One fine drizzly afternoon my mother-in-law suggested that we go to Santo Desierto. With a few other family members we piled into my Dodge Van, nicknamed the "shoebox" or cajita..As we left the outskirts of Tenancingo we floated upwards on Dodge butterball shocks over the narrow steep serpentine road lined with tall cedars, past the dump, a red dirt scar in the landscape littered with the multicolored plastic jewelry of civilization. Basura, or garbage is a growing problem in the New World. Even though the herbalist in the market ties her bundles with grass the disposable culture in combination with hoardes of disdainful litter bugs decorate the landscape in a perpetual christmastide of flotsam.
We climbed and passed through a forest of encinos, older and well spaced with age, each tree giving the other respect, their crowns widening fans of knarly limbs. Set in the crotches of the limbs were epiphytes or "air plants", those cactus like bunches that live above it all, parasitic actually, with a different set of skills for sustenance and a keen sense of place. The winding road afforded glimpses of Tenancingo below skirted on its perimeter by a quilt of fields.
At the top of this mountain, called Nexcongo, which is a national park, there is a Carmelite convent and a small village, called Santo Desierto actually part of Tenancingo. In the early 1900's, Fray Pedro, the lone ranger Carmelite Monk who watched over the nearly abandoned compound invited some to build houses there. Perhaps he was lonely. He could never have imagined the controversy that developed almost 120 years later when the town near the convent grew into the lower expectations of the 21st century. Now that the pueblo's month long fiesta in July, that was originally supposed to honor Nuestra Señora del Carmen and various guilds in the area has turned into a disorganized drunk fest the spiritual peace has been pirated. "The Desierto", which is actually a lush old growth forest, is supposed to be a place of contemplation,, a place where the ambience makes space for the mind's melody.
Lejos de la maraña auditiva de la ciudad, sin música ni ruido y con múltiples carteles que invitan a no hablar, el sitio es un centro de desintoxicación citadina y una invitación abierta a la meditación.
"El silencio tiene una importancia que a veces no comprendemos, sólo el silencio nos deja escuchar las cosas importantes", establece Miguel Murguía, sacerdote superior del Convento.
"Silence has an importance that sometimes we do not understand, only silence allows us to listen to important things," says Miguel Murguía, Superior priest of the Convent."
In the pueblo, Sol and Victoria beer signs compete for your eye and vendors of Mexican fare including "pulque" abound. Pulque is the freshly fermented juice of the maguey, a large bluish green cactus with arms like tentacles. One taps the sweet juice then ferments it for a day or two until it is mildly alchoholic but it seems to possess "other" dreamy properties. Masons with whom I worked would often purchase some from the pulque girl at late lunch time and drink heartily in order to ease the pain of the hard work. After parking the cajita, we ambled past the lady with the upside down ears and baby teeth who sells tortillas. Two of the young ones in our group decided to stay with the food at the puesto of the upside down eared mamacita, too lazy for the walk down to the convent. The rest wended our way down the cedar lined road passing the stations of the cross encrusted in midget totems of concrete and stone. The white cedars or Teolates are like arbor vitaes in their most preferential environment, tall thick, grand and outsized creating a cool light. They stand at inclined attention,,,,,,,and the sweet angle makes them less military-like. Originally from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala, the Teolates inhabit temperate and cloud forest. Knarled encinos spotted the hillside whose branches seemed like unfurling streamers captured in mid flight.
At the bottom of the promenade there is an area of trinket vendors, who sell the kind of things everyone liked as a child like trompos, tablitas magicas, maracas, titeres, and baleros de copa. Before the final 200 yards to the convent in a circle of tall Teolates is a gauntlet of food stands that offer quesadillas de hongus, gorditas, pulque and mezcal.
The monastery sits in a natural bowl swathed in trees. Its mossy walls hide all but the terra cotta roofs and two towers, one round and the other square. The cupola of the round tower descends from the top to rose windows, like portals, each set in its own round conical dormer. The flow of the shapes so attracted me for their organic detail. The walls hide the guts of the compound and the quarters for the carmelites. Even as one descends the hill and has a view from an angle above the inner geometry is restricted from view by the high walls. What is hidden beckons to be seen and what is seen beckons to be studied.
We lined up to evacuate our bladders in a little bathroom before entering the monastery. Many indigenous people, with various "looks", Navajo, Pueblo, Polynesians, East Indians, and Lebanese, were on pilgrammages all braids and rebozos. Some children peered from their charcoal eyes and smile, and the adults stared stoically. My mother-in-law, ever the amiable politician banters loudly with everyone. It is the perch from which she wishes to be seen and she always comes off well having the ability to communicate with all classes of people. This is a form of divinity for those that do not abuse it and a form of devilry when it cloaks raw ambition.
We entered the church in silence through two courtyards of terra cotta framed in white walls aged a little yellow,,then through a hall and into the church proper. My mother-in-law seats herself left in the second pew closest to the altar. My wife seats herself to the right on the opposite side. I go to the front pew on the right......three separate souls who play ball with each other's heart. Everyone prayed but me unless really contemplation without structure is a form of praying. My wife speaks with her god while I wonder why there are two Virgin Marys with the baby Jesus, one large and one small.....insurance? It also plagues me to see the speakers of the P.A. system. I wonder when that arrived and why Carmaelites need speakers. I think about why the gold leaf wasn't well laid, why the paint was a little sloppy, the sequence of construction and from where the stone came.It is still for all its retouches a charming church.
The outside of the church seems better than the inside,,,perhaps because the hands of nature that over time caress the more exposed outer layer are more expert in the trade of detailing. As for the inside perhaps over the years various prelates needed to leave their mark inside the lord's house,,really their house, for it always seems to be not the house of the lord but of the monseignor,,,,,so they bought some paint, gathered some souls from the village and with all the questionable taste they could muster decorated. It now occured to me the process that I follow. It is a process of how and why. It is a system of dismantling,,,,stripping apart.
My wife slides over to sit next to me and gave me her benediction and of course I felt myself slipping into the spell and caresses of my own catholic past. We rose and walked to one side of the interior. My wife commented on the door as she has commented on so many portals. She is a woman fascinated by doors,,,,,hopefully also what is on the other side. She made note of the old doors in San Luis Potosi, the large heavy doors of the monastery there. Old doors are time portals that have opened and closed for thousands of hellos and goodbyes, thousands of exits and entrances,,,,,,,revealing views into their interiors that they often very well hide. I doubted that she was aware of this behavior, and I wondered what she would say are the reasons,,,,, old doors are like the people she respects, who are archives of the past that will soon pass into oblivion as we hurtle into an age that regards only the green light urging accleration and transgression without the gathering of the shreds of humanity,,,,,humanity that has marked space and time.
We left the monastery and walked back to our starting point. The upward climb out of the bowl is a strain for my zaftig mother-in-law: I stay with her telling her to count twenty steps and rest. Taking it in measured little bites helps. We arrive at the upside down eared papacita's kiosk and get down to gorditas and quesadillas. A gordita is a thick oval tortilla folded over a filling of fava beans to form an oval slipper which is grilled on the clay metate. When the skin is towards crisp salsa is added and sometimes grated cheese. Mamacita pats, flips, folds, and flops these onto the large clay cooking surface fueled by wood. I sit in the wake of the wood smoke and collect aroma, something that reminds me of the northern woods. I become engossed in the polyglot pilgrams who arrived at this kiosk before us and who are almost finished. They cut slow moving figures with soft voices and dark smooth skin. At the end comes the "count", for each must keep account of what they have eaten. So many of this, so many of that, three cervezas, two pulques,,,,each person responsible for their own consumption.
A healing Shaman told a friend of mine,,"When we are upset we cannot believe what our mind tells us".
I bought some land in El Carmen, on the mountain. and built a stone house there, something unequivocal,, and when I stayed some nights bathed in quiet I would go outside looking towards the silent glowing splendor of Tenancingo and rule.
