All Over the Map

by Laura Fraser

  And then someone opened the door. Inside was a world of green, of flowers, birdcages, fountains, and painted tile floors. A magic garden. The house seemed to be mostly outdoor space, with the rooms surrounding the courtyard almost an afterthought. The proprietress, a stout woman with curly gray hair and woven, ethnic-looking clothes, bustled about, showing us to our simple whitewashed rooms with twin wooden beds, each with a cross above the headboard. Amy and I flopped down, the fan cooling our humid skin, taking us into a slumber of tropical dreams and anticipation.

  In the morning, I woke to the sound of bells and roosters and a maid swishing her broom on the tiles. Mexico! I nudged Amy, who gave me a sleepy grin, and pushed her harder because it was morning and we were in Mexico and there was no time to spare. We got out of bed, feet cold on the tiled floor, and peeked out the window. In the courtyard, the sun was just touching the lush tropical plants, lighting the pink flowers, shining the surface of the water in the stone fountain. The other doors around the patio were closed. We made our way, shyly, to a breakfast of crusty bolillo rolls with marmalade. “Gracias,” I said to the maid, who smiled—Spanish words actually work—and I was eager to go outside, to explore the town, to learn new words, to make all that was strange familiar.

  WITH THESE MEMORIES swirling around in my head, anticipating my return to San Miguel with both eagerness and dread, we finally come into view of the town. The lights are so widespread it seems as if San Miguel de Allende has spent the past thirty-five years outgrowing itself, sprawling away from its colonial streets. On the edges of town, identical condos line up behind locked gates like prisoners waiting for the count and housing developments march up into the foothills and scatter. My heart sinks as we enter town, when we pass a fast-food chicken restaurant and a supersized grocery store. “That’s new,” says the driver.

  I wonder if the mercado, where short, gnarled women pressed still-warm tortillas into our hands, still exists.

  Nothing about this San Miguel de Allende seems familiar, until we turn a corner onto a narrow, crooked street, our way lit by wrought-iron lampposts that cast rosy circles of glow. I don’t know where I am, but I have been here before. We stop in front of the hotel, and the driver leaves. I give the night attendant my name and he checks the book; there is no reservation for me tonight. Maybe I am so late that my room has been given away, another sign that I shouldn’t even be here. The night man is baffled about what to do. I ask if there is a room, any room, and he nods. Phew. The rate? He is perplexed again.

  “Mañana,” I say. We’ll figure it out tomorrow.

  He smiles broadly and picks up my bag. “Mañana.”

  He leads me through a garden, with tiled stairways curving up to balconied rooms. It is January, and poinsettias are everywhere in pots. My room has an arched doorway and white stucco walls; the bathroom is covered in uneven blue and yellow tiles. The carved bed is firm, with white linens, and, exhausted after a long journey, I fall right in.

  But I’m excited and can’t sleep. In some ways, I am coming back to where I started, as a traveler at least, and I have a sense of summing up, like you have right before your birthday, or on New Year’s Eve after a few too many drinks, when you wonder what you did with all that time. Part of me fears that if I walk around San Miguel, I might come face-to-face with the ten-year-old I used to be, and I would disappoint her. What would that bright pigtailed girl, who roamed freely around San Miguel, a whole new world of experience and language opening up to her, so eager to come home and write stories about it for her sixth-grade class, think about her forty-five-year-old self?

  She would’ve been thrilled to know that one day she would indeed travel to many countries and be awed by so many sights, tastes, and people, but otherwise she might’ve been confused by the reality of herself at middle age: no husband, kids, or house, not even an international affair with some mysterious Basil St. John with his dark eye patch and orchid serum, like Brenda Starr. Not right now, anyway. I toss in bed, wrestling with my ten-year-old self.

  And then I am woken by bells and by blue light streaming through the corner of the wood-framed window. And just like that ten-year-old, I jump out of bed.

  THAT FIRST MORNING it’s chilly, the high-altitude air holding no heat, tiles cold to the bare feet. I’m eager to leave the hotel and walk around town. In the morning light, the buildings are as colorful as in my memory, but they all seem to be in the wrong places. Everything I see is like looking at a painting where the artist has taken familiar objects out of context in order to make them unfamiliar, so that you can see them anew.

  I make my way around San Miguel’s crooked corners for several hours, wandering by instinct and deep memory. I find the park nearby, with its crisscrossing trails, sun streaming through overhanging trees, amateur paintings for sale. The faces of the Spanish-style houses, dating back as far as the seventeenth century, haven’t changed their expressions. I pass the blue-doored bakery, where people have loaded up trays with pastries since 1910, children tugging on their parents’ sleeves to add some more. Street vendors roast ears of corn and sell tidy piles of fresh handmade tortillas. A languid perfume drifts in the air, and in the town’s shady jardín, tourists and residents sit on the benches, eating chunks of cool watermelon, watching children run to the balloon sellers, and staring up at the towering pink La Parroquia church.

  Other things I encounter in San Miguel seem jarringly new and out of place. I barely recognize the boardinghouse where we stayed when I was ten. Its facade has been modernized, and behind its walls are a bank, a gallery, a jewelry store, and a hotel that is under renovation, probably for the third time since we were there; there are no more turkeys on the roof. (It is hard to imagine that my mother left me and my sister Amy here alone for five days, at ages ten and twelve, with only a housekeeper, while she went off to Pátzcuaro with my older sisters, but it didn’t faze us one bit to roam the streets by ourselves.) Now there’s too much traffic for children to play; SUVs clog the streets where there used to be only burros and VW bugs. There are many more gringos, fewer beggars, tourists everywhere, boutiques, chic restaurants, and talk of a Starbucks café on the main square. Good and bad, as the taxi driver said.

  I BECOME REACQUAINTED with the town, and though it has indeed changed since I was ten, so has the whole world, and San Miguel has managed to retain its rustic, artsy, small-town charm. The town slowly reveals itself to me and surprises me, like the Spanish that has been lying dormant in my brain for so many years, which suddenly surfaces, as if being where I learned the language in the first place brings it all back. The atmosphere in San Miguel is slow and pleasant, as if they put lithium into the bottled water, but there is plenty to do. I explore the cactus collection and the trails hugging the canyon at the botanical gardens. I swim in the hot springs pool outside town—the place that lured people to settle here centuries ago, where I remember wondering, as a child, why the other kids wore their underwear instead of bathing suits. I make chiles en nogales at a cooking school in the country and read at a book club. I wander around innumerable art galleries and jewelry stores, which are quite democratic, in that it seems that anyone who has decided, after all these years, to try his or her hand at painting or silversmithing can exhibit his or her wares alongside those of a few real masters. And almost every night I dance—at parties, at clubs, and at salsa lessons, where, by the end of the evening, several drunken Mexican men half my age are begging to come home with me. I smooch a sexy Mexican musician after a jazz concert before I find out that he (like most seemingly available Latin men in their forties or fifties, especially musicians) is married.

  Right away, I find that it’s easy to meet people here, especially women over forty, who are given to loose cotton tunics, stunning big jewelry, and heavy-soled shoes that are comfortable on the cobblestones. Perhaps because they’ve found other, mainly single women in like circumstances, the women in San Miguel are very social: you can walk outside your door, meet someone on the sidewalk for the firs
t time, and get invited over.

  On one of my first mornings I go to a yoga class and meet up with Paige, a fifty-year-old with spiky red hair, the only person I know from San Francisco. She meets me in the sunflower yellow Bellas Artes building, where you enter an enormous wooden door into the former convent courtyard and cross into a mirrored dance studio. The students, many well into their retired years, are amiable, cheerfully shifting their mats over to make room—not like in a crowded class in San Francisco or New York, where a yogini pretending to be meditating on the beauty of now is inwardly cursing the bitch four inches to the right who arrived late and is intruding on her space.

  After class, Paige and I sit in a café on the jardín, under bloodred arches, the sun warming us as we shed early-morning layers. She tells me she came here with her partner on vacation and ended up deciding to return, partly because they met so many interesting women who are escapees from their previous lives, pursuing new paths.

  “You run into so many women here who are divorced, widows, retired—and all of them are blooming,” Paige says. People fall in love with the place, she says, particularly given the favorable economics of living south of the border in a town with excellent gringo infrastructure (wireless Internet, English bookstores, organic vegetables, U.S. mailboxes). She and her partner took a bold step, giving up San Francisco altogether for Mexico. They sold their house, packed up their stuff, and are using the spoils of San Francisco’s real estate boom to stop working full-time and build the home they always dreamed of in the Mexican countryside. They’ll write, they’ll paint, they’ll figure out their next steps later on. Paige is animated, full of all the energy she says drained out of her in the past few years in San Francisco, working all the time, stuck in a harried routine to pay a bloated mortgage.

  For now, she and her partner are living in a house they built last year, a temporary place while their house in the country is being built. We walk back to Guadalupe, their flat colonia, or neighborhood, just outside the historic center. Paige’s blood-orange casa has three bedrooms, a garage, a spacious kitchen, and a rooftop terrace—much larger than where they lived in San Francisco.

  “Not that it was easy,” said Paige. She pulls out photos of a grease-spattered hovel, which they bought for $75,000, a fortune to the owners. I wouldn’t have had the imagination to look at that wreck and see a lovely adobe house with cathedral ceilings and a big tiled kitchen. Paige’s story of buying her lot, designing the house, and having it built sounds like an exciting, creative adventure—for them. For me, it would be a hassle, a logistical nightmare, and a money pit. At the very least, it strikes me that for such a project you’d need a partner to check the plans, do the math on the mortgage, help you settle on the kitchen counters, and figure out where to put the powder room. Just getting the necessary permits, paying a lot of fees, and standing in lines, Paige says, tested the limits of even the most patient American yogini. Nothing was ever done correctly the first time; they built the walls first and then tore them up to add the electricity later on. Everything took longer and cost more than expected. They had to keep an eye on the construction every step of the way. Communication problems translated into expensive mistakes. In other words, all the typical headaches of renovation in the United States times ten.

  Yet the idea of building a house makes me wistful. How much fun to choose which room is best for a study, figure out how you’d like the kitchen to flow into the dining room, pick out cheerful tiles for the kitchen. How wonderful to have a place in the world you could call your own, where you could be at home but, in a foreign culture with a new language, still feel as though you were traveling.

  The fantasy of buying real estate in San Miguel intrigues me enough that I decide to look around, just for fun. I don’t know why—I haven’t the faintest idea what I could afford, if anything, but looking at real estate almost seems like a ritual when you visit the town, like checking out the inside of the big pink La Parroquia church or buying a fringed shawl you’ll never wear at home. In the cafés around the jardín in San Miguel, everyone seems to be discussing real estate. Some are on cell phones making deals, and many of the artists talking about painting are actually referring to the colors of their walls. Walking around the historic centro, real estate office windows are papered with photos of colonial houses and Santa Fe–style condos, all with price tags approaching those of San Francisco.

  I go see a Realtor named Manuel, on a lark, and when I take a wild guess at my price range, his face falls, the way a professional matchmaker’s did a few months earlier when I visited her downtown office in San Francisco and told her I was looking for a smart, single, relatively undamaged man around my own age to date. There just isn’t much out there for me.

  Still, Manuel does his best and shows me a few lots in the far-flung colonias of San Miguel de Allende that I could afford. These are neighborhoods where the gringo cafés haven’t yet reached, where you would need to take a bus or a taxi to get to the center of town. One place way up a hill has a great view, and though it is easy to fantasize building a house with a sweeping vista and an attached studio or guest space, it is much harder to imagine walking back from the market every day lugging a woven plastic bag full of groceries.

  So I’ve done my research. Obviously, San Miguel de Allende—like San Francisco—is out of my price range. If I want to live in the outskirts, maybe I could afford something, but I’m single and like to live where there are other people nearby and I can get around by walking. In San Miguel, that’s the historic center.

  “Algo en el centro?” I asked Manuel.

  He rolled his eyes. “Nada.”

  So that’s that. But as I have a beer near the jardín as evening falls, I am reluctant to give up the fantasy. I feel an attachment to this town I visited thirty-five years ago, and to this jardín, where young men and women came out for the paseo in the evening, a parade of public courting, stealing glances at one another under the watchful eyes of their relatives, holding hands if they were going to be engaged. Now people walk every which way, the couples make out in dim doorways, but there are still music, fireworks, mariachis, dancing, and friends who run into each other and greet each other with kisses.

  For a week, I’ve been lulled into dreaminess in San Miguel, and this morning I have to be alert. First, I need to find a new place to stay. After house-sitting for a few days, I spent last night in a garden room in a fabulous colonial house full of sumptuous plants, parrot cages, and bohemian objets d’art, presided over by a woman of fearless style. Unfortunately, the place smells strongly of the macaque monkeys that also reside there. I woke up with a sickly sweet ammonia smell clinging to my hair and need to move.

  That’s not all I have to figure out this morning: the story I came to report was supposed to be about a business two women started here, but it has gradually dawned on me that the enterprise barely exists beyond a press release, the two women aren’t speaking to each other, and no one is giving me a straight story because both of them want to be featured in a national magazine article anyway. I have to round up someone else to profile, fast, someone who made a sea change in her life at forty and started a business in San Miguel, and then make the case to my meticulously cautious editor for a switcheroo before the photographers show up tomorrow.

  Wandering around the neighborhood, I run across an unmarked garage door with a small metal hot-air balloon hanging above. I’ve heard it’s the studio of a local jewelry company, so I knock. A chic young Mexican woman in jeans and layers of long necklaces opens the door. Inside the workshop, images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and other icons cover the walls, carved wooden altars perch on desks, and sparkling crystals and jewelry are strewn about the tables. I’m curious about this little world, which has a strong, spirited, feminine vibe.

  The young woman introduces me to Cheryl, the owner and designer, who looks about my age, with smart-girl glasses, a warm smile, and a black rose tattoo. Right away she invites me to sit down and have some dark chocola
te with her, asks what I’m doing in San Miguel, and tells me the story of how she ended up in San Miguel, leaving her executive husband and job in fashion marketing in San Francisco to go to a yoga retreat. She stayed on, first selling falafel and hummus to get by, then making funky little bags with Virgin of Guadalupe fobs, evolving to crystal-encrusted necklaces and belt buckles based on Mexican folklore and goddess iconography. Judging from the photos tacked up of celebrities wearing her designs, she has done very well.

  Cheryl fingers an ornate rosary-looking necklace she designed. “I’m not a practicing Catholic, but I love mythology,” she says. “These icons are calming and feminine and ancient. I like to think they carry a little magic.”

  She asks where I’m staying, and I tell her I need a place. She calls her friend Delphine, who has a room down the street, problem solved. I also need a new subject for my article and realize she’s sitting in front of me. Perfecto. Cheryl writes down names of other women who might be appropriate for the piece and tells me to call so we can hang out later on.

  She gives me a kiss on the cheek as I leave. “My friends call me Finn.”

  “Finn.”

  DELPHINE’S HOUSE IS just a few doors away, across from the bullring. I knock, and, as with so many doors in San Miguel de Allende, hers opens onto a surprisingly large, sunny central courtyard. A thin, elegant man greets me, explains that Delphine stepped out; he is a tango teacher who is staying here, holding classes in a studio out back. I’m glad I packed my dancing shoes.