Day of the Dead

The 33rd Festival Cervantino’s final weekend here in Guanajuato was a blowout across the board.

While bar and cantina owners cowered in the back of their establishments as the serious drinkers moved in Saturday night, and hard-core punk and heavy metal headbangers took over the normally bucolic Plaza Baratillo until deep in the night, in the better-behaved venues it was a spectacular finale of theatre and concert and dance performances from Italy, Japan, Spain, Quebec, the USA, Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Poland and Chile in the city’s theatres, churches and concert halls.

Sunday morning broke warm and quiet. Departing festivalgoers wended their way among a few desultory leftover drunks flopped in the sunlit plazas while church bells summoned those inclined to early Mass.

Already the festival is being judged a huge success, having staged 194 performances, 368 artistic functions in all – workshops, conferences, art exhibits, and childrens’ events.

In a ceremony on Saturday a special award was given to elegant, handsome Ramiro Osorio, the festival’s director, who spoke tearfully of the enduring example of culture and the Cervantino in a fractious world where peoples and nations can’t seem to communicate very well.

The state governor, Juan Carlos Romero Hicks described Guanajuato as a city that “respira cultura” - breathes culture.

Fitting somehow that Day of the Dead displays would sprout up in these last Cervantino days. The earth turns brown now, the air dry as we enter the fallow months of the year.

On November 1st and 2nd, all over Mexico, a curiously festive dance of death will take place.

Here in Guanajuato’s Plaza de la Reforma, little puestos (stalls) already brim with thousands of astounding handmade alfeñiques, little sugar or chocolate objects, often in the form of skulls – some with personalized names – also animals, cars, houses, practically anything one could imagine.

In homes and public buildings, altars are erected to the dead: tall tables with four wands on each corner, candles, incense, photographs of the deceased – and a profusion of rich gold cempasuchil, the “flower of four hundred petals”, which we call marigold.

At dusk Sunday, festivalgoers were pouring out of town, some bearing signs offering to share rides back to Monterrey or Guadalajara for 100 pesos (8 euros).

Departing lovers huddled together with their backpacks along Avenida Juarez.

Walking across the half-deserted Plaza Baratillo in the early evening, a soft moon suspended above the fluted fountain, I came upon a local organ grinder pumping out a sad strain into the soft air.

After a three-week feast of international music and theater and dance, it was this this lone, wheezy performance, melancholic and sweet, that most seemed to signal festival’s end.

Beautiful, mysterious Guanajuato, city that breathes culture, had been delivered at last back to its residents and its slumbering mummies.

TC

TONY COHAN is the author of the bestselling travel memoir ON MEXICAN TIME (Doubleday/Broadway, Bloomsbury in the UK) and MEXICAN DAYS, to be published next May.

The ofrenda at the Casa de la Cultura in Tolimán, Querétaro has been painstakingly assembled on a simply decorated altar.

Candles planted in the flesh of organ pipe cacti infuse the atmosphere with the smoke of copal incense.

The dead come to eat tamales and to drink hot chocolate.

What they take is vapour, or steam, from the food.

They don’t digest it physically: they extract the goodness from what is provided.

At midday on 2 November the dead depart.

Those who have been well received go laden with fruit, mole and good things.

Dia de los Muertos, Pátzcuaro, Mexico
Originally uploaded by shadowplay

To Hans, with thanks.

More on Day of the Dead in Mexico.

As part of the 42nd Belfast Festival, our good friend Chloë Sayer has brought two members of the internationally acclaimed Linares family over to N.Ireland. The masters’ creations can be seen at the Naughton Gallery at Queen’s University. The exhibition continues until 11 December.

This is Gicela’s delicious pan de muerto (‘bread of the dead’), almost ready in our home oven this afternoon. Reyna will be doing the same back in Toliman.

I prepared the hot chocolate.

Rugby in Oaxaca? Planeta.com and the Zinacantli Rugby Club host the fourth annual Muertos Rugby 7s Tournament on 30 October.