Photo by Roman Lopez on Unsplash
I came to Guadalajara, Jalisco, to find internal peace. My plan was to stay in a house designed by Luis Barragán, an architect who had won the 1980 Pritzker. He was known for playing with light using geometric lines and bold colors, but his early work, mostly residences built in the 1920s in his native city, had preceded the vogue of “emotive architecture” by featuring gardens and introducing architecture elements that facilitate movements between indoors and outdoors. I am a data scientist and no architecture buff, but such styles still intrigued me. Sitting in the fountained garden of one such home, I had read lately, one was likely to find solitude and get lost in introspection. Building on his legacy, I had read elsewhere, younger Guadalajara architects still designed homes as if they were sanctuaries. Because of the tedium at work and a more general sense of life dissatisfaction, the idea of finding peace in one such sanctuary-home had appealed to me. When I had discovered that one of the first Baragáns, Casa Franco, was in fact on Airbnb, I had snatched it almost on an impulse. And now, after a flight more packed than pre-pandemic times and an hour-long wait at the under-staffed customs, I was finally moving through the bumpy thoroughfares. This was July, the rainy season. Banyans and jacarandas formed voluminous canopies, casting thick shadows on the puddles in the middle of the road. I imagined the lush garden at the destination, getting more impatient at each ALTO sign that commanded me to stop.
I dragged my suitcase to the address, along the sidewalk that had been cracked by the serpentine roots of the banyans. I stood before the property wall made of tiles piling up into a decorative pattern, peeking over the blooming ceibas and corona de cristos at the house. It was a rectangular one-story, with a white plaster façade and Moorish features like arched doorway and dark-green tiles. The fresh dampness in the air lifted my mind to a state of active recollection-imagination: the interior decoration I had seen in the Airbnb photos, the calm that would come together with that tasteful harmony.
Carlos, the bespectacled and polite host, emerged from the garage (which was now his living quarters) and gave me a tour. The entrance opened to the rectangular living room, which transited into the dining room ahead and led to a corridor on the right-hand side. The corridor was of a reversed L-shape, linking three bedrooms and a bathroom. Back to the dining room, I was led to the breakfast nook-cum-pantry and the kitchen. Before entering the kitchen, however, I could open another door to get to the back of the house. To my disappointment, there was no garden but only an atrium, not much bigger than the potted Ficus tree at its center. A staircase coiled by, with its adjacent walls painted mustard and carnation pink. The stairs rose and paused at a chapel (at one point after the 1917 Revolution, the Church was on the verge of going underground) that had been remodeled into a guest suite, then ascended at a steep angle to the roof. One could sit in one of the scattered lounge chairs here and waste an afternoon, but now it was all wet. The city crouched under the rainy clouds and drooping treetops, gloomy and desolated.
Left alone after the tour, I stepped from room to room to settle into the space. Further details emerged only now. The checkered, pink and brown floor was made of tiles, even though the imitation grain had suggested wood blocks earlier. All tall windows of the house had their centers carved out, which could be opened and closed as a shutter. I sat down on the felt sofa and amidst the thickening darkness, examining whether, at my first encounter with the house, it felt like being in a sanctuary, reflections gushing out from the springhead of some inner, peaceful contentment. Feeling otherwise—my mind felt unsettled and alert—I reasoned it must be the novelty of the house and an unfamiliar city that was getting in the way, the weariness from the trip itself. I opened the shutter to let in the breeze, hoping the watery coolness could expedite the coming of internal peace. Drapes of white tulle bulged and subdued, plucking the strings of heart with its soft hems.
It rained that night. I heard it through the shutter I left open to induce peace, for a moment before sleep set in again. Yet for the rest of the night my sleep was fitful, as time and again the sound of traffic shoved me to various degrees of wakefulness. Sometimes, it was a sedan running over a rain puddle; some other times, it sounded like a truck scudding through the nearest thoroughfare, the mental clatters trailing the contact sound between the tire and the asphalt. I thought I even heard some pedestrians talking to each other, in words I could not comprehend but in a pleasant, engaged tone I could grasp.
I recollected all these only vaguely in the morning, my mind still hazy after the first cup of coffee. I looked at the darkness that still reigned over my surroundings and drank my second cup absentmindedly, wondering, for a brief moment, when that peaceful introspection I had been looking forward to would emerge.
There were four other Barragáns within walking distance, and I decided to visit them all to check out if they had what was missing at Casa Franco: the garden, the bringing-together of indoors to outdoors. Two of the Barragáns, Casa León and Casa Castillo, had gone through numerous remodeling and now stood at the opposite end on the aesthetic spectrum: the former was unoccupied, fenced up, and flaunting a fat red “Se Renta” sign, while the latter hosted a dowdy hostel that vaunted its logo on every street-facing wall. The third Barragán, Casa Cristo, now fittingly hosted the state’s College of Architects, but on the day of my visit there were no students around, and the gate to the building was locked. I paced around the building and snapped a few photos, disappointed at its cement-paved, garden-deprived front yard.
Casa ITESO Clavigero was in the best shape of all Barragáns in the neighborhood, and it is the only house that I visited that still had a garden. Originally built in 1929 as the residence for the politician Efraín González Luna, it had since been repurposed as a cultural center for ITESO, a Jesuit university, and renamed after Francis Xavier Clavigero, a scholar of philosophy and Amerindian culture. I went there at what Google said was its open hour but could not push open the fence door. A uniformed worker soon came out, opened the gate, and began speaking.
“Lo siento,” I interrupted him, “no hablo español.”
He stopped talking, then gestured me to sign in. I roamed around the space and scanned the period photos on display. I then walked to the rooftop and then down to the garden in the back. I sat on an embowered bench there and listened to the fountain: the water gushing from a square pond in a pavilioned landing, then falling into a larger pond. I felt my thoughts automatically followed the flow, the gurgling and splashing sound containing no meaning but still calming me down. Yet instead of thinking about my direction in life, I wondered about Barragán’s artistic vision and the language barrier between me and the city; I asked myself whether one had to be in her most comfortable cultural-linguistic environment to feel truly at peace.
I thought I was getting close to, but did not arrive at, peace at Casa ITESO Clavigero because even sitting in the garden, I could still hear the traffic, plus there were also about ten people not far from me, all in uniforms and milling under rows of high tents, as if participating in some sort of convention. Then I suddenly recalled a San Francisco Victorian I had once visited, its backyard in the same verdant hue, its stair descending at the same angle to an embowered bench. If I had four million dollars, I could have bought it; and with the addition of this very fountain, I might be able to find peace because there had no traffic noise nor other people competing for the space. I then wondered how much Efraín González Luna had paid for this house; I wondered whether you need to be a billionaire to afford peace and introspection in your own backyard.
Carlos had a visitor the next day, so he took us for breakfast at Café palReal. I had a tapioca fruit bowl, and they had huevos rancheros. Carlos did most of the talking. He said he had rented Casa Franco and started the Airbnb sideline four years ago, and had been frustrated the whole time because the landlord didn’t want to invest in maintaining and improving the house. Since the pandemic, the business had been doing poorly, to the extent that he had made the difficult decision to close shop in three months. He also said that he had insisted on parking my rental car inside the property because he had once left his own in the street, and back from a lunch break, he had found its computer and tires all stolen. The insurance had refused to pay, so he had since always parked inside to avoid another US$ 8000 lunch.
How could you find peace of mind amidst all this, I thought.
I went back to the thought I had at Casa ITESO Clavigero, that the desire for introspection and peace of mind had a class aspect. Barragán’s ideas of reflection-inducing gardens and easy indoors-outdoors flows made sense to me because there were precedents in the culture I came from: it was the same set of ideas that had guided the official-scholar-gentries in traditional China constructing their exquisite home-gardens, exemplified by those in Suzhou or the Lan Su Garden in Portland. But such home-gardens had never been cheap to build; only the official-scholar-gentries or the merchants had had the means. Forward to now, the four-million price tag of the San Francisco Victorian I favored meant that an introspective garden was still beyond reach for many. While we still read the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations millennia after its composition, we know little about the reflections and thoughts of the hoi polloi. Even Barragán, I could not help but notice, had designed his Guadalajara homes for the rich and powerful, even though he had also chosen the local, peasant styles to tune down the fact.
What do those not even as rich as I want? Do they also desire introspection and peace of mind? I did not know enough to be sure. One ethnography I had read years ago argued that in postsocialist Romania, the urban poor were plagued by boredom; another I had read still further back argued that in Chicago, the homeless understood life on the streets as an honor-staked battle. On Sunday morning, I decided to walk downtown to savor the life of the unprivileged at the San Juan de Dios Market. I walked along Avenida Vallarta, which on Sundays barred motored vehicles and reserved access only to bicyclists, runners, and pedestrians. Groups of laughing children pedaled by; joggers ran past me with their loud music. I was almost in a good mood when I reached Parque Revolución, passing people playing volleyball, hula hooping, and giving massages all on or just by the sidewalk.
I passed Barragán’s childhood home that was a stone’s throw away from the Cathedral, and found the market building not far away from a string of interconnected plazas and squares. From the outside, the geometric cement surfaces and earthenware-colored tiles suggested a modern, clean-cut aesthetics. Yet once in, the beehive-like shops packed with trinkets, the chilly and sour smells from matrices of food stands, and the loud music blasted from seemingly every direction proclaimed a different kind of aesthetics, where exaggerations on sensory inputs trumped subtleties or introspections. I felt both dizzy and intrigued as I walked deeper into the labyrinthic interior of the market; I noticed both the flash phones in people’s hands and the littered trash by their feet.
On the morning before I left, I sat on the felt sofa and tried another time to find peace. The sky was overcast but bright, just like the previous day when I visited Ajijic by Lake Chapala. I went there to see a play by an English-speaking cast, at the Lakeside Little Theater with a roomful of about 30 silver-haired sojourning Americans. The actors all looked like in their 60’s, and by the fact of their being here and performing, I was willing to believe that they had finally found the best intersection of their career, personal, and financial concerns here in the small foreign town.
This small foreign town had sienna houses and cobblestoned streets. A verdant hill rose abruptly in the backdrop, its hulking peaks covered in low-hanging, gray-white pads of cloud. I had seen prettier towns before, many more actually, but the fact that there existed a small English-language theater touched me. I wondered whether it was the inner peace that they had found here that riveted the actors and audiences, because you are on the road when you are still searching; you only stay put when you are in peace.
Or maybe it was simply a matter of age: you search on and on and find peace only at fleeting moments, but even for that you get tired, and need to take a break somewhere. Just resting, getting recharged, not unlike my days here in Casa Franco. Outside, the traffic had died down, and for a moment, I could hear the symphony of birds’ singsong chirps, a remote repetition of “coo-coo” percolated by the closer, higher-pitched cries of different intonations and inflections. A breeze ruffled through the fronds of a palm tree. Watery sunlight poured through the opened shutter and fell on the floor, the checkered tiles revealing its imperfections—the uneven surface and tiny dents that might have occurred during production—and signs of decades of wear and tear. This was, indeed, a moment of internal peace. I decided to enjoy it as long as it lasted, before my flight taking me elsewhere.
Hantian Zhang is a writer based in San Francisco. He is a data scientist by day, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Diagram, The Offing, Eclectica, Manifest-Station, Waxwing, and elsewhere.