By
JOHN SCHERBER
EXPATS IN A DIFFERENT WORLD
One of my
favorite house museums is the Gene Byron Museum in Guanajuato, the capital of
the same state in México. It lies in the close-in suburb of Marfil, one of a string of
silver ore processing haciendas that were mostly owned in the middle of the
last century by a group of Canadians.
They had been originally
built to extract the silver from the ore coming from the great Valenciana Mine,
the largest and most productive in the world, not far away. As the technology
changed, these estates lost their purpose and their value and fell to ruins.
When the Byron property was purchased in 1954, there were no roofs left on the
main, two-story building. Burros were housed on the lower level.
Gene Byron was
a Canadian actress who was born in 1910. She first came to México in 1942.
There, sometime later, she met the man she married, a Spanish pediatrician
named Virgilio Fernandez. Born in Spanish Morocco, raised in Seville, he was
eight years younger than Gene, and he had gone to medical school in Monterrey. He
had been in México since 1939. Together they restored the main building into a
long, two-story residence to house their creative life together.
Gene died in
1987, at the age of 77, from a smoking related illness. This was one of many
things Dr. Virgilio told us as we sat with him near the entrance on this visit.
I had heard he was still alive, but I did not expect to meet and talk to him at
the age of 97. Here he is with my wife, Kristine.
Later we toured
the house, left as it was when Gene died twenty-eight years ago. She was a
woman determined to leave her mark on life. The house is full of her paintings,
including this self-portrait:
The only
painting on the main floor that is not by Gene Byron is this portrait of the
young Virgilio Fernandez.
As well as art,
she was a designer of stone carvings and crockery, and of the gardens that
front the long façade, graced by a series of arched windows. The metalwork that
appears throughout the house, the light fixtures and sculpture, is all hers.
The house was often
filled with creative people. Garth Williams, the illustrator of children’s
books, died in Marfil in 1996. He was famous for his iconic illustrations of
Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and many others. Another frequent guest was
Fletcher Martin, the American painter who studied with the great Mexican
muralist David Siqueiros. He retired to Marfil in 1967 and died there in 1979. Artists
and writers of that era knew of this house and visited it when they came
through, almost like a pilgrimage site. The home of Gene Byron and Virgilio
Fernandez was the center of the artistic and intellectual life of the
Guanajuato expat colony in the 20th century.
As I walked
through those rooms today I felt I could hear the echo of those voices. It was
a different time for México and for expats. I believe there was less emphasis
on retirement and more on living than in today’s colonies in San Miguel de
Allende, Lake Chapala, and the beach communities.
This great
stone house, built in the sixteen hundreds, continues as a center of living
culture. Every Sunday there are concerts on the second floor, now one long hall
with a vaulted ceiling, since the bedrooms have been removed and a grand piano
waits on a platform at one end. The vestibule at the concert hall entrance was
once Gene Byron’s painting studio.
When we left we
stopped at the gatehouse to say goodbye and to thank Virgilio Fernandez. It was
not hard to imagine him wandering through that hacienda, every square foot of
which must speak to him of those rich and rewarding times, both the hours and
the years. Since silence fell, he has been its stalwart guardian, and has
endowed it in his will. He and Gene had no children, but they have left us an
ageless memorial to their life and times.
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