Yesterday I took a day tour from Puebla to see the “Pyramid”
of Cholula.
Don’t expect much in the way of description for Puebla, gem
of the Mexican guidebooks as it may be.
I cruised in and out with barely a glance and a lot on my mind. I wore out the stone sidewalk for the three
blocks between my hotelroom and the city center where the necessary restaurants
and coffeehouses were clustered, and didn’t have the time to look further. Also in the Centro, I did notice, was a
mighty 16th Century cathedral, a stroll inside of which (where photos were
prohibited) revealed such a hangarspace worth of Baroque overdecoration that
its astrally gilded dome could encompass a pillared cupola that itself could
have contained my town church in Cornwall Connecticut. At night, as I emerged strung out on caffeine
from an all-day coffeehouse stint writing three blog posts, the cathedral was
staging a music and light show in which they projected tie-dye colors, spinning
pinwheels, shadow-forms of wing-flapping angels, and a melting Mexican flag on
the ancient stone. I didn’t
approve. But never fear, there were plenty
of other grand old churches to choose from: in my immediate neighborhood there
were at least five, and so many colonial buildings done up in pink-and-white
zig-zag tile that you couldn’t use them as landmarks.
My memories of Puebla will likely be restricted to my
bizarre hotel, the Meson San Sebastian. From
the street you enter a luxurious two-story flagstone courtyard, pillared and
arched in creamy yellow and filled with plants, glass doors and patio
tables. But my room upstairs? It had no lock on the door; instead they
issue you a padlock and its key, which I could affix to the latch either inside
or outside the door to close it. The
room had no windows, a very dim hanging ceiling light, and no desk; one of the
frosted glass panels on the door was broken and Scotch-taped shut, and the
toilet pull-chain broke while I was there.
But it had palatially high ceilings of old wooden beams, and rich red
curtains that one pulled in front of the door at night to shut out the hall
light, and the bed was comfortable. It
was essentially an aristocratic cell.
My padlock
I put “pyramid” in quotes because it isn’t one, or wasn’t
one, or is or was several, or maybe none.
Whatever structure was there was abandoned circa 1100 and immediately
overgrown, and by the time the Spaniards arrived even the natives thought of it
as a green hill, an illusion that persevered well into the 20th Century
(despite Porfirio Diaz running railroad tracks through part of it in the
19th). When archeologists finally
started acknowledging an underhill edifice their hyperbolic verdict apparently announced
no less than four ancient pyramids one on top of the other dating back to 250
BC, with a total base circumference by far exceeding the previous earthly record-holder,
notwithstanding which hoopla it has never been excavated and to this day presents
to the eye the aspect of a green hill (with a colonial-era church on top).
I received this information from Carla, a petite and
energetic brown-haired native tour guide walking between the seats on a huge
tinted-window tour bus that pulled away from the curb in the Pueblo Centro with
all of four tourists aboard. Puebla
apparently runs these things like subway cars, on a daily schedule no matter
how few people sign up. Because of
me—and because the Mexican couple sat rows away—Carla was forced to deliver her
lecture in two languages (Amit, the bearded young backpacking Israeli, being
fluent in Spanish), but she handled it admirably, the more so because I had no
interest in the pyramid, but was hoping only to get a good view of Popocatepetl
from Cholula. I got my first teaser view
of the famous volcano from the bus window en route.
En route to the pyramid we stopped briefly at two of
Cholula’s churches (as if Puebla hadn’t had enough). The first was the Iglesia de San Francisco
Acatepec, another example of that curious Mexican over-candied pullulation of
ornament that bowls one over from a distance but, up close reveals itself to be
a medley of sadly cartoonish babies.
Carla did explain, on her own, that if the interior appears
somehow sup-par it’s because the whole thing is a reconstruction following a
1939 fire; one can stand at a roped-off door and see at the back of an alcove
a tiny piece of the 16th Century original that survived (its cherub looked more
aesthetically finished).
The second church was a local landmark called Tonantzin,
noted because its exterior features images of saints with brown skin, a liberty
apparently granted to the Indian builders so that their exploited race (which
Carla referred to as “we”) could more readily identify with their religious
overlords.
The imagery was again primitive to my taste, which I tried
conscientiously to expand, but when I admired the group of figures playing
musical instruments Carla admitted that that whole section was a modern
addition.
The pyramid is, it’s true, partially excavated, but its most
impressive wall—which one encounters
first, walking the long tourist promenade from the big parkinglot hosting
several tour buses—is a fake, commissioned by the government to lend popular
validity to the mostly invisible site.
This part of the pyramid is fake
The vast majority of the Zona Archeologico is indeed still
mostly a green hill, and we—I was circling it in company with Amit—were now
newly cynical, distrusting any revealed block that looked too smooth or white. At least there was a view of Popocatepetl in
the other direction.
You can, however, quickly learn to appreciate modern
engineering by taking the underground tour.
This follows a series of tunnels cut into the pyramid by the various
archeology teams to, I believe, initially verify that it wasn’t just a
hill. In my search for authentic stone I
momentarily forgot that I don’t like being underground in small spaces; once
in, there was nothing for it but to inch forward in an endless single file of
tourists through an arch-shaped tunnel into the earth barely head-high and too
narrow for anyone to turn around and squeeze backward. I tried to breathe
steadily whenever the Japanese group ahead brought the whole line to a stop for
selfies. And I never loved electric lights,
sturdy metal floors, and ventilation so much.
To be fair, I think that even those without my affliction would find the
unvaried stone to either hand uninteresting.
What is authenticity?
What makes an original “better” than a copy? If we, uneducated laymen, can’t tell the difference,
why does it matter? Given that history,
and perhaps all of culture, is a story we tell ourselves, why shouldn’t we—edit
it?
I think it all boils down to expectations. We visit an ancient ruin to experience a
window to the past, and we want to see the past. If it isn’t the past, it’s a fraud. We look at a famous painting to experience supreme
artistic creativity; if it’s a copy—if it’s not creative—it’s likewise not what
we paid to see. In contrast, the replica
of “Lucy” at the National Museum of Anthropology didn’t bother me, because its
purpose in the room was to illustrate the idea of evolution, along with the
various dioramas; I wasn’t told it
was the original.
Mexico is a country bubbling in a constant convection with
its own pasts, wrestling with its depredations, interpreting its victimizations,
wary of the “authentic” in ethnicity and worship, honoring its ancient stone as
it boasts of its steel and glass, unleashing every kind of constructive and
destructive creativity in an effort to stitch its fractured national story
together. Maybe what we think of as the genuine is only the unifying fiction most victorious in the bloody marketplace of ideas. It was a long climb from the
tunnel mouth to the church at the top of the hill, and Amit and I didn’t have
much time before the tour bus left. But
from there one could at last clearly see the unimpeachably, the perfectly, the beautifully
and eternally authentic:
Ironic that it’s a dangerous volcano, currently closed
because it’s too active.
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