All Over the Map (28 page)

“Sounds like an adventure, anyway,” says Cindy, and then she asks where the house is, to see if she can place it from her memory of the town.

“Right near the mercado,” I tell her.

“Oh,” says Cindy, and her voice becomes dreamy. “I remember getting huge bouquets of sunflowers there for only a few pesos.”

“You still can.”

T
HE ONLY OTHER
person I tell about buying the house is Finn, whom I run into at a café with her little daughter, Tallulah, who is dressed in pink with sparkly shoes.

“You won’t believe it,” I say. “I made an offer on a house.”

“Honey!” Finn says, thrilled. “That’s great!” She wants to hear the whole story, so I tell it, including the part about the irresistible, inexplicable impulse to buy the house.

“It was meant to be,” Finn says with such certainty that I’m feeling a little less crazy—or maybe a little more New Agey.

She insists we walk down to Calle Loreto to see the property.

“This is it,” I say, a few minutes later, standing in front of the house. It suddenly looks a lot narrower than I thought. “It’s tiny,” I say, back to feeling extremely uncertain. Really, it’s a complete dump.

“It’s adorable!” Finn says, then asks Tallulah what she thinks. She considers it. “The fairies can play here,” she says.

We make our way back, past the mercado toward the jardín. “It’s a great location,” says Finn. “That house is a little gold mine.”

A
GOLD MINE
. I’ve been sitting in the attorney’s fusty office for the past forty-five minutes with the owners of the turquoise house, ready to sign the papers, but at the last moment, the elderly
señora is refusing to sell. From what I gather, she thinks there’s treasure buried on the property—silver, and maybe gold.

The diminutive woman, in her dark blue shawl, checkered pinafore skirt, and weathered Indian face, is squabbling with her well-pressed son, who is brushing off her arguments like flies. I’m straining to understand, but the señora seems convinced about the treasure, and maybe with good reason. San Miguel de Allende was founded in 1542 as a way station on the dangerous Antiguo Camino Real, the route the mule trains took from the gold and mainly silver mines of Guanajuato and Zacatecas to Mexico City. There were no banks in those days, so over the years, as the little town grew, the workers and bandits did what people have done with treasure forever: they buried it in their backyards. The turquoise house and its backyard have existed for more than two hundred years; prior to that, it was probably part of a larger property before it was divided up into workers’ row houses. It’s entirely possible someone buried a stash there.

Finally the elderly woman’s son seems to have convinced her to sell. She’s sitting back in the chair, resigned, her feet not touching the floor, her shawl pulled tightly around her crossed arms. The son may have argued that it would, after all, take a great deal of buried silver to make up for the amount of money I am prepared to pay, in cash, for the house. They’re asking the equivalent of 350 pounds of silver for the lot, which is more than you’d get if you turned the entire artisans’ market upside down and shook.

Before the señora can change her mind, I try to distract her by making polite conversation in Spanish, asking how many children
and grandchildren she has—so many, she’s not sure—and when she lived in the house. She doesn’t seem to be nostalgic for the place; eleven people were crammed inside those walls. But she smiles and I smile back, and when everybody’s smiling the attorney gets up to get the papers to sign. The deal’s going to go through.

The attorney is gone for an inordinately long time, but this is Mexico, and while everyone else goes back to whispering in Spanish—the law office has the silent solemnity of a church—I sit there, considering that when I sign the papers, I’ll be committed. It’s a great deal of money to pay for a tiny bit of land in Mexico, especially since it’s everything I have, all that I’ve managed to accumulate writing hundreds of magazine articles at a dollar or two a word. I’m picturing fifty thousand words stacked up like bricks in that little lot. I will have nothing left in stocks or money market funds, no diversification, and PBS financial gurus will be scolding me in my dreams. I’ll no longer be able to buy expensive shoes or airplane tickets to Italy or get my hair highlighted—except, maybe, in Mexico. I’m putting all my
huevos
in one
cesto
.

Finally the portly attorney returns, with no papers, and says something I don’t understand. The elderly woman raises her hands to the skies, and her son rolls his eyes. They both shake their heads in disgust.

It turns out the attorney has done what I’m paying him for; he’s uncovered a lien against the building that, had the sale gone through, I would have been responsible for paying. Some nephew, a good-for-nothing
borracho
from what I can tell from his relatives’ expressions, took out a loan on the house, which wasn’t his
to begin with, but the money is owed, and must be paid, before the house is sold.

Abruptly, everyone gets up from the chairs, we shake hands all around, and the meeting is over. Outside, I ask Roberto what’s going to happen next, whether I’ll get the house.
¿Quién sabe?
“This sort of thing happens all the time,” he says. It could be the reason the house has been abandoned for so long, why the
FOR SALE
sign looks like an antique.

I’
M DISAPPOINTED
I can’t buy the house. Maybe I’ve dodged a big mess. And maybe the idea of buying the house, and the excitement I felt about it, alerted me to a new possibility in my life, beyond the Hippie Apartment in the Haight, which I should explore. The turquoise house can’t be the last one for sale in the centro, but I’m not going to look any farther for now. I’m going home the day after tomorrow.

To distract myself, I go back to being a tourist and visit the Sanctuary of Atotonilco, just fifteen minutes outside San Miguel. I tag along with a group and wander around the church, which, with its all-over frescoes, has been called the Sistine Chapel of the Americas. The artist didn’t have Michelangelo’s cheerful disposition, though; there’s no benevolent God surrounded by happy cherubs giving Adam a loving look as he’s about to touch his finger and awaken him to the glory of the world. Atotonilco is covered with fierce demons, dark angels, and suffering saints, with a gruesome bleeding Christ as the centerpiece. Some 100,000 pilgrims make it to this Mexican Baroque masterpiece per year, most of them on their scraped and bloodied knees or flagellating
themselves. The place has woeful vibes, making me think perhaps I don’t want to be in this part of the world anyway. I’d rather be back in Italy, where the cherubs are fat, the angels are well tended, and the art makes you think that the world, for whatever miseries its lovely saints have suffered, is essentially a beautiful, not evil, place.

As the tour guide lectures the group under the church’s salmon-colored arches, I wander back to the van and chat with Martín, the driver, a short, upbeat man who is about my age. His English is excellent, but I try to speak Spanish anyway because we’re in Mexico.

I ask him where in town he grew up. “Calle Loreto,” he says. His mother still lives on the street and makes the best tortillas in town.

“I think that’s my favorite street in San Miguel,” I tell him. I have pretty much let go of my fantasy about the turquoise house on that street, but not quite.

Martín left San Miguel to work and settled back here after several forays to the United States, to Kentucky, where he worked construction and many other jobs. I presume he crossed into the country illegally—so many of the people in this town risk their lives to go make a few more dollars per hour in the United States—and ask him if it was difficult.

Sí, sí
, he says,
muy difícil
, and I can tell that’s an understatement. He crossed the border several times, and a few of them were very dangerous. He’s been lost, parched, shot at, hidden from border patrols, and had to catch food to survive, eating armadillos and snakes, and glad to have them.

“Were there lots of rattlesnakes?” I ask, shuddering.

“Everywhere.”

Martín is offhand in his manner, but there is something so dark in his answers that I ask if anyone ever died crossing the border with him. I’m not prepared for his answer. Once, he set off with thirteen other people, including a
coyote
they each paid $1,500 to lead them, draining the family coffers, borrowing from everyone, incurring high-interest loans. None of them brought along much water or food because they were told to travel light, it was going to take just a couple hours to reach their destination. Some of them carried just a bottle of Coke. Martín, who had crossed the border before—the first time was when he was fourteen years old—took a full knapsack and lagged behind the group. At some point they stopped for a siesta, and when Martín awoke he discovered that the rest of the group had left him, abandoned in the middle of nowhere. He called out and walked in every direction, but he was absolutely alone. With no
coyote
to guide him, he was lost in the middle of the vast Sonoran Desert, where every saguaro cactus looked the same and there were no landmarks and no shade or shelter from the relentless sun. He wandered for several days, surviving with what food and water he had brought, resting during the day and setting out after dusk, trying to avoid nocturnal scorpions and sidewinders. By the end he was burned, beyond thirst, staggering, and seeing visions. His feet were bleeding, his arms and legs infected by cactus spines. A border patrol—the enemy, the savior—picked him up just in time, offered him water and food, and sent him back across the border. The other thirteen people in his group, he eventually learned, had all died of heat exposure, every one.

“Lo siento mucho.”
There’s nothing to say but I’m sorry. I look back at Atotonilco, whose bloody, violent murals reflect the harsh history of this place. It’s a brutal, unfair land. It is so easy for me to get on a plane and come to Mexico, so dangerous for people who cross over to build our houses and pick our vegetables and grapes, keeping our prices low. And the gringos in San Miguel de Allende, it must be said, are profiting from the huge disparity in wealth between the countries, living easy here on a lot less. It’s complicated, of course: they’re bringing jobs and raising wages, too, so fewer people have to cross the border. Martín is able to stay in the town he grew up in and loves instead of crossing the border, he says, because he makes a good living driving a tour van. Good and bad.

The group at Atotonilco has finished with the lecture and is now shopping at the souvenir stands nearby. “I guess God wanted you to survive,” I say to Martín. “He had plans for you.”

He smiles. “
Gracias a Dios
,” he says.

A
FTER THE TOUR
, Martín drops the group off near the jardín, and the rest of the people scatter. I sit down at an outside table of a café on the corner and order my favorite dish, tortilla soup, with smoky chipotle peppers, strips of avocado, and tortilla shreds, along with a beer. I watch the people in the jardín, which is constantly active, and look up at the Gothic-style La Parroquia, almost comic in its faux-European splendor. I wonder, after I leave in a couple of days, whether I’ll ever come back here. It’s been wonderful to revisit a place from my childhood, to feel its
emotional tug, and exciting to think about buying something here, to consider settling in a foreign but friendly place. But I’ll be traveling on.

I drain my beer and my cell phone rings, which startles me, since hardly anyone has called me on it. I bought it right after I made an offer on the house, thinking I’d need it, and now it’ll go into the drawer at home with a bunch of other cheap international cell phones and chips.

“Bueno?”
I answer.

It’s Roberto. He tells me the family has paid the lien on the building and I can come sign the papers. The turquoise house is mine.

A
t home in San Francisco, I’m stirring a big pot of tortilla soup, setting out plates of tamales, slicing up avocados, squeezing limes for margaritas, waiting for guests to arrive at my birthday dinner.

This year, Guillermo isn’t here. I feel his absence keenly, not only because his Peruvian tamales are so much better than the Mexican ones I bought but because he is unable to travel, still not quite himself after a drunk driver mowed him down while he was out running a few months ago. Things happen that fast. But despite the fact that initially the neurologist in the ICU lamented how bad his MRI looked and whispered that he might not speak or walk again, he is more or less out of the fog, missing a margin of intelligence that only he is smart enough to know has disappeared, a softening of the edges that actually makes him easier to be around. (It also somehow helps him fall in love, get married, and have a baby boy, named after the father he lost in the jungle, only a year later.)

The doorbell rings, friends arrive, and I start pouring margaritas. Chatting in the kitchen, I tell them the news, that I’ve bought a little property in San Miguel. Then I tell them
how
little.