We head for Victoria, where there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of petroglyphs, according to an excursion brochure. It doesn’t say whether these are incised or painted on the rocks, only that they mark a prehistoric shamanic site.
The brochure gives a phone number to call for bus tour reservations. We figure we can find the place on our own.
“We” are Carolyn, our friends Bill and Sally and myself, driving through Mexico’s central highlands in northern Guanajuato on a day trip from San Miguel de Allende. A few hours’ drive on MEX 110 and we find Victoria, pulling up to a food vendor’s station fronting a dusty parking lot.
There are no signs reading TO PETROGLYPHS, which seems odd to me, considering this is an attraction big enough to draw bus tours. I approach a white-haired man wearing a straw hat and brown jacket, sitting in the shade of the food cart umbrella.
“Donde esta petroglyphs?” I try.
A polite but quizzical smile. Friendly enough guy.
I try again. No luck. A few onlookers converge.
“Inglese?” Someone goes into a shop for a younger woman said to speak English. We are becoming a project. The woman with reputed “Inglese” skills appears.
“Petroglyphs?” I try again. She nods, barely perceptibly, but enough that I become convinced she understands.
I wish I were quick enough to try a Spanish construction rather than to continue repeating “petroglyphs” derived from Greek. “Rock paintings“ might help, but I can’t remember the Spanish word for paintings, my dictionary is back in San Miguel and I don’t know the word for rock, either.
She points down the street confidently, her wrist cocked toward the left. Perfect.
A white pickup with lights on top and SEGURIDAD POLICIA on the side stops alongside us, engine running. We wonder if there is a problem somewhere in Victoria, but move on toward our rental car parked facing south.
Nosing down the street, we take the left turn. The adobes get lower and there is less paint on the storefronts. Pleasant-looking people walk past rangy dogs as we inch over topes, concrete speed bump sof varying height and width. Still no signs for petroglyphs, only for various brands of Mexican beer, and we are getting further out of town.
For some reason I glance in the rear-view mirror and see the white truck with colored lights following us at a distance which is gradually closing. Finally, it is directly behind, matching our speed precisely. Bill and I agree we should pull over. This might be the time, I am guessing, to deploy the U.S. dollars I have carried folded in a ready spot for the last five weeks in Mexico on the advice of guidebooks.
We watch in silence as the truck pulls slowly alongside. Two teenagers riding with the thirty-something uniformed driver roll down their window. He calls a question toward us across the teenagers.
We roll down our window too, and ask him our now-standard petroglyph question.
He starts his own questions over again.
Nothing is working. He pulls ahead of us and gets out of the truck. This would be a really good time, I think to myself, to know Spanish.
Somehow, I don’t get the feeling we are in trouble, at least legal trouble. He is smiling, jovial. Despite his black shirt and sunglasses, I don’t feel really threatened.
I get out of the car and meet him halfway. We need room to use hand signs, to see each other’s face and body language, to hear syllables watching them come out of somebody’s mind. He shakes my right hand and claps me on the shoulder with his left in sort of a half hug. This must be a comfortable distance for him but it isn’t for me, a Wisconsinite talking to police in the middle of a Mexican road.
“Buenas tardes,” from both of us. Good afternoon.
He goes on with a few words in English, enough to let me know he wants to help us find our destination. Which was…what, exactly?
“Petroglyphs.”
I try out a normal sentence slowed to a crawl. “We –– heard –– there –– are — some — near — here.”
His smile is unbroken. He doesn’t nod.
We both sense the language game is up.
He apologizes for his minimal English. In Spanish.
I do the same for my Spanish. In English.
Only one thing remains to do, which is to deliver his entire plan in Spanish and hope for the best. English is out of the question. It is time for real communication, not dancing around the obvious in a foreign language, i.e. mine.
We are getting ourselves lost; he knows it and we know it. The only thing he is not sure about is where we are getting lost going to.
I pick up “Inglese” and “Presidencia.” His arms swoop through the warm dry air as if drawing our car toward his truck. Clearly, we are to follow.
OK, so maybe we are in trouble. But he’s not pulling out a notebook or a clipboard, anything with paper on it, not even a little pad of triplicate forms. Nobody has started to remove our license plates.
The buildings get sturdier and more painted the further we follow him back into town. I feel like a police trophy as our car creeps along behind his truck, rising and falling over the topes.
Suddenly a quiet green space opens up in front of us. Trees. A fountain.
He stops the truck and indicates where we should park. Sally and Carolyn wait with the car while Bill and I follow him along a red-clay tiled portico edging the Jardin, an oasis of trees and flowers.
From an office in the wall the cop produces a man in a pressed white shirt wearing chrome-rimmed glasses. A picture ID reading ADMINISTRACION across the top hangs from his shirt pocket.
“Inglese!” announces the triumphant policeman, nodding at our newest resource. The administrator feels his English skills have been oversold.
“No Inglese,” he disclaims.
I wait, hoping.
“Go there,” he begins, pointing along one side of the Jardin, pushing his hand forward and to the right, looking at me for confirmation of understanding. I nod.
When his directing finger crosses the edge of a cerulean house he stops. We both know my comprehension of any further routing advice will be nil. If it cannot be seen, we cannot be directed to it.
“Casa azul?” I try, assuming the blue house is where we are to turn out of town. Then what?
“Si, si.” He seems satisfied with the extent of our conversation. Everybody is nodding now. He moves back toward his office. He and the cop exchange a couple of words. The cop points at the floor.
“Aqui.” Right here, this spot.
“Wait two minutes,” in English.
He raises a finger toward the portico ceiling. It will not be long now. They disappear into the office.
This must be the Presidencia, I think to myself. Presidencia must mean “city hall.”
Bill drifts toward the end of the portico where an ancient man sits on a folded blanket leaning against the white stucco wall. He is selling peanuts, skinny grayish-husked ones, from a rolled-down burlap bag. The man offers him some. Street peanuts? Maybe we are over-cautious. Maybe another time.
“Gracias.” Bill backs off, ambling toward the cluster of people which has now formed outside the administrator’s office, our situation turning into a mix of hospitality challenge and entertainment del dia.
The word “guia” comes up. I realize from having seen the word on the cover of our road map, part of the GUIA ROJI series, that we are on the verge of getting an English-speaking guide.
The cop strides confidently out of the city office followed by the administrator, drawing on all the English they have between them.
To my surprise, a few Spanish words filter out of my mouth as though I had actually planned them. I imagine my Spanish teacher pushing a recall button.
At last I gather they have phoned someone who they know speaks English and who also knows where the petroglyphs are. Unfortunately, that guia Inglese is “no disponible,” but an alternate solution is at hand.
Both of them turn toward a casually smiling bystander next to us. Graying curly hair sticks out below his eggshell-white straw hat. I make drawing movements on the wall and raise my eyebrows.
“Si, si.”He nods. We are on track.
The cop’s job done, he places his hand reassuringly for us on the man’s shoulder, smiling continuously and shaking our hands. He has saved himself a huge problem, i.e. us, driving our dust-covered Neon out of Victoria toward a destination he knows we cannot find and from the vicinity of which he would have to retrieve us come darkness, lost without water.
Happy guy, back to cruising the streets of Victoria.
Our guide sits mute in the front passenger seat, pointing at places to turn when they come up. We are unsure of how much English he knows, though he has not given evidence of understanding a syllable. We are lucky, we say to each other, to have made it even this far; this whole episode will be a high point of the trip. We begin chattering and laughing.
At one point our guia glances toward Bill and I wonder again if he is picking up our conversation. I decide to test with some Spanish words about the beautiful countryside. No response from our guide, though my attempt silences the others.
The asphalt road, narrow but in good shape, straightens out past freshly plowed garden-size fields. A few thin brown cattle graze shrubby vegetation near a couple of wells, one with a galvanized tub perched next to the bucket rope as a watering trough.
Just as Bill begins to speed up, our guide abruptly pumps his open hands toward the floor and points off the left side of the road to a dirt track.
Swerving off the blacktop, we bounce along the track toward a hill of globular camel-colored rocks, passing beneath formations that seem ready to roll off onto us. We park beneath a mesquite tree, its new leaves feathery and chartreuse.
At the base of the hill, our guide points to some faded dark red stick people painted on rocks. We are in the right place.
He talks briefly to a boy tending a dozen goats. The boy points upward behind where he is sitting. The guide, in dusty black leather walking shoes, leads us up the hill springing from rock to rock, eyes alert in an angular face above a grizzled stubble.
Are these the works of his ancestors, I wonder? Does he even know? How would we start that discussion when we can’t even ask for directions?
He points out figure after figure, some human, some deer-like, some abstract. All of reddish-brown pigment, some nearly worn away. Others are so arrestingly fresh we begin suggesting to each other that the goatherd may have developed an interest in creative pictography.
In a narrow shady gap between enormous rocks two scorpion images nearly ten inches long crawl directly in front of my face when I edge into the crevice. The images are so lifelike I abruptly look down at the sandy floor. No scorpions. (OK, breathe).
Then there is the sun painting. About nine inches wide, it is a set of centrifugal finger strokes of red paint radiating from the rim of a solid red circle.
The guide talks quickly now, repeating brief phrases two or three times and looking at us when he finishes.
We can understand barely a thing, yet he makes the same intuitive leap we did in English, that by simply repeating a statement often enough, its meaning will eventually become obvious to someone who doesn’t understand the language. It’s fair; we had tried Spanish and given him hope.
Actually, it is productive. I begin picking up words, as does Carolyn. We have just finished ten Spanish lessons at the Academia Hispano Americana in San Miguel de Allende. Eleven would have been better.
“Veinte uno Marzo,” we hear, and “Primavera.”
March the 21st, and Spring.
Could this be an equinox observation site? The sun painting would fit.
“Si, si,” he nods vigorously as I repeat the date. Maybe I was getting it.
“Muy gente.” He points to the top of the hill above us. Many people, I think he is saying, come to this spot to observe the spring equinox.
“Mas?” He holds his right index and middle fingers vertically, pointing upward at his own eyes. He indicates higher up the hill; he points across the flats to another set of hills a mile off which look identical to the one on which we are standing.
We pause to converse among ourselves. How many pictographs do we really want to see? How long will it take to get home? How much daylight is left? We have another stop to make, the ghost town at Mineral de Pozos.
We decide we have seen what we came for.
“No mas,” I say, “llegamos San Miguel.” “No more; we arrive San Miguel.” How weird, but it’s the only vocabulary I have. Bill points to his watch and makes steering movements. The guide nods once, his head lowered slightly.
Back at the car, we reconsider whether we are missing something besides several thousand more rock paintings by leaving now. We leave anyway.
(Weeks later, we learn that two thousand people come here from all over the world at the spring equinox to watch the rising sun appear through a uniquely situated rock cleft, above which lies the triangular hewn tomb of a prehistoric chief, both at the top of the hill on which we were standing).
Scraping bottom, Bill swings the car onto the pavement and we head back into Victoria. Not that small a town, as it turns out. Three vehicles line up behind where we initially pull over to release our guide.
A traffic cop in a brown uniform moves us ahead a few yards, out of the way. We ask the guide to stay “una momento” and I fish some money out of Carolyn’s purse.
He declines it, “No, no.” I point in the direction of a Corona label painted on the building where we had first stopped for directions.
“Cervezas,” I say, nodding toward the beer ad. He smiles, accepting the pesos.
“Gracias.” We shake hands and part.
Several steps toward the car, I look backward for a last glance.
So does he.