March 10, 2004
Michael Penn: Cypher?
Was walking to the mercado today after visiting the catedral - post to come - and heard a startling sound (NLD, pay attention):
Maybe I?m her Romeo in black jeans
Maybe I?m her Heathcliff it?s no myth
Maybe she?s just looking for
Someone to dance with
Perhaps the most requested song ever by a Harvard Student Employment Office employee. They played it once in three years. Here it?s in heavy rotation at the Italian coffee shop along with, of course, Cerca de Ti.
Temple of the Sun
The church is a buttery-yellow beacon on a hilltop overlooking the college town of Cholula, about two hours south of Mexico City. Nuestra Se?ora de los Remedios, one of more than a hundred built in 1519 during Cortez’s conquest. Though his men built many from the stones of the ancients, historians have yet to decide whether conquistadors knew what lay beneath the foundation.
Piramide Tepanapa remains covered, but archaelogists built nine kilometers of stone tunnels to expose the base. It turned out to be not one but three pyramids built on top of each other by Olmec and Cholultec peoples beginning in about 250 B.C. Though Egyptian and even Aztec pyramids are taller, none is wider than Tepanapa – 440 meters on each side. And, as my guide explains, unlike the Aztecs worshippers at Tepanapa never offered human sacrifices. Every few feet the rough gray stone tunnel breaks open and I glimpse the original grandeur – an impossibly steep flight of stone steps, slanted sides or one of 18 rain channels that corresponded to months in the Mayan calendar.
My guide, Jose Velasquez Hernandez, has been leading the curious through Tepanapa for years. Although he is “A believer,” as he says, a life-long Catholic, he doesn’t even bother touring the church. He lays claim to the pyramid as a sort of home, deploring graffiti artists who take advantage of the free admission for Mexican nationals on Sunday to tag tunnels.
Most tunnels are about five and a half feet high. After a 20-minute tour inside, most emerge temporary hunchback. Fields of singed grass ring the hill, broken by remnants of the pyramid’s exterior. Some are reconstructions. Others, like the wall peppered with sharp black rocks from the nearby volcano or the grand Patio de los Altares, are original sites frequented by the ancients. Here archaeologists found tools of jade and onyx, earthenware bowls and figurines on display at a museum across the street.
As we approach the altars, Velasquez tells me to wait. Stand there, he says, indicating the center. I oblige. He walks a few paces, then starts clapping. He circles the altar, clapping all the time, and I stand transfixed at the sound. Acoustics, he says. The people did not have a microphone.
But it’s laughter I hear. Claps come bouncing back at me like high-pitched voices. Do the people who built this altar, carved a sundial, grasshoppers (like this one)
serpents and homage to rain, wind and sun know about the irony of the church above? A 1999 earthquake almost destroyed it, repairs were only completed this year, and with so many grander neighboring churches, its main attraction today is what lies beneath. I glance up - buttery yellow stucco - a latter-day altar to the sun?
Chololan, Velasquez tells me, gesturing to fields of red and yellow flowers outside the pyramid complex, meant spring. “Pero, after Cortez, it is Cholula,” he said, explaining in classic Spanglish that “Cholula significo nothing.”
March 09, 2004
Cell phone madness
The one I brought from the U.S. depsite all assurances does not work. Therefore, as Martha Ojeda would say, I bought another one (after much haggling with clerks in Puebla).
From U.S.:
01 52 222 365 2263
Those in Mexico know how to adjust. Thanks to all who ahve tried to reach me for your patience, and I hope to talk with you soon.