I may be a Hollywood walker, but the fact is, I walk wherever I am. And when I’m in a new place, say Guadalajara, having been invited there for the Book Fair, and have a few hours to spare, I set off walking, with only the vaguest idea of where I’m going or where I’ll end up.
I guess this is what top psychogeographer Guy Debord called “locomotion without a goal,” abandoning my usual walking habits and letting the environment draw you into what he calls the “unities of ambiance” that ripple through any city.
I never think this is as fancy as it sounds. You walk down the street and come to a junction where you have to turn left or right. You look in both directions and you take the one that draws you. As for what draws you, well, it may be an interesting piece of architecture, a fine old tree, an open space, maybe a bar. Now, as readers of my books will know, I'm at least as obsessed with Volkswagen Beetles as I am with walking. So when I see street that has a Volkswagen Beetle in it I head right for that unity of ambiance.
In my native England, Beetles are close to extinction. Even in Los Angeles, my current home, you see fewer and fewer all the time. But in Mexico, where they continued manufacturing the Beetle (or vocho as it’s known locally) until 2003, there are still plenty to see. And so I walked the streets of Guadalajara guided by the presence or absence of Volkswagen Beetles.
I found myself in an area of the city called Jardines del Bosque: literally Forest Gardens. I didn’t know it at the time, but the layout of the neighborhood was designed by the great architect Luis Baragan. There were inevitable planning problems and the full extent of his design was never realized. Even so, to walk these streets is to find yourself in a wonderful mid-century suburb, or perhaps a theme park: houses with flat roofs, hints of streamline moderne, marble tile and walls of gorgeous, vibrantly colored stucco. And in front of some of those houses, fine Volkswagen Beetles.
I suspect I walked the streets with an idiotic grin on my face, drinking it all in, so many streets, so many curious architectural elements, so many Beetles. And the streets had amazing names: La Luna, Nebulosa, Atmosfera, Cometa, Orbita, Astros. I thought how impeccably cool it would be if people asked you where you lived and you could say, “At the corner of Astro and Orbit.”
The Beetles were amazing too. Some of them were old, verging on classic, a few were customized, one or two were absolutely pristine; but the vast majority were workaday cars, and really not that old. Even so, it is in the nature of the Beetle that however similar they may all look, no too are ever precisely the same. This is their glory.
It’s always hard to know how to end a walk. You feel you need a climax, a resolution, a journey’s end, a perfect moment. But these things don’t occur to order, and nothing’s worse than trying to force it and falsify one. So in this case, after a couple of hours walking I decided I’d had enough fun and headed back to the hotel by the most direct route. But then, as I was getting close to the hotel I came across a small, slightly shabby, but stylish apartment block: white painted brick, stone facings, balconies with angular wrought iron railings. Right away I noticed there was a cool red Beetle parked in the street out front; but then I saw there was another one inside the yard of the apartment block, a faded yellow one. Then I spotted a black one up on blocks, and another that had started out bright orange and was now multicolored as various panels had been replaced.
I was in a kind of ecstasy. I hung around for a while hoping the owner of the cars might appear, although I wasn’t sure I’d have said him other than “Vochos hermosos.” He never did appear. Only a ginger tomcat strolled languidly between the Beetles, and soon enough I went on my way. Even so, there’d been a moment there when I’d had the sense that the streets of Gudalajara, maybe the whole world, had been arranged specifically for my benefit and pleasure. And even though I knew it hadn’t, to have that feeling, however briefly, is one of the things that makes walking, and life, worthwhile.
