Taxco de Alarcón
12/13/2009 at 21:13 from (18.55, -99.6)
Taxco is a vertical city, a sheer and soaring jumble of white buildings and red tile roofs bound together by a matrix of narrow, twisting cobblestone streets so steep they often give up being roads altogether and decide to become stairs instead. It is beautiful and hive-like, humming and bleating and bustling with a relaxed but intent rhythm, unconcerned as it clings precipitously to a plunging arc of rock. The city stands as an open challenge to the gods to shake the mountain down, a defiant community of stone surfers, riding the face of a rocky wave.
We saw it and, even in the darkness, we knew we were in love.
Taxco emerged for us out of the gloom of a bus ride that felt like it had no end. We had said goodbye to Morelia and Max, but couldn't shake loose the ferocious storm that had followed us for hours, beating the roof and windows and lashing the pavement with mounting torrents of foaming water. We edged cautiously up through the climbing passes, hemmed in by a birdcage of lightning. Just as we began to give up hope of ever arriving, we felt the bus tilt slowly downward again. We rounded a massive spur of rock to our right and then, out of the black, we caught sight of a sheet of winking lights that seemed to spill heedlessly down into the valley far below.
Our first impressions were of chaos and beauty and danger. The layout, as we saw it from the road, was a city planner's nightmare. Trapezoidal buildings stood at odd angles to each other, bending to meet the curve of the various paths and roads that crossed the town, seemingly at random. And the roads themselves strove upward at impossible angles, navigating an unyielding terrain in loops and winding traverses.
And one would think that, with straight lines in such short supply, everything would be a tangled and disordered mess. But it isn't. There's a very distinct order to Taxco's twisting. Sure, it's not the measured angularity we've grown accustomed to in the less exotic corners of the world, where row upon endless row of straight streets defy natural obstacles and all the land is parceled into measured rectangles. This is a more natural order, a compromise between the necessity of industry and the resolve of geology, like a highway of ants or a warren of rabbits or a network of elephant paths.
There is an island of calm and spacious uniformity in the midst of the chaos, though. The pink cathedral at Taxco's heart defies the earthward pull of its surroundings, like a knot of trees on a rocky slope. Fronted by a tiny courtyard of black rock, around which the taxis endlessly spin, it is the sole interruption in what is an otherwise unbroken cascade of stone and tile, erected on the only flat space to be found on the mountainside. And for this anomaly, the cathedral is a natural landmark, a visually stunning centerpiece around which the entire town seems to revolve.
And revolve it most certainly does. The air throbs with the sputtering roar of taxis and colectivos, straining against gravity and speeding blind and heedless through the buckled city. Every vehicle, it seemed, was a VW -- bus or Beetle. Our cabbie told us (as he skidded down a street that would be considered too steep and too narrow for walking in saner places, where physics gets the respect it rightly deserves) that the reason for this is a simple matter of weight distribution: rear-engine cars have better traction, and every little aid to friction helps in a city so precariously situated.
The traction, we learned, wasn't just helpful, it was necessary. The days were invariably calm and bright. The air was fresh and warm, but never hot. At night, though, almost every night, a bank of dark clouds would drift over the city and dump sheets of cold rain, turning the maze of streets and alleys into a rushing labyrinth of streams and waterfalls. The larger roads gathered in the output of their tributaries, gaining strength and ferocity as the storms wore on. And all the while, troupes of whining taxis struggled valiantly upstream, facing the torrent with balding tires on polished stone, every hilltop a miraculous triumph.
And so the storm that baptized our arrival was anything but uncommon. We arrived late and were thus forced to stay for a night at a wretched little hole in the very center of the city. It's a stretch to call it a hotel, although in the most literal sense its proprietors did accept money in exchange for a room they attempted to pass as lodgings -- a cramped and dirty place precisely as wide and as long as the bed that took up all its space. When the morning came, we walked into the hotel next door and moved our things into a small, clean room on the top floor, peering down over the market and enjoying our more humane surroundings.
We meandered through Taxco's streets and got lost in her market. Our pale skin made us obvious targets for peddlers of silver, the town's main trade, but even the pushy hawkers couldn't dim our wonder. We quickly uncovered our favorite restaurant (Armando's), our favorite food (gringas), our favorite drink (fresh jugos, made to order). We explored and ate and slept and then ate again. We only regretted that we would have to leave too soon.
But then again, why? What better way to experience a place than to stay for a week or more? And so, we resolved to find an apartment and peer into Taxco's many nooks at a more leisurely pace. Our search was surprisingly short. We just asked the man at the Tourist Information desk in front of the cathedral if he knew anybody with a place for rent. Jorge, as it turned out, knew just about everybody in Taxco. He thumbed through a little black book for a couple of minutes, then gave us a name and a number and pointed us up the road that scaled the mountain to the southwest of town.
We soon found ourselves in front of a thin, four story building on the outer side of a sharp curve in the road. The house had a shrine dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe that faced the street, and people crossed themselves as they walked or drove past, partly out of reverence for Her and partly (I like to think) in prayer, hoping that no car or truck was barreling around the narrow bend in the opposite direction.
After minimal negotiation, we secured an apartment on the top floor -- with a kitchen, bedroom, living room, bathroom, two balconies, and a view of the entire valley -- for a mere $38 per week. This became our new base of operations, a calm and relaxing island of comfort from which we could strike out on more numerous and demanding adventures without worry or burden. We spent the next three weeks in blissful peace, cooking and eating and exploring to our hearts' content.
We saw enough in those three weeks to fill volumes of books. We haggled over silver with the plateros, ate sopes, ate cactus, ate beetles, danced in a deluge, walked an ancient road below a towering waterfall, zipped across a gorge, discovered Jesus on a mountain top, taught a swim clinic (three, actually), watched a symphony perform... in a cavern... underground, and just generally lived intensely. We made innumerable friends and memories over so short a time that it still seems unreal and impossible. Time in Taxco moved differently than it ever has for us.
But for all of our procrastinating, we knew that we'd never see all that the city has to give. There was always another festival the next week, or a neighborhood we had accidentally left unexplored. It was silly to hope that any conspiracy of the fates would ever again yield so incredible an experience, but we needed to press on if we wanted to have a chance of uncovering another Taxco, another gem in our journey.
So we left reluctantly, early in the morning so as to avoid any awkward and difficult goodbyes. We congratulated ourselves on a swift and silent exit from the apartment and were taking in the sights and sounds and smells of our last walk down the hill when Mari and Catalina, the women who had welcomed us to their family's home and anticipated our every want, waved quietly from far above us. We thanked them repeatedly and waved until they were out of sight.
We made the bus just as it was leaving and, as the road climbed and the houses slipped away behind us, we said one last goodbye to a place that, once so alien, had fast become a home for us.