Phantom of the Cathedral of Morelia, Michoacán

Alfonso Vega-Núñez, one of the Great Concert Organists of the 20th Century

©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

of: I invited them to dinner.  My wife, Carol, had planned a crab dinner for us that evening, so she picked up twice as much.  We all sat around the table cracking crab, speaking Spanish and getting acquainted.  Neither Carol nor I was sure what exactly Mr. Vega was in town for, except to play the organ.  At some point the conversation about cracking the crab and how fun and different that was for our guests turned into tell-me-about-what-you-do kind of talk.

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 20^th 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

and practice time for Alfonso at the Community Center on East Napa Street in Sonoma.  I drove Alfonso to the Community Center so he could get acquainted with the organ before he gave his concert.  On the 6^th of December, 1970, Alfonso was scheduled to play at a benefit for Lachryma Montis, the house in Sonoma that was built by General Mariano Vallejo in the early 1850’s, the general sent from Mexico to “settle” California.

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

dressed in casual clothing, we were still floating together in a new friend comfort zone and I simply could not believe what I saw.  A one-man-band.  This one-man-wonder-show had appeared, like an angel, out of the blue.  The transition eluded me completely from having fun conversation to witnessing deeply serious, highly complicated music written hundreds of years before, just falling off the fingertips of this ordinary, humble man.  I thought to myself: “Man! This fellow’s wife did not exaggerate; instead she understated.”

It never occurred to me there was a Ph.D. available in what he studied, so I asked

him what one did to attain that status at his university. There were quite a few parts to his answer and it has been too long to remember all the details of such old conversations, but one of the requirements was that he had to convince the team of professors judging him that he was interpreting Bach’s actual musical intentions and inserting Bach’s soul into the music as he played it, as if he were Bach himself.  Alfonso’s master teacher was Miguel Bernal Jiménez, probably the most famous of all Mexican composers of classical music in our time.

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

state it correctly, squeezed ourselves into the car and headed toward New Mexico, then Texas where we intended to cross the border.  We stopped in Texas a couple of days to visit the family of my drill sergeant at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio where I had had my basic training and befriended that sergeant.  From there we headed to Eagle Pass to cross into Mexico and drive the Pan American highway south, hundreds of miles into central Mexico.

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

and headed further south.  We had many miles to drive through the high desert before the road started to climb in the mountains that completely changed my subconscious impressions of the country which had been formed mostly by cowboy movies of my childhood that took place in dusty, hot desert kinds of places. 

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

not.  When I studied gemology in the 1970’s, I was at first confused by how they used the word “fire” two ways with regard to opals.  If an opal had fire or was fiery, that meant that it exhibited many of the spectral colors the way opals are known to do.  A fire opal, however, refers to an opal that exhibits no play of color, but consists of a body color that is more or less the color of a fire when there are burning embers.

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

cooperatively”, is how you would define EJIDO.  This is much more than one of those beautifully tended neighborhood cooperative gardening projects you see these days in communities all over.  Although the general concept remains the same, the difference is that entire villages depend on the supply of food grown on those local tracts of land for their physical and economic survival.  The bounty and the risk are shared equally and the quality of life is balanced in the outcome, hence it is not just a Saturday morning, suburban fun outing to work on the ejido.

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,

a rich hot chocolate that reminded me of the way John Coltrane played the saxophone: all notes in the correct range, but many testing the limits of boundaries picked up by cultural osmosis, and due to Coltrane’s genius of stretching our musical tolerances, he made it effortless to assimilate our former outer boundaries.  Chocolate, in the candy bar or bon bon state, is a far cry from the real, bitter chocolate.  Chocolate Moreliano pushed me right to my culturally acquired limitations and redefined richness and fulfillment for me the way Coltrane did, with just enough sweetness to save the moment, but not mask the raw, earthy experience of the honest truth about chocolate.

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

remember seeing her at the piano a lot, enjoying her having caught the family music wave.  Her father was the most important organist in Mexico and her mother was similarly accomplished at the piano, not having ever been placed on the path to fame, but very well known in musical circles, considered a great piano teacher for aspiring artists.  Laura seemed at the time to have the option before her to cultivate her obvious musical talent to whatever degree she chose.

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. 

We could feel ourselves growing every day from the assimilation of the thought processes behind the behaviors that constituted daily living in a culture so distinct from our own.

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

already and would keep us safe.

Alfonso warmed up a few minutes on this, the largest pipe organ in Mexico – 4600 plus pipes – a German creation from the early 20^th century, checked the registration, and began to practice a light piece with some heavy moments.  

During the heavy moments the

vibrations became so powerful that the platform chattered with the impact of the lower notes and the whole cathedral vibrated in response to pipe blasts resonating around the cantera walls.  I closed my eyes and recalled the petite, uncomplicated organ at the Sonoma Community Center and began to see it, compared to what I was hearing, like a tiny rowboat compared to a three-masted schooner.

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 8^th 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 6^th 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.

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 8^th 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 20^th 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.