The boy’s not-yet-arrived-at-puberty voice lifts over the barren hilltops with a
ranchera ballad worthy of the lungs of Vicente Fernandez. It rides on the sunshine and cold wind to swirl around us as we sit resting on centuries-old rubble of stone and mortar that once was a chapel. I hear a phrase, a half sentence, nearly recognize it, and then lose it like a scarf blowing in gusts just beyond my reach. The edges of his voice are thin, but he makes up for his shallow resonance with purity and pluckiness. Since I cannot see him, I picture him with sheep in the background, standing like Julie Andrews in the Alps filmed from a circling helicopter.
We sit high in the Sierra Madre, among the more than 200 year old ruins of the Ciudad Abandonada, The Abandoned City, what remains of the 18th century Real de Catorce, a thousand feet above the present village of Real de Catorce. The ruins are nearly at knee level, with not a trace of the old city’s roofs remaining.
We hear his singing for nearly an hour, as we eat our packed lunches and rest the mountain ponies after a morning of slow climbing up rocky trails. From where we sit on our hilly moonscape we scan the hills around us to try to spot the young, singing shepherd, but cannot find him to wave at him and let him know by our waving that we hear him and like his singing. From behind a nearby hill where he tends his sheep he sings, unaware of the pleasure he sends as he sings to pass the time.
The church of San Francisco de Assisi in the center of Real de Catorce dominates the postage stamp view we have of the village. The church sits across a small plaza from an elegant square building that once served as one of Mexico’s treasury mints. Real’s population reached 40,000 around the turn of the century. Silver was discovered in 1773 and poured from Real into Spain and Mexico’s treasure houses until production ended when the mine was destroyed during the Mexican Revolution. Real’s wealthy citizens shut down the opera house, bullring and their colonial mansions, but some families chose to stay. The two-kilometer, one-lane tunnel that runs though the mountain connects Real to the outside world of San Luis Potosi, two hours to the south, and Saltillo and Monterry four and five hours respectively, to the north. Car headlights bounce as they probe the dark, undulating solid rock walls of the tunnel connecting Real to modern Mexico. A primal memory is stirred while driving through the passage, like navigating the birth canal or awakening from a dream, leaving one world to enter another.
The village spills over with visitors once a year in October for Mexico’s second largest religious pilgrimage. Real’s patron saint is San Francisco de Assisi; the saint’s life size, sandal-footed statue’s worn soles attest to his disinclination to stay put at a newer church built across town for him. Villagers are said to have taken the statue several times to its new home, but each morning it had found its way back to the old church. Villagers saw the wear and dirt on the statue’s sandals and decided to leave it alone.
The large church is a testament to the town’s solid Catholic base, but there is also a relaxed acceptance among the villagers for people with different beliefs, including the pagan beliefs of the ancient native culture of the Huichol who revere their sacred, ancient sites near Real. The Huichol travel on foot across the width of Mexico from the state of Nayarit for their annual ceremonies, which include ritual eating of peyote found in the area. Real’s surreal moonscape, along with its remoteness at 9,000 feet is a magnet for hippies, mystics and urban refugees from around world. The hallucinogenic cactus attracts yo-yo’s and yahoos who foolishly collect burlap sackfuls of peyote buttons they couldn’t ingest in a year, destroying decades of growth in an afternoon of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth over-doing” western greediness.
The locals, who are proud of their village and understand its attraction, politely tolerate visitors of all kinds, from professionals from Mexico City on holiday, to scraggly travelers from Anyplace, Planet Earth, on missions of looking for themselves by looking in new places. Locals are accustomed to visitors, but they still view them as somewhat odd curiosities. An anthropologist who lived in Real for seven years told me she detected a common concern, bordering on pity, from the locals toward their resident foreigners. Why would someone want to leave her family and home so far away in England, Italy, or the U.S.? Locals wondered what awful thing had happened to keep a person away from family for so long.
For the past twenty years Real has been populated by about three hundred families and a sprinkling of growing families of new immigrants from Europe and the States. They have opened artist studios and restaurants and are raising families in the arid hills around Real. The latest invasion of outsiders to enter Real was documented in the American press. A Hollywood crew for the (awful) film “The Mexican” brought super stars from California to live for weeks in Real. TV and newspaper accounts about the movie’s filming in the remote location spread news of Real’s existence to a worldwide audience. I followed the news with distress, praying Real would not go Hollywood and be overrun by tourists ruining its ruinous charm.
Spacious showers are standard in Mexican hotel bathrooms, and all memories I have of showering in Real are of racing to finish before the supply of hot water. About a year after the film was shot, on my fourth trip to Real, I am relieved to see only two modestly modern additions: additional phone lines have been installed and a cozy, new one story hotel has been built, both in connection with “The Mexican” film production. One newspaper account reported that the movie star Julia Roberts was unhappy with the whirlpool bathtub installed to her specifications in the hotel, and that she requested it be replaced with another one that suited her better. Brad Pitts, her co-star, is said to have been more accessible and friendlier than Roberts with the locals. He wore an orange tee shirt for several days, and locals copied him, buying out the town’s supply of orange shirts.
Has the singing shepherd seen the movie “The Mexican?” and, if so, what does he make of it? I can’t see him, so I try to picture him. He is about twelve, and short compared to the overfed boys his age in Texas. He has traded his gray hand-me-down clothes for a velvet black mariachi outfit, silver studs along both pants legs. He sings as he twirls a rope in a smoky arena at two a.m. at a state fair, performing to a packed house in the pre-show to the rooster fights, the main attraction. His boots are set with determination in the red sand, legs wide apart, chest held high, head thrown back. His boy’s voice wails into the microphone songs of heartbreak and passion. At the end of his set, in a smooth, sweeping motion, he lifts his dark, jeweled sombrero and bows to the crowd.
We refugees from city jobs scarf down our sandwiches in a hurry, rushing through our lunch break, still on Texas time. We envy the young shepherd and his rhythm of life without stopping to consider if he sings to ward off worries or to mend a broken heart. “What spirit! What optimism! What a legacy the young
pastorcito carries, since before the time of Jesus! (I have finally remembered the Spanish word for shepherd boy. My mother used it with the diminutive suffix “ito” when describing the adult hired hand at her father and uncles’ ranch.) His job was probably the first we humans created coming out the gate of the Garden of Eden! Does the
pastorcito appreciate this? Does he consider the long tradition of which he is a part?” I am swept up with the romance of the stark terrain and his mysterious singing. I then remember the poverty in Real and realize the
pastorcito is unlikely to be as romantic about his life as I am. He’s the boy lost in the reverie of his singing, but he’s also the boy playing at the electronic game machines in the dark bar facing the tiny plaza that is hidden by the treetops a thousand feet below us. He’s the boy reviving the engine of an old cannibalized jalopy that would’ve rotted away in undisturbed retirement decades ago anywhere else but Real. He’s the boy playing soccer and dreaming of a world championship for Mexico. He’s the boy leaving the village at the end of the eighth grade for a job in construction in the metropolis of Monterrey.He's the boy considering a career with
narcotraficantes, maybe he'll be lucky and live to be 30!
On this rocky promontory high above the desert I remember vague strains from the CD of the shepherd folksongs of the French composer Canteloube which was the musical accompaniment of the year I spent writing my Master’s thesis. The ranchera ballad the boy sings is as far from the trained voice of Anna Moffo as this desert mountaintop is from France. Their connection to each other is not the voice or the song, but the shepherd's singing and the loneliness the song expresses and heals all at once.
With friends I hiked on shepherd trails in Ireland’s Dingle peninsula one summer, aware that shepherds made the paths we followed centuries before Christianity arrived on the island. I remember the black and white mop of fur we came across one morning outside a village, tied to a low shed. She was mostly bones and fur, wagging her long tail, pleading to be petted, showing us her tummy. A working dog, this Border Collie, gentle with strangers at the edge of peat bogs. Where was her shepherd, and did he sing whenever he got lonesome, or did he lift his cell phone to call a friend instead? I wonder if
pastores everywhere are going in for career retraining, checking-in the long hours outdoors in the elements for a job at the soon-to-come-to-your-village-Walmart?
I can only hear the young shepherd in fragments, plumes of sound that drift in and dissipate. Is he near? Beyond that craggy hill? Or is it that one? I can tell he is singing full throttle, no holds barred, his whole heart is in every word. Just like Julie Andrews or Anna Moffo, for the beauty and the joy of it.
