"What do you think of the Americans invading Iraq?" I asked one taxi driver who spoke English. He considered the question, tilting his head, knitting his brows, and then after lengthy reflection, he answered me with a slight apologetic shrug of his shoulders: "Nothing."
The taxi drivers play penny poker on the hoods of their VW bugs and affably but resignedly allow us to interrupt them with a fare, ferrying us along the cobblestones with crucifixes and Smurfs swaying madly from their rearviews.
When we walk along our road, called Camino San Juan, friendly women chat with us from their half-completed cinder-block houses in the brambles. I have no idea what we and they are discussing, but gestures and warm smiles suffice. What is compelling and unusual about the town, as I think on it now, is that the barriers aren't as pronounced— between inside and outside, work and family, self and community, life and death, weekend and weekday, rich and poor, nature and civilization. There is a sense, however difficult to measure, of being connected to everything vital around you.
In the evening we often wend our way up San Juan as the sun begins to edge toward the horizon. The warm light thrown upon the cliffs above us and to the east is stunning, like the suffused reds and rusts of the Grand Canyon. Clara might find a horseshoe or a dead snake— and, once, a puppy that we brought home. Geoffrey collects fallen hibiscus petals. Kevin wanders into the corner store proprietor's living room, behind the racks of candy and scarfs down the cat's food.
Life has a fluid immediacy, that preoccupies and consoles.
Some Thoughts on Being an Immigrant
Recently I have been pondering the function of language in an immigrant's life. Shortly before I left for Mexico, I had an opportunity to speak to some New Canadians— which is what Old Canadians who work for the government call immigrants nowadays, in our revised political rhetoric— and they told me about how difficult the transition can be, from living as an Old Yugoslavian or Old Rwandan or what have you to becoming a New Canadian.
The gist of this dinner party conversation was that being a New Canadian can be highly alarming, notwithstanding the fact that many Old Canadians perceive New Canadians to be living indolently and contentedly off of the welfare state. But no, say the New Canadians, in fact they are often humiliated to find themselves back at square one, driving cabs or selling fruit, getting lost and stammering apologies in broken English. They hasten to add that they are grateful for the refuge and the freedom, but much is displaced in exile, including one's basic sense of competence.
Maybe I understood abstractly what they were getting at, but now that I am in Mexico the lightbulb has been really switched on. Ding.
"Senora!" exclaimed the big grinning customs officer at the airport upon my arrival. "How can j'hou be Mexicana? You don' even speak Espanoll"
Well, true. I tried to tell him that I'd forgotten how, but I couldn't remember the Spanish word for forget.
I do know some vocabulary, but it tends to come out as an inscrutable mixture of Spanish, French, and stutter. I recently inquired of a fellow Mexican: "Qu'est que c'est la palabra por . . . uh . . . por . . . uh . . . conoce Scotch tape?"
This was actually, technically, a trilingual sentence, which ought to have earned me some points, except that it managed to project what New Canadians would call an aura of rank stupidity. Language is a major obstacle, in this sense, because until you are fluent you cannot surmount people's perceptions of you as really kinda dumb. The identity crisis is swift and merciless. In a matter of days, you go from being an eloquent and confident person to a goof in a clown suit with foot-long shoes.
Today I answered a question in the affirmative by conflating French and Spanish and saying s'oui, which would be tantamount to a New Canadian saying "yesh," as if they'd just slurped up half a dozen shooters. And the listener cannot help it: When somebody says "yesh" or "s'oui," you think they're inebriated, disabled, or mildly insane. I know this for a fact because one night after I returned to Toronto, I was in a bar when a young Mexican man from the town of Toluca, ironically not far from Tepoztlan, asked to join me. I said no, I'm working, but he joined me anyway and wanted me to know that he was an architect by training, even if he was just now working in a restaurant.
"It is difficult to have aspirations here," he said. Then he raised his hand in the universal gesture of stop, to command my attention. "Consider: what is your definition of asthma?"
"Asthma?" I repeated, uncertain.
"Asthma." He nodded solemnly.
"A breathing condition," I ventured.
"Exactly," he said, and he lifted his baseball cap, ran a hand through his hair, then replaced the cap, sighing. "I only dream in the day. This is the problem."
No, amigo, that's only one of the problems.
There are occasions when I say things that I am convinced are perfectly correct, in Spanish, yet for some reason they still elicit uproarious belly laughs. In puzzlement, I try to deconstruct my errors afterward with my dictionary. This is how I realized that when I wanted to go horseback riding one afternoon, I inadvertently announced my need to hire an onion, while on another day the casual assertion to a cabdriver that I would show him where I wanted to go was, in fact, the declaration: "I am monstrous."
There is an upside to this quandary, though, which is that you lose all vestige of your own prejudices about people because without command of the language, you are completely undiscerning.You can get along famously with absolutely anyone, be they oaf or Nobel laureate.
I had an incredibly engaging conversation with a local cactus farmer, days after the death of Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, whose music this man was playing in memoriam, on a tinny radio hung from a jacaranda tree. I was so stimulated by the task of figuring out the past tense of die — as in, "it's so sad that Maurice Gibb DIED," rather than "it is very tragic that Maurice Gibb deaded," or "what a shame that Maurice Gibb will have deathed"— that the farmer might as well have been Noam Chomsky forcing me to defend my position on the fallacy of global activism at the grassroots level rather than a sun-wizened man in a worn sombrero, squinting in the light and waiting patiently as I struggled to avoid saying, "Hello, I am monstrous. What a sadness that your singer has died-ed."
A Word About Ambition
Today, as a New Mexican, I've been thinking about the downward slide of ambition in an immigrant's life. It is often said that immigrants are ambitious to provide a better life for their children. But what about themselves? New Canadians have told me about how they get bogged down in the challenges of an unfamiliar landscape and take years to feel free enough to pursue loftier goals. I understand that now. The abstract daydreamy ambition I entertained all the time in Canada has been distilled in Mexico into a very modest and specific ambition not to inadvertently plow my car into a herd of cows.
Of course, I also try to avoid donkeys, schoolchildren, possums, and piles of rubble as I rattle along in a sedan that can no longer drive over a green pea without juddering. The roads here are cobbled together with large chunks of volcanic rock, which means that driving the children to school involves clambering over terrain that is so marvelously bad it wouldn't be fit for a Humvee, let alone a Chrysler Shadow that regularly stalls and casts off parts.
Due to the conditions, all Tepoztlan traffic progresses at the pace of minus ten kilometers an hour, with cars creeping all over the road to find the least-menacing chunk to ease over before they arrive, every two blocks or so, at the SPEED BUMPS that some authority ordered built— I assume— for the purpose of bolstering a nephew's struggling cement business.
For no particular reason, one sometimes comes across an actual paved stretch of road, which all drivers immediately zoom over like supercharged Indy racers, causing the aforementioned dog collisions. In any event, the whole process of "commuting," which in Canada provided time for rumination, was now as demanding of my concentration as a pinball game. The same proved true for cafes. What better place to write, daydream, and scheme than a cafe, you might ask. But I was dea
ling with this ridiculous sort of Groundhog Day problem in the local cafe, wherein I would go in and order a cafe Americano, and the woman served it to me black, and I had to wait for her to be free again— periodically flailing my arm in the air— so that I could request milk, which she would, at length, bring over with this pointed expression on her face, so that I'd spend the rest of my time wondering what she was thinking. Some weeks went by before I realized that cafe Americano in Mexico just means black coffee.
Once I had slapped myself on the forehead and sorted out that problem, I turned my attention to figuring out what a Mexican centime was worth and whether or not I owed a tip, and if so how much extra for tormenting waitresses by repeatedly ordering black coffee and then asking for milk.
A Polish friend of mine remembers that he spent a solid eighteen months when he first arrived in Canada just trying to figure out what people were talking about in the Globe and Mail. Another friend was so baffled by urban transit signs that she became agoraphobic. A third got so bedeviled by the lack of familiar reference points that he had a panic attack, which he mistook for a coronary. When the paramedics came, he later told me, they checked his vitals and then asked him how long he'd been in the country. Apparently, this happened a lot.
Being unable to take the ground beneath one's feet for granted is a major impediment to being ambitious. Multitasking is definitely out. I used to be able to walk with my toddler, for instance, and take a cell phone call. Here, my eyes are frantically peeled for scorpions, donkey shit, and mongrels. Consider every parent's warning to their toddler about not touching strange dogs. In Mexico, the dogs all look like a canine version of Pigpen in Peanuts, lost in a swirl of dust as they slink along the littered underbrush on the sides of the roads. If one of them gets hit by a speeding taxi, the others act as if they've found an all-you-can eat buffet.
Thus, telling a toddler not to pat the doggie roughly translates into this: Geoffrey, get back from the snarling, half-starved, germ-infested cannibal. He might not be in a good mood.
Puppies pose a particular dilemma because you don't want your child to think that a puppy couldn't be an angel, but when I hesitated for a long moment when Clara wanted to play with one, a Mexican mother came up to me and said: "What does your daughter want?" I think that's what she said. Maybe she said: "Shame about our soccer heroes losing to those dirty-pig Argentineans, don't you agree?" At any rate, I replied in Spanish: "She wants to play the dog like a violin," which wasn't what I meant. The senora looked at me as if I was insane and made it clear that only bad, reckless mothers hesitate about letting children approach stray dogs.
Soon enough one craves the familiar, if only to boost one's confidence in small decision making. So it is that finding a frozen package of McCain Superfries in the Cuernavaca Superama elicits a ludicrous cry of delight. / know what these taste like and how to make them!
This is why immigrants establish their Little Indias and Chinatowns and so forth— because they need a little corner of the world that isn't baffling. To that end, I'm thinking of establishing a Little Canada here in the town of Tepoztlan.
It could be like a block-long neighborhood where nobody makes eye contact or says anything loud, and all the stores have huge blocks of cheddar hanging in the windows, with bins outside full of maple fudge and President's Choice "Memories of Butter" brand margerine. You'd walk inside the stores, and they'd all have black-and- white TVs behind the counters turned to the Air Farce, with a space beside the Royal Bank ATM along the back wall for an air hockey table. At the Beaver Hut Diner, you'd find framed pictures of the owner posing with Celine Dion or with Michael Ignatieff in a tilted sombrero. "Fabulous tuna casserole" would be scrolled on the picture, along with the celebrity's signature. During the World Cup, all the Canadian-Mexicans could gather in Little Canada to watch Wimbledon or have a health care debate.
And so ends the story of how Patricia Pearson, writer and journalist, became the satisfied proprietress of a cheese shop in Mexico.
Serenity with a Full Complement of Spies
Lately I have been spending mornings at a language school, in order to improve my ability to fight with my landlord, who has been evincing an odd, anal-retentive approach to his plants. I sit at a plastic patio table beneath an orange tree with my instructor, a faintly mustachioed, sandal-clad linguist named Sylvia who runs her small school like an extended family barbeque, with her boyfriend, her son, and a cousin on staff, and an elderly mother who can often be found weeping soundlessly about widowhood in a corner of the office. In between exasperated arguments with her relations and frantic attempts to organize field trips for twenty schoolboys from Denver, Sylvia has been teaching me how to say to Fernando: "What do you mean, you're charging me twenty-five pesos for a stepped-on plant?"
I have always been deeply uncomfortable with landlords because they make me feel self-conscious, as if I'm about to get in trouble but can never predict for what. This self-consciousness in turn leads to all manner of curious predicaments. Once, in college, my landlord came into my apartment to check on some plumbing while I was sound asleep, buried under my duvet. Given that it was noon, and he had no reason to expect me to be in, he was unaware of my presence on the futon, when he sat down on it to make a phone call, placing his rear end approximately four inches from my face. Now this is one of those situations that you simply cannot get out of unless you act swiftly.
Crucial minutes passed, in which I was too shocked and embarrassed to reveal myself to the landlord, and then my chance to sing out gaily "Oh, excuse me!" was lost forever. One does not lie for five minutes with one's nose next to a near-stranger's bum and then suddenly emit an airy exclamation. There was nothing for it but to lie deathly still, barely breathing and praying to God that my landlord held his position and didn't sit on my head.
After two and a half centuries, he finished his phone conversation and left, and I vowed to myself that I would buy a house as soon as I possibly could.
A happy decade followed, before I re-entered the humiliating realm of the tenant.
Relations began amiably with Fernando, of course, when we first arrived— no hint yet that he suspected us of rank vandalism. Early on, he and his partner invited us over to lunch. Their house bordered ours, and they seemed to have developed both properties as a dream project, an infatuated meeting of two lovers' minds— Fernando being an architect and Philip a landscape designer. It never seems to have crossed their minds that a house with real inhabitants might bring them rental income, true, but RUIN EVERYTHING.
We first felt a faint breeze of dissonance when we went to lunch at the appointed hour of two and noticed that they lived a remarkably clutter-free existence in a round gabled home with sparse furniture, few objects, and perfect floral arrangements. At first I wondered if they'd hidden their stuff, preparing for a photo spread in Architectural Digest or something, but I eventually learned that they were not the sort of people who owned any stuff, lest the stuff impinge upon the aesthetic of walls and floors and gardens. Philip, the landscape architect, was a grandfather from Maine with a thick, drooping mustache and easy smile. He favored short cut-off jeans and flip-flops, and seemed happiest puttering amongst his prize tropical flora, with a packet of cigarettes hanging precariously out of his dress-shirt pocket. I cannot recall how he hooked up with Fernando, a patrician architect with aquiline features and a silver beard, who sported white linen shirts, sleeves rolled up, and chinos. But they were clearly a smitten couple.
The pair had a fine, glossy-coated rottweiler named Luna who tended to amble over to our side of the bamboo gates and scarf down large wheels of Oaxaca cheese grabbed straight off the table. You could hear Luna at night in her pen, her deep, gulping rottweiler bark providing a base note to the squeals of terrified pigs at the slaughterhouse across the road. At first, we felt we had pet ownership in common, what with Luna and Kevin smelling each other's bums on a daily basis. But it soon grew apparent that, in addition to being a consummate cheese thief, Luna's
job was to pure-breed puppies and to serve as a cheap alarm system. She never went for walks, received little attention, and wasn't permitted inside their house under any circumstances. Indeed, it would have been insanely unthinkable, like inviting a cow into Tiffany's. Thus the seeds of Fernando's exasperation with us were germinating.
Fernando generally resided in an elegant home in Acapulco, having been raised as an upper-class rico in the Yucatan. When he wished to communicate with us, he spurned e-mail or the telephone in favor of dispatching Mario the gardener or Abondia the maid, with a note written on embossed stationery. At lunch, he and Philip served paella. It was a neighborhood guest list, to introduce us to people of merit on Camino San Juan. Not the neighbors who lived in the shrubbery, but the nattily attired sociologist from down the road and the health food entrepreneur from Mexico City who chain-smoked, and a smattering of other relaxed yet elegant folk for whom Tepoztlan was a weekend getaway. They all imbibed red wine followed by cocktails as they lounged, first on the veranda and then on the lawn, in the long, boozy luncheon style of Mexicans. The Gatsby-esque atmosphere was charming, yet also impossible, really, for us to partake in after the orange soda ran out. Geoffrey began digging in the flower bed with his dessert spoon.
Inasmuch as our own sophistication ended abruptly where our dog and two children began, it seemed a matter of necessity to conceal this very fact from Philip and Fernando. What is the point, they might well ask each other angrily, of furnishing a swimming pool patio with white-cushioned chaise longues if the cushions are destined to be covered in small children's footprints? Why on earth import a rare cactus and place it just so in a desert garden if it merely lures a little girl armed with craft scissors? And the pool itself— the spare, turquoise "splash pool," as Mexicans call the foreshortened, shallow-ledged pools in which they enjoyed double shots of Jimador— how could it be so boorishly despoiled?
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