All Over the Map

by Laura Fraser

  Then Roberto, who lives with Delphine, comes over and introduces himself, and we chat. Roberto is a salsa teacher who also works in real estate. I say I’m thinking about taking salsa lessons, and he tells me when classes are held. Then, for the sake of conversation, waiting there, I also say I’ve also considered building or buying a house in San Miguel de Allende, but everything in the centro seems unaffordable.

  Roberto snaps his fingers. “I think I know a little place you could look at.”

  I don’t really feel like going to look at more real estate I can’t afford. That particular fantasy has passed. On the other hand, I am just sitting here with my bag, waiting. “When?” I ask.

  “How about now?”

  Roberto maneuvers his Jeep up onto a small sidewalk on Calle Loreto, just a few blocks from the central square in San Miguel de Allende, on the less gringo side of town. He parks next to a lamppost, leaving just enough space for another car to pass if it folds in its side-view mirrors. “This is it,” he says.

  We’re in front of a narrow, crumbling, two-story white building, its blue shutters bleached and battered from decades of sun and torrential afternoon rains. The house, squeezed into a row of other tall, thin houses, isn’t quite as wide as a one-car garage. A turquoise band runs around the base of the building like the cuff of a frayed dress shirt, and an iron street lamp hangs from the facade by its ancient appendage. The house has a decrepit charm; the tourists passing by might take an artsy photo of it as a study in textured, colorful Mexican decay.

  Roberto unlocks the sturdy mesquite door, and we step inside a brick-and-concrete shell with a drooping ceiling, old bills and plastic bags scattered on the floor. It smells dank and musty, the only recent visitors stray animals, probably including scorpions. Behind a flaking back door are the ruins of a staircase, a broken toilet and washbasin, pieces of corrugated iron where a roof should be, and a pile of refuse. I quickly head back out to the street.

  “Well,” I say.

  “I think they’d take a hundred thousand dollars,” Roberto says.

  “Huh.”

  Getting into the Jeep, Roberto asks what I think of the place. He says that even though it’s tiny—three and a half meters wide by fourteen long—it has potential. All Realtors think every rundown place for sale has potential, but even he doesn’t sound convinced.

  “It’s … small.”

  I don’t know what else to say or even why I’m here, except that somehow, today, I have ended up standing in front of this little house in San Miguel’s historic centro. Some days are like that when you’re traveling: you follow your nose, and you never know where you’ll end up. Roberto mentions that the restaurant a few doors down, the one with the iron bull outside, makes the best margaritas and fajitas in town. Scruffy boys kick soccer balls around on the gray cobblestones, dodging cars, while their mothers watch from windows behind ornate iron bars. Here in the middle of town, in the middle of the day, roosters crow, dogs bark, and a man in a tattered vest carries his knife-sharpening wheel, blowing a singsong whistle.

  Just up the street is the artisan market. More than thirty-five years ago, my sister Amy and I used to love to wend our way to this mercado after Spanish class, to marvel at the endless stalls of handmade treasures—onyx donkeys, tin stars, embroidered blouses, painted armadillos, mustachioed marionettes. We took a few of them home and put them on our windowsills to remind us of that sparkling market and that summer when we were free to roam the streets of a foreign country and practice a few new words of Spanish. I’ve never thrown away those little onyx donkeys.

  Here on Calle Loreto is the sad, tiny turquoise-and-white house with its hand-painted FOR SALE sign, as neglected as one of the friendly stray mutts people adopt around town.

  “I’ve seen enough,” I tell Roberto.

  He shrugs, adjusts his camouflage hat, and puts the car in gear.

  “I’ll take it.”

  ROBERTO PULLS OUT his cell phone, calls the owner of the turquoise house, and, just like that, makes the offer.

  I’m shocked that I said I’d buy the house, the words flying out of my mouth, propelled by some internal gremlin, bypassing my brain. It was an unexpected, irrational impulse, but it nevertheless hit me as the obvious, right thing to do, like knocking on Finn’s door or renting a room at Delphine’s. Maybe I’m being wildly impulsive. But I recall, when I first started meditating, that Sharon told me that I could prize my quickness and adventurous spirit if I could sort out my reactions from my deeper, intuitive responses. And as crazy as this decision seems, I somehow also feel that it’s been brewing deep in my brain for some time.

  “Wait,” I urge Roberto as he’s speaking. I do realize there is a whole string of considerations people weigh, carefully, before deciding to spend their entire freelance-writer life savings on 525 square feet in Mexico. It’s not like buying boots. One ought to ask a few questions.

  He puts his hand over the phone. “What?”

  “Do you think I can get it for less?” I say. That’s all I’ve come up with. I could probably use my sister Jan here now; she spent her entire summer in Mexico learning how to bargain in the market and has been bargaining ever since.

  “No,” he replies. “There’s another offer on the house, so that’s as low as they’ll go.”

  “Así es,” I say. That’s how it is.

  “Así es,” he says, resuming the conversation. He closes his cell phone, and they have accepted my offer. I realize I don’t even have a check for the down payment, but Roberto says he’ll front the money until Friday, and in the meantime I can retrieve the maximum out of the ATM every day.

  WE RETURN TO Delphine’s house, where I meet her, a lean woman of indeterminate age with a white-blond ponytail, leggings, ankle boots, and a black hat. She’s a painter, and the house is full of tall paintings, mainly of tango dancers. I notice how people seem to make their dreams come true in this town, like the way she has a tango studio in the back of her house where masters from around the world come to teach her ocho cortados. When I tell her I’ve just made an offer on a house, she is as enthusiastic as Roberto is blasé and as I am numbly full of wonder.

  “That’s what happens,” she says. “People come down here and fall in love with the place, and pretty soon they’re making an offer on a house.”

  Delphine shows me to my room, a simple and lovely whitewashed bedroom with cobalt blue tiles and dark Spanish wood furnishings. I splash water on my face and flop down on the bed. This room, I think, isn’t any wider than eleven and a half feet. Well, maybe a little wider. I’m not really a very good judge of space.

  Sitting there in the little white bedroom, daylight fading, I can’t fathom that I’ve just decided, randomly, to buy a house. It hits me that as sure a decision as it seemed at the moment—if you can even call such an impulsive move a “decision”—there are a million reasons buying a tiny ruin in Mexico is foolish. I can’t even begin the list.

  I can’t call my parents, sisters, or friends to talk it over, either, because they’ll tell me I’m completely loco to even consider spending my entire life savings on an abandoned lot in Mexico that is only eleven and a half feet wide. They’ll ask a lot of annoying questions, such as How are you going to design a house on such a small lot? Where will you live while construction is going on? How will you oversee building from San Francisco? What about all the permits? Where will you get the money to build? Who will rent it? Who will take care of it when you’re not there? What about gas, electricity, and running water? and What happens if there’s a revolution?

  I get up from the bed and pace around the little room. I could still back out of the Mexico house. I haven’t put any money down. I’m under no obligation. I could just say oops, sorry, my mistake, disculpame, let the other guy who supposedly had an offer on the place buy the house. Roberto would be pissed off, but getting pissed off at deals falling through is what happens to people who sell real estate. I’ll be leaving town soon anyway, and already I’ve p
retty much seen and done what there is to see and do here. I have a real affection for San Miguel de Allende, but so what—there are so many places left in the world to explore.

  Yet I feel strangely settled about buying the house. Was it, as Delphine said, that I had come to San Miguel de Allende and fallen in love with the place? But I fall in love with places all the time and have never considered buying a home—except in San Francisco, where a divorce and a dot-com boom, ancient history by now, priced me out of the market. Or in Italy—which I’ve known as intimately as a lover, the wonderful and the infuriating, and where I’ve learned the language well enough that Italians don’t always recognize me as American. But buying a little place of my own on my favorite Sicilian island has always been a fantasy too far out of reach, something I felt I could never do alone, and here in my forties, I am alone.

  So why Mexico? I could say Mexico is the new Italy, now that the dollar can be used as toilet paper in Europe. Mexico, too, is full of gorgeous buildings and piazzas, rich history and art and remarkable cuisines. But really, Mexico is Mexico.

  Then is it like settling for second best just because I’m in my forties and it’s getting late? Instead of the smart, funny, good-looking guy who is well read and easygoing and heads outdoors whenever he can—an entrepreneur who loves Nabokov, Scrabble, Barolo, and bicycling over the Golden Gate Bridge, say—I’m going for the guy I’m not wildly in love with but who is okay, maybe the best I can get here in middle age, me with my extra fifteen pounds and countless imperfections and tendencies toward … impulsiveness? So if I can’t have Italy, I’ll settle for Mexico?

  No: whatever drove that crazy decision to buy the house, it wasn’t resignation. It may be fate, magic, or stupidity, but the only person I seem to be listening to is the ten-year-old in me, who is thrilled with the idea of buying a little house in San Miguel, right near the mercado.

  THE NEXT MORNING, after draining the ATM for the day, I have to tell someone what I’ve done. I start with Sandra, who will be easy. She is enthusiastic in general and loves Mexico in particular; since she lived next door to me in San Francisco for years, she understands that I can never afford to buy a place there but would like to own something, somewhere. She’s photographed textiles in Chiapas and the Day of the Dead in Pátzcuaro, and now says she can’t wait to visit San Miguel. “Fantastic,” she says.

  Buoyed, I call my sister Cindy.

  “Wow,” she says, surprised. “It was such an impulsive move. Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “Of course,” I say. “I have plenty of experience being impulsive.”

  Cindy laughs. I can almost hear her shaking her head, marveling at what crazy thing I’ve done now. She’s used to me calling and saying I’m off to Vietnam on a bicycling trip or need to go to Argentina next week. Then, more seriously: “Have you thought it through? Do you think it’ll be a good investment?”

  “Definitely,” I say, even though when it comes to the math, permits, or construction, I haven’t actually thought it through at all. I made this decision on intuition, and I’m assuming it’ll eventually work out. I don’t really want to think about it in terms of an investment.

  “It’s a great investment,” I say and come up with some reasons for why that could be true: it’ll be easy to rent, since it’s walkable to everything, and the historic centro, including my little lot, is about to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in San Francisco, it’s that in an architecturally charming, culturally savvy city with no room to grow, sooner or later real estate is bound to go up. San Francisco is out of my price range, but the smallest house in San Miguel is not.

  “So how small is small?” Cindy asks.

  I hesitate before answering, because it sounds so ridiculous. “About eleven and a half feet wide.”

  “Huh,” she says. Concerned.

  “It’ll be cute,” I say. I’m not worried about living in a really small house. New Yorkers live in small spaces all the time. The narrowest house in Greenwich Village—a converted alley where Edna St. Vincent Millay lived—is only 9.5 feet wide, so at 11.5 feet wide, this place is positively spacious.

  “Well,” says Cindy, “how much space do you really need, anyway?”

  “Right,” I say. Cindy and her family live in a little house on a big piece of land and, like me, believe in small spaces and minimal living for environmental reasons and also because it forces you not to accumulate too much stuff, which is an American disease. I see friends who have garages and spare rooms packed with big plastic Tupperware-like boxes and am glad I’m limited to two hall closets and the space beneath my bed. Having less stuff makes me feel light. I’m definitely guilty of having too many books and shoes, but we’re all guilty of something.

  “Sounds like an adventure, anyway,” says Cindy, and then she asks where the house is, to see if she can place it from her memory of the town.

  “Right near the mercado,” I tell her.

  “Oh,” says Cindy, and her voice becomes dreamy. “I remember getting huge bouquets of sunflowers there for only a few pesos.”

  “You still can.”

  THE ONLY OTHER person I tell about buying the house is Finn, whom I run into at a café with her little daughter, Tallulah, who is dressed in pink with sparkly shoes.

  “You won’t believe it,” I say. “I made an offer on a house.”

  “Honey!” Finn says, thrilled. “That’s great!” She wants to hear the whole story, so I tell it, including the part about the irresistible, inexplicable impulse to buy the house.

  “It was meant to be,” Finn says with such certainty that I’m feeling a little less crazy—or maybe a little more New Agey.

  She insists we walk down to Calle Loreto to see the property.

  “This is it,” I say, a few minutes later, standing in front of the house. It suddenly looks a lot narrower than I thought. “It’s tiny,” I say, back to feeling extremely uncertain. Really, it’s a complete dump.

  “It’s adorable!” Finn says, then asks Tallulah what she thinks. She considers it. “The fairies can play here,” she says.

  We make our way back, past the mercado toward the jardín. “It’s a great location,” says Finn. “That house is a little gold mine.”

  A GOLD MINE. I’ve been sitting in the attorney’s fusty office for the past forty-five minutes with the owners of the turquoise house, ready to sign the papers, but at the last moment, the elderly señora is refusing to sell. From what I gather, she thinks there’s treasure buried on the property—silver, and maybe gold.

  The diminutive woman, in her dark blue shawl, checkered pinafore skirt, and weathered Indian face, is squabbling with her well-pressed son, who is brushing off her arguments like flies. I’m straining to understand, but the señora seems convinced about the treasure, and maybe with good reason. San Miguel de Allende was founded in 1542 as a way station on the dangerous Antiguo Camino Real, the route the mule trains took from the gold and mainly silver mines of Guanajuato and Zacatecas to Mexico City. There were no banks in those days, so over the years, as the little town grew, the workers and bandits did what people have done with treasure forever: they buried it in their backyards. The turquoise house and its backyard have existed for more than two hundred years; prior to that, it was probably part of a larger property before it was divided up into workers’ row houses. It’s entirely possible someone buried a stash there.

  Finally the elderly woman’s son seems to have convinced her to sell. She’s sitting back in the chair, resigned, her feet not touching the floor, her shawl pulled tightly around her crossed arms. The son may have argued that it would, after all, take a great deal of buried silver to make up for the amount of money I am prepared to pay, in cash, for the house. They’re asking the equivalent of 350 pounds of silver for the lot, which is more than you’d get if you turned the entire artisans’ market upside down and shook.

  Before the señora can change her mind, I try to distract he
r by making polite conversation in Spanish, asking how many children and grandchildren she has—so many, she’s not sure—and when she lived in the house. She doesn’t seem to be nostalgic for the place; eleven people were crammed inside those walls. But she smiles and I smile back, and when everybody’s smiling the attorney gets up to get the papers to sign. The deal’s going to go through.

  The attorney is gone for an inordinately long time, but this is Mexico, and while everyone else goes back to whispering in Spanish—the law office has the silent solemnity of a church—I sit there, considering that when I sign the papers, I’ll be committed. It’s a great deal of money to pay for a tiny bit of land in Mexico, especially since it’s everything I have, all that I’ve managed to accumulate writing hundreds of magazine articles at a dollar or two a word. I’m picturing fifty thousand words stacked up like bricks in that little lot. I will have nothing left in stocks or money market funds, no diversification, and PBS financial gurus will be scolding me in my dreams. I’ll no longer be able to buy expensive shoes or airplane tickets to Italy or get my hair highlighted—except, maybe, in Mexico. I’m putting all my huevos in one cesto.

  Finally the portly attorney returns, with no papers, and says something I don’t understand. The elderly woman raises her hands to the skies, and her son rolls his eyes. They both shake their heads in disgust.

  It turns out the attorney has done what I’m paying him for; he’s uncovered a lien against the building that, had the sale gone through, I would have been responsible for paying. Some nephew, a good-for-nothing borracho from what I can tell from his relatives’ expressions, took out a loan on the house, which wasn’t his to begin with, but the money is owed, and must be paid, before the house is sold.

  Abruptly, everyone gets up from the chairs, we shake hands all around, and the meeting is over. Outside, I ask Roberto what’s going to happen next, whether I’ll get the house. ¿Quién sabe? “This sort of thing happens all the time,” he says. It could be the reason the house has been abandoned for so long, why the FOR SALE sign looks like an antique.