All Over the Map (25 page)

A little later, coming into view of the reservoir outside of town, the driver asks if I’ve been to San Miguel de Allende before, and I say I lived here for a while, as a child. I can tell that gives me a little credibility; I haven’t just read about the place in
Sunset
magazine and decided to come down to build a big dream house. “
Fue muy mágico
,” I tell him.

It had indeed been magical. In 1971, Mom got the idea to take us four daughters to Mexico for the summer. This was before her Outward Bound trip, but she was already on her adventure streak. She wanted us to see something of the world outside Littleton, a suburb where most dads worked for aerospace companies and almost everyone voted Republican.

But Mom could venture only so far outside Littleton. Since we weren’t going to move out of the suburbs—Dad, a pediatrician, had an established practice in town, and they both enjoyed the sprawling lawn and proximity to the mountains—she brought other cultures into our home. Or, as we kids saw it, she brought home strays. Every few months, new people would take up residence in the guest room: Navajo children, a Cuban family, Swiss exchange students, visiting Greeks. During the Vietnam War, she opened the door to several antiwar students who were participating in a program called “ATSIV,” which is “VISTA” spelled backward, in which instead of going into poor neighborhoods to
work, postcollege kids went into wealthier homes to “raise the consciousness” of the suburbs and to have a nice free place to stay and meals to eat between demonstrations. June, my favorite of these ATSIV students, splashed around naked in a fountain in downtown Denver just to see what would happen (she got arrested, then eventually went on to drive a cab, join a cult, adopt a guru-bestowed name, and settle in a communal house in northern California with both her boyfriend and her ex-husband, practicing visualization and taking esoteric workshops in self-improvement).

My father wasn’t exactly thrilled with this parade of visitors, though he’d go along with the invasions cheerfully enough as long as he could occasionally shut the door to his den, light a pipe, and read in peace. Dad sometimes lost his affable composure when a hippie student crashed his motorcycle trying to put it in reverse or played Frank Zappa really loud when he came home from seeing wailing babies and fretting mothers all day long, and then he’d decide his consciousness had been raised quite enough. He was more interested in the foreign students than the political ones and eager to inflict his Spanish, French, or German on whomever was passing through. Now and then he went off to work on a reservation with the Native American public health services and is proud to say he’s the only white guy you’ll ever meet who can do a complete physical in Navajo.

When Mom brought up the idea of moving to Mexico for the summer, Dad was initially reluctant. It’s not as if you could trust the hippie students to mow the lawn in perfectly even stripes, the way he does. But as with most things—voting Democrat, getting
a toy poodle, hosting radical prison activists for cocktails—he eventually went along with Mom’s idea. She’d heard about San Miguel de Allende from her friend Janet MacKenzie, another of the dozen Democrats in Littleton, whose artistic and worldly tastes far transcended the avocado green, shag-rug ambience of the neighborhood. Jan MacKenzie had recently returned from several weeks in San Miguel de Allende, tanned and resplendent in colorful woven shawls and oversized pieces of silver jewelry, her four children effortlessly chattering in Spanish. The MacKenzies had studied at an art school, the Instituto Allende, and stayed at a boardinghouse in the center of town.

Mom started planning our trip.

The art scene is what made San Miguel de Allende a magnet for the Jan MacKenzies of the world. An American-accredited fine arts school, the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes, opened in 1938, and by 1948, several former World War II soldiers on the G.I. Bill discovered that they could attend school and live very well in San Miguel on their modest grants. That year,
Life
magazine ran a three-page spread on the place: “GI Paradise: Veterans Go to Mexico to Study Art, Live Cheaply and Have a Good Time,” reporting that apartments were $10 a month, full-time maids another $8, and rum 65 cents a quart. The resulting influx of would-be painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, and rummies spurred the opening of another accredited art school, the Instituto Allende, in 1950. By the 1960s, San Miguel de Allende was a counterculture destination for U.S. truth seekers and acidheads, including Ken Kesey; they came down off their high in 1968 when the notorious beatnik Neal Cassady, woozy on barbiturates after a wedding
in San Miguel, wandered back along the train tracks to Celaya, apparently to count them, wearing only a T-shirt and jeans on a cold and rainy night, and was found in a coma the next day, dying in a nearby hospital just short of his forty-second birthday. Still, many of the artists and expats stayed on, forever painting the pink facade of the Gothic La Parroquia church in the main square, seeking spiritual enlightenment, and creating a community that welcomed other like-minded bohemians. They opened galleries and coffee shops, an English library, and, inevitably, real estate offices. By the 1970s, it had calmed down enough to become a popular place for artsy and progressive parents to bring their kids for a summer to safely introduce them to another culture.

And so we set off for Mexico by bus from El Paso. This was our second time in that country: we’d gone to Baja a few years before, but all I remember, besides the vast novelty of the ocean, was how mortified my nearly teenaged sisters were when I rolled down the window and yelled
“¿CÓMO ESTÁ USTED?”
as loudly as I could to the first Mexican I saw, who politely waved back.

The bus was cramped and dusty, but I was too interested in how everything changed, once in Mexico, to care. The guy at the border checks your passports, waves you through, and, just like that, people speak a different language, dress in clothes that don’t match, and sell seeds you crack and scatter the shells of on the floor of the bus. You had to pay to use the bathroom at the stops, and it was someone’s job to sit there, collect the pesos, and hand you three squares of something that was closer to wrapping paper than tissue. The arid landscape was the same as in Texas, as were the cowboy hats and pickup trucks, but other than that, everything in Mexico was instantly different.

When we reached Mexico City we had wilted, and it may be that some of us were whining. We waited and waited for another bus that didn’t come as scheduled, and when it finally arrived, the bus to San Miguel de Allende made the one from El Paso seem outrageously luxurious. It had school bus–style bench seats, springs sproinging out of thin green vinyl, people sitting precariously on laps and standing in the aisles, and crates of live chickens aboard. With no shocks, the bus jolted us out of sleepiness with every winding, lurching turn. Outside Mexico City we saw miles of slums, poverty that television only hinted at on the news—a long way from Littleton.

Then the desert landscape was the same for hours, slowly rising, and we were almost managing sleep when we rounded a corner and came upon a Mexican Oz: a city of sunset-colored houses sloping down to a central pink spire.

The bus let us out in the center of town, near another church and a square. We suddenly felt very gringo, surrounded by our suitcases, probably more stuff than the people around us owned. We ate steaming tacos with our hands and drank orange sodas. Then we were able to take in the town—the trees dripping with flowers, the old cheek-to-cheek buildings that would have been plain-faced but for their marvelous colors: pink, crab apple, marigold, Fanta orange. The streets weren’t paved, exactly, but covered in flat, irregular stones, like an old, smooth riverbed. After the dreary bus ride, suddenly everything seemed calm and colorful, infused with waning shades of sunlight. We piled ourselves into a couple of taxis that threaded through narrow, one-way streets on the way to our new, temporary home.

We passed donkeys, indignant under their heavy loads. We
drove by houses where the tops of the walls were embedded with glass shards to keep burglars out (though a cat was delicately making its path across the broken bottles, undisturbed). Finally we pulled up to a stucco house with a heavy carved wooden door. The place seemed stark and forbidding, with no wide screen doors, lawns, sprinklers, or anything else we associated with summer. We girls glanced at one another nervously: we were going to spend our precious summer
here?

And then someone opened the door. Inside was a world of green, of flowers, birdcages, fountains, and painted tile floors. A magic garden. The house seemed to be mostly outdoor space, with the rooms surrounding the courtyard almost an afterthought. The proprietress, a stout woman with curly gray hair and woven, ethnic-looking clothes, bustled about, showing us to our simple whitewashed rooms with twin wooden beds, each with a cross above the headboard. Amy and I flopped down, the fan cooling our humid skin, taking us into a slumber of tropical dreams and anticipation.

In the morning, I woke to the sound of bells and roosters and a maid swishing her broom on the tiles. Mexico! I nudged Amy, who gave me a sleepy grin, and pushed her harder because it was morning and we were in Mexico and there was no time to spare. We got out of bed, feet cold on the tiled floor, and peeked out the window. In the courtyard, the sun was just touching the lush tropical plants, lighting the pink flowers, shining the surface of the water in the stone fountain. The other doors around the patio were closed. We made our way, shyly, to a breakfast of crusty bolillo rolls with marmalade.
“Gracias,”
I said to the maid, who
smiled—Spanish words actually
work
—and I was eager to go outside, to explore the town, to learn new words, to make all that was strange familiar.

W
ITH THESE MEMORIES
swirling around in my head, anticipating my return to San Miguel with both eagerness and dread, we finally come into view of the town. The lights are so widespread it seems as if San Miguel de Allende has spent the past thirty-five years outgrowing itself, sprawling away from its colonial streets. On the edges of town, identical condos line up behind locked gates like prisoners waiting for the count and housing developments march up into the foothills and scatter. My heart sinks as we enter town, when we pass a fast-food chicken restaurant and a supersized grocery store. “That’s new,” says the driver.

I wonder if the
mercado
, where short, gnarled women pressed still-warm tortillas into our hands, still exists.

Nothing about this San Miguel de Allende seems familiar, until we turn a corner onto a narrow, crooked street, our way lit by wrought-iron lampposts that cast rosy circles of glow. I don’t know where I am, but I have been here before. We stop in front of the hotel, and the driver leaves. I give the night attendant my name and he checks the book; there is no reservation for me tonight. Maybe I am so late that my room has been given away, another sign that I shouldn’t even be here. The night man is baffled about what to do. I ask if there is a room, any room, and he nods. Phew. The rate? He is perplexed again.

“Mañana,”
I say. We’ll figure it out tomorrow.

He smiles broadly and picks up my bag.
“Mañana.”

He leads me through a garden, with tiled stairways curving up to balconied rooms. It is January, and poinsettias are everywhere in pots. My room has an arched doorway and white stucco walls; the bathroom is covered in uneven blue and yellow tiles. The carved bed is firm, with white linens, and, exhausted after a long journey, I fall right in.

But I’m excited and can’t sleep. In some ways, I am coming back to where I started, as a traveler at least, and I have a sense of summing up, like you have right before your birthday, or on New Year’s Eve after a few too many drinks, when you wonder what you did with all that time. Part of me fears that if I walk around San Miguel, I might come face-to-face with the ten-year-old I used to be, and I would disappoint her. What would that bright pigtailed girl, who roamed freely around San Miguel, a whole new world of experience and language opening up to her, so eager to come home and write stories about it for her sixth-grade class, think about her forty-five-year-old self?

She would’ve been thrilled to know that one day she would indeed travel to many countries and be awed by so many sights, tastes, and people, but otherwise she might’ve been confused by the reality of herself at middle age: no husband, kids, or house, not even an international affair with some mysterious Basil St. John with his dark eye patch and orchid serum, like Brenda Starr. Not right now, anyway. I toss in bed, wrestling with my ten-year-old self.

And then I am woken by bells and by blue light streaming through the corner of the wood-framed window. And just like that ten-year-old, I jump out of bed.

T
HAT FIRST MORNING
it’s chilly, the high-altitude air holding no heat, tiles cold to the bare feet. I’m eager to leave the hotel and walk around town. In the morning light, the buildings are as colorful as in my memory, but they all seem to be in the wrong places. Everything I see is like looking at a painting where the artist has taken familiar objects out of context in order to make them unfamiliar, so that you can see them anew.