Everyone loves to see films that are shot on location in their hometown, and I’ve had the fortune to live in towns that are desirable film locations: Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. As a result, I’ve had my share of star sightings and the opportunity to mentally correct many inconsistencies, like corners that are turned that put the actors in a completely different neighborhood. When I walked into Casa Spratling, I felt like I was walking onto the set of one of my favorite San Francisco based mini-series: Tales of the City. I knew it wasn’t the actual set, but to a degree it was even better than the series because it was people actually living stories I’d watched on TV.
If you’ve never lived in San Francisco, you’ve probably never heard of this show, just like most of America has never heard of the show Portlandia, though all of us in Portland are familiar with it, at least conceptually. Tales of the City is about the lives of several individuals occupying a quirky apartment building in San Francisco during the lively 60s. It was run by an eccentric woman with a mysterious background. This is exactly what I stumbled upon when I entered my AirBnB in Taxco, Mexico.
I was greeted by the landlady hurriedly making the bed in my room. I had arrived a bit early and asked if I could drop my bag and explore town until the room was ready. On my way in, I had to walk through the restaurant also on the premises and decided to enjoy a meal while I waited for my room to be ready.
I had been to Taxco twice, but only for short visits while bringing tourists to visit. It surprised me that I didn’t remember how much I loved the place. As I sat at a table looking at the two steeples of the town’s main cathedral over the red tiled rooftops of the buildings in front of me, I already knew I would be staying longer than the week I’d booked.
I’d originally planned a larger tour of Mexico to discover it’s mountain towns. I’d flown into Puerto Vallarta a few months earlier and decided it was too hot and humid a place to spend an extended period of time in, so I began looking at hill towns with cooler climates. From previous trips, I knew there were several high elevation towns in Mexico, but the trick was finding somewhere large enough that I could spend a month.
My Google map was filled with starred places I’d intended to scope out when I arrived in Taxco. The road leading to town hugs a cliff as it undulates around the natural curves of the landscape. My seat was on the left side of the bus so I was treated to a view of the town in the distance as we approached. Tears began to well up in my eyes as I saw this impractical town cascading like a waterfall down the side of a mountain. I knew those who worked to build a city against such unfavorable odds would be my kind of people.
When the landlady had finished preparing my room she came to explain the history of the place. It was originally the studio of the first silversmith to set up shop in Taxco. William Spratling graduated from Alabama Polytechnic Institute with a degree in architecture. He was well aware of Taxco as a mining town but was surprised to find that no one had set up a silversmith there.
The room in which my AirBnB was located is the former office for Spratling, but it is just one room of what can only be described as a hacienda of 16 rooms that wrap around a garden courtyard. The landlady was quick to point out that the garden is shaded by the largest tree in the town of Taxco.
I was immediately struck by a familiarity to the TV show I’d watched while living in San Francisco. It too had a central shaded courtyard from where you could see everyone’s apartment. Though the complex is made up of at least three different buildings, they are all connected by bridges and walkways. To a degree, there is no way to get to your room without passing the room of someone else, and inevitably, any effort to come or leave is impeded by a conversation with one of the other guests or residents.
Before long I came to learn the stories of all the residents. Looking at the building became like opening a book filled with stories, each unit a different chapter. While some of what I learned happened organically, I did coerce the landlady into telling me the stories of all the residents one night over a bottle of wine.
The penthouse unit was the only one that stretched the entire length of the building. On the rare occasion when the curtains were drawn, I could see light streaming out one of the many windows, but it was too high up to see inside from my angle on the terrace. I learned that it was occupied by a 65 year old artist and his 19 year old wife. Fittingly, her name is Dulce, which in Spanish means “sweet”. The landlady explained to me that the man was a friend of her father. Both Italian men, they apparently subscribed to the philosophy that, if you get them when they’re young, you can train them. To be fair, on many occasions I have heard women speak the same of training their men.
I never saw Dulce, but I imagined a pretty lonely life since her husband spent half the year in Italy. It explained why the only time I saw movement in the penthouse was early in the morning when she was on the phone calls convenient to her husband’s schedule.
Below the penthouse lives a man named Manuel who, like most everyone in the complex, is an artist. His tool of choice is the camera. I learned a new Spanish word when the landlady described him as a fresa. Literally translated it means strawberry, but in this case she was using it to mean uptight. True, he never joined any of our patio get togethers until my going away dinner. I’m fairly certain it was the table full of women and not a desire to bid me farewell that brought him down from his apartment that night.
Below him lives Anabel, a silversmith whose butchered Spanish accent frequently woke me from my afternoon naps. To be fair, she spoke the language fluently, having moved here from England 40 years earlier. It’s just that she never picked up the accent.
Though I was horrified the first time I heard her Spanish, which is more comprehensive than mine, she turned out to be charming, and I came to love chatting with her daily across the courtyard from our respective balconies. It was the kind of setting where you didn’t need anyone’s phone number. You just poked your head out the window and yelled their name. Almost without fail, you’d soon see the head of the person you’d called for poking out a window or appearing from a doorway.
This improvised communication system worked with the outside world as well. Every morning, vendors walked the alleys below broadcasting a litany of items for sale. If you wanted fruits or vegetables, you simply told the caller what you wanted and he or she would go running back to the main street to return with your order. Everyone had a basket tied to their railing, and they would lower it down with the money and bring it back up with the delivered produce. It was the Mexican version of Amazon prime delivery.
Next to Anabelle lives Vesta, a professional graphologist, which means she interprets people’s personalities based on their handwriting. I’ve got to guess this is a dying art since most writing is now electronically. I only met her once, when borrowing a can opener, but more interesting is the story of her dearly departed husband.
Violante, the landlady, went on to share that one night Vesta was yelling frantically that she needed help. Violante went over to see what was wrong, and it appeared Vesta’s husband had died. Still she insisted that Violante perform CPR. While Violante agreed, she also told Vesta she was not putting her lips on another woman’s husband, even if he was dead. So, the two worked at CPR on the cadaver until it was clear he wasn’t Lazurus.
Violante called the mortician, who showed up with a coffin much too small for the man’s body. It was understandable since Mexicans are relatively short, and the mortician had no way of knowing it was a European who’d passed away. Mexicans are the consummate problem solvers, and the mortician suggested he could bend the body in half in order to fit him into the coffin, at least until they could get it to the mortuary and put him in a bigger coffin.
The wife refused, and the mortician was forced to go back and return with a bigger coffin. This meant Vesta had to live with her dead husband in the house another day. When he did arrive with the bigger coffin, the mortician wanted to bring it inside to carry the body down. Violante suggested that it might be easier if they just carried the body downstairs to the coffin waiting outside and that’s what they finally did. I couldn’t help but think of what an impact this would have had on an incoming AirBnB guest!
It’s fitting that Violante is central to many of the stories because she has two narratives of her own. I didn’t know it at the time I arrived, but I’d met her alter ego Jaunita. She was a bit manic the day I checked in, and since I’d arrived early, I offered to help her. She said she was fine but left the room half cleaned when she told me it was ready.
By the time I’d texted her that there was glass on the floor, she’d already taken off for her second property and instructed me where to find a broom. She told me her sister had just died and she needed to get away. This was news to me because one of the other guests I’d met told me her sister died the month before. Apparently neither was true, since her sister was still alive when I’d left the place.
Matt, who Violante called Andrew the entire time I was there, was another long term stay in the unit overlooking the town’s central cathedral. He shared with me that Violante had spent days drinking in her room. He also told me that Violante claimed her sister killed herself the month before.
I really enjoyed hanging out with Matt since he was a fellow adventurer, and for a change, I got to listen to someone else’s crazy travel stories. He’d lived abroad illegally for years and was only caught when Covid came along. Apparently, border officials in Europe had never looked very closely at his passport and he’d been moving around the European Union for about 25 years.
By the time someone actually noticed his entry date, it had been so long since he arrived that they just assumed the border guards had forgotten to stamp his passport at his latest entry. Having a time limit now though, Matt decided to return to the United States. He was to be joined by the girlfriend he’d met in Denmark, but she had to spend two weeks outside of the EU before she could enter the US. They decided to spend that two weeks together in Mexico.
When Violante returned from her hacienda she was a completely different woman. Happy, driven, and friendly. Since I’d only met her a week before, I didn’t know what to think of it, but she explained that I had met her alter ego, Juanita. She said that Juanita was the depressed alcoholic who was not kind to anyone. I guess I’d dodged a bullet.
The man living below Violante confirmed this to be true. I’d met Josh one night when I stuck my head out the window to see where the pulsating dance club music was coming from. He told me that since returning to Mexico from the US, he’d started up a juice business and was also teaching Capoeira classes. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines elements of dance, acrobatics, and music. Every evening between 7 and 8, I could expect to hear the music pulsating through my bedroom floor. I guess I should have been thankful that it wasn’t a real dance club with music that could go well beyond midnight.
I hung out with Josh several times because he was full of interesting stories. One time he even invited me on his rounds to deliver juices around the village. His clients would call with orders, and once he’d prepared them all, he headed out for deliveries. The one day he asked me to join him I was about ready to take a nap but couldn’t pass up on this unique opportunity.
We went to jewelry stores, produce markets, and people’s homes. It was fun to get a brief look into the lives of the individuals who made up the town of Taxco. He even tried to set me up with one of his clients, but I declined knowing I didn’t want to complicate my upcoming departure.
I’d already extended my stay once, and was surprised when Violante said she was ready for me to go. I was afraid that Juanita had resurfaced, but she told me that Easter season was coming and she could get a lot more money for my room than the monthly rate I’d negotiated with her. She agreed to let me stay an extra week, and said I could stay in her place.
She’d move to one of the smaller units so I could have a kitchen, and she could rent out the apartment I’d been occupying the previous month. It was a good deal for everyone, and I enjoyed seeing the community from her perspective.
On my last night, we all brought something to drink and gathered to share more stories and farewells. We were joined by the woman staying in my previous apartment, which was pretty interesting because she and her husband had been traveling Mexico for the past 3 years and publishing a video blog of their journey.
It was with a mixture of sadness and excitement that I left Taxco for my next adventure. For just a little while I had been part of a community, something I value greatly but can’t really afford since it would keep me anchored to one place. It was nice to know that I could still enjoy the taste of community even as I continue to travel.