Remembering Guillermo Tovar de Teresa

 Remembering Guillermo Tovar de Teresa

    Guillermo Tovar y de Teresa, as Wikipedia will explain, was, at the age of 13, adviser to the President of Mexico on the subject of Baroque Paintings. So, a child prodigy. He was born in Mexico City 1956, of a well-off family (indeed of several such families), self-taught to a high level in art and culture and a noted collector; he died in 2013 aged 57. I bought on impulse a copy of his posthumous Historia de México: Tomo I (1519-1761), a strange collections of essays and remarks put together by his loyal family and published February 2025. 

    When I learnt that the family home (Valladolid 52, Colonia Roma Norte, Mexico City) had been made into a 'Guillermo Tovar de Teresa Museum' we decided to visit. It was a pleasant walk of 3.4 Km through tree-lined avenues and streets known to my companion since childhood.

    The house, a substantial two-storied town house (c. 1900) with basement, living floor and roof-terrace enclosing a tiny garden open to the sky, filled with rocky stairs, waterfalls, plants and mirrors. A gallery runs round the garden and all the living quarters lead off the gallery. There is a narrow  adjoining space for a garage, converted now to a tiny slip of a café run by young members of the family.    

    Following the prescribed route as best we could, we strolled through the chain of small, ill-lit, rooms, crammed with dingy pictures (or prints) and religious sculptures, but found nothing that caught our eyes, for longer than a glance. 

    Out on the street we noticed the adjoining café and ventured in. Behind a small bar at the entrance a barman greeted us, but that was immediately followed up by a most striking figure who bustled up. Young, a touch below median height, slight build, strikingly dark hair and eyes, wearing a generously long and substantial black coat, that barely revealed some elegantly-pointed snake-skin boots.  His effusive welcome gave us the strong impression that he was part of the family and that this was his terrain and his rôle. At one of the small square tables that ranged down the narrow and chilly ravine, the high walls of which prevented the warmth of the sun from penetrating, sat two well-wrapped young women, chatting over glasses of 'mimosa'. Our gracious host, job done, went and joined the ladies who thus also appeared as 'members of the family'. We chose Quiche Loraine and glasses of tinto de verano. 

    The waiter brought toast on a wooden board to one of the ladies, who proceeded to describe it while the young man of the elegant boots filmed her on his mobile phone. Later he paused at our table and chatted awhile, confirming and adding to our speculations. (He kindly offered to search for Historia de México: Tomo II (1761-1988) for me.

    I think the most interesting thing about 'Guillermo Tovar de Teresa' is the spell he appears to have cast over his whole family; siblings, nephews and nieces. 

    As we headed home up Calle Sinaloa, we passed a vacant lot on which nothing remained of the vanished house except some glazed tiles. It amused me to wonder if Isaura had known the occupant. At that very moment she pointed across the street at a substantial house of the old style and told me that a lady had lived there who had been very kind to her grandmother when the family had lost their (two) Durango haciendas in the wake of the 1910-20 revolution.

    A few yards further up the street the wheezy yet piercing whistle of the man selling hot camotes (yams) brought back memories, for I had often heard him in the street outside our apartment, but had never seen him. Here he was in action, a plume of smoke issuing from the chimney as his boiler built us pressure for another wheezy whistle. 

    And so home, to count up our kilometers, and to reflect on fame, revolution, grandparents, snake-skin boots and the making of memories.