©Copyright 2015: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved
“Mr. von Sternberg,” they
announced over the intercom, “we need you to come to the office; we are sending
a substitute to take your classes for the rest of the day.”
EMERGENCY
The clock has now been turned
back to 1970 where we find me, in my second year as a Spanish teacher at a
school in Sonoma, California, wondering why I would be yanked out of my classes. As it turned out, a logistical error had been
committed by the group responsible for getting an organist from Mexico to play
a concert at the Sonoma Community Center.
The organist and his wife arrived by bus in downtown Sonoma but nobody
was there to meet them or take them to their hotel. Sonoma was little more than a village at the
time with a downtown where all the merchants and most people knew each other.
Mr. and Mrs. Vega-Núñez stood
out and were asked if they needed any help but were unable to make clear what
help they needed, as their English skills were limited and there were no
Spanish speakers in the vicinity at the time.
One of the merchants called the local school district office from where
a call went out to my school because I was a Spanish teacher. Off I went downtown to try to help with the
embarrassing crisis.
Pity that I did not have a
camera with me, for mine were the first Spanish words the couple had heard, and
the sight of great relief coming over their countenances would have made a
perfect picture. Relief was palpable all
around as the sense of urgency dissipated into the beautiful afternoon on the Sonoma
plaza and I shook hands with a couple who became two of the very best friends I
have made during my entire life.
CRACKED CRAB
I got them checked into their
hotel and did the most hospitable thing I could think
Perhaps because Mr. and Mrs.
Vega just looked like plain old people and dressed like most of humanity in
day-to-day casual clothing, I was not prepared for the spate of qualifications
and credentials Mrs. Vega let roll off her tongue that her husband had piled up
in life that, as far as I could tell, had not in any way gone to his head.
“My husband is the organist
of the cathedral of Morelia, Michoacán, received his Ph.D. in sacred organ
music and has performed in concerts all over the world. He has had audiences with every pope in his
lifetime, every president of Mexico and many important dignitaries from many countries. In musical circles, he is considered a
modern-day interpreter of Bach’s sacred music for the organ.” Alfonso sat quietly, did not smile or grin,
did not wax boastful or egotistical.
Carol and I were fresh out of
college, beginning teachers, had traveled nowhere, met no popes, presidents or
even mayors. For a few minutes it was
hard to think of anything to say. My
grandmother had been an opera teacher in her day and the first radio broadcast
in the state of Idaho was my mother playing Chopin at the turn of the 20th
century. There was a lot of classical
music in my background, but this was the first time I had been this close to
somebody whose musical ability was world-renowned.
I tried mentioning these
things about my relatives and received polite responses while the conversation
seemed to want to return to the crab we were cracking, dipping and
savoring. Our guests were ebullient
about the basic things that were taking place in front of them, as were we, and
in moments we were chatting away, all participating, all laughing, all enjoying
each other’s company immensely, not returning to any deep subject, not even
music, during the rest of the evening.
The words all flowed so naturally and comfortably that we could all see
we were becoming friends.
BEFRIENDING A GENIUS
We spent as much time
together as we were able, working around teaching schedules
We sat down at the console
together inside the Community Center and Alfonso began to practice. He found two keys that stuck and one pipe
that did not make any sound. Such was
the status of the very old organ in the very small town of Sonoma 30 years before
it began to transform into a world-class tourist Mecca in California’s Wine
Country. Few hands of such stature and
accomplishment had ever touched the keys of Sonoma’s rustic organ, yet Alfonso
never let on that it was of any concern that it was a slightly crippled
instrument as he just worked around the issues.
Having just begun to enjoy
the fruits of forming a new friendship, the kind of friendship we all like,
that begins with equality among the friends and never changes, paradoxical
replaced equal as it became impossible to feel in any way “equal” to this man
whose hands and feet began to snap, ripple and fly around all the keyboards and
pedals before me as if attached to some extremely fine-tuned, calibrated
machine engineered to do things perfectly, methodically, repeatedly. Familiar Bach pieces most humans have heard
through their lives began to boom out of the organ’s pipes, played flawlessly,
the way recordings of famous orchestras sound.
I noticed there were no music books or scores in front of him. He was just warming up.
I was nonplussed. I had been with Alfonso quite some time by
then; he was still
It never occurred to me there
was a Ph.D. available in what he studied, so I asked
I imagined what it would take
to convince people at the level of Bernal Jiménez, whose music is played by
great orchestras all around the world, that Johann Sebastian Bach was sitting
at the console in the spirit of Alfonso Vega-Núñez playing his most complex
toccatas and fugues from his heart. They
had, after all, granted him his Ph.D.
He looked at me and smiled
the same smile I had become used to seeing as we became friends, disarming the
self-consciousness I was beginning to feel, demystifying the out-of-context,
riveting musical experience I was having unlike anything I had ever
experienced.
THE INVITATION
Among the many treasures of
wisdom my mother left me was her warning to be most cautious when rushing into
any kind of relationship because, she explained, those rushed into will most
likely be rushed out of later. Her
caveat did indeed prove to be true for me except in this particular case where
the friendship guided itself along a natural and progressive course
surprisingly quickly. After more meals
together, more rehearsal time at the Community Center and the performance
there, more driving around Sonoma and environs, Mr. and Mrs. Vega surprised us
by inviting us to come live in their home in Morelia with them and their six
children. Not just drop by, have supper
and go, but to occupy a room, have meals together, experience life in Mexico
together.
Carol and I began to
contemplate what, for us, represented an abrupt departure from our daily
routine, as much as newlyweds can establish a routine, that would take us to a
foreign country, deep into Mexico, a country whose border towns were the only
places we had been. As I considered it,
the words of my inspirational professor of Spanish, Dr. Francisco Gaona filled
my thoughts. I remembered him telling me
that, as surprised as he was that I had become as proficient as I had in
Spanish without ever having traveled to a Spanish-speaking country, due to the
fact that I had not, I was forced to admire the whole Spanish-speaking culture
with one eye still shut. He urged me to
travel and open the other eye.
Replaying the tape of
Francisco’s words in my head removed all doubt as Carol and I graciously
accepted the invitation and planned to leave at the end of the academic year
for Morelia, the cultural center of Mexico located in a land of perpetual
spring at a high altitude between Guadalajara and Mexico City.
During that particular
academic year, heaven had sent me one student who was from a Spanish-speaking
family, but who did not speak Spanish herself.
She worked like crazy to learn every day knowing how much it would
please her parents for her to be fluent.
She had a mature, calm way about her along with a balanced approach to
life and was, therefore, a pleasure to be around. Her parents knew Carol and I were going to Mexico
the coming summer; in one of our conversations with those parents we spoke
about Nanette riding along with us to Morelia (we had planned to drive there)
during which time Nanette’s father placed several hundred dollar bills into my
pocket to cover any expenses that might be incurred by our passenger.
A VERY LONG DRIVE
Shortly after school ended
that year, we packed up our Renault, I mean compacted to
Crossing the border into
Piedras Negras, a Mexican official began looking over our paperwork as I spoke
to him in Spanish. He stopped at one
point, stared into my eyes and asked me where in Mexico I was from. I couldn’t believe that anybody would think I
was from Mexico. I told him I was just
another “gringo” and off we drove into the Coahuila desert toward Saltillo
where we had reserved our first night’s stay.
Nanette was a teenager and
had her teenage likes and dislikes in music, food, fashion and style. I did not want her to be disappointed, so I
told her that Mexican music was quite different from ours, that for the rest of
our journey we were likely to encounter serious cultural differences we would
have to adjust to as foreigners. I bet
to this day she probably still smiles whenever she remembers how wrong I
was. After our very long trek along the
highways of northeastern Mexico toward the south we checked into a hotel that,
coincidentally, was having a party to celebrate the graduation of a local high
school. The same music that teenagers
were enjoying where we had come from was blaring out of speakers as the locals
in Saltillo were dancing, which, as would be expected, brought a grin to the
lips of our friends’ daughter.
The next day we woke up in
Mexico, the big party was over, we breakfasted in style
We got further
and further away from anything familiar, then came to a town known as San Luis
Potosí where using a variety of cactus called Prickly Pear locals pluck the Nopales (paddles) known as Tuna and
extract a nectar that they ferment into liquors and a cheese. There were signs everywhere as we entered the
town advertising Tuna, which made me wonder if we had made a wrong turn and
were at the coast.
I had to get out my
Spanish-English dictionary to fill the hole in my knowledge and discovered that
the word in Spanish meaning tuna, the fish, was atún.
STILL NO BIG CITIES
Our next destination was like
all the towns we would drive to or though on our way to Alfonso and Martha. The complete difference in landscape and
vegetation between the major Mexican towns surprised us, as did the ways in
which they were all almost identical in the obvious impact of the culture of
Spain visible in rooftops, architecture in general, aqueducts, cobblestones,
cathedrals and churches, zócalos (town squares), houses that were yard-free and
high-walled in front, opening to beautiful patios in the middle of the house to
which almost all living quarters faced.
What made Querétaro different than all the other towns we saw was the
presence of opal mining in the area.
Everywhere we walked, we were
approached by children with baskets of crystals and polished gems shouting
“Ópalos, ópalos” with hundreds of specimens.
Opals have come from Australia and Brazil for hundreds of years, and
recently, from Ethiopia. There have also
been opals mined in Mexico since the 1800’s, but they are distinct from others
found elsewhere in the world due to the presence of an orangish or reddish body
color.
They appear in the ground as
crystallized opal and some have fire while others do
They are cut and polished as
cabochons (gems with no facets, only a dome) or faceted gemstones. Nowadays gem cutters from all over the world travel
to that part of central Mexico to take home crystals mined from places with
names like Magdalena, La Carbonera, and La Única. These special opals are popular among the
cutting firms of Idar-Oberstein, Germany.
THE DRIVE TO MORELIA
Big lakes, pine forests, farmers
walking behind plows pulled by oxen, striking peaks of mountains, valleys,
canyons, ejidos, trucks passing other trucks and buses along dangerous
stretches of roadway around corners, large animals lying on the roadway, wild
sudden-appearing thunder and lightning storms with gully-washer downpours,
replaced by warm sun were some of the phenomena that caught our attention being
strangers in this strange land.
The “Ejidos” were the biggest
surprise for me and showed me how little of Mexico’s history and culture I
really understood. I grew up in the
so-called “McCarthy Era” – the beginning to the middle of the 1950’s – a time
when communists were avidly pursued and demonized. When somebody in Mexico explained to me later
what was meant by the signs I saw along the way that read “ejido”: that it was
a Mexican institution influenced by the benefits of communism, a chill came
over me that made me think of all the things that my teachers had said about
communism, things the parents of many of my friends had said, things I had seen
on the news, TV serials about communism such as I Led Three Lives. I look
back on those thoughts and chuckle to myself.
“A tract of land held in
common by the inhabitants of a Mexican village and farmed
Along the main highway from
Querétaro to Morelia, we became momentary angels as we pulled off the roadway
to see if we could be of assistance to a driver looking particularly forlorn
standing by her car. While packing our little
Renault until it was crammed to capacity, I went back and forth in my mind
about whether to include a 3-gallon gas can as it took up quite a bit of
space. In the end I decided to include
it in case we found ourselves stranded somewhere with an empty tank. In spite of the fact that I had had thoughts
only of our own wellbeing when adding the spare gas can to our travel supplies,
this driver was in the predicament I feared for us, and that fear in me turned
out to be grace for the woebegone Mexican woman. She couldn’t believe her eyes when I opened
my trunk.
After a number of hours of
driving, Morelia appeared in the distance as we descended into the Valley of Guayangareo. Today Morelia
is one of Mexico’s large cities boasting a population of over a million
people. In the early 1970’s we
descended, instead, into a town less than one tenth that size, a town known as
the cultural center of Mexico’s colonial empire that began in the 1500’s. It was large enough to be home to the
University of San Nicolás, yet small enough that virtually everybody there knew
or knew of Alfonso Vega-Núñez, knew that at the colonial masterpiece of
architecture that was the town’s cathedral, Alfonso was referred to as Maestro.
WAITING ON A CORNER
Arriving at the very center
of town where the road ended I saw the lean, solitary figure of the Maestro
waving to me, smiling from the curb. A
rear car door opened for him as our nervous teenage passenger in the back seat
had to lean sideways to accommodate as Alfonso guided us through the maze-like
streets of this centuries old downtown on our circuitous route to the
Vega-Núñez home. A few minutes later our
long drive half way across America and deep into Mexico ended as we pulled into
a covered parking place inside the gated home, shut off the motor and did not
start it back up until the day we left Mexico months later.
From the first moment we
entered the premises we were treated with honor and respect that surprised
us. Perhaps it is more common in our
culture to help our guest find a nice hotel to stay, but Alfonso and Martha
would not hear of it. They had abandoned
their own bedroom and rearranged their living quarters for us so that we could
have our own private area and be comfortable and never once complained or even
intimated there was anything unusual taking place. After a few days I thought of a saying of
Benjamin Franklin: “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after 3 days.” and
wondered why so much time was passing and we weren’t getting the feeling we
were extra baggage or in the way.
CHANGE IN ENVIRONMENT
Like most people traveling to
a place for the first time, a lot of energy was expended comparing cultures and
traditions. The first tradition that we
experienced so different from our own, one that made a difference to us, was
mealtime. The three of us were
accustomed to having a strong meal in the evening and came to our first dinner
ready to fill up with fine Mexican treats, looked around the table and saw a
plate full of cookies and some cups for coffee or hot chocolate. In Morelia, as in many parts of the world
with Latinate cultures, the evening meal is the lightest meal of the day. I have heard that it is easier to sleep on a
stomach not so glutted as one might have in our culture, but with the appetites
we brought to the table, we found it hard to sleep on such an empty stomach.
I remember waking up grateful
not to have to drive anywhere, curious to see how much the real Mexican breakfast
resembled my fantasies of it. A moment
later we were introduced to Chocolate
Moreliano,
Mrs. Vega came to the table
with something she had picked moments before from the garden and took a little
nibble from whatever it was. Several people were seated at the table, a
conversation was breaking out. For
awhile the conversation distracted me away from my glance at the family
matriarch. A minute or two later,
however, when I looked back in her direction, I noticed her face intensely red,
little tears forming and splashing over her eyelashes while she struggled with
an unproductive cough.
Carol had figured out Mrs.
Vega picked red hot peppers from the garden and returned to the table to
perform her acts of culinary self-sacrifice.
She asked our hostess why she was eating things that made her cry and
Martha looked sheepishly through her red hot pepper tears and said: “Because I
love them.”
THE CHILDREN
Shortly after arriving we
were introduced to the six children ranging in age from 6 to late teen age:
Leonardo
Juan Bosco
Fabiola
Laura
Alfonso junior
Martha junior
By the time I met the Vega
family I had studied and taught Spanish for 12 years. Besides my formal education of the Spanish
language, which began in high school, my human interaction with Spanish
speakers began at my first job where one of the three Spanish speakers spoke
very little English. From the strictly
academic environment of high school Spanish, I immersed myself in Mexican
culture and continued to meet many Mexicans from central and southern
Mexico. Over the years I assimilated a
certain accent, a certain speaking speed, cadence, pitch and the whole Vega
family spoke a highly cultured form of the Spanish I was most comfortable with.
Alfonso senior had several
siblings who also had children, most of whom lived very close by. In short order we met dozens of relatives and
began to see them on a regular basis. My
closest relative lived hundreds of miles from me. Carol was all the family I saw on a daily
basis, so it was enriching to be with the immediate Vega family and be able to
experience the extended family and see another way of life day after day until
our need to compare everything to “home” faded away and we simply lived in
Morelia.
Leonardo was little and
cute. Back in the 70’s there were no big
box stores in Morelia where parents could stock up on closets full of toys the
way it is done today; children were still making their own toys and
entertaining themselves gleefully, as Leonardo did. Leon would chase up and down the hallway with
a stick trying to make a paper ball go where he wanted it to, laughing and
squealing like a happy child.
 |
| Mrs. Vega and her three boys, Leonardo, Juan and Alfonso |
Juan Bosco looked like a North
American: blue eyes, lighter hair. When
I was introduced to him, I did not know for sure he spoke Spanish so I started
speaking English to him until I realized he was not following a word of what I
was telling him. He had many burning
interests including OVNI’s (the local way of saying unidentified flying
objects). He loved to talk about them
and I was loving that he would converse with me, concerned that I might not
understand something he was saying, patiently explaining until I caught on,
then moving on with his conversation.
Unlike adults, who were most likely to try to find a word I couldn’t
think of while I was pausing, suggesting this word, that word, some other word,
anxious to get on with the sentence I was saying, Juan would sit patiently
waiting for me to figure out what I was trying to say and say it in
understandable Spanish. In this way of
really caring about what I was trying to tell him, he may have been my best
Spanish teacher of all.
Fabiola was 13 years old,
also a playful child, but transitioning to adulthood gracefully. Her smile was so genuine and infectious, that
she could make everyone around her smile in chorus. Watching her interact with people was
refreshing because I could see she had been working on refining the art of
getting one’s way from its human beginnings in the ego to a natural, kindly
state of diplomacy. Even her voice was
melodious and agreeable to the ear. She
had an air of a person recording everything that was happening in life in
detail for future reference. Smart,
determined, sweet.
Laura was more serious, a few
years older, wiser. I
Martha, the oldest daughter,
was crowned in a beauty pageant while I was there. Her beauty was striking in two ways: That
which was apparent to the eye as well as the spirit on the inside of her. During the time I spent with her, she drew me
into dozens of conversations that ran to profound depths about the great issues
alive inside her.
We talked about the
purpose of makeup, the common misunderstandings between children and adults,
biology, the fine arts, the history of Mexico and on and on. I was enriched by every minute I spent with
every member of the Vega family and with Martha I found a special intellectual
capacity to think with passion that has affected me all my life.
She brought up the subject of
Maria Montessori one day and talked about her for hours. Even though I was an educator myself with a
valid teaching credential, Martha was talking about education at a higher level
than I experienced up to then; many years would pass before I would come to
completely understand what Martha was so excited about, so many years, that she
died of cancer before I was ever able to thank her for all she taught me.
Alfonso, the adolescent male
of the family, made life ten times as entertaining as it would have been
without him. He was brainy, comical,
extremely perceptive. He was as
whimsical and spontaneous as a stand-up comedian and could make fun of
anything. He played with words
inexhaustibly with a mastery few ever achieve.
He would take the simplest sayings, like the Spanish saying for “Nice to
meet you” (El gusto es mio), change one letter of one word to turn the whole
saying up-side-down, but make you have to think about the words to be sure you
heard right. In this case he would say
“El susto es mio”, substituting the s of susto for the g of gusto, and change
the whole meaning from “The pleasure is mine” to “The fright is mine”
I couldn’t get enough of
Alfonso. It was a little like spending
time with a Spanish speaking Robin Williams.
I had decided to begin my own exchange program at my school when I got
back to Sonoma and wanted to have an insurance agency in Mexico insure the
children I would be bringing. This
required a trip to Mexico City, so Carol and I invited Alfonso to accompany us
on our train ride to the capital.
He brought his comedian self
with him to a restaurant one day in the tourist section where he saw a perfect
opportunity to make a scene that could not have been any better in a
movie. He looked around the restaurant
and saw a multitude of proper American faces speaking English and began to
curse in English with a Spanish accent he was faking for effect. “Son of a
……..” he blurted out, “Damnit!!!” With the addition of another expletive or
two, he had the attention of every patron in the restaurant, their coffee cups
stilled, their sense of being offended palpable. Carol and I wished there were an exit beneath
the table through which we could crawl away unnoticed. With everybody’s eyes looking into his,
Alfonso raised his right hand, pointed his index finger at me and said: “Thees
eez my teecheer.” With that he made everybody
in the restaurant, including us, laugh so hard we cried.
TRIPS OUT OF MORELIA
One morning I woke up before
anybody else and picked up the copy of LA VOZ de Michoacán and began to read
the news. There on the front page was a
headline announcing that a team of scientists had examined the local drinking
water and determined every citizen needed to boil all drinking water due to the
bacterial content. Like everybody else
in the house, I thought of all the water we had all consumed that had never been
boiled. Mrs. Vega decided to follow the
recommendation of the scientists and began boiling water that morning. I was relieved, but still concerned about
water all over town.
The very next morning the
same daily announced that the scientists had made a mistake and that it was not
necessary to boil the water. Tens of
thousands of people must have fallen into cognitive dissonance and forever
wondered if the sudden change was required for political reasons, public
relations, or if an honest mistake had been made.
Because of that fiasco, I had
a particularly good time on a trip we all took to Uruápan, at that time a very
small town in Tierra Caliente, an amazingly pristine center of aquaculture of
the ancient Tarasco people where hundreds of years earlier they took on the Río
Cupatitzio (a large river running through the area) and routed it through
statuesque fountains and waterfalls on its way to the fertile valleys where
they irrigated rice fields, avocado plantations.
Everything was about water in
Uruápan.
The big beautiful river was
sourced by a deep, clean spring that provided a constant and abundant supply of
sweet water that needed no filtering or boiling, a pleasant break from the
mental earthquake caused by the vacillation of the local news source about
water containing deadly bacteria.
We began to take day trips to
exotic little places like Paracho, Tzintzuntzan, Santa Clara del Cobre, Zamora,
Pátzcuaro and larger towns like Acapulco, Taxco, Puebla, Mexico City,
Guanajuato and others.
THE CATHEDRAL
Alfonso, the Maestro, gave us
a lot of his time to show us around and integrate us into his family and
society. One day he asked me to come
with him to the cathedral while he practiced and have a bite to eat later. That day marked my first time seeing a
world-class pipe organ with a full range of pipes and trumpets, keyboards with
full registration, in a perfect acoustical surrounding. That surrounding was the magnificent precious
gem among Mexico’s cathedrals in the center of the old downtown, a masterwork
of architecture clearly reflecting the baroquie style of Mexico’s early
colonial days.
We entered the cathedral,
walked back to a spiral staircase that wound around and around climbing upward
until I came face-to-face with my fear of heights. I looked out over the whole cathedral from
above and worried for a few minutes about being so elevated, ultimately
convincing myself that this little platform we were occupying had been in place
for several hundred years
Alfonso warmed up a few
minutes on this, the largest pipe organ in Mexico – 4600 plus pipes – a German
creation from the early 20th century, checked the registration, and
began to practice a light piece with some heavy moments.
During the heavy moments the
FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE ORGANO
ALFONSO VEGA NUNEZ
In 1966, Alfonso put together
the first international organ festival that would turn out to be an annual
event attracting many of the greatest names in the world of famous concert
organists, people in the league of Alfonso.
As a tribute to the maestro, the still-running annual function has
integrated Alfonso Vega Nunez into the name of the festival itself. It is the longest running function of its
kind in the world.
Alfonso had an office in his
home, the only place you needed a key to enter, the walls of which were covered
with posters and ads for concerts he had performed, photos of him with
important church officials and politicians as well as posters from the few
organ festivals he had put together by the time we met.
INSTITUTO VALLADOLID
One of the teachers at a
school in Morelia had become a favorite of many families, a brother in the
Marist order, and was visiting the Vega home while I was there one day. Like the children he taught, I was taken by
him immediately, lightened by the levity of his way. He took me to the school to meet all the
teachers and the principal and asked me to talk about what I did in America,
exactly how I taught Spanish.
By the time I met the
teachers, I was already thinking about bringing students to live in the houses
of all the great families I was meeting.
A schemata for the development of my own student exchange program was in
the process of refining itself in my head, but once I brought the concept up in
conversation, the idea caught on and spread around the group of people in the
very large circle of friends and relatives of the maestro.
Most exchange programs of the
day took place during vacation periods which I thought lacked the capacity to
provide the students who participated to fully appreciate the culture they were
immersed in because they did not attend a real school the way the children they
visited attended, except, of course, during vacation. At the same time I contemplated this, it
occurred to me that there was a way for my students to enjoy the best of both
worlds: to live in Mexico during the
school year with a family, attend school, take weekend trips with the host
family, but have the students return after the Christmas season ended early in
January, thereby experiencing a familiar religious holiday as a remarkably
different cultural phenomenon.
SIDE TRIP TO MEXICO CITY AND
ACAPULCO
Alfonso was invited to play
in Mexico City in a billing of some famous organists that included the British
born E. Power Biggs who was living in Massachusetts from when he emigrated in
the 1930’s up to the time he died in the late 1970’s. Alfonso took the train to Mexico City to
arrive enough time before the concert that he could rehearse properly and the
plan was for the rest of us to drive there a couple of days later.
Alsonso normally drove the
family places, but in his absence, I was elected. Having driven hundreds of miles into Mexico
uneventfully, I did not anticipate any great difficulty. (That was because I had never driven in
Mexico City before.) This was before the
days of GPS and cell phones, nobody had thought to bring a map, so, after
several hours of driving through Mil Cumbres (which means One Thousand Summits)
for many hours we encountered more and more traffic, narrower and narrower
lanes for traffic and then extremely aggressive drivers cutting in and out of
traffic, weaving around people wildly.
I was terrified and had no
idea where I was or even where we were going.
Martita (as everybody affectionately called Alfonso and Martha’s oldest
daughter) had penciled some general directions on a notepad and began reading
from her notes. Look for the Periférico,
she shouted out. There was another word
I never learned in college Spanish, but was able to analyze my way to its
meaning by thinking of its root: “peri”
I thought of periphery and periphrasis, two words in English that
contained the same root: the second one, periphrasis, was already familiar to
me in Spanish – “Perífrasis” – meaning to beat around the bush. I reasoned that Mexico City had constructed a
freeway that made a loop all the away around the big city and, sure enough,
that was a correct assumption.
On that freeway the lanes
were so small that there was no leeway, no room for error as the cars next to
you were RIGHT next to you. I couldn’t
wait for Martita to find a familiar street to descend to from the Periférico
and soon we were on surface streets looking for the auditorium where the organ
concerts were taking place.
I had turned the pages of the
music of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor so many times while Alfonso had
rehearsed or played it, that I had assimilated his personal playing style. It had become my favorite piece of music as I
memorized almost every note, every wall-shaking crescendo, every movement of
hands and feet required to play the highly complex and difficult piece it
was. This Bach masterwork was scheduled
to be played by Biggs, for whom I interpreted conversations he wanted to have
with Alfonso. Mrs. Vega studied Biggs as
he spoke about one thing or another and said later of him: “Se cree el muy
muy.” It was hard to contain myself when
she said the equivalent in Spanish of the English words: “He thinks he’s hot
stuff”.
When Biggs finished the
Toccata and Fugue, it seemed to me that he had never had a master teacher who
had expected him to take on the persona of Bach himself to interpret his sacred
music. He was an excellent musician, a
technician, so to speak, who did not appear to be inserting his soul into the
music the way Alfonso did. Did I feel
that way because Alfonso was my dear friend?
I still wonder about that this many years later.
We packed up the Vega Dodge
sedan with more bodies than it was designed to accommodate, the three of us and
a bunch of Vegas, squished uncomfortably into a traveling mass of bones and
skin and headed to Acapulco where we had no reservations anywhere. Passing through pristine forests and small
towns, we headed from a springtime type of climate into more and more what
seemed like jungle heat and humidity.
It
began to rain, all windows were rolled up, then it got steamy, the windows
fogged up beyond the Dodge’s ability to clear them, windows came back open and
we drove in the rain packed like a box of vegetables for another hour or so
until we arrived in Acapulco.
Alfonso saw a man waiving,
stopped, asked him to get in the car which forced the passengers in the front
seat to turn sideways to make room for him. The fellow’s role was to find us a
hotel where there would be room for all of us.
Off we went from hotel to hotel while the new fellow tried to negotiate
a room for us in this famous resort town.
There weren’t crowds there for it was the time of year when the heat was
oppressive. A lot of hotels were simply
closed for the season, but we found one and checked in.
We were all eager to get to
our rooms, dry off, cool down. They gave
us rooms on the 8th floor, handed us our keys and then announced in
a low voice that the elevators were being repaired – to use the stairs – and
that there was a problem with the air conditioning. Eight flights of outdoor stairs in the
burning sun, with luggage. At least it
had stopped raining.
We did all the touristy
things we could do, including the world-famous Clavadistas, the cliff divers
who study the sea’s waves meditatingly before launching themselves off the high
cliffs to the rolling waves below, knowing a moment of bad timing will make
them dive straight into big rocks to their death. We also swam in the Acapulco bay one day and
saw things floating in the water you would prefer not to read about,
remembering that sewage treatment technology had not evolved to the level I
enjoyed in the beach town where I was born and raised.
On the way back to Morelia,
they told me it was a 14-hour drive and asked me if I would mind driving half
way. What happened on the way back was
the most amazing bit of luck I have ever seen with my own eyes. We were climbing a long, long hill on a two
lane road (one lane each way) miles from any towns when an impatient bus driver
decided to overtake and pass me on a portion of the hill where there was no
shoulder onto which I could pull over.
The bus was inching by me almost imperceptibly as the two of us occupied
all the space there was on the road, heading uphill toward the crest of the
road from which a vehicle speeding toward us could appear at any second and
cause a terrifying calamity.
A white dog with black spots
suddenly appeared on my right at the edge of the road and darted out in front
of me to cross from my right to my left, headed toward where I knew the bus
would be in a couple of seconds. All of
us in the car saw it at the same time and shrieked out a cry of sympathy for
what we all saw to be the inevitable fate of the dog about to become road kill
in the hills of the state of Guerrero, Mexico.
I had nowhere to turn, no
room to swerve and I knew the bus driver had not seen the dog leave the edge of
the road; nor could that bus driver have done anything about it anyway. In less than a second the dog went from being
in our forward view to a sight in the rear view mirror as all heads turned
around, except mine, to witness the dog’s demise. That fortunate hound had made
it to the midpoint between the two front tires of the bus when the vacuum
caused by the kinetic energy of the bus moving forward literally swept the dog
off its feet and began it spinning and rolling forward. In the rear view mirror I was able to see the
dog stop spinning, watch him stand up and miraculously walk away.
Not another word was uttered
all the way back to Gertrudis Bocanegra 120, the Vega-Núñez residence, all
spellbound by the extremely unlikely fate of the dog and the bus. Our time with the family came to an end and
left us all bonded having witnessed a miracle together. We had to drive home and get busy setting up
my student exchange program.
EXCHANGE PROGRAM
Not wanting to join any
national student exchange organizations and give up the control of the events I
wished to orchestrate between Sonoma and Morelia, I had trouble selling my
school district, its superintendent, and the board of directors on the merits
of my proposal. The parents of about 20
of my students were determined to do whatever it took to help me get students
to Morelia the next school year. They
began showing up to school board meetings where I finally submitted a
proposal. Two of the five board members
had children they wanted to send to Morelia, the momentum was building to let
us go, but the superintendent dragged his feet and finally said it was too much
responsibility for the school district to assume.
I was teaching in the most
advanced foreign language program in any public school in California. We were known as the model of an articulated
foreign language teaching program that linked studies in Spanish from the 6th
grade, through junior high, then high school, and on to Sonoma State
University. Our guide and mentor was Dr.
Gaona, whose father had invented the world-famous Thunderbird School of
Languages in Arizona, a model immersion study program. Camera crews from major East Coast
universities appeared regularly to take videos of our teaching methods to use
to teach their own students.
The parents who wanted their
children to go on my exchange program knew what we were about, knew that three
months in Mexico on top of everything they had already learned from our program
would rocket their children to bilingual status, and they became frustrated by
the district resistance. One of the
board members was an attorney. He called
me and explained that the school district only had any say over the matter so
long as the students in question were enrolled in the district. Since I had already arranged for a school in
Morelia to accept all the children I brought there, he advised us to pull the
students from the district rolls and free ourselves from their regulation, then
take the students to Morelia and bring them back in January at which time they
could re-enroll here.
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| Sonoma students in classes at Instituto Valladolid in Morelia. The one on the right with her eyes closed in Nanette, the daughter of our friends who urged her to take the trip to Morelia with us when we stayed with the Vega family |
I accompanied them to
Guadalajara where they spent one night at the Tapatío Hotel. The next morning we boarded our bus to
Morelia and were greeted at the station upon arrival by all the families who
were excited to receive and host our students.
By the time I was back in January to retrieve them, I was floored by how
far they had all progressed with their Spanish.
Because they were all 12 to 13 years old, they had little intellectual
resistance to learning everything about the language: they got the accent, the
pitch, cadence, juncture, syntax and lexicon, they absorbed it all. In November they were terrified to say even
one word of Spanish to anybody. By
January I was able to carry on fluent conversations with them, not resorting to
English or needing to translate anything.
I was eternally fulfilled by the success of my exchange endeavor.
Later in the year the time
came for students from Morelia to come north and live with host families in
Sonoma. Up came Mr. and Mrs. Vega and
most of their children. They were not
age-specific as were the students I sent (who were all 8th
graders). We had little ones and older
adolescents as well as adults come to stay with us. School was not in session, so it became a
social experience of a different kind that what you would expect from an
academic exchange program, but it worked and satisfied the needs of Sonoma to
meet the people the town’s children could not stop talking about after becoming
bilingual in their culturally rich central Mexican city.
RACIALLY-BASED BEHAVIOR
Alfonso had arranged a
concert at a church high up in the East Bay hills and had asked me to accompany
him to familiarize himself with their pipe organ a few days before the
concert. Two things happened that proved
to be an international embarrassment, two things that made me reflect on my own
culture in ways I had only theorized about before.
Alfonso and I sat at the
console of the church in Kensington, turning pages, making music, staring
around the empty building when all the pleasure of the moment left us to be
replaced by panic, pain and moaning as a humbled Alfonso doubled over in agony
and began writhing, blanching, sweating, all within a few seconds transition
time.
The cell phone had not been
invented, there were no people in the church complex, I decided to pack up my
friend in my car and race him to a hospital armed with the map I had used to
find the church. Off we zipped down the hills to a pay phone where I could call
for directions to an emergency room. I
did what people did back in those days:
I picked up the pay phone and dialed zero to get an operator. When the operator came on the line, I
explained that I was with a friend visiting from Mexico who was doubled over in
pain. “From Mexico?” she asked. Yes, I said, from Morelia. With my left hand holding the phone and my
right the map, I followed the operator’s directions along visually until the
end, able to visualize the drive in my head.
I thanked her and off we sped to the emergency room. I turned left, then right, then raced
straight and finally arrived at the address, pulled into the parking lot and
looked up at a sign that said “VETERINARIAN”
There it was, plain as
day. A fellow human, a telephone
operator, had been victimized by her own emotions to assume a cavalier sense of
the life-and-death urgency of somebody from another culture and had flippantly
directed us on a detour where there was no room for humor, only intensified
panic on the parts of Alfonso and myself.
A cruel hoax.
I decided to head north
toward Sonoma to get into familiar territory where I could get done what I
needed with no prejudicial roadblocks such as what the operator had sabotaged
us with. The first person I met was the
toll-taker at the end of the bridge across the Carquinez Straits. He read the terror in my eyes and asked me
what was wrong. After only a sentence or
two, he picked up on the urgency and directed me to an actual hospital only a
few minutes away.
I helped Alfonso to the door
of the hospital hoping to get somebody with a gurney and start the process that
would bring an end to his excruciating pain.
I sat my suffering friend down in a chair while I approached the
admissions desk and took a seat opposite the hospital official. In a moment or so I had explained most of the
situation we found ourselves in, was just ending the story, when I was interrupted
and asked if my friend had insurance. I
was on a course to continue discussing what was an obvious medical emergency in
medical terms when a financial matter pushed the medical emergency off to one
side.
“Please,” I pleaded. “Can we have this conversation after Mr.
Vega’s medical needs are attended to? I
will vouch for him.”
“That won’t be good enough,”
she boomed back at me.
After having been directed to
a vet by a cruel bigot, any kind of further obstacle to Alfonso’s urgently
needed medical attention, especially a financial one, made me feel apologetic
for our way of life that would turn anybody away in that condition. (This was, of course, many years before we
ceased to allow such a thing to happen in life-threatening emergencies.) I could tell what the official really wanted
me to do was take Alfonso back out of
her little corner of the world and drive away.
On the top of a shelving unit across the room behind the hospital
official, turned slightly sideways, I made out what I thought to be the
MasterCard logo.
“Do you take MasterCard?” I
blurted out.
“Nope”, she answered,
apparently hoping that would be the final question before our exit. She saw I was staring behind her, turned
around, focused on the credit card logo as her face turned beet red. “Well, I guess we do.”
She wanted to go from there
right into paperwork, but I steered her into getting a doctor to look at
Alfonso. Moments later they figured out
he was trying to pass a kidney stone and would require hospitalization. I stayed with him and translated for all who
took care of him until they had sedated him enough that he fell into a sleep.
Hospital stays were expensive
even then. With no insurance to cover, a
few days in the hospital could turn a person’s reserves into Swiss cheese. I took Alfonso to the hospital in Sonoma so
he could see all his family while he remained there to pass the stone. I contacted the local paper and got them to
let me write a piece about him, what had occurred and how the bills might cause
serious hardship. Money began to flow
from concerned locals to a bank account until there was more than enough
kindness from the lovely townsfolk to pay all the hospital bills. Three cheers to Sonoma!
ST. MARY’S CATHEDRAL
A famous San Francisco
landmark burned down in 1962: Saint
Mary’s Cathedral. According to Walter
Bahn, the man who was the organist for the new St. Mary’s and its musical
director when I met him in the 1970’s, there was a very large insurance
settlement and a sizeable donation from one member of the congregation which,
in total, allowed the church to recreate what was before, but with 20th
century refinements and embellishments which included a world-class Ruffatti
organ designed to resonate perfectly within the 18 million cubic feet of open
air space that, along with architecturally modern concrete pillars, constitute
what in St. Mary’s Cathedral is the acoustical environment classical organists
dream of.
When it came time to dedicate
the cathedral’s most magnificent organ, it was Alfonso Vega-Núñez who emerged
as the correct person to give the inaugural concert. Up to that day, I had been seated next to the
maestro during many of his concerts, turning pages for him, interpreting for
him, with a hundred people or so in attendance.
In Alfonso’s world, however, this was a huge gig that attracted the
attention not only of his musical contemporaries, but people with high
positions in the church, important politicians, persons of general interest and
persuasion and all types of just plain folk, like myself, all of whom realized
a once-in-a-lifetime event was unfolding at the cathedral. Thousands of people showed up forcing
conditions to change to “standing room only” amid crowds of people who gathered
outside to hear Alfonso weave deep spiritual musical moments into their lives.
 |
| Richard von Sternberg turns pages for Maestro Vega during inaugural concert at St. Mary's Cathedral |
This evening I was seated for
turning pages, looking at the throngs of people in the overflow audience,
feeling daunted. I introduced each piece
Alfonso played in English and Spanish, spoke about him and his background and
what an honor it was to be his friend.
Because I had been with Alfonso at the multiple keyboards of organs so
many times and had so many conversations about the musicians whose works he
preferred to play, I was able to liven up the introductions to the pieces to
the point of evoking laughter from the audience. At the end I was given some applause at the
end of Alfonso’s thunderous standing ovation as he pointed to me in a gesture
of thanks for helping him pull off this major event in his life.
At the gathering that
followed the concert, Martha looked at me, winked one eye and said: “Ricardo,
robaste la mitad del triunfo.” (Richard,
you stole half the show.)
 |
| The Maestro signs autographs after the dedicatory concert at St. Mary's Cathedral |
YEARS DRIFTED BY
I changed professions one
year, letting go of my teaching tenure to travel the world in pursuit of
precious gems. Constant travel was
required to see clients and suppliers.
As my daily grind restricted itself to the pursuits of my business to
make the business viable, I lost track of the people and places that had
nurtured me along the way to adulthood.
One day I felt an urge to
take my family to Morelia. So much time
had passed that the little Vega kids had grown up and had children of their
own; Alfonso was in his 80’s. We all
took the winding staircase to the console platform and stood while Alfonso
played the Tocatta and Fugue for my family, the last time I saw him in person.
Alfonso, the oldest son, has kept
me updated with current photographs of his family.
 |
| The Maestro never misses an opportunity to be with family; here he and Laura sit and enjoy time together |
 |
| Alfonso, Jr, and his mother Martha |
In the most recent ones, the maestro shows signs
of becoming, like all of us eventually do, a shadow of his former self so very
many years later in those branches of the personal history that intertwined our
families. When we met, the maestro was
as fresh as the tight bud of a beautiful rose with perfect petals just
beginning to open. He matured and
bloomed while I knew him as did his family, special people who learned to
synchronize with the forces of the universe that let a person be a contributor
and a receiver simultaneously, leaving trails of kindness as they move forward
in life.
Ay, Alfonso, how you moved me
in life, how I salute your genius, your heart.
How I love you.
