Writer and painter move from LA to San Miguel de Allende and become part of the local community. Their journey over 15 years:
| We were busy, successful, tired. |
| In youth we’d both traveled widely on shoestrings, lived in Europe, North Africa, India, Japan. Now we had the money but no time. Instead we read about it, recounted old experiences, festooned our dwellings with Third World artifacts, talismans of trips once taken. |
| We sleep and wake at odd times: our tiredness, we discover, has many layers. We wander the town endlessly, speaking only to exclaim at something that interests us. While Masako goes off to explore the markets, I pace the cobbled lanes, which after some blocks become hilly dirt paths, then dissolve into raw countryside. Though the little green and white taxis are just a few pesos, I walk everywhere. When the mountain air tires me, I pause and take in a view. |
| From a scenic lookout above, San Miguel de Allende most resembles Spanish and Italian hill towns, its steep lanes and old houses gathered around churches and squares. |
| Masako and I meet up in a courtyard restaurant, our eyes shining. The words tumble out, our recountings taking longer than the trips themselves. I saw a man with a stack of chairs on his back for sale, another piled high with tropical birds in cages. She saw mariachi musicians serenading the Virgin of Guadalupe under the portals off the plaza. In a hardware store I saw faces right off the codices. She followed a funeral to the graveyard, spent two hours there sketching. How long since we’ve talked like this? Married a decade, we’ve mostly worked. Recently we’ve endured a succession of family crises: my mother’s illness and death, my father’s subsequent neediness, strains in Masako’s family’s business. Tangled in adulthood’s web, pumping out the tasks: we’ve barely had time to look up. |
| Mexicans are curious at most, never hostile. On my side, I feel released from L.A.’s flat, paranoid impersonality into clean bright air, sensory richness, unforced gaiety. We’ve traveled together before, but this is different: in Mexico we hear the music of surprise and revelation that first drew us to each other. |
| Mexicans seem to squeeze the small green lime they call limón over everything, a universal solvent and cure-all. |
| We are naive visitors, in a state of grace, taking the cure, using Mexico for catharsis. We’ve come for the warmth: now, warmed, I want to know where I am. |
| It dawns upon me that, arriving as a tourist, I’ve blundered into a civilization. No, three civilizations overlaid upon each other: Mesoamerican (Aztec, Mayan, Toltec, Olmec, Zapotec), Spanish colonial, contemporary. How could I have lived so close by all my life and neglected to realize? |
| Verb forms resurface in clumps, with their euphonious conjugations: amo amas ama amamos aman. So many ways to love. |
| Limited to the only tense we know, we exist in an unbroken, sensuous present. |
| a kind of Mexican Williamsburg. |
| At sunset, hiking to El Chorro, the old waterworks at the south end of town, I realize with a start that I’ve been standing on a corner for a good fifteen minutes, staring at the exfoliating pentimenti of an eroding wall, my mind bleached of thought or language, lost in traces of history, the passage of time. Some deeper process is being addressed here. I’ve become the unthinking minder of my own renewal. |
| With the passing days I note the gradual departure of the frozen, strained glare in the mirror. Some vaguely human apparition gazes back. |
| “So how do you find Mexico?” Paul asks me. “If I smile, people smile wider. If I say ‘buenos días,’ they say it back, stronger. Sometimes they don’t even wait.” “In Mexico,” Paul says, “you put out a little, you get back a lot. In human terms at least, you could say it’s a functional economy.” |
| ‘The day set out from the east and started walking.’ The day is on a journey. We’re woven into the design of that day, though we’re not inventing it.” |
| my homeland: that place where, in Octavio Paz’s words, people “wander in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens, and moral precepts.” |
| I remove my watch and put it back in my suitcase. We’re on Mexican time now. |
| Maybe I miss the point. I think of a story by B. Traven, Canastitas en serie. It tells of an Indian man who brings a few woven baskets to market. Approached by a rich American who wants to buy in volume to export, the seller turns him down. The American naturally thinks him a fool. “Señor,” the basket maker tries to explain, “I weave these baskets in my manner, with songs and fragments of my heart woven into them.” It’s not about volume but participation. In the States my aversion to supermarkets nears the pathological. Here in open air and natural light, moving among pyramids of tomatoes and avocados and onions, brushing hands with sellers, exchanging words, I feel alive, a participant. |
| We know nobody here. |
| Mostly we are strangers, moving through a world of color, light, and aroma, the language a pleasing tangle of alien sound, the whitewash of the old walls flaking off in our hands, the canopy of night stars ours alone. |
| a weird mélange of those who, as the saying goes, are either not wanted where they came from, or are. |
| We described our exodus to friends as a “sabbatical,” time off, though we suspected we had something stronger in mind. “You’re really leaving,” an incredulous screenwriter friend said at our garage sale. Yes, we are. “So is it a quality-of-life issue or what?” His very choice of words seemed to encode the reasons we were getting the hell out of there. At what point do you stop doing the same thing over and over? Sooner or later, windows turn into walls. |
| Each night ends with the same ignominy: me jumping around our room with a rolled up newspaper, embedding mosquitoes in the stucco walls until the buzzing and bloodletting cease. |
| She reaches over and flicks off the light. “Remember lying in bed listening to the helicopters? You’d say, ‘There must be something after L.A.’” “Maybe what’s after L.A.,” I whisper, “is what was before L.A.” |
| The days and weeks gain rhythm, unfold in time. The cobbled paths we tread become inner landscapes. |
| Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiápas, and Yucatan, |
| Gradually our Mexicos diverge. |
| In this part of Mexico, nothing happens between two and four in the afternoon. Businesses close, drivers pull off the road, towns go dead for comida, the day’s main meal. Nominally shops reopen at four; but if it’s a good lunch or the conversation is rolling or the proprietor could use a little siesta —any excuse will do—it might be closer to four-thirty, five even. Yet the same store might stay open past eight if there’s a stray customer, or nothing special waiting at home. |
| Lately we’ve begun to ape Mexican body language: the pinch of thumb and forefinger signaling “in a minute,” the sideways waggle of the index finger meaning emphatically “no,” the good-bye wave with the back of the hand rather than the exposed palm. |
| “Sometimes, though, the bell rings at seven-nineteen,” Masako says. “Or two-oh-eight. What does that mean?” “It means the bell ringer is late,” Paul says, deadpan. Gringos, obsessed with time. We want it all perfectly clear—on the dot, by the book. |
| Presidencia, where he languishes in jail. In this peaceable |
| Maruja says everybody understands that nothing will happen to the governor, the crime’s “intellectual author” (as they like to say in Mexico), and that after a suitable amount of time it will be duly noted that the hit man mysteriously “escaped” from jail. |
| Mexicans don’t seem to have time anxiety, in our sense. If the day, as in the Mayan poem, sets out from the east and starts walking, wisdom suggests one fall in step with it. If there are infinite causes for things, and everything is interrelated, bound inside this walking day, then there must be a reason why the truck is late from Mexico City. This was advice given me by Teresa at the Ambos Mundos, who told me one day: in Mexico there’s always a reason. In the States I expect things to work, quickly and well; often they don’t. Here, expecting little, I find things generally do function, and at the end of the day things get done, more or less, más o menos. If not, there must be a reason, however inscrutable to me. My narrow need, inset in this day that started out walking from the east, is deferred, or revised, or revealed to have not been all that important. These pages I need to print out will arrive in New York a day later: as if agent and editor were drumming their fingers on the table waiting—a convenient fiction I use as a goad. I may be a little late with my delivery, but then I may be a little late for my own death as a result. Is that so bad? |
| We’ve wandered into a food area. Vendors thrust samples at us on the edge of knives, fruits whose very names are colors. |
| “Huitlacoche!” |
| Mexico, forgotten by time and commerce, run roughshod over by successive revolutions, languishing in backward politics and economic straits, still breathes that air of possibility. Buildings lie unused, awaiting the restorer’s hand. Threatened species survive here. Dreams range, hidden from the global advance of capital that erases culture and difference. It won’t last. Population pressures build, Mexican industry advances. Migrant workers return home to develop their lands. These old towns will become tourist meccas, like central Italy or Provence: exquisite, expensive, gourmet sites. |
| the Third World’s vibrant unruliness, not central planning, may be what will save it in the end. |
| There is a lab a few blocks away from the Ambos Mundos that will be happy to test you for amoebas or worms, though the cure is said to rival the disease: weeks on some chalky antidote of questionable efficacy. So far we either show no symptoms or don’t admit to them. Has our own bacteria count now reached equilibrium with the environment—like the church bells and the fireworks at dawn we barely notice now—while little devouring creatures bore their way through our intestinal walls? |
| Some nights the stars and the moon veer so close that, pausing on the cobblestones walking home, I’m tempted to reach up and stir them about with my hand. |
| Some bear surprising résumés not always evident from their appearance: diplomatic corps, doctor in Ghana, ex-director of Versailles. There would be something a little odd or different about them that they’d end up late in life in this rather remote, unprotected mountain town of such unusual beauty but with few medical facilities. Some remind me of Tennessee Williams’s or Paul Bowles’s people: sad, touching, a derelict gleam in their eyes. |
| “Where have we gone wrong?” she says suddenly. “Alone in our houses with televisions and newspapers and books, crowing the whole time about how much freedom we have. The sexes are either terrified of each other or at each other’s throats. We’re frightened of commitment. We marry then divorce, preferring our private satisfactions, our careers, to enduring with one another.” Her eyes earnestly search mine. “We’ve gone off track somewhere, don’t you think?” |
| “Maybe it’s why we come here,” I say to the woman. “To try to tend to the part that’s missing.” The party is dispersing around us. We stand to go. She looks at me doubtfully. “But it’s too late, isn’t it?” |
| “We’re happy for no reason.” |
| The twinge, the push-pull, as parents age. What do we owe each other? What is expected? What is important? |
| In what separate chamber of the soul does this place reside? Have I tumbled out of reality or into it? |
| In the eighteenth century, San Miguel was formally charged by the Crown with the crime of having “an excess of fiestas.” Citizens fought the charge and won. Now it seems there’s a fiesta nearly every day in San Miguel—civic, Indian, religious, patriotic, pagan. |
| Objectified through Richard’s impatient, critical eyes, the place suddenly seems flimsy, without compelling attraction. |
| reasons I don’t enjoy driving in Mexico: old unsafe cars, two-lane roads traveled by speeding buses and trucks, predatory cops. |
| Sparkling fruit, mint tea, the afternoon’s languor. |
| Mexicans are afflicted with charity, the curse of a brimming heart. A man who spends his day blatantly raking money from the public till lavishes it on his church or a neighborhood fiesta. A drug dealer responsible for untold deaths lavishly outfits his town’s soccer team. Money moves along different channels here. |
| the thickness of the air will make me feel I’ve already eaten, drunk, and smoked too much. |
| Mexico’s contemporary identity seems unformed at times, half in shadow, as if constrained by a past that paradoxically feeds it—leaving Mexicans inwardly rich, functionally vague. Their revolutions, more symbol than substance, failed to bind society in a meaningful civil contract. Police and army are seen as predators, not protectors, the government as corrupt custodian of privilege. Twenty million people need work. Fifteen million are hungry in a country of ninety million with rich farmlands, abundant natural resources. Milk and even corn, that most indigenous of staples, has to be supplemented by imports. The Catholic Church, officially illegal since the Revolution—it can’t own property, and priests and nuns can’t wear their habits outside church precincts—unites Mexicans more than the state. |
| We’ve obliterated pre-European realities, truncating continuity with land and memory of what went before, imprisoning ourselves in a fretful, unreadable present. |
| This morning Masako came back from town bewildered. Supermercado Sánchez sells a canned tuna in a spicy tomato sauce so original, so tasty that people have been telling friends about it. Quickly it sells out. Reorders have been taking longer and longer. Masako asked Señora Sánchez why it hasn’t reappeared on the shelves. She stopped ordering it, she said. But why, when it’s so popular? That’s just it, Señora Sánchez replied. People are always asking for it. Then we run out. They complain. Too much trouble. “No vale la pena,” she says, throwing her hands up. Not worth it. North American dreams of instilling the profit motive here, where people proudly claim they work to live, not live to work, remain so much theory. |
| Mexicans tend to present a serious demeanor until the least zone of safety is established; then laughter, wit, and jokes (chistes, bromas) pour forth. This beguiling blend of dignity and wit makes them generally nice to be around. People who dance with skeletons and skulls, have a Day of the Locos, and endure an abysmal government with scornful laughter are de facto absurdists. |
| “I am atheist but I am still Catholic,” Carlos says. “Do you know what I mean?” “Not really,” Susana says. “It’s a Mexican thing,” Paul says softly. |
| Stars glitter brilliantly, little nodes of electrical song. For some reason I think of the sky above L.A., which shows few stars, reflecting instead its own ambient light, narcissistically, ready for its close-up. L.A.: where passion is the name of a perfume, ecstasy a drug, adoration something reserved for film stars, and mystery a genre of fiction. |
| This Mexican dance with death is beyond morbidity, more like its surreal antidote. Poe would be lost here, where laughter trumps fright. |
| Abundance and joy are fleeting, all the more to be savored. The life-bringing sun will turn harsh: flowers wither, crops fail, rivers dry up, children and animals die. |
| For an instant, I imagine I could stick, here in this mountain town. |
| So our dreams draw us forward, as water whispers to the dowser’s wand. |
| OUR FOURTH YEAR IN MEXICO. WE LIVE between worlds these days, frequent flyers. The Mexican cycles of seasons and holidays entwine us deeper in town and country. Friends come and go, fall in love, split up; babies are born. Our life in San Miguel de Allende remains the intimate sum of our days—sensual, revelatory, engaged. |
| Observing age’s effects upon our parents, we make careful calibrations between desire and duty. |
| Old friends are busy climbing up, clinging to, falling off career ladders. The conversation is the same one we checked out on six months earlier, different only in detail, with television and movies the referent, not live experience or books. |
| Few people walk for pleasure. |
| Mexico in memory can be flat, flavorless, a postcard—like trying to remember sex, or a good meal. It lives in the senses, not the mind, collapsing all abstractions into the brimming moment. |
| Yet hearing a corrido on the radio, or Spanish spoken in an L.A. market, can unleash a near-overwhelming, Proustian effect, bringing tears. Now I understand better the mariachis’ howling laments of memory and loss. In California we don’t talk much about Mexico. We’ve grown tired of the blank stares, the feigned interest, the allusions to Tijuana and the border towns, the beaches of Cabo or Cancún. Now I know why Mina and Paul used to be so reticent. In glossy, xenophobic, dollar-grubbing late-eighties U.S.A., Mexico is buzzless: a torpid blank somewhere south. Mexico, grail to generations of artists, site of primordial revelation—Mayan temples, brujos, muralists, hallucinatory mushrooms—has fallen off the map. This whorled, ornate neighbor civilization, secretly and essentially entwined with ours, is invisible, its people among us silent, nameless wraiths who clip lawns and clear tables. |
| It’s as if we have a secret life, in a secret place. I used to like L.A.: the cool speed, the indifference to history, the near-monastic life of house, car, house. It freed the mind to run along some ever widening horizon line. Flatness, the absence of affect: not a bad place for a writer. There’s no world out there so you invent one. I can’t muster that appreciation any longer. I want taste, smell, sabor, ambiente. I want the human shape to my days. |
| “In Rio, dreaming of New England/In New England, dreaming of Rio,” |
| When visiting places we like, we often talk of buying. It’s a sort of pulse-taking, a measure of interest, a way of being there. |
| In Mexico, the fideicomiso, the thirty-year legal instrument by which foreigners are allowed to lease through a bank but not officially own property, means we could be sent packing overnight. Mexico has expropriated foreigners’ holdings before. “Nuestro patrimonio!” rolls off Mexican senators’ lips like butter, especially where norteamericanos are concerned. There is unrest in the southern states, murmurs of open revolt. The peso totters, the ruling PRI is terminally corrupt. Drug money surges through the economic system like a toxin. Tourism bottomed out after the earthquake and has never recovered. “Don’t put any more in Mexico than you can afford to lose,” the aphorism runs. |
| Even ex–foreign service types who know the world’s sweet spots end up here. |
| Never own a house, an older novelist once told me. It sucks money and attention, the two things a writer never has enough of. |
| “Ahorita doesn’t mean right away, pronto doesn’t mean fast, mañana may not mean tomorrow. And if somebody says quince días, two weeks, you’re out of luck.” |
| milusos, as Mexicans say, a thousand uses, a handyman. |
| Suave, suave; gently, gently. |
| Ojalá—that expression meaning “hopefully” or “God willing,” with its suggestion of surrender to fate—creeps deeper into our vocabulary the more we work on the house. |
| Killing a man once is one thing, but twice? We have a legal term in Mexico: rematar. To re-kill. That’s why René got a life sentence. |
| Driving on Mexican roads requires an attitude of fateful surrender. Trouble could come from anywhere: |
| Mexico insists I live more through my eyes. |
| You labor to untangle the pre-Hispanic from the Catholic Spanish from the contemporary. This occupies you for a long time in Mexico. Finally you realize it’s like trying to separate the different parts of a plant (a “burning flower,” the desert Huichol people call life’s origins). Apostate from the cult of tomorrow, you begin to see that the future has already passed, many times, and around you lie the ruins of old futures dreamed. You arrive, with a bump, back in the layered, resonant Mexican present, your eyes open, your reality wider. |
| Holy shit |
| Walking to the hotel, I say, “I wonder what the occasion is.” “Womanhood, beauty, tribe, harvest,” Masako says. “The dance is the occasion.” |
| A long-running favorite, Vaselina Dos, remained mysterious to me until I spotted the preening, ducktailed star on the lobby poster: Grease II. |
| Touchdown in Mexico City, and that familiar, deep, pleasurable exhalation. Back to long stretches of work, five-hour dinners, books read cover to cover, the endless round of fiestas, processions, weddings and funerals, and that humanizing ambience we now equate with life itself, in this town I can walk end to end, carrying a single key in my pocket: the key to the high mesquite door on Calle Flor. |
| With the arrival of “the gigantic red evening,” as the novelist Malcolm Lowry called it, contentment overwhelms all desire to alter things. |
| Sometimes the midday silence of the house is so large it’s like a thought. |
| Like so many Mexican men, Hilario can fix almost anything—a house, a car, an animal —or bring a discarded thing back into use. |
| Reason unravels in Mexico; extravagant behavior erupts. I think of Crazy Jeem the speed freak and the other twisted souls back at the Ambos Mundos; Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared into Mexico never to be heard from; William Burroughs, who shot his wife to death here; Howard Hughes’s descent into madness and decrepitude in Acapulco. |
| The poor are not poor The rich are not rich Only those who suffer pain are poor SIGN OVER THE PATIO GATE OF THE NIÑO FIDENCIO |
| No surprise when last week bottles of Tlacote water began appearing at Espino’s market alongside the other bottled waters, though at a slightly higher price. The brothers Silva, perhaps obeying God’s further instructions, have gone into business marketing the magic waters. But devotion has its own power apart from fact; and Mexican daily life is steeped in the miraculous. Here there are no ordinary days: each belongs to some saint at the least, and the Virgin appears continually in myriad guises—in a tree, in a subway station, by a river. A few days ago I came across a singing procession bearing a new statue of a Virgin glimpsed last year by a campesino outside our town. The image had been rendered by, for some reason, a sculptor in Yugoslavia. They were carrying her to San Francisco Church to reside there for Holy Week. Working my way closer, I looked up into a pert, pink-faced Virgin face with aquiline nose, tiny chin, and thin lips—looking more like Barbie or Bo Derek than anyone from around here. Did the campesino really see a Virgen who looked like that in a tree, or was some instruction lost between here and Yugoslavia? |
| Masako brought home a color television and VCR she’d bought from a departing Englishwoman. It sits in her studio, glassy-eyed and ominous, awaiting cable hookup, threatening to admit inside these walls that other life—cool, electronic, agitating—that we’d left in L.A. January seven years ago for this intimate, voluptuous, sense-driven one. In other ways, we watch gringo and Mexican cultures blend, collapse, begin to resemble each other: free trade agreements, computers, drugs. |
| We want so much to be moved. In Catholic Mexico—and Mexico is overwhelmingly Catholic—it’s hard not to feel the power of adoration, the urge to surrender to some ideal of purity, redemption. I’ve felt this before, in the Arab world. Still we know the price our century has paid for such absolutist yearnings, and so we curb them, pretend they don’t exist, burrow back into a secular world whose blanket never quite covers us. |
| The house, little changed but for patched leaks, paint, furnishings, and plants, is refuge and work space, monastery and site of the sensual: food, sex, garden. |
| Mexicans have no fear of stone. The country is in endless construction and reconstruction, every roadside piled with bricks awaiting the mason’s trowel, swarms of teen youths pouring into the trades, the tapping of chisels and hammers throughout the town as pervasive as the bells. Loose building codes and accommodating officials make Mexico a builder’s paradise, province of endless invention. |
| Veranda: a place from which to ver, to see. |
| Mexican builders don’t use carpenters’ levels to establish a horizontal. They fill a hose line with water, hold one end at the height they seek, then watch where water bubbles from the other end to determine a level: fascinating, and accurate. |
| Depende. An ominous word. |
| Our existence in Mexico is as fragile as this year’s disturbances or some xenophobic politician’s anti-gringo campaign. |
| I was ambivalent about writing on Mexico. I’d kept notes and diaries but had never written publicly about our life here. I considered Mexico my refuge, not my subject. |
| “An unnecessary death,” someone says. Was it? Is there such a thing? Isn’t it blasphemy, here in the nunnery, to question God’s design? But must the niños die from dehydration, the politicians from drug bullets? Why does Mexico, festive and abundant land brimming with life, always make you think about death? |
| Mexican cultural influence is everywhere, even if nobody wants to go there. The global monoculture advances, knitting our two worlds closer together: earth as one vast bazaar. Masako now buys Art News in San Miguel, while Californians eat off pottery from Dolores Hidalgo. |
| Where does one country stop, the other begin anymore? Where is the border between experiences? |
| We live in transnational space, airports our waiting rooms, our suitcases always half-packed. |
| THE WEATHER MAPS OF U.S. NEWS programs often portray Mexico as a blank— as if weather, not to mention life itself, simply stopped at the Texas border. But Mexico’s lustrous coasts, stubbly deserts, furry jungles, and ragged mountains, its high peaks and dank lowlands, are beset by a living weather of withering heat, biting cold, hurricanes, and droughts—not just that benign sun so tonic to northerners. |
| The intimacy of weather and land extends to nearly everything around us. We’ll eat today from plates and bowls thrown and glazed at the Vásquez kilns in Dolores Hidalgo half an hour away, using Talavera techniques that first came from Spain to the Mexican town of Puebla. The blue and green drinking glasses are hand-blown at the factory down by the train station. We’ll dine on a table made of an old door from an abandoned nearby hacienda, beneath a chandelier forged in an ironmonger’s shop in town. We’ll sit on chairs hewn from local mesquite trees and leather tanned here. The muslin tablecloth comes from a factory outside of town, the hand-loomed cambaya cloth napkins from our trip to Michoacán. We’ll eat fat green chiles from a nearby farm, brought on a food truck to the Parque Juárez every Thursday. The squash blossom flowers that Masako—and Mercedes, who is helping us today—are making into soup in the kitchen were brought to our door by laughing girls. The dark Oaxaca-style mole, with its countless spices, will be served over chicken bought from the lady whose gringo husband runs the ice cream store and changes money at a better rate than the banks. After lunch we’ll climb the stairway León built of stones from a riverbed a few miles from here, mortared by the descendants of masons who built the old Chichimecan pyramid on the other side of the dam off the Guanajuato road. This sensuous texturing of time and history into the everyday provides the undercurrent of pleasure in being here: a voluptuary of moments. Use and beauty combine into what Octavio Paz has called the “fiesta of the object.” Sabor, that inclusive Spanish word meaning flavor—not just in food but in all things: music, art, speech, dance—suggests a sensory profusion understood to show generosity of heart and imagination. Walking from kitchen to dining room to patio to studio to garden, each object my eye lands upon is coded into time, memory, and experience: a living history that twines around us more each year, like the jasmine, sisus, moneda, and bougainvillea vines that embrace the garden and patio walls. |
| Fecund Mexico. So many foods come from this part of the world. What did Europe eat before Columbus? Turnips, game, gruel? |
| Time shifts the cast of characters. |
| In this town full of stories, I become, as years pass, a repository of lore. Maybe I become lore myself: the gringo writer who lives in that old house on Calle Flor, sometimes seen standing on street corners staring at blank walls, or gazing up at an empty blue sky. Or Masako, the japonesa artist and photographer with the beautiful long hair she makes art from, the one with the gringo husband. |
| When we first moved here, the few foreigners around were young transients, old retirees, aging bohemians. Now boomers arrive in droves, buying up the old houses, starting businesses. We have two Internet servers now, a dozen realty offices, boutiques, video stores. Movie stars sneak in and out of town to visit or take art classes at the Instituto Allende. You can buy portobello and oyster mushrooms, Bulgarian yogurt, French brie. There’s a facelift clinic outside of town. San Miguel de Allende is touted in the magazines as a place to visit. In old towns like this one, history, religion, and ceremony soften the effects of change. Mexicans, unlike North Americans, consider technology a convenience, not a faith or a metaphysic. Foreigners still number little more than 5 percent of the population. (“One good kidnapping,” Carlos joked the other day, “and they’ll scatter like pigeons.”) |
| In Heisenberg’s physics, we alter a phenomenon by the act of our regard. In writing about this country, this town, this house I love, I sacrifice part of it. There is eco-tourism, but no equivalent restraint on cultural tourism. Inevitably, historical sites like this will be preserved as commercial “living museums.” We will visit a place called “China,” in quotation marks, or go out into “nature.” We will visit “Florence” in situ, once the site of a Renaissance city of the same name. What was formerly the town proper becomes the “old town,” surrounded by the “new town.” |
| The romance of the Other—part of what first landed us here—dims: in California I speak more Spanish; here, more English. My two environments cross, come to mirror each other. Last week I went to a party where there were more gringos than there used to be in the entire town. Sometimes I wonder: Will a plague of our own kind drive us on? |
| Maybe there’s no home really, only road’s end. |
| “Así pasan las cosas.” He uses the expression casually, as Americans might say “that’s life,” or “shit happens” —though its poetry always floors me, with its healthy resignation to fate, its recognition of how the world really works. Así pasan las cosas. Things come, they pass on |