During our three-day whirlwind sojourn through the city of Guanajuato’s Festival Cervantino –
an annual Quixote-centric cultural blitzkrieg ravaging this colonial jewel nestled among the silver hills of central Mexico for about three weeks – my travel companion and I inadvertantly pulled a trick often utilized by Shakespearean actors, which consists in frequently alternating two disparate but interrelated roles, in our case the central personages of Spanish writer Miguel Cervantes’ 16th-century work, “Don Quixote,” a monumental literary zeppelin considered by many as the first novel in the modern sense.
The trip’s three-day plummet into the Cervantino’s dizzying rabbit hole of wonders started Friday, October 20, a day we soon realized while leafing through the grey, course paper of the festival’s schedule of events was short on anything likely to put a spring in our step.
We did, however, find the gumption, after the quick consumption of a speed-ball consisting of espresso and a couple of cold lagers, to wheezily thread our way up through Guanajuato’s kaleidoscopic jumble of pock-marked, peeling dwellings to the municipality’s chief draw, a peerless view of the city’s undulating, lapidary expanse from a lookout ruled over by el Pipila, a colossal beige stone statue of independence hero Juan Jose de los Reyes Martinez Amaro.
For two travelers in lazy Panza mode, the viewing of this quietly jaw-dropping spectacle proved to be the outer-most extent of ambition, other than later eating street tacos and getting heavy-lidded and loquacious on fine spirits at Inundacion, a bar with live music on the second floor of a charmingly decrepit building (there exists in Guanajuato no other variety of structure) around the corner from Teatro Juarez.
The owners of Inundacion, incidentally, produce their own mescal in Guerrero. Its called Mi Chingon and is otherworldly, good enough to nurse at roughly the pace that water drips from a stalactite. But good luck finding it other than inside its makers’ Guanajuato smoke-filled, salsa-blaring saloon.
Saturday found one of your ass-dragging hobos in at least moderate Quixote, goading the other on a quest to greedily pan the silver city for all the glimmering nuggets she would deign to relinquish into our greedy palms.
Much of what she gives during Festival Cervantino is, in fact, free and of a piece with the city’s singular atmosphere of spontaneous whimsy, such as weather-beaten campesinos in full getups of white linen and red rope belts holding forth on struggle, blood and injustice, or men clad like Brooklyn bartenders dangling puppets into an open-topped box with an oval cut into the front accommodating the rapt visage of a single spectator.
Curated events - rather than ones occurring according to the whims of the willful and shameless - are also to be found slotted into many of Guanajuato’s sun-baked plazas. One such event was put on by two comely, limber Frenchmen in their early-30s – acrobatic members of Collectif Porte 27, in fact, putting on a show called “Caida” in tiny Plaza San Roque. The men – one dirty blonde with goofy mein (Matthieu Gary), the other bald with prominent black eyebrows and large, serious eyes (Vasil Tasevski) – performed on a jet black wrestling mat surrounded on all sides by several rows of oft-bewildered spectators in folding chairs. The two performers spent a disconcertingly long amount of their performance staring intensely at each other from either opposite ends of the mat, which isn’t unusual behavior from members of the Gallic race, necessarily, but still proved unnerving for many viewers. However, these strange interludes of ferocious European eye-wrestling were ameliorated by feats of balance and strength that sent shivers of admiration through the audience gathered around their sinewy gesticulations and spastic leaps.
Tasevski explained the show’s premise just a few minutes after the show’s end, the residual adrenaline as audible in his voice as the sweat on his brow was visible.
“The idea of tumbling, falling, is present everywhere, in the lives of everyone on earth. The whole world is falling, in a sense. We use falling to talk about many different things,” said Tasevski.
The city bathed in the gold of magic hour, we left Plaza San Roque for the grim, grey Alhondiga de Granaditas, a granary-turned-battleground-turned-museum which currently houses two exhibits whose subjects, the Cuban Revolution and Leon Trotsky, embody good old-fashioned, utilitarian Marxism – no better antidote for the lofty continental bloviation to which we had just been subjected.
The photographs featured in the Cuban exhibition, according to their curators, have only just now seen the light of day. If you are wont to fetishize Latin American revolutionary imagery and iconography – and enjoy the sight of Che Guevara alternating between wide grins and pensive scowls while chomping on a giant cigar – know that this exhibition runs until January 15.
The rest of the weekend flew by in a flurry of frenzied activity, of eating and drinking and being led through steep, winding alleys by modern day minstrels clad in puffy-sleeved outfits (a tradition known as the callejoneada).
Multiple images flicker before me as I write these words, like a parade of letters and numbers clicking past the eye at an optometrist’s office. One image looms larger before my eye, though, that of an Israeli cellist/vocalist sawing away with the focused fury of a resurrected Beethoven, her drummer pounding away a few feet to the left, his mien suggesting a similar state of violent passion. They were, respectively, Maya Belzitzman and Matan Ephrat, a duo from Israel that outdid anything we had seen before or subsequently in terms of originality and sheer bravura. In fact, the repeated, crashing descent of her bow on gut strings proved to be just as beautiful exemplar of the harnessing of gravity as anything in Collectif Porte 27’s admirable but ponderous “Caida.”
And like that, the weekend was over. Monday had oozed its way into our fortress of fun like a sulphur breeze. However, my companion proved, in the end, more of a Quixote than I: instead of returning with me to Jalisco’s capital on the 2 p.m. bus, she decided to take the next one bound for nearby Queretero and further adventures. Alas, for this Sancho Panza, real-world duty called in what is –at least compared to the fanciful Neverland that is Guanajuato – the very sensible, work-a-day city of Guadalajara.
And with that, duty is done. Now perhaps I can at last gingerly attempt to dip a toe into a certain 16th-century doorstop whose mastery I’m told is the moral and aesthetic obligation of every Westerner who doesn’t wish to be branded a cud-chewing simpleton.
While the Festival Cervantino has now concluded, many of the exhibits at the Alhondiga and other galleries will remain open for a good deal longer. Go to festivalcervantino.gob.mx for details.
You can follow the virtuosic duo of Ms. Belzitzman and Mr. Ephrat at their Facebook page or at mayabelzitzman.bandcamp.com, and the promising Collectif Porte 27 at porte27.org.
GUANAJUATO TOURIST TIPS
The city of Guanajuato offers a cornucopia of things to do and see for visitors, even when not in the throes of the Festival Cervantino. Here are some essentials:
Museo del las Momias: A variety of mummified corpses in varying states of preservation. The museum is found just above the city, adjacent to the municipal cemetery. Open everyday 9 a.m.-6 p.m., 6:30 p.m. Friday-Sunday. 55 pesos general admission, students and children ages 6-12, 36 pesos, seniors 17.
Diego Rivera Museum: The artist, Mexico’s most renowned along with his wife, Frida, was born in this narrow, multi-storied building. It now houses his and other artists’ work. Positos 47, Zona Centro. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m., 3 p.m. Sunday. 20 pesos.
Edificio Central del Universidad de Guanajuato: A broad, multi-flight stairway (La Escalinata) leads to the entrance to this marvel of ornate architecture. The view from the top of the stairs is stunning. Calle Pedro Lascurain de Retana 16B, Calzada de Guadalupe.
La Ahondiga de Granaditas: Once a granary and now a museum housing a wide variety of exhibits, the building was the site of a bloody independence battle in 1810. Mendizabal 6, Zona Centro. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., 3 p.m. Sunday. 65 pesos.
El Pipila lookout: Statue of local independence hero who breached a loyalist stronghold (the Ahondiga, see below) wearing a large stone slab on his back, situated at a gorgeous 180-degree scenic lookout. A funicular is available for the exercise-averse.
