I was helpless where the pool was concerned— I do have to say that in my own defense. For Geoffrey began running a continual science experiment designed to address the abiding query of the (two-year-old) human mind: What floats? What sinks? On any given morning, particularly when Geoffrey had gone about his experiments after dark and escaped notice, the pool contained what appeared to be the entire contents of a yard sale, replete with espresso maker, stegosaurus, wooden spoons, tea bags, my bra, and anything prized by Clara, in particular Penelope, the battery-operated talking dragon. I constantly apologized to Mario, whom I'd find early in the morning, stoically and gracefully fishing the yard sale contents out with his pole, bent over the water in the one T-shirt he owned, his olive-skinned arms reaching for waterlogged toys and submerged barbecue tongs as he lived out the theme of a Luis Bufiuel film without comment.
Every now and then he would glance up at me and smile shyly, a beautiful young man with the classic features of a Nahuatl Indian, high-boned and almond-eyed, his hair dark as onyx. Little did I know that Mario was dutifully reporting back to Fernando about our transgressions, acting as an undercover operative who had infiltrated tenant lines.
Landlords are not supposed to know what tenants get up to until tenants leave, said tenants having madly scrubbed and polished the premises to leave no trace of their lives. Landlords remain blissfully ignorant, provided their tenants aren't engaging in serial murder or pet hoarding. (As I write, a woman in Wisconsin has just been evicted for keeping seventy-six ducks in her apartment. It is this sort of person, this sort of owner of seventy-six ducks, whom I wish Diane Sawyer would interview with that concerned and puzzled knit to her brows. "Why seventy-s/x ducks?") Anyway, in Mexico, the rules are different. You get to be spied upon every single day by the "gardener" and also by the "maid." It is said here that the walls have ears, a situation compounded by the striking absence of physical walls, so that said gardener and maid can observe you eating dinner in your dining room, and watch you cooking quesadillas in the kitchen and file eyewitness reports of your six-year-old using the antique chest of drawers as a nest for the blind and hairless newborn opossum she has found ejected from its dead mother's pouch on the side of the road.
Thus it was that Fernando dropped by one afternoon with a pool maintenance man and explained to me with a tight and condescending cheerfulness that pools filled with appliances and toys tended to run up filtration repair bills, which naturally I would be expected to pay.
His greatest angst, however, arose over the treatment of Philip's plants. This was a predicament to which I was doomed when I rented the house on the Day of the Dead with a swollen head and a hangover, and not the faintest passing acquaintance with the difference between rhododendrons and thistles. I had never noticed the plants at all, and I first realized Fernando s anguish because of Kevin. My dog has a psychotic habit of nosing large stones around and then chewing and snapping anxiously at the grass surrounding the stone, as if frantically attempting to free it from its grass . . . trap? . . . before the stone, or "egg," perhaps, or "small, hard, inert puppy" is . . . killed? By cats? Or captured by the enemy? In any event, Kevin has been doing this all his life, and it was never more than just ridiculous behavior until the grass belonged to Philip and Fernando. Then it became the source of whispers, rumors, mounting tension, and finally a note on embossed stationery: Kevin was to be tied up.
Shocked, for the lawn was mostly perfect, as Kevin rarely finds the right sort of (sacred? egglike?) stone to set him off, I considered pointing out to Fernando that the issue here was just a bunch of fucking grass. Happy, easygoing, growable grass, versus a dog free to move more than five feet in any direction. But I held my tongue and even let it plague me with acute self-consciousness, finding myself rushing at Kevin and squawking like a frenzied hen to make him stop it, stop it! until one afternoon, noting that we had refused to tether our dog, Fernando upped the ante. I was furnished with a bill for 250 pesos "for the plant that was destroyed."
This ominous and entirely ambiguous note was delivered via Mario, and offered no further elaboration, as if I knew exactly what plant was meant because I had just had a thunderous party at which several large men got hammered and crashed over backward into a tub of hydrangea. I immediately began scouring the garden in a huff, searching for some sort of plant catastrophe and wondering whether this bill was meant as a replacement cost or a fine. Was I being slapped at financially for failing to display appropriate reverence for all this delicate, intimately imagined greenery? Or punished for Kevin?
I interrogated Mario, deploying my newly acquired ability to speak in the past tense: "Donde esta la planta que fue destruida totalmente??" Mario professed innocence, "No se, senora," and when I read out the charges brought against me, he shared a sidelong smile, a sign that he agreed that Fernando was being a snob and a goof. Mario allowed that while Geoffrey did tend to shear off the tops of certain plants and pour coffee on others, while Clara was fond of sprinkling flower petals into the lily pond, as far as Mario could tell, everything was at least still alive.
Vindicated, I planned to storm over to Fernando s casa and have it out with him about his preposterous bill for an imaginary calamity, but then I worried that he might retort in various verb tenses that I hadn't yet learned, like the past imperfect or the present imperative, and I wouldn't know what he said.
One day, I found a kitten in my dishwasher. I discovered her after trying to figure out where the meowing sound was coming from in our kitchen, a problem that vexed us for a good eight hours. When we narrowed it down and finally freed her, she scrammed out of the room and shot across our lawn.
The next day she got herself stuck on a ledge somehow, up inside one of the chimneys. More sleuthing, followed by pity and a dish of milk.
Then she couldn't get down from our plum tree. Ambrose refused to come to her rescue again, so I dragged a chair over and clambered up, climbing a tree for the first time in years. The black kitty eyed me curiously and timidly for a time, and then began to purr, rubbing her neck and head against the bark. It struck me that she was engaging in ploys for attention. I don't know anything about cats, but I figure if you're the size of a pinecone and living alone in rural Mexico surrounded by starved dogs and vultures, you probably court attention. At any rate, I could hardly transport her down the tree with both hands without falling myself, so I sent Clara running dutifully and excitedly back to the fed-up Ambrose.
"Daddy, you have to come!" I heard her declare. "Now Mommy is stuck in the tree. Our own MOTHER!"
This is how it goes, creatures big and small blowing through our house, bees the size of trucks banging against the window, coatis taking bites out of the bread, geckos getting caught in the barbecue, spiders in the bathtub, fleas on the kitten, lice in the children's hair, stray dogs of all sizes scuttling under Fernando s flimsy gates and doing cannonballs into the swimming pool. You lose your fear of the creatures after a while and soon simply tend to their needs.
By the time another feral cat gave birth to a litter of four kittens in the shower stall of the guest bathroom, it was nearing the end of our sojourn in Mexico, and I no longer cared about Philip and Fernando and their vision of fine living. They had drawn the wrong lessons from the landscape surrounding them, I had come to decide. They were aspiring to beautify and control nature the way that we more northern North Americans had been doing so obsessively, with so many products to assist us, and for what? We dress our dogs in booties and scoop up their poop, blow-dry their fur, read their minds, and don't give a rat's ass that thousands upon thousands of their southern kin are emaciated and struggling for bare survival.
In the inestimable words of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, you look into the eyes of one of these animals, the rudely abandoned offspring of man's "best friend," and flinch at the plea, the profound, incontestable rebuke in their rheumy hopeful faces: "We are too menny."
So, a bid for serenity turns into an incontestable mission that neither
therapist nor queen need assign. When you escape a commercial environment that aggressively lays court to the idea that it's all about you, you realize quite succinctly that it is not about you, except insofar as you have the resources, the affluence, and the education to be of help.
In our last weeks in Mexico, I quit my newspaper column in Canada, stopped following the news, and turned my full attention to the ground beneath my feet. We had several stray dogs vaccinated and found homes for three cats, which in Mexico was no easy feat, given their pathetic abundance. We handed most of our possessions to Abondia and Mario and their children, and made preparations to bring three more cats home with us on the plane. We donated money, we sponsored a foster child, and I taught Clara to make fun of a commercial we saw, in which a group of fashion-conscious Barbies chirp: "We live to go shopping!"
Ambrose resold the Chrysler Shadow, which in Toronto would have been rejected as worthless, for God forbid anyone should restore a car that can be tossed and replaced. But he found a man with a cement sofa, whose small child traipsed through the living room during the sale with a dead lizard attached to a string. And this man understood that you don't just toss cars out because they've lost their novelty value and their mufflers. You don't just keep gobbling up the world like greedy freaks with no sense of tomorrow.
A final night in Tepoztlan. The rainy season crashes down upon us now; it pours and thunders and shakes the very walls of our house, sending Kevin to tremble under the bed. Each morning the pool is full of drowned spiders and scorpions and worms, grasshoppers and flying ants and walking sticks and beetles. Flooded carnage. What Geoffrey once threw in that so mortified me is nothing compared to what nature can clog drains with. Who knew? There are moths about with fur, and fireflies and mosquitoes and millipedes as long as my foot. The rain is a deluge, a wondrous, theatrical cleansing that makes a mockery of control.
As I write a final journal entry, a daddy longlegs soft-shoes down the wall beside me, and the cicadas and crickets keep up their continuous chorus. Our phone is out again and the car is broken down. I had to gather up Geoffrey and Clara and their end-of-school artwork, just abandon the car for its new owner to fetch and repair, marching my youngsters up the cobblestone street to one of the town's main thoroughfares in order to catch a taxi, whose driver I now knew by name.
We left two kittens behind at the school in a canasta; one went home with the cook, the other with a little girl in primera. I wonder how they will fare, the bewildered little sweeties, and where they will sleep. The other three will, at least, have one another and us, as they undertake their strange adventure on Aero Mexico and land in a world of unimaginable animal luxury.
Funny. This final night. The stress of our departure is almost nonexistent compared with our arrival. No racing mind; no irritability or anxiety. Suitcases packed, and what ever happens happens. Striking. I have genuinely slowed myself down, looked around me, grown purposeful and thus relaxed.
Mahana, mahana, as the Mexicans say. Every day has its essential tasks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt thanks to the following people, for their mentorship and faith:
Dianne deFenoyl, formerly of the National Post, for whom many of these pieces were originally written.
Glen Nishimura at USA Today, who goads me to keep making sense of the news, in spite of frequent episodes on my part of wretching like a cat.
Patricia Hluchy at Maclean's, who was my champion and became my friend.
Anne Collins at Random House Canada, whose loyalty is the highest compliment a writer could be paid. (Thanks also to Kendall, Craig, Marion, Frances.)
Lucia Macro at William Morrow, who took a chance on me, for which I will always be grateful.
Gillian Blake at Bloomsbury USA, who invited me into a house that feels like home.
Paula Balzer and Sarah Lazin, the agents who edit, and manage, and nourish, and provide comfy beds. Without them, frankly: what career? For inspiration, feedback, love, and laffs thanks to:
Landon, Geoff, Hilary, Katharine, Anne, and Michael Pearson; also Keri, Mark, Doug, Dot & Whay, Patsy, and the Mackenzie and Pearson clans.
To my brilliantly funny friends, whose sly wit would have given the Algonquin Round Table a run for its money, thank you: Kenton Zavits, Pdc Bienstock, Michael DeCarlo, Karen Zagor, Eric Reguly, Paula Bowley, Blair Robins, Dave Eddie, Pam Seatle, Pier Bryden, Elaine Evans, Sheila Whyte, Clayton Kennedy, Daphne Ballon, Steve and Jeff Butler, Claire Welland, Shannon Black, Russell Monk, Doug Bell, David Hannah, Bill Rogers, Janet Allon, John Allore, Robert Labossiere, Patrick Graham, and Jessica Macdonald, to name but a few. I've been blessed.
Gratitude to my collaborators at the National Post, Natasha Hassan, Theresa Butcher, Sheila McKevenue, Dianna Symonds, and Gerald Owen in particular.
Muchos abrazos, tambien, a mis amigos en Mexico, incluyendo mi madrina, Margaret Del Rio;Arturo Marquez; Sylvia; y Pip.
And finally, to my little pack, with whom I trundle hither and yon across the landscape, generally making a mess: Clara, Geoffrey, and Ambrose, with a special hug to Nanny Verdlyn.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Patricia Pearson is a frequent contributor to USA Today and the author of the novel Playing House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Observer, the Guardian, and Redbook, among other publications, and she has won three Canadian National Magazine Awards, as well as the Arthur Ellis Award in 1997 for best nonfiction crime book, When She Was Bad. She recently moved from Toronto to the boreal forest outside Montreal with her husband and two children.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this book is set in Bembo, which was first used in 1495 by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius for Cardinal Bembo's De Aetna. The original types were cut for Manutius by Francesco Griffo. Bembo was one of the types used by Claude Garamond (1480-1561) as a model for his Romain de L'Universite, and so it was a forerunner of what became the standard European type for the following two centuries. Its modern form follows the original types and was designed for Monotype in 1929.
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