On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  The colonial classicism is undiminished in the historical center of town, but the sprawl of trophy houses, mansions, condominiums, gated communities, and exclusive townhouses that clutter its margins have given it what seems like an unsustainable urban density and a maddening parking problem that makes being in San Miguel like being trapped in a cyclorama of colonial cuteness.

  The building continues unchecked. When I asked about zoning or regulation, Mexicans smiled and made the money sign, not finger-rubbing but the Mexican version, a hand gesture, forming an upright claw with the thumb and forefinger.

  San Miguel de Allende by most accounts is one of the most desirable retirement destinations in the world. Houses in its so-called planned communities, such as Rancho los Labradores, are priced in the millions, and so are the luxury townhouses behind secure gates in town, though many apartments and condos cost much less. But as with other towns in Mexico that attract the wealthy and well connected, San Miguel has its share of whispered crime stories and violent incidents.

  Without warning, bombs were exploded in bars on three occasions in 2016, and some people were injured. No motive was established; perhaps extortion, intimidation, revenge—no one knew. There were no government investigations, no arrests, no police reports. The absence of verifiable news provokes rumors, and the whispers in San Miguel were that it was gang related. I asked a local man who owned a business not far away what he knew. “Probably a fight among narcos trying to stake their territory,” he said. “It has not recurred since.”

  This was another example of the Mexican mantra, “There is no business without terror.” Stories of nighttime muggings abounded, and I saw more policemen walking the beat in San Miguel than in any other place I passed through, as a reassurance to the retirees and an encouragement for more outsiders to take up residence.

  Because much of San Miguel’s prosperity rested on its real estate boom, many of the dark whispers I heard concerned land scams.

  “I bought a building and fixed it up,” a Mexican woman told me. “Then I bought an adjacent piece of land and thought I could put in some condos. This investment would see me into my old age, I thought. Years went by, I kept making improvements, renting the condos I’d built. And I was planning to sell everything when I got some bad news.”

  We were seated in a restaurant. She had been eating slowly as she spoke, and then she put her fork down, sipped some water, and tried to resume, but the memory of this bad news made her stammer and go silent.

  I said, “It’s all right. You can tell me some other time.”

  “We say, ‘Better not to say too much about such things.’” She shook her head and went on. “At the tax office, when I was applying to pick up a copy of my deed, they said, ‘That’s not your deed. This land belongs to someone else. We have the deed here.’ And they showed me the paperwork proving that my land, my building, the condos—everything—belonged to a man I did not know.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Mordidas,” she said. “Sobornos.” Bribes. She shrugged and went on, “A dishonest lawyer. A dishonest notary. They drew up a whole set of false papers which named this man as the owner of my property.”

  “That seems incredible,” I said. “For one thing, it’s about as crooked as anything can be.”

  “Yes,” she said, and favoring her manicure, using her knuckles, she pushed her plate aside and stared toward a fountain that was plopping water into a basin. A hummingbird hovered, poked its beak into a nasturtium, backed away, hovered some more, and darted into a new flower, not flying but levitating itself from blossom to blossom.

  “I can’t sell if I can’t prove I own it. And to prove I own it, I will have to show that this deed is a forgery. This could take years—and I’m not getting any younger.”

  The scam was diabolical, a stranger falsifying a deed of ownership, having it notarized and backdated, inserting himself into this woman’s life by claiming that he owned her considerable property, and not only preventing her from selling it, but maintaining that he had owned it all along.

  She swore that she would fight it, but that she had limited resources—her money was tied up in the property, in improvements and repairs. She had a lawyer, but she had no certainty that she would win against someone who was not only a crook but had enough money to bribe the officials who had connived to create the fake deed, pulling the rug—her own expensive rug and much else—out from under her.

  She was a besieged woman, but a brave one, and I wished her luck. I heard other tales of land deals gone bad and the pressure for bribes in order to speed up transactions or anything requiring government permission. But these stories were mild by comparison with the saga of Walmart’s corruption in Mexico, reported in the New York Times (December 17, 2012). Walmart wanted to build an enormous store near the ancient pyramids at San Juan Teotihuacán, outside Mexico City, much visited by tourists. But a zoning regulation specified that commercial development was prohibited near this historical area, elaborated on a zoning map. So Walmart bribed Mexican officials to redraw the map in its favor, the map was published, and the big-box horror store was built, its obscene size swelling over the pyramids. But this was not the end.

  “Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000,” the New York Times story continued, “Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.”

  Still, San Miguel de Allende was praised by many for being a great place to live. The retirees who flocked there, and thronged it on weekends, have made it more Mexican, and for both sentimental and practical reasons have helped preserve its character, enlivened it with concerts, festivals, literary occasions, and art exhibitions.

  But you could find such events in many retirement communities, I said to a man from California who had decided to make San Miguel de Allende his home during his later years.

  He said, “Mexico is a great option for older retired people.”

  “For the cultural activities? The weather? The low cost of living? What?”

  He said, “All of that. And in Mexico you can always find someone to look after you.”

  And cheaply. For 1,000 pesos, or $50, a week, you could hire a maid to work an eight-hour day (Sundays free), cleaning and making simple meals. Perhaps double that if she lived in. A night nurse would be about $25 a week. Gardeners and menials were paid a pittance.

  It was easy to see why people were attracted to San Miguel de Allende. The city was made for strolling, for shopping, for drinking and dining. For almost a century, until 1990, the largest employer in the town had been Fábrica La Aurora, a textile factory, a fifteen-minute walk from the main plaza. When it closed, instead of tearing down the building, solidly made with a four-acre footprint, it was turned into a center for the arts—gallery upon gallery, with coffee shops and restaurants. Here and there iron clumps of machinery have been left on pedestals, looking like vorticist sculptures.

  Most nights there’s a concert on the bandstand in Benito Juárez Park, or in one of half a dozen theaters or concert halls. The plaza El Jardín hosts mariachi groups and elaborately staged music nights, such as one I came upon by chance, Grupo Mono Blanco—eleven musicians strumming and slapping their instruments, including a harp, ukulele, and mandolin, while a handsome hopping señorita in a gauzy gown swished her skirts, stamped, and flirted in a traditional step dance—the jarabe tapatío—whirling around a smug, round-faced young man dressed as a farm boy in a crushed straw hat, or perhaps mimicking the white monkey of the group’s name, he too clicking his heels in a percussive, thumping dialogue of happy feet.

  In the Parroquia Sa
n Miguel Arcángel, the iconic church—pink steeples, ornate facade, courtyard scuffed smooth by centuries of churchgoers, the weathered stone, like a superior cicatrized sand castle, abraded by light rain—I attended one of the many Mexican weddings that weekend, as an uninvited, eavesdropping celebrant. This display of elegance and poverty side by side—the elegance self-conscious, the poverty exuberant—resembled a Hieronymus Bosch painting or a Mexican mural, both alike in their portrayal of the grotesque in the flurry of their multilayered strangeness and their distortions of body types.

  The wedding party was in the process of gathering, greeting and kissing in the cobblestone courtyard at the church entrance. The plump, nervous bride, flicking at her veil, posed in a voluminous gown and glittering tiara, attended by a bevy of young men in black suits, slicked-down hair, wide shoulders, and confident smiles; the bridesmaids, all shapes and sizes but dressed in identical purple gowns, stumbled badly in stiletto heels on the cobblestones. Surrounding them were potbellied matrons in tight dresses, portly husbands in yellow suits with stupendous sideburns and droopy mustaches, overdressed children, and heavily made-up crones in bombazine and shawls.

  Add to this surrealistic spectacle of wealth the ragged children of San Miguel standing a few feet away, gawking and kicking at the stray, whining dogs, provoking them to bark at the wedding party, tugging balloons and pull toys. Workmen in paint-splashed overalls puffed on cigars and pointed, and shrouded white-robed nuns hovered over pots of soup, ladling it into bowls, while nearby at a smoking stove one woman was deep-frying meat and another slapping tortillas on a skillet.

  As a spectacle, it was an opportunity for townspeople to gape, to tease, to eat, to become part of the throng, as a pack of imploring beggars lined up for alms, some with bowls of coins, others slumped, one nursing a child at her breast, another wildly gesturing to her comatose baby and pleading for help—and a few feet away, the taffeta gowns, the silken shawls, the gleaming suits, the misshapen wedding guests, grinding out their cigarettes under their expensive shoes in anticipation of the ceremony.

  Then some trumpeted chords from inside the church, organ music. The wedding party stood at attention and, tugging at their clothes, began to shuffle through the archway and down the main aisle. It was easy to see, from the energy and enthusiasm of this eventful town, why people wanted to come here.

  “Reposado, tranquilidad,” Lupita, the hotel manager, said, praising the place.

  But I was not looking for repose or tranquility. This weekend was an aberration. It is pleasant in Mexico to sit by the beach, inert and sunlit, sipping a mojito, but who wants to hear about that? What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm.

  A Shakedown: “How Can We Resolve This?”

  I upped and left San Miguel in a mellow mood early on a Monday morning of blue sky and sunshine, heading to Mexico City. I kept to country roads in order to bypass the big city of Querétaro, but after fifty miles I found myself back on a racetrack toll road, rolling into the outskirts of the city of twenty-three million. Half of this huge number of chilangos—as the Mexico City dwellers call themselves—are classified as enduring dire poverty, many enjoying extreme wealth, and an estimated fifteen thousand children live on the street. Driving from the Periférico into the sprawl—low hills of houses, dusty air, blur of distant buildings—the city seemed immense and daunting, visibly ramshackle and overcrowded, an almost unimaginable farrago of the nastiest version of urban life.

  The sign BUENA VISTA stayed in my memory, not only because the view of tenements and factories was unpleasant, but because it was near there that a policeman on a motorcycle drew up next to me, indicating with the fat finger of a leather-gloved hand that I must follow him.

  In the heavy traffic—trucks, buses, speeding cars—this was a challenge, and what made it particularly difficult was that he led me to an off-ramp of stalled vehicles, and then beyond it, to a side road and then, bumping in front of me, into a series of slummy streets, where he came to rest, waving for me to park behind him, in a barrio of rundown tenements, in an alleyway, on a dead-end road.

  Some startled pedestrians—poorly dressed, looking seedy—glanced at me and then at the policeman and hurried away, ducking behind fences and into doorways, and it was clear to me that they had a better idea of what was about to happen than I did.

  When the policeman dismounted, swaggering to my car, I could see he was short and bulge-bellied, his face almost level with mine, and I was seated. His helmet framed and seemed to squeeze his face, concentrating the fury in his muscly cheeks, the cruel glint in his black eyes. But by then—even as he approached, pigeon-toed in big boots—he was shouting at me.

  I rolled my window down and said, “Good afternoon, sir.”

  His screams drowned me out, and at first I had no idea what he was saying. I said, “My Spanish is poor. Please speak slowly.”

  “The license plates on your car. They are not Mexican plates. And you’re driving on our roads!”

  “I have the documents. My Vehicle Importation Permit, my insurance, my visa. Would you like to see them?”

  They were in my briefcase, in the trunk, but I was hesitant to get out of the car. I was much taller than the policeman, and he might make my height a cause for provocation, but I also feared his physical proximity and felt safer speaking to him through the car window.

  Interrupting me, he shouted, “What I am saying is that your plates are illegal. Do you understand? You are breaking the law by driving on our roads.”

  “I have a permit,” I said.

  He had now worked himself into a froth of spitting rage, and as he screamed out of his congested face I saw that he was wrapped in belts, a holstered pistol in one, handcuffs in another, a truncheon, a phone, chrome-plated chains, and his uniform was tight against his hard, fat body, as though in his fury, his body—in the way of some panicky animals—was swelling to add greater menace to his threat posture.

  “Do you want to see my papers?”

  The hot stink of this decaying part of the city clawed at my nose as he leaned and put his darkening face closer to me, shouting, “Do you know what I can do to you? I can take you over there”—he flapped his hand in the direction of the dark end of the alleyway where the slum dwellers had fled. “I can take your car. I can do what I want.”

  “Sabes qué te puedo hacer?” Do you know what I can do to you? Spoken by an enraged policeman in Mexico, that statement seizes your attention, and so does “Puedo hacer lo que quiero”—I can do what I want. After all, this is a country where police have been responsible for arbitrary killing, kidnapping, suffocation, and torture, including electrocution and medieval strappado. And in my anxiety, I remembered, because he had mentioned my license plates, how on some days of the week, certain cars, designated by the numbers on their plates, were prohibited. “Hoy no circula”—No driving today—to combat Mexico City’s toxic (and visible as a brown cloud) air pollution.

  I said, “Is it because I can’t drive today with these plates? Hoy no circula?”

  But he was too worked up to listen. His eyes were very small—tiny, dark pebbles, pierced with a wicked glint—and his nose was an enlarged snout, like a stabbing weapon. His gloved hands were now two leather fists. It seemed that his anger was partly theatrical, that he was amping up his shouts to intimidate me.

  It worked. I was afraid. This I can do what I want was the most worrying threat. I have written elsewhere about how I have been frightened in travel, nearly always by someone with a gun—a boy in Malawi, a shifta bandit in the north Kenya desert, and three boys with rusty spears had accosted me in a lagoon in the Trobriand Islands, threatening to stab me to death. There was also the apprehension bordering on fear that I had felt, paddling on a river heading into Mozambique, when a fellow paddler—a Malawian, who knew this stretch of the river well—pointed to a reach in the stream ahead, a bank of mud huts partly
hidden by tall reeds, and said, “There are bad people in that place”—a place we could not avoid passing.

  Fear is a sense of physical weakness, the certain knowledge that you are trapped and helpless and in danger. And what made this sense emphatic was that all this time, as the policeman was screaming, local people—slum dwellers, barefoot children, women with bundles—were passing by, glancing at me, and moving on. They knew what was happening, and so I was also alarmed by their reaction—their fear was added to mine.

  “I can take your car to the corralón.”

  I did not know this word, which he kept repeating. I should have figured it out—corral is clear enough, implying an enclosure. I later found out that corralón is a car pound or tow yard. But you do not simply pay a fine and pick up your car. You must first prove that you own the car, and this requires notarized documents, a lawyer, visits to various offices, and a fine of up to $500 for inconveniencing the police department and the car pound. Being berated by an infuriated cop in a side street of a slum, I did not know how serious that threat of a corralón could be.

  But I was still alarmed. The accepted way to broach the subject of a bribe in Mexico is to say, “How can we resolve this?” (“Cómo podemos resolver esto?”), but I was too numb to remember this delicate proposal, so I said bluntly in Spanish, “What do you want?”