"a thousand words" / Sharpie vs camera

I take pics with my tiny snapshot camera because it's fast and easy and I like to. I refer to images when writing to help me reimagine a place, find the words to describe a scene or an object--figs growing, the hug of a tight skirt, a hot water radiator such as I used to have in an apartment thirty years ago.






A camera is fast and easy, but I envy people like R who have the facility--and decades of practice--to draw. The lines of a sketch are more expressive than the flattened image taken by a camera. The camera doesn't discriminate. What to do about all the extraneous visual disturbance that ends up in the frame? (Don't tell me about photoshop. I can't be bothered.) I like that the pencil only sees what it wants to.

I say pencil, though I think lately R has been using predominantly pens. That was the case recently in Mexico when he ran out of the German pens he likes to use and we began the search for new pens. Mexico City has at least one humongous stationary/school/office/art supply market. Venues and stalls are packed tight together. Aisles both curve and cut angles. Some are broad, some tight--when several concessions have been squeezed into a space. The maze was so confusing that when R decided to return to where he'd bought a pad of paper to buy another, he couldn't find it again.


R doesn't like designated art supply stores because he finds them overpriced, but this one caught our attention because of the mannequin in the window. Waxed moustache, shaggy mutton chops, fedora, patterned shirt, white trousers (pressed!), barefoot. I don't know if it was ironic. Note that R does *not* look like this. Not even ironically.

In Guanajuato we visited several stationary and paper stores. R found a pen that seemed promising and bought several, but when he was out and about, sketchbook open, the pens didn't work. They cost enough that it was worth going back to the store. The woman there calmly took the pens, one by one, and they worked for her. Ah... because you had to be at a table and hold the pen perfectly perpendicular to the paper--which isn't the case when sketching outdoors.


In another store he was urged to try a thicker marker pen--actually a Sharpie. He liked the thicker strokes but could finish a Sharpie within a few hours. He did spend a lot of time sketching. Got up every morning at 6:30 and headed off into the cold dawn streets. We were in the mountains. Temps dropped to 2C at night. He only returned at 9 when breakfast was served. I stayed in bed, made myself tea, read. Sometimes he took his paints and pots of water.

Here's one of the Sharpie sketches. I'm pretty sure the dump refers to the hotel and our room.

R finally--happily--found pens he liked in the Mexican equivalent of Bureau en Gros aka Staples. I don't recall what the store was called in Mexico but the employees wore the same red shirts. He liked those pens so much that he returned two days later and bought the whole stock.

(He did the same when we were in Vienna a few years ago and he found the shaving cream he discovered on a trip some years previously in Berlin. He bought every tube of shaving cream in the pharmacy, not knowing when he'd find it again. We've looked and it can't be bought online. It's not a fancy or expensive shaving cream, he just likes it.)

Since I'm very particular about the tactile feel of the notebooks and pens I use, I understand his quest for a pen that has a certain tip and glide and feels good in his hand--although I've learned from experience not to expect to find the paper I like en route and usually bring what I might need with me.

I don't travel with my fountain pen because it's magic and I'm terrified of losing it. Mind you, I felt that way about my previous fountain pen that I had for twenty years and that finally leaked so much that my fingers were stained blue and it couldn't be repaired, not even by the fountain pen wizard in the pen shop in the Cours Mont Royal. I survived finding a new pen and with time it has become equally invested with magic.

Sometimes I wish I could draw and R tells me anyone can draw. Yeah, well... I don't know how to get angles or foreshorten or control what I'm doing. He says Matisse didn't concern himself with foreshortening either. Just draw. Follow the line on the page.

Drawings, painting and photo courtesy of my favourite travelling companion, RA.
More artwork here:
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMBh5FWdXqTzEzWHHpxQC9LunHm8qQN6uyw1OiJm_MiSURLNA-xGbU-UAC_jSNiTg?key=TUk0ZVI2SXlfOEwyYkI4elozbW9jMUhZVUJyRlJR

Chilaquiles / visiting the graveyard / Guanajuato

I wanted to visit the cemetery in Guanajuato in Mexico. It wasn’t on the tourist map the hotel gave us, but I looked up el panteón on Google Maps. It was behind the mummy museum, which was well-signed throughout the city, though far enough outside the centre that directions were for people who were driving. Not the nicest roads for walking.

We headed up roads that seemed to angle in the same direction. I stopped to ask a man if it was the right way. He’d been to the  market and bought a bag of poblano peppers and a dozen avocados. He’d arranged the vegetables in two neat rows across the bag he’d spread before him on the sidewalk where he sat. That would be his income for the day: whatever profit he could make. In retrospect, I should have bought a hot pepper. When I asked about the cemetery, he nodded up the steep hill at the row of cypress trees along the top. Los arboles, he said. Look for the trees and you’ll find the cemetery.

The road climbed, twisted away from the trees, toward them again. Whenever it forked, R guessed which side would head us the right way. I was of no use because I’m directionally challenged. Turn me around twice on the street where I’ve lived for the last eighteen years and I might not be able to find my way home.

When I say we were following roads, I don’t mean asphalt. The surface was concrete bricks, stones and cobbles. Wide enough for cars, though, which was not the case on the other side of the city where the roads were steeper. For foot traffic only. That included the gas man who pushed a dolly of canisters along the cobbles at 6 am, calling out Gas! Gas! Residents had to lug their groceries up, carry their bags of garbage down. 

Our hotel was on that side of town.

What also happens on that side of town are corridos in the evening. This is not to be confused with a corrida which is the running of the bulls. A corrido is a narrative ballad led by singers and musicians dressed in black velvet jackets and breeches. They walk up and down the streets, singing and strumming. People sing and shout the responses. The word amor is repeated often. Long stories are told. There are laments, there is laughter. Some buffoonery. To join the group, you need to buy a ticket. Bring your own tequila.

The first night that R and I heard the singers we were charmed. We heard them well since one of their gathering points was in the square next to our hotel. Their route when they set off was past our balcony. Guanajuato hosts a large Cervantes festival every fall, but the corridos happen every day, all year long. Don Quixote T-shirts too. Since we stayed in Guanajuato for two weeks, the singing began to seem less charming. On weekends there could be as many as three corridos in an evening, the last one well past midnight. I think it’s great that they honour Cervantes, though it also seemed like another excuse for more noisiness and tequila.

R and I were still walking up the hill, aiming for the cypress trees when we could see them past the buildings. Stucco blocks in every colour are crammed up against each other, stacked on an incline. Guanajuato climbs the slopes that surround the historical centre of the city. The vista is onto hills/low mountains. They don’t seem high because Guanajuato is already at 2000 m/6,600 ft. (For comparison, the village in the Tirolean Alps where my father was born is at 1,100 m/3000 ft.)

One afternoon R and I set out to hike up one of the hills but I wasn’t wearing the right shoes for the scree once we got off the path and I didn’t want to risk sliding, falling, and getting a scrape. I take a blood thinner. A scrape would be dumb. I was happy to get as high as we had, to breathe mountain air.  

The cypress trees were close now, we were hungry, we could smell frying. Up a set of stairs was an eatery called Rosa. Four tables against the white-painted railing had a view onto the town. Rosa was cooking on one side of the small room behind a counter. She had a grill, a flame, several cast-iron saucepans. It was busy and she’d called her two teenage daughters who must have been home from school on their lunch break—still wearing their blue skirts—to come help carry dishes because the waitress had to step behind the counter to help her. There was a menu on the wall. Mostly she was frying meat she served on large plates with red rice—rice cooked in tomato juice. We sat at the only empty table against the counter and ordered chilaquiles:  tortillas cut into strips, dropped into a pan, doused in red or green mole sauce, shaken up over the flame, slid onto a plate. I’d asked for no meat or eggs. Rosa was making several meals at a time but gave me a questioning look before adding ingredients to our plates. White cheese crumbled on top? A drizzle of cream? Sí, sí, está bien. Another couple came in and sat at the corner of our table because it was the only place left. They were Mexican-American, joking in Mexican with her, talking American between themselves.

There were more people in the street now because it joined up with the main road to the mummy museum. El Museo de las Momias. The day before we left Guanajuato we met a Canadian whose mother and grandmother had lived there and who was now retired there himself. He said that when he was a child he’d gone with an aunt to visit the mummies. At that time they weren’t kept behind glass as they are now—to stop people from plucking off bits of skin and hair. Pubic hair was especially prized. His aunt had swung her shawl around her shoulders. They didn’t notice she’d caught a mummy until she started walking again and dragged it along behind her. They and everyone around them shrieked.

The entrance to the cemetery was a grand stone wall with an arch and a frieze of skulls. The layout of plots was peaceful, relaxed, jumbled.

Here and there lay large, empty cans of jalapeño peppers and I wondered if that signified wishes for mucho piquante in the afterlife until I saw flowers jammed into a can. They were cheap and handy, good-sized vases. A skinny cat flitted through the stones, following and avoiding us.

The walls of the crypts where urns were stored were… 10 m/30 ft high? I’m not much better with height than direction. Not everyone could afford to have names engraved.

The administrative office was a small dim room with only one desk where a man sat before a computer. (I recalled the character in Cora Sire’s fine novel, Behold Things Beautiful, who works in a cemetery in a fictionalized South American country.)  I asked the man how I would find a particular tombstone. I wasn’t looking for one but I wanted to know how to proceed if I were. He said he would need the date of birth—nacimiento. Interesting. I asked if he had all this information in his computer. No, he pointed at the wall where thick binders sagged on shelves.

Later, when I told the Canadian with the shawl-flinging aunt that we’d been to the cemetery, he asked if we’d met the man who worked in the office. Yes, he said, everything is stored in those fat binders—and the shelves they’re on are made from old coffins.

Now, back home again, I’m wondering if they were used coffins or coffins that had been made but never used or…

Except for the cemetery, the pics were taken on the other side of Guanajuato.
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Mexico

We got on a bus in Mexico City and the driver said we couldn't pay cash. We needed a card that was charged with trips.

Oh.

We turned to get off and a man hallooed from a few seats back, lifting his card.

The driver said, There you go.

I paid the man for our two trips plus a bit extra for his trouble. He tried to hand back the extra coin. No, no, I said, not a mistake. Gracias.



Would that have happened in Montreal? In Toronto? In Vancouver? I'm naming big cities because Mexico City is big--over 20 million. Maybe someone might have helped two strangers with different coloured skin, but would that person have handed over their transit card for the strangers to use? Hey, what if we'd jumped off the bus and run away with it? Maybe it was a scam?