All Over the Map

by Laura Fraser

  I’M DISAPPOINTED I can’t buy the house. Maybe I’ve dodged a big mess. And maybe the idea of buying the house, and the excitement I felt about it, alerted me to a new possibility in my life, beyond the Hippie Apartment in the Haight, which I should explore. The turquoise house can’t be the last one for sale in the centro, but I’m not going to look any farther for now. I’m going home the day after tomorrow.

  To distract myself, I go back to being a tourist and visit the Sanctuary of Atotonilco, just fifteen minutes outside San Miguel. I tag along with a group and wander around the church, which, with its all-over frescoes, has been called the Sistine Chapel of the Americas. The artist didn’t have Michelangelo’s cheerful disposition, though; there’s no benevolent God surrounded by happy cherubs giving Adam a loving look as he’s about to touch his finger and awaken him to the glory of the world. Atotonilco is covered with fierce demons, dark angels, and suffering saints, with a gruesome bleeding Christ as the centerpiece. Some 100,000 pilgrims make it to this Mexican Baroque masterpiece per year, most of them on their scraped and bloodied knees or flagellating themselves. The place has woeful vibes, making me think perhaps I don’t want to be in this part of the world anyway. I’d rather be back in Italy, where the cherubs are fat, the angels are well tended, and the art makes you think that the world, for whatever miseries its lovely saints have suffered, is essentially a beautiful, not evil, place.

  As the tour guide lectures the group under the church’s salmon-colored arches, I wander back to the van and chat with Martín, the driver, a short, upbeat man who is about my age. His English is excellent, but I try to speak Spanish anyway because we’re in Mexico.

  I ask him where in town he grew up. “Calle Loreto,” he says. His mother still lives on the street and makes the best tortillas in town.

  “I think that’s my favorite street in San Miguel,” I tell him. I have pretty much let go of my fantasy about the turquoise house on that street, but not quite.

  Martín left San Miguel to work and settled back here after several forays to the United States, to Kentucky, where he worked construction and many other jobs. I presume he crossed into the country illegally—so many of the people in this town risk their lives to go make a few more dollars per hour in the United States—and ask him if it was difficult.

  Sí, sí, he says, muy difícil, and I can tell that’s an understatement. He crossed the border several times, and a few of them were very dangerous. He’s been lost, parched, shot at, hidden from border patrols, and had to catch food to survive, eating armadillos and snakes, and glad to have them.

  “Were there lots of rattlesnakes?” I ask, shuddering.

  “Everywhere.”

  Martín is offhand in his manner, but there is something so dark in his answers that I ask if anyone ever died crossing the border with him. I’m not prepared for his answer. Once, he set off with thirteen other people, including a coyote they each paid $1,500 to lead them, draining the family coffers, borrowing from everyone, incurring high-interest loans. None of them brought along much water or food because they were told to travel light, it was going to take just a couple hours to reach their destination. Some of them carried just a bottle of Coke. Martín, who had crossed the border before—the first time was when he was fourteen years old—took a full knapsack and lagged behind the group. At some point they stopped for a siesta, and when Martín awoke he discovered that the rest of the group had left him, abandoned in the middle of nowhere. He called out and walked in every direction, but he was absolutely alone. With no coyote to guide him, he was lost in the middle of the vast Sonoran Desert, where every saguaro cactus looked the same and there were no landmarks and no shade or shelter from the relentless sun. He wandered for several days, surviving with what food and water he had brought, resting during the day and setting out after dusk, trying to avoid nocturnal scorpions and sidewinders. By the end he was burned, beyond thirst, staggering, and seeing visions. His feet were bleeding, his arms and legs infected by cactus spines. A border patrol—the enemy, the savior—picked him up just in time, offered him water and food, and sent him back across the border. The other thirteen people in his group, he eventually learned, had all died of heat exposure, every one.

  “Lo siento mucho.” There’s nothing to say but I’m sorry. I look back at Atotonilco, whose bloody, violent murals reflect the harsh history of this place. It’s a brutal, unfair land. It is so easy for me to get on a plane and come to Mexico, so dangerous for people who cross over to build our houses and pick our vegetables and grapes, keeping our prices low. And the gringos in San Miguel de Allende, it must be said, are profiting from the huge disparity in wealth between the countries, living easy here on a lot less. It’s complicated, of course: they’re bringing jobs and raising wages, too, so fewer people have to cross the border. Martín is able to stay in the town he grew up in and loves instead of crossing the border, he says, because he makes a good living driving a tour van. Good and bad.

  The group at Atotonilco has finished with the lecture and is now shopping at the souvenir stands nearby. “I guess God wanted you to survive,” I say to Martín. “He had plans for you.”

  He smiles. “Gracias a Dios,” he says.

  AFTER THE TOUR, Martín drops the group off near the jardín, and the rest of the people scatter. I sit down at an outside table of a café on the corner and order my favorite dish, tortilla soup, with smoky chipotle peppers, strips of avocado, and tortilla shreds, along with a beer. I watch the people in the jardín, which is constantly active, and look up at the Gothic-style La Parroquia, almost comic in its faux-European splendor. I wonder, after I leave in a couple of days, whether I’ll ever come back here. It’s been wonderful to revisit a place from my childhood, to feel its emotional tug, and exciting to think about buying something here, to consider settling in a foreign but friendly place. But I’ll be traveling on.

  I drain my beer and my cell phone rings, which startles me, since hardly anyone has called me on it. I bought it right after I made an offer on the house, thinking I’d need it, and now it’ll go into the drawer at home with a bunch of other cheap international cell phones and chips.

  “Bueno?” I answer.

  It’s Roberto. He tells me the family has paid the lien on the building and I can come sign the papers. The turquoise house is mine.

  At home in San Francisco, I’m stirring a big pot of tortilla soup, setting out plates of tamales, slicing up avocados, squeezing limes for margaritas, waiting for guests to arrive at my birthday dinner.

  This year, Guillermo isn’t here. I feel his absence keenly, not only because his Peruvian tamales are so much better than the Mexican ones I bought but because he is unable to travel, still not quite himself after a drunk driver mowed him down while he was out running a few months ago. Things happen that fast. But despite the fact that initially the neurologist in the ICU lamented how bad his MRI looked and whispered that he might not speak or walk again, he is more or less out of the fog, missing a margin of intelligence that only he is smart enough to know has disappeared, a softening of the edges that actually makes him easier to be around. (It also somehow helps him fall in love, get married, and have a baby boy, named after the father he lost in the jungle, only a year later.)

  The doorbell rings, friends arrive, and I start pouring margaritas. Chatting in the kitchen, I tell them the news, that I’ve bought a little property in San Miguel. Then I tell them how little.

  Marc shakes his head. “You can build San Miguel’s first bowling alley.” He grins. “But they’ll have to take turns for the lane.”

  “Baguettes,” Axil chimes in. “It’s perfect for baking baguettes.”

  “It’s going to be great,” says Sandra, putting an arm around my shoulder. She looks at the guys. “I mean, it’s almost as wide as this kitchen.”

  I take a few sips of my margarita and ask Peppe, a construction engineer, if he thinks it’s possible to build a house on a lot that narrow. He laughs, asks if I considered that
before I bought it, and then, seeing my anxious face, swipes his hand over his smooth head and reconsiders. “È possibile,” he says. “Ma sarà un bel problema.” Possible, but it’ll be a nice problem.

  Possible is good enough. I’m not going to worry about the house. It’s a party, I’m surrounded by my friends, and I’m much cheerier at forty-six than I was on my forty-fifth birthday.

  I’VE SENT A check for the house to Mexico, and after waiting several weeks—repeatedly e-mailing Roberto, who writes, “Relax and go eat a gordita”—I finally get a receipt, a deed, and a key to the house. I have no clue what to do next. I recall Sue, a new friend in San Miguel who married her nineteen-year-old Mexican student when she was teaching English there in her early thirties, telling me that the tradition is to have campfire parties on a property where you can’t afford to build. The lot may just sit empty for a few more years, as it has for the past thirty; I’ll bring down marshmallows.

  Financing construction of a house in Mexico when you don’t own anything in the United States turns out to be tricky. Some people, I realize, would have discovered that before they bought the property. When I walk into my bank on Haight Street and sit down to talk to the ponytailed loan officer, he points out that I have no collateral and nothing with which to secure a loan, because property in Mexico isn’t something the bank can easily seize.

  “Dude,” he says, spreading his palms on the desk. “There’s, like, no way.”

  I make some calls and find companies that do construction loans in Mexico, but their fees and rates are exorbitant, and most insist that you use their contractors, who, judging from the Web sites, build only peach-toned faux-Mediterranean villas with Ionic columns, decorated with giant inlaid seashells. My best option seems to be to open a bunch of credit cards, pay for the construction with cash advances, then declare bankruptcy and run off to, um, Mexico.

  I finally turn to the Bank of Mom and Dad. I’ve never asked my parents for a loan, partly because, growing up poor in the Depression era, both with single mothers who were teachers, they have a bootstrap mentality about money. But I come up with a plan to pay them the interest they’re making on their other investments, ask a lawyer how to make it all official, and present it to them, explaining how my experience in San Miguel de Allende as a child helped shape who I am, and how I am, in some ways, coming full circle.

  To my surprise, they agree to the deal and seem happy about the prospect of my finally having a place of my own. They’re worried about the details of how it will all work out and ask a lot of questions, but I also get the sense that they’re glad, since they’re a little bored in their retirement after extremely busy careers, to have a stake in an interesting project. It makes me feel content to know that though I don’t have a partner to rely on in my life, I have my family. (A year later, when stocks crash, my parents are pleased that they took the money out of the market and are getting reliable interest on a loan.)

  Designing the house is much more fun to think about but also a challenge, since I’ve never done anything more imaginative, spacewise, than paint a room yellow or move the piano to the other wall. It stretches unused muscles to visualize building a small house, calling forth spatial relations skills I haven’t used since I packed a carry-on suitcase to spend three weeks during winter in Egypt, London, and Ireland. I buy books on small spaces, sketch a lot of long, wobbly rectangles in my notebook, play with putting the kitchen here or there, and wonder where there will be room for stairs.

  However small the house, the project seems huge to do alone. With no experience in the realm of architecture or design, the only thing I have in my corner is a sure sense of taste. Good or bad, whatever anyone else thinks, at forty-six you have developed your style. Architecture and decor have to be a lot like fashion or art: at a certain point you’re confident about what you like and what suits you, and you’re less apt to make mistakes you regret. So I decide to just trust what I like.

  I head back to San Miguel in March and start looking around at other houses as models. Unfortunately, the house I like the most, owned by my friend Jody—built around ruins in the centro, modern but using historic materials—is huge and worth millions. It ruins me for other houses. It’s like a painting—you can’t help it, you fall in love. I want a miniature by that same artist. Jody tells me the architect is named Anja, and asking around, I learn that her reputation is that she’s good but expensive.

  I try other architects and designers who might be cheaper. In each house, I sense that something’s wrong, unharmonious, too phony colonial. When a young Mexican architect who does modern, minimal houses comes to visit the house and I open the door, I’ve forgotten how really small it is.

  “Well, you can do something here,” he says gloomily. “Maybe a spiral staircase.” He isn’t enthusiastic and doesn’t come up with any sketches or plans, as promised, to bid on the job. When we leave the house, I feel uneasy; maybe I’ve made a disastrous decision.

  I finally call Anja, introduce myself, and tell her I’ve bought a little house on Calle Loreto.

  “The turquoise one?” she asks and says she’s inquired about the house herself (I meet many others in town who tried to buy the house, one woman for five years, with no one answering the calls; I got lucky, or, as they say in San Miguel, it was Meant to Be). “Great location,” Anja says, and we make an appointment to meet.

  Given her talent and reputation, I expect someone older than the lively Mexican woman in her early thirties who walks into the café. She kisses the owner, then greets me and sits down with me. She’s warm but all business, describing her process, which involves taking measurements, drawing plans, obtaining permits, and overseeing the construction. She makes quick sketches in her notebook with perfectly straight rectangles. She seems to be competent at everything I’m not.

  Anja asks how big the lot is, más o menos. This is where I’ve lost the other architects’ interest, when they’ve told me there’s no way to build more than one bedroom, where the subtext is that it just isn’t worth their time.

  “Three and a half by fourteen meters,” I say. I drain my coffee, ready to get up and leave.

  Anja lights up, clasping her hands together. “We can make a little, what do you call that, where you put your joyería?”

  “A jewel box?”

  “Sí, sí! We’re going to build a little jewel box!”

  AND SO WE DO.

  Most stories—maybe every story—about building a house in a foreign country are full of drama, disasters, crumbling ceilings, pipes bursting, thieving neighbors, insect infestations, and contractors running off with cash, leaving things half finished. But from the beginning, Anja and I have a seamless and delightful collaboration, our flurries of ideas easily settling down and taking shape.

  She starts by drawing up a wish list of all the things I want in my house. This is much more satisfying than making a list of all the qualities you want in your dream man, sending your intention out into the universe so that he will magically show up. This is concrete. So I begin with the general—a great kitchen and writing studio, some outdoor spaces to sit in the sun, two bedrooms—and move on to specifics such as a knife drawer in the kitchen island, wine shelves tucked into the dining room bench, reading lights over the bed, and a napping couch in my office.

  A few weeks later, Anja sends watercolor plans to San Francisco that astound me—she has managed to put everything into my little house, while making it feel spare. I show them to my friend Peppe for an expert opinion; after looking at Anja’s drawings, he tells me I’m in good hands, asks if she’s cute and single, then begins referring to her as “La mia fidanzata messicana,” my Mexican girlfriend.

  But when I return to San Miguel in a few months to check in on the house during the “obras negras,” the black works, the initial brick and concrete construction, the tiny place is heaped with bags of material and litter. What have I done? The place where the kitchen is supposed to go is a dark, dank hole. Nothing of the original
house, two hundred years old, is usable, except the front mesquite door and the interior doors; even the bricks are rotted through. I’m claustrophobic in the space.

  “No te preocupe,” says Anja, laughing, don’t worry. Then she takes me up the zigzagging stairs, with no railing yet, to the top terrace. I have no idea what the view from up there will be. It turns out to be sweeping, with all of San Miguel at our feet. “Look,” Anja says, pointing. “You can see the Parroquia from here.”

  We scramble back down to the bottom of the construction site, which I eye nervously. “Let’s go pick out tiles,” Anja says, dismissing the mess.

  FROM THE START of construction, Finn insists I stay at her house whenever I’m in town. Hers is a rambling colonial place, with odd twists and turns, built as a party house for the property next door, later inhabited by elderly ladies who insisted that fairies live there; Finn’s three-year-old daughter, Tallulah, is careful not to pick the leaves off the plants because that’s where the ladies said the fairies hide. There is always a little bit of magic in the air: Tallulah and her friends Alejandra and Fernanda put on princess dresses and run around casting spells in Spanish, Finn takes her energy healer as seriously as her accountant and personal trainer, birds twitter, I play Mary Poppins songs on the grand piano for the children, and some days I think Bogart the Bijon Frise will start speaking French and Phoebe the mutt will answer back in street Spanish. Every morning I get kisses from the girls, the first of many kisses I’ll get from friends in Mexico all day long. The atmosphere feels light, feminine, twinkly, and happy.

  Finn uses my visit as an excuse to throw a party, with a Breakfast at Tiffany’s theme, and the place is packed with men in skinny ties and women in little black dresses wearing giant cocktail rings, gringos and Mexicans alike, all waving long cigarette holders and dancing to a swanky jazz band until the early morning. Under their costumes they reveal themselves to be artists, designers, massage therapists, pastry chefs, party planners, teachers. One woman comes as Frida Kahlo, complete with a monobrow, which confuses me, themewise, until someone explains that she dresses like that all the time. There are clearly a lot of fun-loving people in this town, as well as more than a few eccentrics.