Somewhere in the Southern part of the state Nuevo León, Mexico, there is a small town called Iturbide. I ended up there by chance one time a few years ago. Being back in Mexico I recalled this little town and the day I spent there. I would not know how to find my way there again, and if I could, I probably would not go anyway.
It was during the time that I was doing my internship at MARCO in Monterrey that I got in touch with a woman from Argentina called Laura. She knew a colleague of mine who had told me I should get in touch with her since she was a part of a group narrators who were touring the state performing old folk stories. She thought it might be of interest to me for my thesis that I was about to write about art and public programs. I gave Laura a call and she invited me to come along on a trip they were doing the following weekend.
When the Saturday came and my alarm went off I was wishing I hadn´t made that phone call. But now there was no turning back. I took the metro to the place where we had arranged to meet. And there they were, my new gang that I would spend the next 12 hours with.
I squeezed myself into the backseat and wondered what this day would be like. I was sitting in the middle, with Laura on one side, and a woman called Consuelo (=comfort) on the other and during the trip we started to talk about all kinds of things while listening to El Gran Silencio on "pirata" CD.
Outside the landscape changed and the nature became wilder. There was not a single village for hours and I was starting to wonder if there would really be a town called Iturbide by the end of the road. It became colder and it started to look a little bit like Scandinavia. It is strange that sometimes it seems as the further you go, the closer you get home.
Just before noon we arrived to the little town called Iturbide. We parked our car next to the Zocalo, the main square, where the town hall was situated and where they were going to perform later in the afternoon. We had some elote (corn) to eat and then we took a walk around the centre. The town was so quiet and beautiful and it felt as if we had just landed in another word.
On the square we ran into a couple of teenagers and we started to talk to them, or they to us, I can´t remember which. Since I had said in the car that I had just started to like cumbia music we got an idea to ask them about places where we could maybe listen to some cumbia later at night. We had obviously run into the right people cause they just happened to have a band playing cumbia music themselves.
Within half another they gathered the rest of the band and then they set up their instruments on the square and started to play. It was all very sponatenous and friendly. Consuelo started to dance and the rest of us followed. I had no idea how to dance to cumbia music, but to stand still while they were playing just felt wrong. So there we were on the main square in Iturbide so far from our homes, dancing to cumbia music, during the middle of the day.
Later in the afternoon Laura, Consuelo and the other two guys performed their stories in the town hall as planned. Then we had dinner with some of the people from the town. I think they were some important people working with art and culture. But I hardly spoke to them and nor do I remember anyone of them now. My memory from Iturbide consists of these young kids that welcomed us with their music and played for us just because they wanted to. It was spontaneous and from the heart. At first they were shy, and so were we taking our first dance steps on the otherwise empty square. But then we did not think anymore of how it all came out to the people around us. We just enjoyed the moment and the atmosphere together, just like it was, spontaneous and improvised and with no expectations. To me that was a Dreamday.
It was dark when we left Iturbide. We drove back on the same winding roads that we had come from in the morning. We looked at the lighs of the town and we saw them getting smaller and smaller until they finally disappeared somewhere behind the mountains. I knew I would never see these people again, nor would I ever come back to Iturbide. For a moment it made me a little bit sad, but then I thought, isn´t this what life is all about? Finding a place that you like, meeting people you never met before and enjoying a moment together. Then leaving it all as the evening comes. When you think about it, it is not sad at all.
Written to you from The Italian Coffee Company, Calle 2 Sur, Puebla.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment