By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 7, 2006
I didn't need to know a word of Spanish to understand what the guard was trying to tell us. The chains wrapped around the gate to the Spanish language school spoke the international language of "closed."
Now all that I, my wife and daughter could do was stare through that wrought-iron barrier to the darkened hacienda and its manicured grounds, wondering what, exactly, we were going to do for the week that we had rented a house here in Taxco, 100 miles south of Mexico City.
How could this be? I'd made explicit arrangements weeks before coming to this cobblestoned mountainside town. First by phone, and later by e-mail, I had spelled it out: classes for my nearly fluent wife, and daily one-on-one sessions for our 9-year-old daughter, who had made good progress in our Montgomery County Spanish immersion school.
No problem, the director told me. Just show up at 9 o'clock on Monday.
No problem, except that the Monday we were talking about was the first day of Holy Week, the on-ramp to Easter Sunday that is anything but business as usual in Mexico -- a detail the director had somehow missed.
The snafu was but a minor blow to my own embarrassingly modest ambitions. Having long ago surrendered to my neurally calcified, monolingual fate, I was looking forward to a lazy week of reading on the panoramic patio of the home we'd rented in advance, just a few minutes' uphill walk from Taxco's bustling Zocalo, or central plaza.
But Spanish school had been the whole point for our daughter, Katherine. And classes had been a vacation prerequisite for my exceedingly disciplined wife, Natalie, for whom hours a day spent drilling on verb forms is a way of unwinding from her usual routine of writing science books and pumping iron.
With classes unexpectedly canceled, I knew it would not be long before demands arose to find another city with a working school, or even to surrender and go back home. Considering the nonrefundable house rental and the airline's ruthless change fees, dollar signs began to spin, cartoonlike, behind my eyelids.
Yet a silver lining would soon dissipate our blackening mood -- an appropriate metaphor, given Taxco's reputation as Mexico's premier sterling jewelry center. No, we did not climb out of our funk with a shopping spree. Rather, we got to know, thanks to our sudden aimlessness, Oscar and Sylvia -- the husband-and-wife handyman and housekeeper of our rented home, who otherwise might have puttered about almost unnoticed during our visit.
By the end of our week, we had climbed high into the mountains with them and their two sons to a hidden waterfall; accompanied them to an ancient Aztec ruin; whiled away hours together, talking about politics, religion, and our children's hopes and dreams; even attended the wedding of two friends of theirs, who had decided to get married after 15 years of living together.
Almost all of this was done in Spanish, the only language Sylvia could speak, providing a more practical -- and far more convivial -- linguistic workout than any university could have offered. And between Oscar's passable English and assistance from Katherine, who took some pride in her ability to translate for her dad, I never felt left out. In fact, by the time it was over, I had picked up enough simple vocabulary to leave me wondering whether this old dog might still have it in him to learn, at least in rudimentary fashion, a second language after all.
Call it a resurrected Easter vacation.
* * *
We had first heard of Taxco a couple of years ago, when neighbors returned from Mexico raving about Casa de las Palmas, a wonderful house rented out during parts of the year by its American owners. Spacious (it can sleep up to seven) and filled with artwork from around the world, it features a garden courtyard, a large fireplace for cool evenings and unrivaled balcony vistas of Taxco and the Madre del Sur mountains. (A sunny studio across the courtyard, once used by Diego Rivera and other artists, is rented separately for up to five people and would be a perfect romantic refuge for two.)
Most tourists visit mile-high Taxco for just a day or two, typically as a side trip from Cuernavaca or Acapulco. They shop for silver and enjoy the buzz of street vendors surrounding the central church of Santa Prisca, an 18th-century baroque beauty that looks as though it were made of wet sand dribbled from a giant hand on high.
But there is enough in Taxco to keep a visitor's interest longer than that, including a few fine museums of just the scale that a 9-year-old will tolerate without complaint. Casa Humboldt (also known as the Museo de Arte Virreinal), for example, boasts an array of colonial-era artifacts and funerary paintings unearthed from a secret room in the basement of Santa Prisca that remained undiscovered until a recent renovation.
And the Museo Plateria features exquisite pieces of sterling jewelry, many of them inlaid with precious stones or mother-of-pearl. The collection includes several pieces designed by William Spratling himself, the American architect who became enamored with Taxco's silver lodes during a 1929 visit and decided to stay and turn his design skills to metal. The workshop that grew up around him (and still operates today) -- and the beauty of his creations, which meld deco and pre-Columbian influences -- elevated Taxco's reputation from a slumbering silver town to Mexico's mecca of silver jewelry.
Today the old silver mine at the edge of town has pretty much bottomed out, and production has shifted mostly to lead. But Taxco's streets are still lined with hundreds of shops carrying everything from dime-store silver pendants to museum-quality sterling necklaces and mantelpiece objects that can run into the thousands of dollars. Countless locals make simple pieces in their homes for hawking at the Saturday morning market. And starting the last week of November, the town goes hog-wild with a silver fair that includes displays and competitions among some of the country's finest silversmiths.
Then there are the walks -- or should I say climbs -- through residential Taxco, a jumble of small, whitewashed, red-roofed homes clinging to the narrow cobblestone streets that snake at rakishly steep angles up the side of the mountain. A fleet of antique Volkswagen Beetle taxis -- most of them with their front passenger seats removed to allow room for, say, the couple of bushels of corn a rider might be hauling -- ply the meandering lanes like tireless ants.
Sidewalks are mostly nonexistent, so pedestrians hug the walls on either side of the street or duck into the nearest open doorway whenever a crescendoing "braaaapp!" announces the approach of another Bug. When two of the vehicles come face to face, which is often, the drivers do a quick and remarkably nonconfrontational calculation as to who should back up to the nearest pullout or side street.
For those who grow claustrophobic in such squirmy environs, there are some worthwhile road trips.
A few minutes south, on the one paved road leading out of Taxco, there is nothing but high, dry mountains and simple homesteads, each with the requisite corn plot, some chickens and an occasional mule, cow or horse. After about a 20-minute drive you can find -- with proper guidance -- a walking trail that after a half-hour or so of hiking will take you to a tiered pair of waterfalls that spill more than 100 feet into a sparkling pool. Dragonflies and water striders abound, as do cicadas so loud they can be mistaken for chain saws.
Another 45 minutes down the road (Oscar drove the seven of us in a hulking Chevrolet Cheyenne with expired Arizona tags that an American guest had simply left with him, but VW buses called combis run the route, too) is Ixcateopan de Cuauhtémoc. Most of the buildings and even the roads of this tiny village are made of luscious pink and white marble, which just happens to be the most common local rock; around the edges of town, hundreds of lumpy outcrops poke out from the soil like giant gumdrops.
This is the birthplace and final resting ground of Cuauhtémoc, the last of the Aztec emperors, executed by the Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortés in 1525. Only 50 years ago Mexican archeologists found and began excavating the ancient site -- though the first order of business, of course, was to build a Catholic church over Cuauhtémoc's exhumed skeletal remains, now startlingly on display.
* * *
Back in Taxco, the nightly processions of pain and penitence that are the highlights of Holy Week grew larger every night: caterpillars of sorrow inching their way through the ever-more-crowded streets to the thud of bass drums and the scratchy whine of violins. Men with backs bleeding from self-flagellation, wearing black hoods with small eyeholes to hide their identities, carried 150-pound bundles of thorny branches on their shoulders in search of forgiveness for unspoken crimes. Hooded women in black robes, dragging heavy chains around their ankles, shuffled barefoot for hours -- schlink, schlink! -- a few of them collapsing in front of hushed onlookers, then being carried off by helpers.
Finally there were the floats, big and heavy, each one carried palanquin-like on the shoulders of eight or 10 men and adorned with a towering statue of a beneficent Christ. A crucial helper walked alongside each float: someone with a 15-foot-long forked stick whose job was to raise -- well above Jesus's head -- the jumbles of electrical wires that sag from pole to pole across the streets. That the week ended without any electrocutions or a citywide blackout seemed nothing short of miraculous.
Looking back on it now, I can only thank my lucky stars that Oscar, Sylvia and the town of Taxco itself pulled through to save our vacation from what could have been the scheduling error from hell.
And next year? Natalie's making the reservations. In Spanish.
Rick Weiss writes about science for The Post.
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