Following Fact and Fiction Into a Colonial City
 Mary Duenwald - NYTimes
| | Founded in the mid-16th century, Morelia was among the first Spanish cities in Mexico. It is the setting of a chapter in Wallace Stegner’s novel “Angle of Repose.” (Adriana Zehbrauskas/NYTimes) |
In the late summer of 1880, Susan and Oliver Ward traveled by steamship to Veracruz, Mexico. They then boarded a train and finally a stagecoach, heading 450 miles inland to the state of Michoacán. Along the way, the couple passed through towns and cities that had been built soon after the Spanish conquest — with tiled domes, terraced roofs and bell towers that looked as if they might have been exported whole from Seville.
To Susan, a writer and illustrator who had been living, not so happily, in mining settlements of American West, Mexico looked “like something rubbed up out of a lamp, as different from the false fronts, cowhide boots, flapping vests and harsh disappointments of Leadville as anything could possibly have been.”
“Oh!” she told her husband on the night they finally arrived at the Hotel Michoacán, “I have never been anywhere till now!”
The scene is from “Angle of Repose,” Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, which is set mostly in American mining towns and on the banks of Idaho’s Boise River. Mainly, the novel — winner of the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for fiction — is an epic tale of frontier life, the story of a long marriage, challenged by disappointment and lost hope and wounded by betrayal and compromise.
But halfway through, in one thin chapter in the very center, Mr. Stegner offers this sunny interlude in Mexico, where Oliver Ward, an engineer, has been sent to inspect an old silver mine. Susan Ward makes the most of the trip — and treasures its memory the rest of her life. “Mexico,” she tells her grandson decades later, “was my Paris and my Rome.”
Paris and Rome: not usually what Americans imagine when they think of Mexico. Yet Susan’s impressions are as sharply detailed as a photograph.
That is in part because Mr. Stegner did not entirely make them up. His Susan Burling Ward was closely modeled after a real American writer and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote, also married to a mining engineer, who published her impressions of traveling to Michoacán in 1881. Mr. Stegner unabashedly borrowed Mrs. Foote’s experiences and impressions — but rendered them in his own artful prose and placed them in the context of the Wards’ complicated marriage.
The result is a travelogue so romantic and full of enthusiasm, it recommends a trip to Mexico’s colonial interior. This past spring, using both “Angle of Repose” and Mary Foote’s reminiscences as a guide, I traveled in the 19th-century women’s footsteps.
I had seen other parts of Mexico that Americans more often see: the beach towns of the west coast and Baha, teeming Mexico City, even a few of the better-known colonial cities like San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato. But I had never heard of Morelia — the little stone capital of Michoacán, high in a mountain valley — or known anyone who had traveled there.
Passenger trains no longer run from Veracruz to Mexico City, but I and my 16-year-old son (and translator) found a luxurious alternative in the form of the UNO bus line. The five-and-a-half-hour journey lifts you from sea level to Mexico City (7,300 feet) on a road that provides, as Susan Ward’s train window must have provided her, a leisurely look at the snowcapped Pico de Orizaba, Mexico’s highest mountain.
The Wards’ stagecoach gave Susan ample chance to observe and sketch the architecture and the people. “She had a heart as well as an eye,” Mr. Stegner wrote, “and they were sometimes at war. Patient Indian women with their babies slung in rebozos, men bowed under their burdens, looked to her like people waiting for their souls. A cathedral rising out of a huddle of huts ... made her ashamed of the delight she took in a picturesqueness created out of so much driven human labor.”
Susan notices, and admires, every detail. “Even the way an Indian woman hands you a tortilla on her flat palm is like a movement in a dance,” she tells her husband.
Our taxi from the bus station, like the Wards’ coach, took us past Morelia’s forested city park, alongside the soaring antique aqueduct and into the stone-paved city center. There, we settled into the Hotel de la Soledad, a 250-year-old Spanish inn made of the same pink stone used in all the streets and buildings of Morelia. And in the morning, I went in search of Casa Walkenhorst (Casa Gravenhorst in Mrs. Foote’s account), the great house in the center of the city where Susan was a guest for all but the first night of her stay in Morelia.
Neither description of the trip, fiction nor nonfiction, identifies the house, except to say that the couple’s bedroom looked down on the Plaza of the Martyrs, Morelia’s central square. I could see only one structure, now offices, that might have been the house — fronted by a row of nine arches. The double doors to the courtyard were open that morning, so I could see the half-dozen shiny cars parked inside.
A century and a quarter earlier, the great center court had accommodated a steady traffic of people, mules, horses and dogs — to the stables, or the saddle room, the kitchen and other centers of labor behind stone pillars on all four sides. Upstairs, an open-air gallery, supported by massive vine-wreathed arches, gave access to the living areas — bedrooms, dining rooms and salons, 20 in all.
Susan Ward would rise early in the morning and stand in that gallery to watch the house wake up: At dawn, old Ascención would scatter grain for the doves before plodding up the stone stairs to water the flower pots and sweep the corridor. He would lift the hood from the parrot’s cage, and the bird, in perfect imitation of 10-year-old Enriqueta greeting her white poodle, would shriek: “Enrique, mi alma! Enrique, mi alma!” and then “in a conspiratorial mutter,” “Buenos días. Buenos días.”
Susan Ward admires the skill of her hostess, Emelita, at running the household. Her linen room alone, Susan tells her husband, was “a shrine.” “If I’d been a true housewife myself I’d have gone down on my knees.”
The view of the Plaza of the Martyrs from Mrs. Ward’s window would not be the same today. There are no beggars like those she saw sitting in the niches of the Morelos monument; there is no such monument in the square to Don José María Morelos y Pavón, a native son and hero of Mexican independence for whom Morelia was named.
But the square is still a neat public garden of pruned laurel trees and waving purple jacaranda. People walk or sit in quiet conversation on the benches at all hours.
Susan Ward was not allowed to wander in public alone. Aristocratic women could go out only during their brief afternoon coach ride, or “airing” as it was called. The only people really enjoying the cool air of the afternoon, she writes to her friend in New York, are the men on foot or horseback and the Indian girls who “swing up and down, and use their rebozos not to hide their faces but to enhance their eyes, and giggle and hug one another and cast slant eyes at passing boys.”
So when Susan wants to sketch the market and fountain, she must be accompanied by Emelita and a maid. She describes “... the things spread out there on the ground, under the matting roofs! Oranges, lemons, watermelons, little baby bananas, camotes (sweet potatoes), ears of their funny particolored corn, strange fruits, strange vegetables, chickens hanging by the legs like so many bouquets of Everlasting drying in an attic. Turkeys, pigs, beans, onions, vast fields of pottery and baskets, booths where were sold tortillas and pulque and mysterious sweets and coarse sugar like cracked corn.”
“Such a colorful jumble,” she says, “such a hum of life, such bright hand-woven cottons and embroidered chemises!”
The monumental fountain — a stone trio of indigenous women holding overhead an enormous tray of fruit — is still in place, as is Morelia’s baroque stone aqueduct, a mile-long row of 253 arches. The massive and ornate cathedral, built from 1640 to 1744 and known simply as the Catedral, would also have looked much the same: a two-towered, ornate structure — a hybrid of baroque, neo-Classical and Herreresque architecture — that presides over the city.
What would be a shame is if because of the restrictions on women’s movement, Susan Ward/Mary Foote might not have explored the many smaller churches and monasteries in Morelia — the Baroque Sanctuary of Guadalupe; the Temple of Saint Augustine, with its 16th-century Corinthian columns; or the Temple of the Roses, with its dark richly carved altar wall. Across the street, in a shady slip of green called Rosas Park stands a statue of Cervantes and, across from him, the seated stone figure of a monk named Don Vasco de Quiroga.
The former Convent of San Francisco has been turned into the House of the Handicrafts, where a series of rooms are set aside for the crafts of individual towns: straw baskets and crucifixes from Ichupio, gold and silver jewelry from Huetamo, ceramic masks from Tocuaro, stringed instruments from Paracho. In our visit, we bought a guitar from Juan Cano Onchí, a small, stern man with bushy black eyebrows and well-calloused hands, who picked out a sad, beautiful Spanish melody on the instrument he had made before passing it over to us.
Susan Ward dreamed of moving to a house near the forested city park and riding horses with her son. “It gives me a delightful sense of wickedness to contemplate it,” she wrote to her friend, “though I wouldn’t think of being so cavalier with the proprieties at home.” But her husband (like Mary Foote’s in real life) found no rich vein of silver in the mine, and she let go the idea of living in Michoacán.
“A short dream, but intense,” Mr. Stegner wrote. “She put it aside, and did not mope, and made the most of the trip back. It is a commentary both on her personally and on the Genteel Female that she rode the two hundred and fifty miles to Mexico City in a little over five days.”
VISITOR INFORMATION
GETTING THERE
Flights from New York to Morelia are likely to involve a connection in Houston, with round trips on Continental starting at $562, or in Mexico City, with Aeromexico round trips from Kennedy Airport starting at $785. The whole trip takes about seven and a half hours.
WHERE TO STAY
The 17th-century pink stone buildings in the city center house several comfortable hotels. Hotel de la Soledad (52-443-312-1888; www.hsoledad.com), a half block off the main square, has colonial-style rooms, a grassy courtyard and antique coaches in the galleries. Rooms start at 1,100 pesos (about $100 at 11.13 pesos to $1). On the square are Virrey de Mendoza (52-443-312-0633, www.hotelvirrey.com), starting at 1,900 pesos, and the newer Los Juaninos (52-443-312-0036, www.hoteljuaninos.com.mx), also from 1,900 pesos. Also close to the square, La Casa de las Rosas (52-443-312-3867, www.lacasadelasrosas.com) offers rooms from 1,980 pesos.
WHERE TO EAT
Most hotel restaurants serve local dishes. The restaurant in the Hotel de la Soledad offered delicious uchepos for breakfast (a sort of cornmeal in tortillas in tomato sauce with cream and jalpeños on top) for 95 pesos. Mirasoles (52-443-317 5775, www.losmirasoles.com), a chic restaurant in an ancient building three blocks west of the main square, provides a generous sampling of Michoacán fare, including corn tamale soup, churipu (broth of beef bones), chile chilaca and chongos (a sweet, milky dessert). For dinner, expect to spend 200 pesos per person or more.
WHAT TO SEE
Casa de las Artesanías, or House of the Handicrafts (52-443-312-1248), is a two-story museum shop in the former Convent of San Francisco where you can see (and buy) pottery, textiles, brass pots, gold and silver jewelry, guitars and other stringed instruments made by Purépecha Indians Open daily; free. The Catedral, built from 1660 to 1744, towers over the city center. Many ornate details have been added over the centuries, including an 18th-century silver neo-Classical baptismal font and a 20th-century pipe organ. The Museo Regional Michoacano (52-443-312-0407) showcases the history, geology, flora and fauna of the state. Closed Mondays; free. |
Vallarta Weddings
Travel & Outdoors | September 2006 
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us