The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by Scott Lynn, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

During most of my childhood the image of a mysterious girl hung to one side of my father’s bed, in the area where he kept his constellation of amulets. Each amulet on the wall told its own story, real or imagined, and emitted its own aura. Their positions would shift whenever there was an earthquake. A bronze pendant of a man once sent by a shy northern European poet hung diagonally to the right of a cross woven by an indigenous Huichol artist. Childhood photographs of me and my sister lit up the wall nearby. Only the painted girl returned my gaze, and whenever I’d look over I would find her staring back at me. At seventeen I left Mexico and went to study abroad, first in the US and then in England. After several years in Berlin I returned to England and settled in London, where my parents have come to visit each autumn. For my fortieth birthday, they brought a square package. Inside was the girl. I hung her on my bedroom wall.

The portrait is the size of a miniature, its palette muted and dusky, enclosed in a gold painted frame. Partly because of this, its young subject has an ancient and funerary air. Her hair is pulled back, possibly into a bun, possibly with a braid looped around her head, creating an aureole effect that verges on the saintly. Yet there is a hint of impatience about her expression. Her arms rest one above the other on her waist and lower chest, not quite crossed but enough to create a barrier, reminding the painter he can only come so close. She watches on, self-possessed, with large eloquent eyes beneath a high forehead. On the back of the portrait the artist wrote her name, Susanita Valdivia, and the date she was painted, 2 October 1868.

Each time we lock eyes I am led to memories of visits to my grandparents’ home in Contepec, the small village in Michoacán where my father spent his childhood, a village most likely the size of Susanita’s. The drive from Mexico City would last between four and five hours and my sister and I would listen to our Walkmans in the back seat as our maroon Chevrolet station wagon traversed the countryside, our mother at the wheel. Every now and then we’d spot a run-over dog from the window or, even more unsettling, a lifeless donkey. We knew we were getting close when the highway succumbed to dirt roads, and with every cornfield we would enter more deeply into that lull that settles over city dwellers when they first leave the city. My grandmother, whose sixth sense seemed to sharpen with age, would be waiting at the door and upon hearing the commotion my grandfather would materialize behind her.

Each time we arrived, I’d feel visited by a similar conflict. It was a relief to be leaving behind the tumult of the city, all the teen angst surrounding school and social life, and be embraced by a more tranquil and compact world—an entire landscape, distilled into a handful of streets and fruits and conversations. Yet I would also feel a pang of anxiety, and worry that I would soon be too cut off from everything beyond, left alone with the existential questions that arise from silence.

Whenever I look at the little painting in my bedroom, I am reminded of the intensity of village life, the atmosphere of quiet fervor and containment that’s present in practically every portrait by Hermenegildo Bustos, as the painter was called. Nearly a century before Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece Pedro Páramo, Bustos captured with great authenticity and immediacy something of the spectral quality and enigmatic inner lives of village dwellers.

Hermenegildo Bustos was born on April 13, 1832 in Purísima del Rincón, Guanajuato. His father, José María Bustos, was bell ringer of the local parish and adorned the church interior on special days. He also worked as a registrar, his instinct for documentation passed on to his son and turned into a passion. There is less known about the mother, Serafina Hernández. The name of their village, inspired by the Immaculate Conception, suggests a peaceful, cornerly existence and as a municipality it had its own jurisdiction. The only communication with the capital of León, twenty miles away, was by stagecoach.

At the age of twenty-two Bustos married Joaquina Ríos, age fifteen. They never had children, but their extended family included an owl—Tecolotito Bustos—a dog, and a talking parrot. In his famous self-portrait of 1891, painted at the age of fifty-nine, Bustos wears a military uniform he designed himself. His initials are embroidered into the collar in golden letters. HB: a fence and half a butterfly. Nearby are two golden crosses. Bustos described this garment as a militia uniform that was half republican and half celestial, and with this statement he mapped his allegiances, between human- ity and the spheres. His arched eyebrows reveal the gaze of someone endlessly interested in the world around him, and his mustache has a restrained Habsburgian air.

Bustos never left the small universe in which he was born. As a painter he was self-taught, and his style remained impervious to the artistic movements of the outside world. With modest fidelity he turned his attention to the faces of his village—its six hundred inhabitants mostly indigenous, Purépecha or Otomí, and became their chronicler. The portraits were often small in size, 10 by 20 centimeters, and formed part, over the years, of an extraordinary living archive; many a local would have had his or her double on the wall.

Along with portraits, Bustos made a living selling nieves, a sweet concoction of sugar, fruit, and ice similar to sorbets. He’d capture the features of a face for posterity while giving shape to treats that would lose their contours within minutes. The lifelong and the fugitive: his day-to-day confronted both. During the months he wasn’t selling nieves he found ingenious ways to stay afloat. He worked as a carpenter, fixed roofs, assembled coffins, carved tombstones, made masks for religious festivals as well as flags, drums and bouquets; he grew corn and magueys, lent money and loaned objects such as books, lanterns, or guitars for a fee; he bred leeches and hired them out, and worked as a healer. A passable musician, he played the guitar, mandolin, and saxophone, and would join the municipal band in the plaza on Sundays. Other humans weren’t the only ones to profit from his industry; drawing on his talents as a tailor, he fashioned clothes for the saints and virgins in church altars. His creations were part of everyday life, and everyday life was an integral part of his existence.

Bustos began by painting the more illustrious families in Purísima, who offered him commissions, and gradually extended his practice to others. He charged little for his work, usually six to eight pesos, but refused to do it for free. By the end of his life, he’d show- cased many professions, from landowners, priests, merchants, widows, and artisans, to farmers, gardeners, and the dispossessed and deceased (including his father). He portrayed individuals as they sat before him, and never seems to have given in to the impulse to transform them into archetypes or mythological figures.

Bustos painted faces but very few full bodies, still lifes but never a landscape. He was also commissioned to paint religious ex-votos, expressions of gratitude for a wish that had been granted at a distressing moment in life, such as illness or accident. In those days there was no electricity in the village, and everything would have been painted by natural light or in the vicinity of a candle. Most of the portraits like the ex-votos were painted on sheets of tin called láminas. Few of his subjects smile, as though they take the act of portrait sitting very seriously, solemn in their Sunday best.

For someone so versatile, it is not surprising that Bustos paid such close attention to the sitters’ hands, which nearly always occupy a conspicuous part of the frame. In some instances they hold up an object that suggests a certain trade or social position. One man exhibits a large gold coin extracted from his pocket like a full moon.

A white-haired gent with clear eyes and a furrowed brow shows us his calling card. A boy in a blue jacket and striped cravat wields his pen and writing board. A double-chinned elderly woman clasps a small black tome, possibly a Bible. (A large number of female sitters hold books). Clasping is what many of these hands are doing, as though they were clasping on to the rituals and traditions that held everything together, harboring an abstract fear of the changes ahead.

As for Susanita, what was she thinking when she placed her arms in this protective pose? Sitting for Bustos would have brought the hours to a halt, perhaps interrupted her play, or assistance with chores. She holds her sweater closed, the voluminous black sleeves at either side like stilled sails, the pleats of her bluish gray skirt gathered at her waist. For the time being her hands are at rest, yet who knows what they occupied themselves with before and afterwards. It’s not hard to imagine them reanimated once she departs from the frame.

Popular throughout the homes of nineteenth-century Mexico was the Calendario Galván, its pages filled with ecclesiastical dates and astronomical and meteorological charts. Farmers would consult it religiously for their harvests, women would supposedly choose their latest haircuts in accordance with the phases of the moon. Bustos laid great store in its predictions, and the margins of his 1894 edition flow with annotations in small fine print. Along with homicides and weddings and changes in the weather, he noted down the amount of ice left after every frosty night, and its thickness. The absence of electricity in Purísima meant there was no electric fridge, and in winter Bustos would gather the frost that collected in the maguey stalks and store it in a deep hole in the ground, then cover the ice with maguey leaves. Once summer arrived he would extract it from the ground, still in its frozen form, and with his wife’s help crush it up for the nieves.

Along with his other trades, Bustos considered himself an amateur astronomer, and closely followed the “Efemérides” section of his calendar, which predicted the arrival of every comet. Comets, partly composed of ice themselves, fascinated him, and he painted four: the first two (1881, 1884) in fine luminous wisps and the second two (1858, 1882) in their full-bodied magnificence. He watched them from his rooftop as they blazed over his village and committed them, one by one, to the same sheet of tin.

While reading about the comet of 1858, I was struck by the fact that he too had glimpsed Donati’s comet, the same one that appears in William Dyce’s enigmatic painting of Pegwell Bay, which hangs in Tate Britain and inspired a section in my second novel, Asunder. Dyce painted it on October 5 and Bustos a few days later. It is extraordinary to imagine these two artists, inhabiting such wildly different worlds—Dyce an academician, Bustos self-taught—witnessing the same celestial moment, each of them deeply rooted in local life while exploring their affinity with the cosmic. In Pegwell Bay the comet is nothing more than a faint white brush stroke over a maritime scene, far less of a presence than Bustos’s renditions, in which the comets appear fulgurant against the night sky; as with his portraits, the subject is captured in its essence, with no need for further contextualization.

For someone so involved in the study of natural phenomena, it is curious that Bustos should have painted only two still lifes. The first, from 1874, resembles an exercise in composition and classification. A range of fruits and vegetables is laid out on the table as if for inspection: a poblano chile, a chilaca chile, half a tomato, green and red prickly pears, apricots, figs, plums, avocados, a banana, a pomegranate, a large slice of watermelon, a cocoa bean. Spread out on a white tablecloth, they sit immobile and cast subtle shadows. Some are sliced or carved in places, split open to reveal another color or texture. They vary in ripeness; like the villagers, in stages of maturity. Yet the fruits and vegetables are not alone: a frog and scorpion join the arrangement, adding a note of menace. The frog, its vigil turned outwards, holds guard over the upper left hand corner of the painting while the scorpion cuts a path between two rows of fruit, perhaps heading towards the frog.

On my last visit to Contepec, long after my grandparents had passed away, my sister and I spent a particularly restless night in the house. First we kept being awakened by the distant sound of circus music, the raucous tunes stopping and then starting up again, trapped in the endless announcement of a spectacle. We got out of bed and turned on the light, only to discover a baby scorpion on the wall. We debated whether to wake up our parents in the room next door. What harm would such a tiny creature bring? We returned to bed. Half an hour later, still kept awake by the circus music, we turned on the lights again. The scorpion was now nowhere in sight. It was even harder to sleep in the knowledge that it was elsewhere in the room.

The second still life by Bustos, painted in 1877, doesn’t feature any creatures. The fruits and vegetables are on their own, arranged closely with scarcely an empty space between, and they too reveal their interiors: a pineapple with a narrow slice carved out down the middle, a small papaya with a missing slice, a zapote and a mamey with gaping holes, half a lemon, more prickly pears, two guayabas. Whenever I look at these paintings I can almost hear the voices of the fruit, the splits and incisions, the tear in the pomegranate, like mouths as they converse in their shared language. These deconstructed still lifes are less mute to me, less hermetic, than the villagers.

Bustos hung both paintings in his bedroom and refused to sell either. They remained by his bed for over thirty years. At the age of seventy-five he declared that soon he would no longer have the strength to go down to his orchard, nor grow anything again. More than ever he needed to keep these fruits at home, he said, for contemplation.

Bustos died on June 28, 1907. Among the coffins he’d once made were two for his wife and himself, which he’d stored in his workshop. She went first. For his own death, one year later, he left detailed instructions.

It wasn’t until after the Mexican Revolution that his work became known to a larger public, thanks to Diego Rivera’s mention of a mysterious indigenous master in a small Mexican village who let fantasy dictate his daily dress and pursuits. Frida Kahlo counted his portraits among her inspirations. His paintings were featured in the great exhibition of 1951 in the Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas and in 1954, the village of Purísima del Rincón shed its cornerly reputation and changed its name to Purísima de Bustos.

As for Susanita Valdivia, I often wonder what sort of life she went on to have, whether she ever left the village. In her face I can envisage her older incarnations. She may have gone on to be photographed, but did she ever sit for a portrait again? I do not know how her likeness came into the hands of Marte R. Gómez, a prominent politician and art collector who after the Revolution devoted himself to gathering the work of both celebrated and lesser known Mexican artists, but my parents tell me that in the early eighties my father was taken by a painter friend to look at some works from Gómez’s collection that were for sale in Mexico City. The moment he saw the portrait of the girl, my father knew he had to buy it. It is very rare to find a Bustos for sale. Fortunately it did not cost much, he says, a price quite reasonable for a poet’s salary.

After three nights in Contepec, our parents would ask us to pack our bags and prepare for the journey home. We’d shake out our shoes for scorpions, make sure our Walkman batteries were charged, and follow them to the front door. I always experienced a mixture of sadness and relief, a pang at abandoning my elderly grandparents but also a current of excitement that we would soon return to the urban thrum.

The birds have long flown, the rooms lie vacant. Decades after those visits to Contepec, my memories threaten to crumble. Yet the presence of Susanita Valdivia in my room somehow keeps them alive. Her delicate, inquisitive face is the last thing I see at night, the first in the morning. Her stillness centers me. Its intensity. A devotional painting in a secular household. Against the undefinable muddy gray background, she occupies an unspoken hour between day and night, and a place of both restlessness and containment. Fresco, icon, daguerreotype: at different moments, she is each of these.