A Road to Emmaeus

I have finished my third week. 

My Spanish continues to improve. There are days of frustration when I feel that my progress has stalled, but this is often followed by a conversation or two where I find myself using new verb tenses with relative ease and employing all of the new words that I have learned. Learning a language is like watching the smoke dissipate around you as new symbols and sounds come into focus. Whenever I learn a new word, it seems like I suddenly see it pop up all around me: in the newspaper, in public advertisements, and in the morning news broadcasts. I update my notebook daily and review it every night until all of the words have been absorbed into my brain. I estimate that I’m learning about 15-20 new words a day, which is about the most I can absorb while retaining the majority of it. I still get frustrated in situations where I need to access a simple verb (to escape, to replace, to pretend) and I simply don’t know it or have forgotten it. That being said, it certainly will not take me ten years to equal the scope of my French vocabulary. 

Language ultimately is just a series of symbols, and the more symbols you can recognize, the easier it is to stitch together patterns and understand the meaning. I recall early frustrations with French when I knew only a handful of words. One memory in particular: plopped in front of a TV in a hostel in Marseille in the summer of 2007, the day before my flight back to the States, doing my best to follow a news broadcast and failing to catch anything more than je suis d’accord from one of the interviewees on screen. I’m further along that that already in Spanish, but I look forward to the time when I can watch a news broadcast and understand most of it. 

As for pronunciation, this too is coming along. Earlier this week I had two reading and pronunciation sessions with my conversation partner. We focused specifically on the “double r” sound and I can now produce it with relative accuracy, most of the time. The challenge for me is recognizing the proper position of the tongue, and repeating it until I have the needed muscle memory. Overall, I was told that my pronunciation is good, and that for the “double r” I need to continue reciting tongue twisters until the sound is second nature. I hope that by March I will have succeeded in adopting a Mexican accent, strong enough so that Spanish speakers from anywhere will be able to recognize that I learned my Spanish in Mexico. Maybe one of these days I’ll actually speak Spanish well enough to be mistaken for a Mexican, which I will take as the ultimate compliment.

And now about the city itself. 

Sitting in a valley and surrounded by active volcanos, Puebla is Mexico’s fourth largest city with a population of about 3.2 million. Founded by the Spanish in 1531, Puebla had no pre-Spanish indigenous inhabitants and is therefore a purely planned, European city which was long the center of Catholicism in Mexico. The American celebration of Cinco de Mayo originates from Puebla, as it is a commemoration of a great victory that the Mexican Army won over French invaders on May 5, 1862. The center of the city is the Zocalo, or central square, where Puebla Cathedral’s enormous towers (the largest in Mexico) dominate the skyline. The square has a central fountain, gardens, and sculptures and is surrounded on three sides with porticoes housing restaurants and cafes. On the weekends, food and craft markets and live music and dance performances enliven the space, while Pokemon Go players descend en masse in search of exotic virtual creatures. The Zocalo is the spiritual heart of the city and its most defining landmark. 

For us students, the Zocalo is the lodestar against which all other locations in the city are measured. The city grid of Puebla is very simple, allowing for easy navigation on foot: avenidas run east-west and the calles run north-south. The neighborhoods surrounding the Zocalo are packed with tiendas of various types, cafes, restaurants, and parks, interspersed amongst innumerable churches and chapels. The typical city block near the Zocalo consists of multi-colored concrete and brick structures spanning several historical periods, from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. These are typically two to four stories tall with towering doorframes, neoclassical designs, abundant verandas with potted plants, and occasionally wild trees and shrubs that have taken root in spaces abandoned by humans. The crumbling, dilapidated look and broken windows of some of these facades give the city a charming, Old World feel. Due to the unattainable cost of restoration, many of the buildings in the city center have fallen into disrepair over the decades. Apparently, there’s an ordinance that prohibits altering the historical look of the city center. The school itself is housed in the remains of an eighteenth century convent, the relics of which are visible from the school’s second and third floors.

The city takes on a special allure in the mornings and evenings, when the striking greens, blues, reds, and yellows become truly luminous. At dusk, the heat of the day dissipates and currents of evening air drift through the streets. It seems that there are no tourists in this city, just poblanos going about the rhythms of life: merchants in the print shops waiting for the last customer of the night, municipal police making their rounds, mobile food carts hawking churros and elote (corn on the cob with chili powder), young couples taking their dogs for a stroll. Pueblo is like an unknown little gem to the outside world. 

To my delight, music is an ever-present aspect of this city. Every day I see young men strolling the streets with their guitars, which are almost always classical instruments with plastic strings. Sometimes they have cases, other times they don’t, instead clutching the guitar necks haphazardly as they amble their way through the streets. Whenever I see them I wonder what they’re up to. I do see some of them wandering the cafes and restaurants, even boarding public buses, while they strum away on their battered and splintering guitars, belting out their repertoire of songs whether people want to listen or not. While eating tacos the other night, I was visited by a guitar duo who busted out a convincing rendition of “La Bamba,” including lead and rhythm parts; impressed, I gave them 100 pesos (about $5 USD) for their services, which was probably their biggest payday in a while. I ran into them again the day after, and they recognized me from my straw hat – a relic of my Madagascar days. They hailed me from afar and I gave them a thumbs up: never stop strumming, boys, never stop.

This is the troubadour approach: going from place to place, pounding out chords and choruses, and shaking the money jar. Others find a fixed location, like most street buskers in the States. There’s a three piece mariachi band that plays almost every day near the school, consisting of a violinist and two guitarists. I’ve also seen solo trumpeters and saxophonists, classical string ensembles, and multi-piece, unplugged bands serenading the town with everything from Adele to the theme song of Game of Thrones. I know that somewhere in this city there must be an open-mic night for singer-songwriters to practice their craft. I asked one of the guides recently and he did mention that such forums do exist; I just need to track down the details. I’ve got this on my to-do list. Before I leave Puebla, I will have at least two or three Spanish language songs that I will play in public somewhere 

And my own music? I had my first mariachi guitar lesson earlier this week. My teacher was a guy named Frank, about my age, and an experienced guitarist and occasional vocalist who plays weekly in a mariachi group. It was after sundown when we finally got to the park bench to start the lesson. When he pulled his guitar out of this bag, I was surprised to see a five-stringed instrument somewhat smaller than a mini-sized American guitar. He explained that the tuning is the same as that of a standard six-string guitar, the only difference being that the low E string is removed entirely, thus requiring slightly different fretting positions. I took my steel six-string out and zoned in on his fingers as he explained the first and most basic mariachi rhythm: the ranchero. This uses a basic baseline pluck and two downstrokes, which I picked up immediately. Next we moved on to the bolero, a simple downstroke-heavy rhythm based on quarter notes and rotating through four chords. Finally, we got to the more complicated huapango, which involves a combination of strumming and palm muting and is instantly recognizable as a mariachi rhythm. The huapango introduced me to a new technique, with requires dragging the fingers across all six strings to let each one ring out individually during a single downstroke. This “dragged” downstroke is drawn out and preceded by a swift downstroke, and the timing of the two balances out so the guitarist can stay in rhythm. The overall feel of the huapango, as described by Frank, is that of undulating waves in the ocean; there is a clear ebb and flow to the guitar, and it almost feels like you’re speeding up and slowing down constantly. It took me most of the lesson to get the huapango down, and I made a minute-long recording of us playing it in tandem so I can practice later. For fun, he showed me the same rhythm when played at a faster pace, which is a glorious thing for a guitarist to behold. There will be more lessons with Frank, I’m sure. I can’t guarantee that I’ll join a mariachi band before I leave Pueblo, but I am intent on incorporating these new techniques into my own compositions. 

In terms of writing, I’m almost finished composing my first English-language song since my arrival in Mexico. The working title is “Times Like These” and it reflects a kind of existential unease that I’ve felt in the last couple of weeks. I am enjoying this sojourn to Mexico, but I know that it won’t last. The reality of life will set in soon enough, and all of the questions that I have – about life, about where I’m going, about what’s really out there in those wide open spaces – all of that hasn’t changed.

Strumming on a rooftop as the sun goes down

Volcano ash rising high into the clouds

Cathedral bells tower over all

Reminder of a life that remains unresolved

It’s times like these, I almost think I can leave my ghosts behind

It’s times like these, my worries will dissolve like sugar into lime

South of the deserts in the heart of Mexico

I hear the mariachis from my terrace window

Cantos of love and loss that they sing

I’m looking for redemption a change of place might bring

It’s times like these, I almost think I can start anew

It’s times like these, I’m asking all the questions, looking for the clues

Bold blue chapels, peeling paint on the walls

There’s a temple in the valley that no one recalls

Aztec roots lie deep in the skin

I hear a prayer of a spirit buried deep within

It’s times like these, I know I’m still the seeker I’ll always be

It’s times like these, I know that my escape is a moment’s reprieve

It’s times like these, seems like everyone’s got it figured out except for me

It’s times like these, my ego does the talking and I can’t be free

These are the words that tumbled out of my mouth when I starting laying down chords and fingerpicking patterns up on the rooftop of my apartment. I was watching the sun fall lazily behind Popocatepetl volcano out on the horizon, its dying gasp pushing brilliance into the clouds and the billowing ash, a truly Mexican sunset if there ever was one. There were clothes drying on the laundry lines, mosquitos hunting for human flesh, and the bold flash of the pharmacy sign across the street coming into focus (Lo Mismo Pero Mas Barato!). I was waiting for the song to arrive, and it finally did, though not as quickly as I would have liked. I don’t know if “Times Like These” will be one of my better songs, but I hope that it uncorks my creative energies so that any cantos that follow do so seamlessly and organically. We shall see.