All Over the Map (29 page)

Marc shakes his head. “You can build San Miguel’s first bowling alley.” He grins. “But they’ll have to take turns for the lane.”

“Baguettes,” Axil chimes in. “It’s perfect for baking baguettes.”

“It’s going to be great,” says Sandra, putting an arm around my shoulder. She looks at the guys. “I mean, it’s almost as wide as this kitchen.”

I take a few sips of my margarita and ask Peppe, a construction engineer, if he thinks it’s possible to build a house on a lot that narrow. He laughs, asks if I considered that before I bought it, and then, seeing my anxious face, swipes his hand over his smooth head and reconsiders. “
È
possibile,”
he says.
“Ma sarà un bel problema.”
Possible, but it’ll be a nice problem.

Possible is good enough. I’m not going to worry about the house. It’s a party, I’m surrounded by my friends, and I’m much cheerier at forty-six than I was on my forty-fifth birthday.

I’
VE SENT A
check for the house to Mexico, and after waiting several weeks—repeatedly e-mailing Roberto, who writes, “Relax and go eat a gordita”—I finally get a receipt, a deed, and a key to the house. I have no clue what to do next. I recall Sue, a new friend in San Miguel who married her nineteen-year-old Mexican student when she was teaching English there in her early thirties, telling me that the tradition is to have campfire parties on a property where you can’t afford to build. The lot may just sit empty for a few more years, as it has for the past thirty; I’ll bring down marshmallows.

Financing construction of a house in Mexico when you don’t
own anything in the United States turns out to be tricky. Some people, I realize, would have discovered that before they bought the property. When I walk into my bank on Haight Street and sit down to talk to the ponytailed loan officer, he points out that I have no collateral and nothing with which to secure a loan, because property in Mexico isn’t something the bank can easily seize.

“Dude,” he says, spreading his palms on the desk. “There’s, like, no way.”

I make some calls and find companies that do construction loans in Mexico, but their fees and rates are exorbitant, and most insist that you use their contractors, who, judging from the Web sites, build only peach-toned faux-Mediterranean villas with Ionic columns, decorated with giant inlaid seashells. My best option seems to be to open a bunch of credit cards, pay for the construction with cash advances, then declare bankruptcy and run off to, um, Mexico.

I finally turn to the Bank of Mom and Dad. I’ve never asked my parents for a loan, partly because, growing up poor in the Depression era, both with single mothers who were teachers, they have a bootstrap mentality about money. But I come up with a plan to pay them the interest they’re making on their other investments, ask a lawyer how to make it all official, and present it to them, explaining how my experience in San Miguel de Allende as a child helped shape who I am, and how I am, in some ways, coming full circle.

To my surprise, they agree to the deal and seem happy about the prospect of my finally having a place of my own. They’re worried about the details of how it will all work out and ask a lot of
questions, but I also get the sense that they’re glad, since they’re a little bored in their retirement after extremely busy careers, to have a stake in an interesting project. It makes me feel content to know that though I don’t have a partner to rely on in my life, I have my family. (A year later, when stocks crash, my parents are pleased that they took the money out of the market and are getting reliable interest on a loan.)

Designing the house is much more fun to think about but also a challenge, since I’ve never done anything more imaginative, spacewise, than paint a room yellow or move the piano to the other wall. It stretches unused muscles to visualize building a small house, calling forth spatial relations skills I haven’t used since I packed a carry-on suitcase to spend three weeks during winter in Egypt, London, and Ireland. I buy books on small spaces, sketch a lot of long, wobbly rectangles in my notebook, play with putting the kitchen here or there, and wonder where there will be room for stairs.

However small the house, the project seems huge to do alone. With no experience in the realm of architecture or design, the only thing I have in my corner is a sure sense of taste. Good or bad, whatever anyone else thinks, at forty-six you have developed your style. Architecture and decor have to be a lot like fashion or art: at a certain point you’re confident about what you like and what suits you, and you’re less apt to make mistakes you regret. So I decide to just trust what I like.

I head back to San Miguel in March and start looking around at other houses as models. Unfortunately, the house I like the most, owned by my friend Jody—built around ruins in the centro,
modern but using historic materials—is huge and worth millions. It ruins me for other houses. It’s like a painting—you can’t help it, you fall in love. I want a miniature by that same artist. Jody tells me the architect is named Anja, and asking around, I learn that her reputation is that she’s good but expensive.

I try other architects and designers who might be cheaper. In each house, I sense that something’s wrong, unharmonious, too phony colonial. When a young Mexican architect who does modern, minimal houses comes to visit the house and I open the door, I’ve forgotten how really small it is.

“Well, you can do
something
here,” he says gloomily. “Maybe a spiral staircase.” He isn’t enthusiastic and doesn’t come up with any sketches or plans, as promised, to bid on the job. When we leave the house, I feel uneasy; maybe I’ve made a disastrous decision.

I finally call Anja, introduce myself, and tell her I’ve bought a little house on Calle Loreto.

“The turquoise one?” she asks and says she’s inquired about the house herself (I meet many others in town who tried to buy the house, one woman for five years, with no one answering the calls; I got lucky, or, as they say in San Miguel, it was Meant to Be). “Great location,” Anja says, and we make an appointment to meet.

Given her talent and reputation, I expect someone older than the lively Mexican woman in her early thirties who walks into the café. She kisses the owner, then greets me and sits down with me. She’s warm but all business, describing her process, which involves taking measurements, drawing plans, obtaining permits,
and overseeing the construction. She makes quick sketches in her notebook with perfectly straight rectangles. She seems to be competent at everything I’m not.

Anja asks how big the lot is,
más o menos
. This is where I’ve lost the other architects’ interest, when they’ve told me there’s no way to build more than one bedroom, where the subtext is that it just isn’t worth their time.

“Three and a half by fourteen meters,” I say. I drain my coffee, ready to get up and leave.

Anja lights up, clasping her hands together. “We can make a little, what do you call that, where you put your
joyería?”

“A jewel box?”

“Sí, sí!
We’re going to build a little jewel box!”

A
ND SO WE DO
.

Most stories—maybe every story—about building a house in a foreign country are full of drama, disasters, crumbling ceilings, pipes bursting, thieving neighbors, insect infestations, and contractors running off with cash, leaving things half finished. But from the beginning, Anja and I have a seamless and delightful collaboration, our flurries of ideas easily settling down and taking shape.

She starts by drawing up a wish list of all the things I want in my house. This is much more satisfying than making a list of all the qualities you want in your dream man, sending your intention out into the universe so that he will magically show up. This is concrete. So I begin with the general—a great kitchen
and writing studio, some outdoor spaces to sit in the sun, two bedrooms—and move on to specifics such as a knife drawer in the kitchen island, wine shelves tucked into the dining room bench, reading lights over the bed, and a napping couch in my office.

A few weeks later, Anja sends watercolor plans to San Francisco that astound me—she has managed to put everything into my little house, while making it feel spare. I show them to my friend Peppe for an expert opinion; after looking at Anja’s drawings, he tells me I’m in good hands, asks if she’s cute and single, then begins referring to her as “
La
mia fidanzata messicana,”
my Mexican girlfriend.

But when I return to San Miguel in a few months to check in on the house during the
“obras negras,”
the black works, the initial brick and concrete construction, the tiny place is heaped with bags of material and litter. What have I done? The place where the kitchen is supposed to go is a dark, dank hole. Nothing of the original house, two hundred years old, is usable, except the front mesquite door and the interior doors; even the bricks are rotted through. I’m claustrophobic in the space.

“No te preocupe,”
says Anja, laughing, don’t worry. Then she takes me up the zigzagging stairs, with no railing yet, to the top terrace. I have no idea what the view from up there will be. It turns out to be sweeping, with all of San Miguel at our feet. “Look,” Anja says, pointing. “You can see the Parroquia from here.”

We scramble back down to the bottom of the construction site, which I eye nervously. “Let’s go pick out tiles,” Anja says, dismissing the mess.

F
ROM THE START
of construction, Finn insists I stay at her house whenever I’m in town. Hers is a rambling colonial place, with odd twists and turns, built as a party house for the property next door, later inhabited by elderly ladies who insisted that fairies live there; Finn’s three-year-old daughter, Tallulah, is careful not to pick the leaves off the plants because that’s where the ladies said the fairies hide. There is always a little bit of magic in the air: Tallulah and her friends Alejandra and Fernanda put on princess dresses and run around casting spells in Spanish, Finn takes her energy healer as seriously as her accountant and personal trainer, birds twitter, I play Mary Poppins songs on the grand piano for the children, and some days I think Bogart the Bijon Frise will start speaking French and Phoebe the mutt will answer back in street Spanish. Every morning I get kisses from the girls, the first of many kisses I’ll get from friends in Mexico all day long. The atmosphere feels light, feminine, twinkly, and happy.

Finn uses my visit as an excuse to throw a party, with a
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
theme, and the place is packed with men in skinny ties and women in little black dresses wearing giant cocktail rings, gringos and Mexicans alike, all waving long cigarette holders and dancing to a swanky jazz band until the early morning. Under their costumes they reveal themselves to be artists, designers, massage therapists, pastry chefs, party planners, teachers. One woman comes as Frida Kahlo, complete with a monobrow, which confuses me, themewise, until someone explains that she dresses
like that all the time. There are clearly a lot of fun-loving people in this town, as well as more than a few eccentrics.

As my house takes shape, so does the community around me. At times, I worry that as enchanted as I am with the town, I might not fit in with its people. Friends in San Francisco have questioned why someone who travels to remote parts of the world would buy a house in such a gringo-infested town. Indeed, I run across retirees who’ve built dream houses that, aside from the cost, might as well be in suburban Texas; some scarcely bother to learn enough Spanish to say
“Gracias.”
I see women in heavy jewelry whose puppet faces display their penchant for cheap plastic surgery. There are “healers” who seem to have attained their degrees by dint of crossing the border, throwing on a shawl, and listening to a few Eckhart Tolle tapes. But there are people in every town who are not your crowd, and there are few enough of them in San Miguel that they’re easy to avoid.

There are also people like me here, who want to mingle in another culture, learn to speak another language, soak up the colors and sun, and work on creative projects and who recognize that it isn’t easy for a single woman in her forties to plop herself down in any town in Italy or Mexico, that she would be too much of an outsider, and too alone, without a community of others who have ventured here before her. There’s a balance between what’s foreign and familiar, what’s daring and safe.

The more time I spend in San Miguel, the more depth I find in the people I encounter. The cafés are full of artists and photographers, and many of them are serious about their work, some world class. Just as the plain faces of the houses in San Miguel
hide magnificent courtyards and whimsical houses, you never know what kinds of talents you’ll find in the people you pass on the streets. The town is a playground for architects, whose clients let them run wild with their creative visions. The theme of self-invention that I first came here to explore for my article is repeated everywhere, as I meet more and more people—women, in particular—who have moved here after one phase of their lives has ended, whether because they have divorced, their children have grown, their jobs are over, or they simply want a change, to take a leap into something new, something truer to who they want to be in the latter part of their lives; most are much happier as a result. Many expatriates create programs for the community—midwifery schools, collective child care centers for young Mexican working women, kitchens in the camp to feed schoolchildren, dance classes to build young girls’ confidence, rescue groups for the town’s innumerable little stray mutts. One friend who started a writers’ conference here asks me to teach. Others immerse themselves in Mexican folk art, history, or indigenous communities. The town isn’t divided into gringos and Mexicans, as I originally feared, or young and old; I find myself collecting an international group of friends of all ages.