Simone de Beauvoir's Impressions of Santa Fe

The Generous Spaces & Virgin Freshness of the Mountains & the Deserts of the Far West

From America Day by Day / L’Amerique au jour le jour; A Wonderful and Forgotten Travel Account 

March 20, 1947: Santa Fe rises at one end of a plateau, at an elevation of six thousand feet. At 11 in the morning, in bright sunshine, there is a marvelous freshness to the air. From the first look, we are seduced by this little Spanish town where you can walk around on foot, the way you can do in Europe. And it is not a straggling village but a real city.  After NY and Chicago, after LA and San Francisco, what an enchanting and novel experience! The streets are winding –not a right angle in sight.  Most of the houses are built in the Mexican style, with heavy earthen walls and no windows. There are arcades around the central square, as in Madrid and Avila. The big La Fonda Hotel –which is full- resembles an African village with its earthen walls and crenellations. There are few cars, dark-haired people walk in the cool sunshine, speaking Spanish.  The women don’t have the long legs of the call mannequins on the coast, but their eyes shine and their bodies are warm and alive. On the square, people chat and stroll around, as they used to do on the Ramblas in Barcelona. Indians in elegant costumes sell embossed silver and turquoise. The beautiful objects in the curio shops are a bit reminiscent of the street market, but this makes them no less picturesque.

We have only three days to spend here –no time to lose. I consult the list of addresses P.C. gave me that broiling afternoon on La Cienaga. This is how earlier travelers went from town to town across Europe –armed with letters of introduction.  First we enter the museum to see Mrs G, who is the administrator. It is a charming provincial museum where, among other things, there is an exhibit of memorabilia of Kit Carson, the man who fought the Indians so fiercely at the beginning of the 19^th century. You can see his boots, his hat and his revolvers. A diorama displays the Spanish trail which the Spaniards took to New Mexico in the 17^th century and which the wagon trains coming from the East coast later followed.  Still later it was crossed by stage coach and now it is used by greyhound buses; trains don’t climb up this far. Near Mrs G’s office I recognize a young French architect R.C. whom I met in San Francisco. He, too, travelled by greyhound and arrived two days ahead of us; here, he has met PB, another French man, who is traveling by Greyhound from NY to LA. Thanks to this chance meeting, Santa Fe seems singularly accessible. Mrs G has invited us all to a party this afternoon, and N. and I are going to lunch at La Fonda with our two countrymen. RC tells me that they were immediately given a warm welcome by people here: there is a whole colony of intellectuals and artists in this town who are attracted by the climate, the site, and the proximity of the Indians, but who find local life a little tedious and are eager for any diversion.

The La Fonda is the most beautiful hotel in America, perhaps the most beautiful I’ve ever seen in my life. Around the patio there are cool galleries paved with mosaics and furnished in the Spanish style. In the lobby an Indian has, for years, been selling fake turquoise and petrified wood to the tourists. This small-time tradesman has a noble face sculpted with deep wrinkles, like an old chief in James Fenimore Cooper. The dining room is in Mexican-style in décor, dress, and varied cuisine. And here we are, four French people gathered together by chance, fraternizing around a table, just as travelers fraternize at roadside inns in old adventure novels. RC is visiting America as an architect, PB as an economist, N and I without any definite point of view, and we compare our impressions with an entirely French volubility. Around us, the Americans eat in silence, as usual, and finish quickly. We’re the last to leave our table. We prolong the conversation in the bar and agree to meet that evening.

Meanwhile, N and I continue to explore the town, the only town in America you might explore entirely on foot. We see houses made of wood and earth that are said to be oldest in the New World, and a church that is one of the oldest Spanish missions. It is simple and spare like a French village church. We climb as far as the little ethnography museum, which is situated on a small hill two miles from the plaza. From there, the view is striking. During these last weeks I’ve seen so many landscapes, but this one touches me –I’d like to live here. It has the generous spaces and virgin freshness of the mountains and the deserts of the Far West, and yet it’s as orderly as a landscape in Spain or Italy; its vastness is harmonious and measured. I’d like to return here each evening, and each evening make more discoveries and grow even fonder of it. In the distance, there is a smoke-stack –Los Alamos, where there’s an atomic plant in the middle of an industrial city of 80 thousand people. It’s in this area, in the heart of these deserts, that the first atomic bomb was invented.

The museum has a fine collection of Indian objects, especially pottery. But N correctly observes that if one is not a professional ethnographer, there’s something irritating  about contemplating charming objects that don’t have the distant beauty of works of art, that are made to be possessed and handled with familiarity, and that one still cannot grasp any better than the cliffs of Colorado. We get tired of this pottery, which is so seductive, so varied, so similar in its diversity, and so useless in its attraction. What can we grasp on this journey? What can we carry away with us that we can truly call our own? What good is it to look at these pots, or at anything for that matter?

We turn our backs on these depressing displays and ask to see the director of the museum. He receives us with all the kindness in the world and points out on a map the major Indian villages we ought to try and see around Santa Fe. He quickly explains to us the Indians’ situation on the reservations. (He glosses over the fact, as is his job, that all the fertile lands have been taken away from them under the pretext that they wouldn’t know how to cultivate them, and that they have been left with a land of broken stones and no water, where growing crops is nearly impossible.) They earn a living primarily through their weaving, which is no longer done so much by hand but in factories. Apart from a few privileges, they are poor, and their standard of living is very low. But they can vegetate rather peacefully within their designated territories. They have neither the status of American citizens nor the rights that that status confers. Furthermore, they have only some of the corresponding responsibilities [of citizenship], and under the paternalistic protection of whites, they enjoy a semblance of autonomy. For example, they carry out their own system of justice, according to their own laws, as long as it’s only a minor transgression. A murder or a burglary, even within the reservations, is handled by the American justice system. Yet such cases rarely come up for these are very gentle people. They live a life rather like that of carefully kept animals in a zoo. Yet they have the right to leave this enclosure, to become citizens, and to try their luck in the vastness of America. They do not excite the hostility provoked by blacks; they are the descents of people who never experienced slavery, and certainly, neither their numbers nor their ambitions and their vitality represent and racial threat. But because of their education, or perhaps their temperament, they are poorly equipped for the struggle for life, and when they get away from their usual situation, they rarely achieve a satisfying position.

We come back by car and failing to find another restaurant that seems appealing, we dine again at the La Fonda. The musicians languidly play vaguely Spanish tunes. We take the taxi to Canyon Road. It’s a small street at the foot of Santa Fe that seems like a cross between Montparnasse and Greenwich Village. Painters, musicians, poets –often all at the same time- live there in little, wooden, artistically furnished houses. Mrs G’s house is tiny and charming. The Indians have remained rather impervious to the influence of whites, but the whites who live here have been proudly susceptible to the Indian influence. They have adopted the taste for vivid colors, for hand weaving, for the lost past –the taste for quality. Whereas the average American knows no other measure of value than the abstract yardstick of money, the aesthetes of Santa Fe suspect subtler gradations, living as they do in intimate contact with these masks, these dolls, all these familiar and magical objects for which there is no monetary equivalent. The influence is palpable first of all in the furnishings; everyone tries to acquire the rarest rugs, blankets, and knickknacks. Acquiring dolls is a delicate matter. They belong to the children and Indians have a respect for childhood; none of them would deprive his daughter of her favorite toy. For this reason, you have to negotiate a deal with the children themselves, offering them candy, American toys, or money, and there are some who resist all temptation. The way these men and women dress is also remarkable; it is a bit reminiscent of the summer residents of Saint-Tropez. In fact, Santa Fe makes me think of Saint-Tropez, with the Indians playing the role of the native fishermen, whose trousers and rain slickers are imitated by tourists. The women are striking in their pallor, the men in their emaciated look. Because of the altitude and climate, many pulmonary patients are sent here, but this look of ill health is certainly also cultivated. If no makeup disguises those white cheeks, it’s because these ghostly faces are in fashion. And it’s the fashion for the men to let their beards and mustaches grow wild.

Our French friends have come with us, as well, and the other guests assail us with questions. They ask us for the news from Paris, and we talk a lot about Henry Miller, whose trial fascinates his admirers.  Santa Fe is not very far from the West Coast and belongs to Miller’s zone of influence; here, they seem to think he’s America’s most important writer. (…)

Before we part, they give me a sheaf of poems, articles, brochures, catalogues of exhibitions, and reviews, all meant to inform me about the literary and artistic production of Canyon Road. And we’re invited to another party the following day. 

p. 184-189; trans. Carol Cosman. University of California Press, 1999.

Originally published by Gallimard, Paris 1954.