I took a rocky path shaded by trees on one side, avoiding the sun's glare. After a few minutes I encountered a young man in running shorts. This was Plutarco's son and heir, also named Plutarco—Kaco for short. He lived in a cabin on Las Pozas property, 80 acres in all, before moving to a larger house on its outskirts.
Farmers who come to market in Xilitla from the surrounding 40 communities dotting the mountainside trek for two, sometimes three hours under heavy loads on rugged paths. The Huasteca is a land of coffee and citrus plantations. Workers build their houses out of cement block, and most live on a few dollars a day. They raise chickens, and when they need money they sell their stores of coffee.
I had a sense that there was no end to the place. Through a narrow orange iron door, you enter an instant archaeological site: it was left unfinished to be assailed by humidity. Iron poles were allowed to poke out from the concrete structures so new rooms might be added on. (James would often leave on a trip and return with a sketch for another part of Las Pozas.) Today, the poles have mostly rusted right into the core of every column and wall.
At a clearing, a group of boys splashed noisily in a deep blue pool formed by one of the many waterfalls.As I walked—advancing with a multitude of butterflies and invisible insects—the sound of one waterfall receded as another drew near. I entered a state of hypnotic striving: the paths, bridges, and staircases led me from one vantage point to another, and each held the promise of "arrival." But every new platform, terrace, tower led to another path, another climb. Cement in fading colors competed with moss. Tall concrete poles shaped like bamboo stalks or organ pipes oscillated at the lightest touch or breath of wind. Staircases leading nowhere spiraled upward vertiginously. James's architecture belongs to the forest—and Las Pozas is the land of vertigo, a cathedral to nothing celebrated by nature's highest pomp: tall trees growing skyward into a screened cupola of branches and leaves just above the source from which majestic torrents come crashing down.
I had left Mexico City early in the morning. Andrés Zamorano Villamil, an artisan of wrought iron and an amateur archaeologist, met me at the airport in Tampico to drive me first to Ciudad Valles, then Xilitla. Swarms of white and yellow butterflies scattered before our windshield. We passed a villa modeled on the Kremlin, built by a prosperous pensioner who had made his fortune in America. The cluster of exotic colored domes overlooks a vast cement factory. We stopped at the roadside store of Alberto Rosa in Huichihuayán, in the plains, before the road climbed into fog-capped mountains. Rosa left Xilitla after witnessing a murder in the shop of a friend, but he remembered James: "He was the illegitimate son of a king of England, Eduardo No-se-qué [Edward I-Don't-Know-What], and his mama was a Lah-dy No-se-qué. He held a little pig in his arms and let him eat from his plate. Once I saw him sitting on a rock at Las Pozas, with his feet in the water, wearing only a pair of shorts, writing."
Rosa offered us a stool. He was pleased I am Italian, because every Sunday he eats spaghetti and drinks Barolo. He could not confirm what a physician in Mexico City had told me: that James fixed the roofs of the houses in Xilitla and built a clinic. Everyone seems to agree, though, that James supported as many as 40 families through the construction of Las Pozas, which continued for 35 years and cost more than $5 million—forcing James to sell his collection of Surrealist art at auction. There were paintings by Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and René Magritte, all of whom he had met at the start of their careers. Magritte did a painting of the back of James's head as he stood facing a mirror that reflected the back of his head.As for Carrington, James offered her $200 for 20 canvases when she was still relatively unknown and expecting her first son. Having agreed on that sum, he tried to lower it, but she kicked him out of her studio. Months later he returned and bought the paintings.
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