the years into a slight doe-eyed girl; on successive visits, we saw her selling tortillas on the market floor. She had survived her impoverished childhood, but at fifteen died giving birth. The wizened little grandmother was now having to nurse yet another baby — her daughter’s. Such tragedy and suffering were woven into the fabric of the peasants’ daily lot; I could only marvel at their resilience and fortitude as their smiling faces accepted the harsh life doled out to them.
Our town was home to an amazing number of weird and wonderful characters: garrulous Larry from the cement jungles of the Bronx, living in a state of euphoria among San Miguel’s natural vegetation; the svelte southern gentleman who furnished his living room with coffins; the paraplegic rock guitarist pushed around in a wheelchair by his devoted mother; the epileptic newspaperman bellowing animal sounds; the sometimes psychotic painter staring with vacant smiles at the Parroquia. Sharing the sun with us, they enriched my “people repertoire” with the great varieties of humankind. Our town had become a haven for artists and writers: a crucible of interesting ideas and lifestyles. It was here we met Neal Cassady — Kerouac’s model for his “beat” hero, Moriarty, in his book On the Road. A few weeks later, his body was discovered beside the railway lines. Death in San Miguel from exposure and too much liquor somehow befitted his legendary nomadic lifestyle.
The renegade Canadian writer Scott Symons turned up in town. We spent Christmas Day in his home, a rented chapel, sipping pulque with an odd assortment of friends. Scared by an outbreak of hepatitis and a reluctance to visit the local doctor, they lined up the next day for gamma globulin injections administered by my mother and sister, who were adept at giving allergy shots. But after a few weeks Scott and his young lover were fleeing south, with the Mexican police hot on their tail trying to catch and deport them. The two men vanished for months to the safety of the wild southern hills of Oaxaca, their only “crime” an unacceptable love affair. Symons’s boyfriend came from an influential Canadian family who intended to rescue him from the clutches of this “latter-day Oscar Wilde.” Months later, by cover of night, they turned up at our door, furtively heading for the border to return to Canada, where Symons’s new novel, Place d’Armes, had been awarded the Beta Sigma Phi First Canadian Novel Award. My father helped repair their old car’s headlights and sent the fugitives on their way, Scott having entrusted his precious new manuscript to us in case of capture by the Federales. There was never a dull moment in San Miguel; the days were filled with intriguing events — a far cry from the equanimity of my Toronto high-school life.
Into my world drifted a continuous stream of bizarre characters worthy of the pen of Guy de Maupassant. An English poet with aristocratic connections and a tendency to stutter took a fancy to me, and invited himself to our house. “Good gracious, no dinner!” he exclaimed in plummy Oxford English to the consternation of my mother, who endeavoured to throw something together for him to eat while Vivien and I giggled in the kitchen and my father plied him with literary conversation and tequilas. We attended one of his poetry readings, but the combination of alcohol and nerves ensnared him in his own words, such that the aristocratic bard was unable to complete his masterpiece and slunk off through a side door with a beet-red face. An invitation to model for a local charity fashion show flattered me, but decked out in an oversize sailor suit and clutching a large pink paper flower, I self-consciously dashed between tables to the wolf-whistles of dark-suited businessmen, zigzagging along the circuit like a panicky jackrabbit in the high beams of an oncoming car. The embarrassing experience left me vowing to never again participate in such an ordeal. So much for my debut as a model.
Liberal with reading matter and movies, my parents were strict in matters of dating; Vivien and I had 10 p.m. curfews that extended to 11 p.m. for fiestas. Mexican girls were chaperoned, as marriages were customarily arranged between families, so we gringas were much sought after by San Miguel’s teenaged boys. My first unintentional “conquest” was the dashing occupant of a green Mustang who flashed around the Jardín. There was a certain feeling of security in the company of Jaime Fernández, the bright and attractive son of the ex-governor of the state, but that relationship was soon nipped in the bud. His experience at Hot Springs High School in Arkansas had evidently given him certain expectations of North American girls, and at seventeen I had no intention of losing my virginity in the back seat of anyone’s green sports car!
Eventually we met two friends, Raphael and Emilio, who escorted us around town, helped improve our Spanish, and danced away many evenings with us at La Escondida while our heads pounded with the music. Often our parents joined us on the dance floor, while little Damien sat riveted by the local rock group, Los Finks. One night, after a gun-slinging shootout, we beat a hasty backdoor retreat. Another day, buckets of water and bricks were dropped on us from the overhanging rooftops, narrowly missing Vivien; Raphael’s enraged betrothed had discovered he was dating my sister. Life in Mexico had its own particular hazards.
Whenever a birthday or Saint’s day rolled around, we were awakened in the early morning hours by mariachi music floating up through our open windows. My father always crept downstairs and balanced his hidden microphone next to the window in order to preserve the performances for posterity. At times the local police who patrolled the night streets arrived to demand a serenade permit, but after a few swigs from the communal bottle of tequila, the officers invariably overlooked this formality, contributing their voices to the off-key strains of “Adoro” or “Cuando Calienta el Sol.” Serenades from our Mexican admirers were a romantic experience of which we never tired.
There was a nip in the air as my mother, Vivien, and I wound our way through the chiaroscuro of wet-washed streets to the opalescent dawn of open desert on the edge of town. The massive church of San Antonio stood solitary among scattered maguey cacti, and travel-weary pilgrims flagellated themselves with straw whips and crawled on bloodied knees toward the stone steps. The dusty plain soon filled with a milling throng of devout peasants, curious onlookers, tortilla vendors with smoky braziers, and sellers of garish-coloured drinks which competed for brilliance with towers of dancing balloons. Suddenly, shrieks rent the air. An enraged bull destined for the corrida had broken its tethers and was charging straight toward us! A fear-inspired burst of energy enabled the three of us to leap into a cattle truck standing at least six feet high! We looked at each other in disbelief at our amazing acrobatics while the crowd observed in silent amusement.
Our Mexican boyfriends took us horseback riding at the local ranches, biking to villages where women scrubbed clothes in the river, and, secretly, exploring in the damp catacombs deep beneath the Parroquia. On most evenings we joined in the communal stroll, or paseo, circling the Jardín: girls walked in one direction holding hands, while boys walked in the opposite, each group surveying the other. On fiesta nights, highly decorative, highly dangerous fireworks often injured the macho youths who dared each other to pick up exploding fragments of castillos. Relishing San Miguel’s tapestry of novelties, my family fully immersed itself in this strange, rich culture.
One day my brother came home with a box concealing a tiny field mouse given to him by a friendly gardener at the Institute. “Should I tell Mummy or keep it a secret?” he asked. As I predicted, our indulgent mother allowed him to keep little Federico in his room. In the evenings, after racing around the house, he returned, tempted by his treat of Chihuahua cheese. One night, as we sat in the firelit living room, my mother and I knitting sweaters, Vivien reading her horse book, my father glancing at “El News,” and Damien spreading his butterflies to the Mexican music playing on the radio, we saw little Federico scurry in front of the fireplace. The next moment he was on the couch, and no sooner had he put in an appearance there than we spotted him running along the windowsill. Suddenly we realized there were many Federicos sharing our address. My father, using the lettuce shaker, devised a humane trap from which each day a whiskered captive was released at a distance from the house. The Mexicans laughed as they saw him walking down the hill with his homemade contraption, trying to appease the compassionate concerns of his children!
Vivien rode daily on a horse entrusted to her by an absentee owner. Clinging to her waist, I sometimes joined her to plod over stony, cactus-sprinkled desert and mountain-goat trails. Once she was set upon by wild dogs, forcing her against a prickly pear cactus. Valiantly, she limped home with bloody legs after spending hours extracting the thorns from her horse’s flank. Damien and I watched in horror as my father tugged with his steel pliers at the barbed spines deep in her legs.
In 1967 everyone in the art world, on whose periphery we lived, seemed to be dabbling with mind-altering drugs. My liberal parents reluctantly decided to allow Vivien and me to quell our curiosity by smoking marijuana once, “just for the experience.” Seeing the burned-out, stoned faces of many American kids who came to Mexico looking for cheap “grass” and “magic mushrooms,” they thought they should confront the San Miguel drug scene rather than run the risk that we might be tempted to experiment on our own. One evening, after Damien had been put to bed, we turned on our favourite Simon and Garfunkel tape and rolled a couple of joints from a small packet of “Acapulco gold” my father had been given by a fellow artist; neither he nor my mother had ever tried grass before. Amid giggles, we puffed and choked on the acrid smoke, trying to convince ourselves that the music sounded different, but eventually we had to admit our efforts were futile and slunk off to bed with sore throats. The Boyds’ valiant attempt at psychedelia had been a bust; my parents thankfully threw away the dry leaves and never touched the weed again. Years later, while at university, I sampled hashish with equally dismal results. As a last resort, at my brother’s urging, I fried an entire homegrown marijuana plant, which I ate with honey. My mother never could understand why her frying pan smelled so odd! As nothing seemed to work on my impervious brain, I lost interest in the whole experiment. Since then I have never felt tempted to experiment with any kind of hallucinogenic drug.
Our family was frequently invited to attend exhibitions and art gallery openings. San Miguel’s natural charms, perfect climate, reasonable cost of living, and stimulating community had seduced painters and sculptors from around the globe to pursue their creative muses in the tranquil hillside colony. That year I gazed at thousands of paintings: some were disturbing or incomprehensible to my young eyes, some were bland and meaningless, yet others spoke to me of the artist’s spiritual quest for beauty and truth. I watched Lothar Kestenbaum perfecting his figurative bronze sculptures; saw Dan Brennan, a modern-day Gauguin, struggling to capture shapes and colours in his passionate canvases; observed with fascination the talented hands of Jesús Cuéllar, the Gómez brothers, Louis Ribak, James Pinto, York Wilson, and Leonard Brooks. Absorbing the massive earth-tone murals of the Bellas Artes, I sensed the influence of Mexico’s master muralist, Diego Rivera; in awe, I gazed at the huge wall painting by Siqueiros that dominated one of the rooms. In our town, art made its presence felt everywhere.
My father devoted his time to palette knife and paint brushes on his rooftop aerie, while my mother made charcoal drawings sitting on the stone steps of the marketplace. In the evenings, while fingering the Castelnuovo-Tedesco guitar pieces sent by Eli Kassner, I could hear them printmaking together on the kitchen table. Their art and the art of San Miguel was opening up a new awareness in my psyche, engraving a profound and lasting imprint on my life. It was to be many years, however, before I was tempted to develop my own artistic talents.
Nineteen sixty-eight was the year Mexico hosted the Olympic Games, and government orders had been issued to “clean up the country” in time for its deluge of international visitors. This decree was reinterpreted by our local authorities to mean “Rid the town of all the hippies.” The San Miguel police were a sinister-looking breed of Lilliputians in dark blue uniforms who, armed with rifles, patrolled their headquarters in the Jardín. Nobody trusted them in those days; both Mexicans and gringos were fearful of an encounter. Since the police were paid so poorly, they supplemented their incomes with bribes and false arrests. This was to be their field day! Gerard, and Peyote Pete and Crazy Carl, were implicated in drug-possession charges, rounded up, and paddy-wagoned back across the border, but our neighbour, furious that his maid had taken it into her own hands to throw his precious marijuana away with the trash to protect him, set off to the local garbage dump in a vain effort to retrieve it. The police were having a marvellous time. They decided that anyone with long hair or beards, including many of our own friends, must be tidied up, so they were seized one by one to have their heads shaved in public. My brother and father had to lie low for a few days while the sacrificial bloodletting ran its course. After the son of a New York psychiatrist was dragged in by police for an unexpected haircut, making headlines in the New York Times, things gradually settled down again. All this unpleasant activity had given us an uncomfortable week, making us realize that our Shangri-La had its dark side too.
After six months, complying with the law, we motored up to the Reynosa border to renew our tourist visas, but when we returned, we were told that no hippies were being allowed into Mexico and were given a curt refusal of re-entry. We were hardly hippies, but the VW bus with painted flowers did nothing to help our image! After trimming a few inches off our menfolk’s hair, we drove on to the next crossing. “Buenas noches, we were expecting you,” the officious Mexican gloated behind his curling moustache and forbade us entry. Off came another inch of the male Boyds’ hair; we bundled back into the bus and headed off determinedly to the next checkpoint a hundred miles farther along the border. A Texan in front of us was forced to hand over a fistful of greenbacks to the corrupt guards, who let us sail through without a hitch in the afterglow of their windfall.
In May, our VW bus spluttered us south to the steamy tropical port of Veracruz, where soothing marimba music filled the streets. Crossing the isthmus to the Pacific coast, we camped on the beach at La Ventosa, wandered in awe through the Oaxaca pyramids of Mitla and Monte Albán, were bitten mercilessly by sandflies in San Blas, and spent a glorious week camping in Pie de la Cuesta in Acapulco. Vivien and I befriended two flirtatious Jamaican boys from Montego Bay, with whom we shared fresh coconut and stolen kisses on the wave-washed sandbanks. Our next stop, Paracho, specialized in building guitars and guitar cases, causing the air to reek of drying fish glue. Nearer to our San Miguel home, we picked teeth off the floor of Guanajuato’s claustrophobic tombs, where hundreds of skulls were piled high, and mummies with horrific facial expressions had been preserved by the volcanic soil. In the silver mining ghost town of Pozos, we explored the ornate facades of old colonial mansions, the remains of churches open to the sky, and the deep echoing wells of abandoned mine shafts. Only the persistent desert wind rattled the town’s old stones, and impudent cacti protruded through the crumbling walls.
Everywhere we travelled I religiously practised my guitar, learning new pieces by Alexandre Tansman, Sylvius Leopold Weiss, and Manuel Ponce, which Eli sent by mail. Everywhere in Mexico there was music to be heard: it spilled out from jukeboxes in the open cantinas and lightened the work of the women as they swept the sidewalks. Boys sat in doorways picking out popular songs on cheap guitars, while the harmonies of trios floated over the walls from garden parties. Marketplaces and cafés were alive with ranchero songs pulsating from tiny transistor radios, and as night fell mariachi players strolled through the Jardín. Frequent parades with legions of uniformed schoolchildren marched around the square to the repetitive notes of off-key brass bands spurred on by strident drums. Through the open doors of churches, the wailing chants of female voices could be heard; their music had an eerie, pagan quality, compelling in its intensity. At one nightspot, where they supplied indigenous musical instruments, we often participated until late into the night, learning the lyrics to traditional ballads while enjoying the sonorous voices and plaintive guitars. Winding our way home through the narrow streets, we sometimes turned a corner and encountered young fellows dressed in the gaily coloured ribbons and dark cloaks of medieval troubadours: an estudiantina group singing and playing in the traditional manner at the window of a sweetheart. Mexico had developed within me a lasting affection for the poetry of the Spanish language and the expressive rhythms of Latin music.
Thinking back to the days in San Miguel, I am haunted by the sounds — plangent bells from the pink Parroquia echoing over the rooftops of the town and floating up the hillsides telling the hours; corn tortillas crackling and spattering in roadside stalls; braying burros struggling up and down the cobblestones; street vendors calling out in their singsong lilt; black clouds of querulous birds settling into the trees at dusk; and the happy strains of mariachi and ranchero music drifting from behind those colourful crumbling walls of adobe that I had grown to love.