Sounds of San Miguel

Everything is music

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

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+ January 11, 2019 + +

In California I only ever met my neighbors after an earthquake. In Georgia it was big snowstorms that brought everyone together. In Massachusetts it took the first Red Sox victory in 86 years for me to meet my upstairs neighbor.

Down here the trash truck brings everyone together every morning.

One of the men hops off the truck at each stop and walks ahead, banging a bell up and down the street. It’s not really a bell, though it sounds like one. It’s a hunk of metal the size of reporter’s notepad, which he beats with a broken bit of pipe that clangs and echoes off the concrete facades. There is no mistaking when the trash man cometh. Assuming you know what the sound means.

That’s how trash is done here, you bring it to the truck yourself. You hear the bell, grab your trash and then stand in line with your neighbors, awaiting the trash truck. Everyone says hello, everyone chats. Some raised an eyebrow at me in the beginning, a gringo bringing out the trash. Unexpected apparently. After a few days people started to say buenos dias to me as well, commenting on the chill of the desert mornings, and then turning to ask after their other neighbors.

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man taking out trash, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf

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San Miguel has a reputation for being a bright and colorful colonial town, with good reason. Still, what I end up noticing when I walk around is the kaleidoscope of sound that bounces around amidst all those colors. Not the random noise of chaos in a city, though there is that, but out of that comes organized sounds — the bells, chimes, whistles, and clangs that mean something. There’s always a melody drifting around the corner, down the alleys, always someone signaling their whereabouts.

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red and pink walls, San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf

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hole in the wall photographed by luxagraf

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San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf

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Even in our courtyard, sounds drift in and the kids know now, sound has meaning. They always want to open the courtyard doors and discover the source of whatever reaches us. Every morning they yell, Daddy, trash man is here. But the trash man isn’t the only one announcing his arrival.

The knife man comes by in the afternoons. You know him by the piercing whistle he plays. He carries what looks like a miniature pipe organ, similar to indigenous flutes I’ve seen elsewhere. Whatever it is, it’s an unmistakable calling card. Grab your knife and head out the door to get it sharpened.

The propane tank guys aren’t so creative. They blast a musical spiel that I assume is some sort of sales pitch, though I can’t understand it. It’s not the Spanish that’s hard, it’s because it’s played out of what sounds like a New York City subway announcement speaker. It squawks and buzzes in roughly four-four time with a scratchy harmony, and that’s when you know the truck with all the propane tanks is near. Not to be confused with the propane truck, which is one giant tank of propane, and must be summoned by phone.

Bells, softer bells you won’t notice if the windows are closed, are generally pushcart vendors of some kind, helado or elote or pina or who knows.

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helado cart, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf

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The honey hawkers shout, miel, miel! The shrimp man, whose son usually carries the bucket of shrimp, cups his hands and yells something that vaguely resembles the word camarones, but we live in a desert and for a long time I thought I must be mishearing him. But no, it is a bucket of camarones on ice.

The water truck is silent. The delivery man holds everything in his head, knows who needs what and delivers it all without any signifying sound. I want to tell him he should leave a few empties on the outside of the truck, they’d drone all down the road, but my Spanish isn’t that good, besides, maybe silence is his calling card.

Fauna and Flora

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Birds
- American Coot
- Bewick's Wren
- Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
- Broad-billed Hummingbird
- Cassin's Kingbird
- Cattle Egret
- Crested Caracara
- House Sparrow
- House Wren
- Inca Dove
- Northern Shoveler
- Ring-necked Duck
- Ruddy Duck
- Vermilion Flycatcher
- Violet-crowned Hummingbird
- White-faced Ibis
- White-tailed Kite
- White-winged Dove
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These Walls Around Me

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San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

+ – Map +

+ January 3, 2019 + +

We moved into a new place at the beginning of the year, down a block and over a street from where we’d been, overlooking Canal. I miss swinging open the heavy wood doors on the second floor of that house and watching the life of the street below. Our new place has its charms though. We have a courtyard, a roof top deck. Pretty fancy stuff for us. Haven’t been able to find the engine though.

It’s a spare place, tending toward the monastic, which is perfect us. There’s no knick knacks, no clutter, nothing on the walls even, save one image of Guadalupe. It suits us I think. It’s nice enough, but it seems obvious that this a place for people who are passing through, in every sense of the idea. We did our own temporary decorating.

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house, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf

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view from the balcony of our new house photographed by luxagraf

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We moved in a couple days before the new year. One nice thing about our one-bag-per-person lifestyle, moving is simple. Except for food. Pretty sure our new neighbors thought I was crazy schlepping bags of sauces and spices and flours and oils and vinegar down the street, but hey, we like to cook. And we wanted to spend the new year in a new place, which we did. With sparklers of course.

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sparklers, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf

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house, san miguel de allende photographed by luxagraf

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The streets here are cobblestone rivers threading canyons of smooth, watercolor concrete. The canyon walls rise on either side as you walk, one side offering shade, the other sun, their smooth contours running continuous, unbroken lines down the street, save the occasional door or window.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell where homes begin and end. Looking at photographs, you might assume that color changes in the canyon wall mark where one home ends and the next begins. Sometimes you’d be right. This can be misleading though — sometimes colors change for no reason, or don’t change at all from one house to the next for an entire block.

The doors aren’t much help either. It’s hard to know which door goes to which house, or even if they lead to a house at all. Many doors, usually double doors, open to courtyards like ours, or similar outdoor spaces, which offer an air-gap between home and world, making home feel at least a little removed from the bustle of the street.

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Streets of San miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf

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Walls of San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf

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courtyard, umaran, san miguel de allende, mx photographed by luxagraf

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Courtyards are one-way mirrors of sound. The street comes in. You hear everything. Less seems to go out. Walking down the streets you rarely hear noise coming out of the walls. Perhaps the noise of the street hides it, or perhaps a single family can’t make a enough noise to get it over the tops of the walls.

I do a lot of listening in the courtyard. It’s visually cut off from the world, but sound surges over the high yellow walls. Disconnected from the source, it’s only tiny parts of stories, never the whole thing. Inchoate beginnings, clipped endings, snippets of sound — brakes whining sharp and shrill, engines grinding gears, cracked mufflers growling, conversations drifting, doorbells buzzing, phones chiming, whistles, horns, bells, birds, buzzers.

On rare days when the wind blows, it seems oddly quiet on the street. The courtyard swirls with sound of rustling bamboo and clattering palm leaves, putting me back in southeast Asia, or wishing for the west coast of Mexico, the Yucatan, somewhere tropical, somewhere sandy, somewhere hot and humid, with watery winds, salt air, the unbroken horizon of the sea.

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Papel Picado, San Miguel de Allende photographed by luxagraf

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In our courtyard, near the door to the street there’s a cluster of bamboo stretching far above the broken-glass topped walls. The leafy crowns of bamboo play host to a flock of house sparrows every morning and every evening.

It’s a deafening chorus of feathers, a large enough flock to leave a significant amount of crap on the concrete below. Strangely though, you rarely actually see the birds. The bamboo isn’t particularly dense, but it’s enough to mask them. The balcony off our bedroom is roughly eye level with the top of the bamboo, and even from there it still takes concentrated effort to make them out. If you sit and stare, wait for your eyes to adjust to the subtlety of shadow and leaf and bird and light you slowly begin to make them out, singing, fluttering and bouncing among the leaves.

They’ve been here for a long time. One day I was walking back from the market, about to cross the street to our house, when I noticed a little girl walking, tugging on her mom’s dress, saying mama, mama, el arbol de los pájaros. Another day I was sitting at the table in the courtyard, drinking coffee when I heard a little girl’s voice drifting in from the street, roughly the same words, but in English.

You can set clocks by the sparrows, light clocks anyway. They are shadow singers. Like true Mexican birds, they don’t seem to care much about watch time, but they do sing at the same time everyday, with regard to the light. When the light in the evening reaches a certain point, when the tops of the bamboo are in shadow I think, and it seems obvious that dusk has settled on the world, they begin their farewell songs.

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In the mornings, when it is light enough to see, but the sun hasn’t yet risen high enough to reach the bamboo, they sing again. Each time their singing and chattering lasts about twenty minutes and then they sort of fade out. In the mornings they don’t leave all at once, they trickle away in pairs and alone, which makes the noise of them seem to fade away, you don’t notice them leaving, just later, when they’re definitively gone.

They come back around the time we eat dinner and have their evening song and chattering, and then, I’m not sure, but I suspect they roost in the bamboo. It seems at tad rude to go out later at night and shine lights on them just to check a hunch, but I think they’re up there all night. I like to think of them still up there anyway, roosted down for the night, a ruffle of feathers tucked in a bamboo node here and there, sleeping, waiting for dawn, waiting to sing again.

Fauna and Flora

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Birds
- American Coot
- Bewick's Wren
- Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
- Broad-billed Hummingbird
- Cassin's Kingbird
- Cattle Egret
- Crested Caracara
- House Sparrow
- House Wren
- Inca Dove
- Northern Shoveler
- Ring-necked Duck
- Ruddy Duck
- Vermilion Flycatcher
- Violet-crowned Hummingbird
- White-faced Ibis
- White-tailed Kite
- White-winged Dove
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