No le busques pies al gato porque le hallas cuatro.
Don’t go looking for the cat’s feet, because you will find four.
I’m in Chimayó to photograph a crumbling adobe wall. I first stumbled across it on Christmas day, when my brother and I took a break from family festivities at my sister’s house nearby to go looking for good light for painting. Arturo is a painter, and he is always searching out the “magic hour” light. It’s a quest I share with him. On Christmas, we looped around the old plaza road just as the low winter sun was casting its last golden rays on the worn, pastel-hued patina of the adobe wall, the remnants of a house that had burned down a few years before. I couldn’t assemble my camera gear quickly enough to catch the golden light then and vowed to revisit the wall on another clear winter evening soon.
It’s just over a week later and I’m back, with plenty of time before sunset to place my tripod and choose an angle for the magic hour light. But I have a problem. New, tightly strung barbed wire—a rarity in Chimayó—blocks access to the field. I have to get inside in order to find the right perspective on the wall, but I don’t know who owns the land. Were it a fallen fence on property whose owner I knew, I might act differently. But I’m reluctant to cross the boundary now. My friends Chris and Nancy live nearby, and I think to ask them who owns this property. But their gate is closed and locked. So I drive toward the next nearest house.
On my way down the road, I remember the first time I passed this way, many years ago. It is only a few hundred yards from the Plaza del Cerro, but back then, when I was seven years old, this was well outside my zone of comfort in Chimayó. And to put me even more ill at ease on that distant day, I was actually driving a car. It was the 1932 Chevy that had been parked for decades in the garage of my great-grandpa’s dispensa (storage building) next door to Grandma’s house. Arturo and I had rolled the car out of the driveway while Grandma and Mom were busy inside. Arturo, seven years my senior, had managed to finagle the keys for our family car, a 1962 Dodge station wagon, and was determined to start the old Chevy by pulling it down the road with the newer Dodge and “popping the clutch.”
So I found myself behind the wheel of the giant old car, a marvel of gleaming black steel and chrome, straining to reach the pedals and see over the hood as we bumped along at twenty miles an hour. I was trying to keep clear Arturo’s instructions. He was most emphatic in telling me to push down the brake pedal if I saw the Dodge’s red brake lights go on. That much I was sure of, but I didn’t really understand how to let go of the clutch, hit the gas, and rev the engine when he gave me a hand signal.
We wanted to stay away from houses and the prying eyes of neighbors, and so Arturo pulled me (using an old strap we’d found in the dispensa) down through the plaza, in front of Tía Melita and Uncle Ike’s house, and down around this corner, past the two-story adobe house whose burned and partially fallen wall I want to photograph now.
When Arturo made the hand signal to let go of the clutch, I did—but the engine didn’t catch. I jammed the clutch back to the floor, which made my head sink below the level of the steering wheel, but not before I saw we were rapidly running out of road. Just ahead was the T-junction with the dirt track in “the first arroyo,” and as we drew near, the taillights on the Dodge lit up. But I could barely see above the hood of the Chevy, and in any case Arturo’s instructions about the gas and clutch and brake pedals all merged in my mind. I did nothing, and the Chevy slammed into the back of our new family car. I still remember the look of astonishment on Arturo’s face when he emerged to survey the damage. The tailgate of the car was deeply dented, but the Chevy, solid as a tank, had suffered no harm.
The thrill of that ride could never be repeated. It was like riding a spirited horse, someone else’s horse, a feeling expressed by the dicho “Caballo ajeno, espuelas propias: el mundo es mío.—Borrowed horse, my own spurs: the world is mine.”
But I’m back in the ’hood now and turning into the driveway of a house whose owner I don’t know at all. I roll up to the drive port and beep the horn. A young man comes out, looking perplexed as he circles around to my window. I introduce myself and tell him who my family is. He is nonplussed by this information; he’s too young to have heard of my kin in the plaza, most of whom are dead.
“I’m wondering if you know who owns that property with the burned-out adobe on it,” I say. He looks even more confused and more than a little suspicious. I explain I’m taking photographs around Chimayó, especially of old buildings, and that the wall in early evening light would make a really nice picture.
“It reminds me of an old Greek ruin or something,” I say by way of explanation, and although his bewilderment doesn’t diminish, he tells me the ruin belongs to a “some guy who lives out of state.” Then he comes closer and asks, “Have you seen anyone walking around here, anyone suspicious looking?”
I’m taken aback by his anxious expression, but his question brings to mind three teenagers I passed just as I exited the old plaza on my way down here. With baggy pants, tattoos, shaved heads, and a cocky kind of strut, they might be considered suspicious looking, although I’m not one to profile. They did give me the friendly—or at least nonthreatening—Chimayó nod, a quick up-flip of the chin that passes for a “howdy.” But I know the history of at least one of the kids, and that doesn’t weigh in his favor. So I tell the man in the driveway about them. He shakes his head and describes a shattered window and footprints in the snow behind his home.
I’m no stranger to burglary. Just about everyone has suffered a break-in in Chimayó at least once, and there are countless stories about the audacity of the thieves, some of them told and retold because of their almost comical nature. I recall when someone broke into Tío Victor’s store on the Plaza del Cerro and made off with all the merchandise that was left there after Victor’s death in 1945. They say that after the break-in people showed up at the post office wearing the old-fashioned button-up shoes that had been lifted. Then there was the time that someone made the mistake of breaking into the trailer of a man who kept a tiger and other exotic cats in his home; the burglar escaped but showed up at the hospital with a mutilated leg.
The yarns about Chimayó burglaries go on and on with their dark humor, and in general people remain vigilant about that kind of crime at all times—a sad fact that has spawned a modern-day bilingual dicho of sorts, uttered by an aged cousin of mine as she took leave from a family gathering: “Ya tengo que irme a mi casa, antes de que hagan break-in.—I have to go home now, before they commit a break-in.”
Crime waves come and go in Chimayó. A particularly dramatic peak in the mid-1990s inspired local citizens to form an organization, the Chimayó Crime Prevention Association, to do something to slow down the rash of burglaries that was plaguing the valley. At one point the organization, which included business owners and citizens of every stripe, held a meeting in the parish hall of the Holy Family Church. Residents vented their frustration with representatives of law enforcement agencies and the courts—and with each other. One woman stood up to shout at a man across the room, accusing him of stealing her television just the night before. A crazily drunk man complained that he was stopped by officers who had the nerve to “take the law into their own hands” as they arrested him on outstanding warrants and suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol. (He got no sympathy from the crowd.)
The hard work and persistence of the crime prevention group led to significant improvement in law enforcement. Federal, state, and local law enforcement officers descended on Chimayó by air and land one Sunday morning, mounting a major bust that cleared out several drug dealers, including some who had been entrenched in the community for decades. The Santa Fe newspaper published a map showing the locations of the major drug dealers’ houses (a nice map that I copied and used to give directions to my house, which was near one of the homes busted in the sweep). This slowed down the traffic to the dealers’ homes, and burglaries, which are almost all committed by addicts stealing goods to sell to feed their habits, dipped dramatically.
As I look at the angry expression on his face before me, I commiserate with the recent crime victim and ask him what he lost in the burglary.
“Just my gun,” he says, “and the TV.”
The homeowner’s brother roars up in his pickup, and then my friend Chris, who lives nearby, walks up. They’ve heard about the break-in and are here to find out what happened. After some talk about the crime at hand, I tell Chris about my desire to find the owner of the property across the road. He knows who it is and assures me it’s OK to cross the fence and take photographs, but he’ll call the owner in Florida to be sure.
I climb over the shiny new wire and drop into the property where the wall stands. The house that stood here belonged to Santos Ortiz, an industrious vecino who had seven children and put them all to work in various enterprises, including weaving. Each child had a job in the family corporation; one cooked, one did dishes, one fed and cared for the animals, one spun wool, a few wove, and so on. He was a stern taskmaster and turned a handy profit—enough for him to build the first two-story adobe in Chimayó, which people came to marvel at. I’m looking at fragments of its tall walls now.
The Ortiz family name has been around for a long time and has many ties to other families in the Plaza del Cerro area. Our family papers first record the name in 1820, when Matías Ortiz signed as a witness to a land sale from Pascual and Nicolás Ortega to Manuel Ortega, my great-great-great-great-grandfather.
There are patches of snow on the ground, and the evening chill is settling. Deep magenta light is already starting to creep across the landscape and onto the plaster of the burned adobe walls. There is little time, so I begin positioning myself, searching for the best angle on the crumbling structure that stands in the weedy field.
The sound of footsteps on the crusty snow behind me surprises me. I spin around to see a young man bent low over the ground, examining something intently. I shout a startled greeting, and he barely acknowledges my presence, then kneels in the snow and reaches down again. Looking closer, I see a tape measure in his hand. He’s measuring my footprints. It dawns on me that he’s investigating the crime scene, comparing the size of my prints to those found along the back wall of the house, beneath the broken window.
Of course I would be a prime suspect. I’m a stranger here, and the break-in happened moments before I showed up. I hope my shoe size doesn’t match the size of the burglar’s. But there’s no time for distractions. The wall stands in full, radiant winter sunlight. Framing it from multiple angles as the sun drops behind the mountains occupies me until darkness falls.
Es una lámpara que da luz sin aceite.
She is lamp that gives light without oil. (Said of a very smart person.)
Ese huevo quiere sal.
That egg wants salt. (Said when a person is especially nice because he wants something.)
Está a migajas de otro.
He is at the mercy of others.
Está como dos en un zapato.
He is like two in one shoe. (He’s anxious to get going.)
Gente melosa, siempre cautelosa.
With sweet people, always be cautious.
Habiendo carne y cueva aunque llueva.
If one has meat and a cave to stay in, it doesn’t matter if it rains. (If your basic needs are met, the problems of the world are of little consequence.)
Hacen más unos callando que otros gritando.
There are those who accomplish more being quiet than others who are shouting.
Hay muertos que no hacen ruido, y son mayores sus penas.
There are dead people who don’t make noise, and their woes are greater. (Said of people who go about quietly committing sins worse than those committed by people who do not hide their actions.)
La caridad bien ordenada empieza por uno mismo.
Charity well dispensed starts with oneself.
La mona, aunque se vista de seda, mona se queda.
Even if she dresses in silk, a monkey is still a monkey.
Perro que ladra no muerde.
A dog that barks doesn’t bite. (His bark is bigger than his bite.)