Back in Business

As I walked down San Pancho’s main street in mid-October, a sign in a shop window caught my eye: “20% OFF ON EVERYTHING UNTIL THE BRIDGE IS FIXED.” Now that sign is gone. People and vehicles can cross the river into San Pancho again, and the Avenida is bustling with commerce.

Torrential rains in early September caused flooding, mudslides and bridge collapses throughout the Bahia de Banderas area. “The most rain I can remember in 50 years,” one San Pancho old-timer said. On September 6 rushing water and fallen trees slammed into the San Pancho bridge. It collapsed, creating a crisis in both economic and human terms: The village was cut off from Highway 200 and the rest of the world; families who lived near the river banks became homeless overnight; houses were inundated with up to four feet of water.

The people of San Pancho rallied. They improvised a zipline across the river and then threw together a rickety wooden footbridge. Seventy people whose homes had been washed away lived and ate for two weeks in EntreAmigos, the town’s community center. The owners of La Patrona Polo Club donated things like baby diapers and food and sent a boatload of supplies to the San Pancho beach.

High-riding SUVs could ford the river not long after the washout, but regular cars couldn’t make it across. The water was just too high. To solve this problem a raised dirt embankment was built in late October. It is only one lane, and if you don’t have your wits about you, your car could slide into the water, but the embankment serves its purpose. Regular vehicle traffic in and out of San Pancho resumed.

Local people saw a business opportunity: all those hungry bridge workers; heavy traffic all day on the embankment. New taco stands sprang up, one of which also advertises low-cost haircuts and manicures. A portable hot dog stand parks at the site. An enterprising woman sells clothing, displayed on a clothesline like clean wash. Victoriano Mendez, the artist who used to set up his easels near the bridge, has returned, painting and selling his landscapes.

Construction is almost complete on the new bridge. San Pancho is back in business.

The Night Visitor

Rustling sounds from the vacant lot behind our bedroom wall stir my sleep. Is it a gentle breeze moving among the wildly overgrown thicket of plants and weeds, a brief interlude in the night? Again, the soft swishing intrudes, scuffling footsteps, an iguana or a creature beyond imagining. I am not going to wake up, I vow, but open my eyes just enough to see the clock, 2:00 a.m. It is hardly a time for an investigation; it’s dark, too dark to see anything. I snuggle further beneath the comforter, burrowing, my head tucked inside like a tortoise.

No way, now I am awake. I strain to hear the noise again; did we lock the bedroom door I wonder? But now there is only the usual cacophony of our neighborhood: dogs, roosters, faint strains of music. I drift into an uneasy sleep.

Early morning light filters through the windows. I am groggy from a fitful night and ready for coffee. I see him as soon as I open the door to the patio beyond our bedroom. He stands perfectly still, a white horse, ghostly against the striated sky. He is tethered to a long rope which corrals him into a small area just meters away from our wall. He moves slowly among the brambles, grazing steadily. I watch him for a few minutes and make tentative horse-calling noises; he doesn’t look up.

With coffee in hand, I give him the once-over. I don’t recognize this horse as one who belongs to any of my neighbors. For one thing, he doesn’t look very healthy. I can see the outline of his ribs. And what’s more, he’s quiet, not one whinny for my benefit.

I watch him throughout the day and make an occasional attempt at communication. Head down, he ignores me. His movements track the sun as it journeys to the ocean, and he stays within its warmth. In the purple/pink haze of the sunset, he glows. In the morning, he is gone.

Tlaquache Terrorism

I wrote a blog entry a couple of years ago about the possum problem in our house and garden; there are certain animal lovers who have not spoken to me since. Though the murder plot didn't come off, there was a lot of premeditation, and for possum offenses no worse than being ugly and waking us up nightly with hisses, rustlings and mating clicks. But now the situation has become worse by several orders of magnitude.
The other night I was minding my own business, heating up some leftovers for dinner on top of the stove. I had just stirred the pot and returned to the living room when the stove exploded. The Le Creuset pot flew up and over the island and landed upside down; the burner apparatus and grills likewise, the oven door blew open and wisps of insulation streamed from the joints. The neighbors came running to see if we were still alive.
Alive, yes, but considerably shaken and also dumbfounded. The oven hadn't been on; I had been cooking daily—now I vowed never to go near the stove again. It wouldn't have been pretty if I had stirred that pot a few moments later than I did. We shut off the gas, cleaned up the mess and went out to dinner. We planned to check out the stoves in the shop on the corner in the morning and when we did, we found a nice one that went better with my dishwasher anyway.
But first we really had to make an inspection. Jonathan pulled the stove out of its slot in the counter. There sat a slightly singed tlaquache in a nest of leaves showing its vicious little teeth—teeth which it had used, in its spare time, to chew through the metal mesh-clad gas line. As a parting insult, when Jonathan drove it out from under the stove, it ran and hid under the dishwasher and he had to disconnect and pull that out, too. The possum finally scurried off into the garden, where, animal lovers, it plots with impunity—for the time being.

Yakati Yak Jack

Today Manuel brings us a gift. Unannounced, he lumbers down the steps that lead from the street to our garden retreat lugging a bulbous object with both hands. His knees are splayed wide to better support the weight of what he carries. Teenage sons Harry and Edgar bring up the rear.

"Yaka," says Manuel. He looks around for an appropriate perch in which to set it down. The wide edge of the pool will do. "Deliciosa, y para la salud, excelente."

"He says it tastes good. And it’s good for you." Harry translates although we easily get the drift of where the scenario is going. Edgar wrinkles his nose. We soon learn why.

My husband and I had seen the gigantic globes of yaka, or jackfruit, hanging from hooks at fruit stands alongside the highway between Las Varas and San Pancho. We had never given close inspection. I scrutinize this specimen with suspicion as to edibility. The greenish pimply rind looks like a porcupine with snubbed-off quills. Harry tells us he doesn’t particularly like the taste of the fruit, but it’s okay when blended with milk and banana for breakfast. "Good for virility," he adds.

Okay. I’m game.

Manuel requests a knife, cooking oil, a bowl, another bowl with water, discarded newspaper. The ceremony begins. Like a surgeon he makes a clean cut, severing the beastie in two. He douses both hands in vegetable oil and plunges inside the folds of the fruit. Up to his wrists he curls his fingers around two-inch-long brown pods nestled beneath slippery squares of pale orange flesh. Pods tossed on the newspaper, pulpy flesh plopped in the bowl of water. A strong scent, like cheap perfume from the five and dime.

About 30 minutes later Manuel’s midwifery yields dozens of pods and a bowl heaped with slimy-looking foodstuff. He dunks the fruit a bit, swirls it around the bowl, offers me first bite.
Tastes like over-ripe cantaloupe this side of floozy: a little too much scent and slick for my taste, but, hey, it is interesting. Samples all around. My husband, Win, looks askance. Harry passes. So does Edgar. Manuel takes a sizeable chomp, grins.

I thank Manuel for expanding my culinary experience. He thanks me for the work we provide his family, and for the referrals we are happy to give our friends.

"Le gusta armadillo?" he asks, as he prepares to leave. I look at Harry. I look at Edgar. I look at Win. "Did Manuel say armadillo?" I ask."

"Afraid so," says Win.

Julio, My Poetic Spanish Teacher

I’ve had a lot of Spanish teachers, and Julio Delgadillo was one of the best. Julio is a Mexican architect who lives in San Pancho, and he and I first met in 2003. The architecture business was slow, and Julio was playing guitar and singing in a local café. Between songs he often recited a poem that drew the crowd’s rapt attention. His delivery was perfect: a deep baritone, flawless diction, just the right amount of dramatic emphasis. I asked him about the poem, which he said was La Casada Infiel (The Faithless Wife) by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

I strained to understand the words Julio recited, but my Spanish wasn’t up to it, so I bought a dual-language anthology of Spanish poetry and read the poem in English. Sensual and mysterious, it was the story of a gypsy’s romantic encounter with a woman he had believed was unmarried.

Knowing I was a fan, Julio stopped to say hello when we saw each other around San Pancho. We chatted as best we could, given that neither of us knew much of the other’s language. Soon Julio was stopping for morning coffee on my porch, toting his English books. Eager to practice Spanish with a native speaker, I was ready with my Spanish dictionary and "501 Spanish Verbs".

Julio and I talked for hours about social customs in the U.S. and Mexico, music, politics, the best places to shop, Mexican art, Julio’s architecture projects, and his love life. We checked with each other regularly for new chisme (gossip) from the village. But our most interesting topic was poetry. Julio’s favorite poet was the Chilean Pablo Neruda. In the ‘90s I had seen the Italian film Il Postino, a story based on Neruda’s year in Capri, but I hadn’t read his poems. Now Neruda became a favorite of mine, too.

Though Julio came from humble circumstances, he is a person whom Mexicans might describe as educado. More than “educated,” the word connotes “well-mannered, polite.” He was born in 1959 to a poor family in a tiny village near Tepic, Nayarit. Julio’s parents had split up, and he was cared for by a grandmother and an aunt. As a young boy he tended the family’s cows and goats, and, although his father was a teacher, Julio’s schooling was not a priority. In 1973 he and his father moved to San Pancho, where his father found work.

By the time Julio was in secondary school, he showed talent for drawing and reciting poetry. His teachers picked him to do the customary poetry recitation at end-of-the-year ceremonies. At first he did it simply because he had to, but then he realized his recitations distinguished him from the other kids, and he began to enjoy them. Julio demonstrated for me how he had perfected his diction: He placed a pencil crosswise between his teeth, and then practiced the words to the poem. A teacher gave him a poetry book -- “Five Hundred Famous Poems” -- and the first poem he memorized was “The Faithless Wife.”

Danger

This is my new response to the question, “Are you safe in Mexico?”

“As safe as I am in Evanston, Illinois” I say. Here’s why.

It is 5:00 pm on a hot and sunny Fourth of July. We are ready for a cook-out, a good old fashioned fourth; hamburgers and hotdogs, fresh corn on the cob and potato salad. Comfortably encamped on our deck with friends, we have iced drinks in hand.

Police cars, sirens screaming, screech to a halt outside. They block our street. If the sheer number of squad cars is any indication of a threat to our safety, we are in serious danger. We watch as police claim access to the back yards and alleys on foot, rifles at the ready. What is going on?

Murder, just blocks away. A twenty year old male was shot and killed while driving his car; a gang retaliation. Bloodied, dying, his car crossed two lanes of traffic and crashed onto the opposite sidewalk. On this bright sunlit day, miraculously no one was in his path. He died alone. Now, the search is on for his attacker.

A familiar tale told and retold in the media, both in Mexico and the U.S. Murders, the mayhem of drugs and violence, bodies strewn across the country. Mexico produces the drugs; the U.S. consumes them. Drug lords and gang members, locked in the world of suppliers and users kill each other on both sides of the border. There is no escaping the war that is being waged, not in Mexico or in our quiet suburb of Chicago. It’s the cost of doing business and we are all paying the price.

News reports the next day describe the victim alternately as a hoodlum with a long arrest record and as a misguided young man, mixed up with the wrong crowd. Outrage is expressed that the revelation of his crime-ridden past somehow dimishes the loss of his young life. Perhaps there was promise ahead, if only he had resisted the pull of gangs and drugs.

“If only…” we say, thinking of choices and risks. I know we won’t walk away from our rich full life in Mexico nor will we abandon Evanston, where we have spent half of our lives. We have made our choices; as for the risks, we’ll take them too.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

My husband and I recently attended one of the Hay Festivals. In 2010-2011 they are being held in Wales, Cartagena, Beiruit, Kerala, Nairobi, the Maldives, Belfast, Segovia and Zacatecas—conveniently located about nine hours away from our summer home in San Sebastian. Writers, musicians, film makers, scientists, and social entrepreneurs talk, play, screen and inspire; Bill Clinton called it “the Woodstock of the mind.”

The festival was a brilliant experience and the romance of the city couldn’t be missed. A lecture might be held in the Antiguo Templo de San Augustin or in the partially ruined nave of the ex-convento which now houses the Museo Rafael Coronel with it’s collection of 1600 Mexican masks. The open-air concerts, and what perfect high altitude summer air it was, were held in a plaza created by a cluster of colonial jewels. Our hotel, formerly a bishop’s palace, had displayed Morelos’ severed head for two weeks on its tour of Mexico during the Revolution. Other historical sites, templos, museos and ex-conventos crowd the small Centro; we tried to see them all.

At the of the other Coronel brother, Pedro, one of Mexico’s most noted twentieth century artists, the visitor enters through a library. Once belonging to the ex-convento that houses the museum, the library is a grand room, perhaps seventy feet long with sixteen- or eighteen-foot ceilings and high windows set in the thick walls. The upper reaches of the shelves are lost in the dim light and are packed with leather-bound and gold-tooled volumes. We immediately began to see treasures—first editions of Bernal Diaz’s history of the conquest of Mexico and of Prescott’s conquest history in Spanish translation. As other museum goers passed through the library and on to the rest of the collection, we were riveted, exclaiming over and examining every shelf until the distinguished old librarian offered to let us see whatever book we wanted. He extracted whatever we asked for, bringing it to the lectern on the little desk beneath the window and turning the pages for us with his gloved hands.

Then he offered to show us the rest of the library. We passed through a black-curtained arch into another room, even larger, at a right angle to the first, taking up the entire side of the former convent. This room, the librarian explained, contained books from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Every one was bound in parchment, discolored and crinkled, with hand-scribed titles on the spines in red and black ink. Then a third room along the back of the convent. Here were books with balsa wood covers and brilliantly marbled end papers, dictionaries, atlases, a facsimile of the Mendocino Codex, one of the few Aztec codices to survive the Spanish bonfires.

All that was a dream experience, but then this: Write out a solicitud, a request, go to the pharmacy and buy a left-over swine flu mask and latex gloves and all this was mine for the examining. I did it. Just another couple of hours, I assured Jonathan, but it took an extra day in Zacatecas before I tore myself away. Ask me what items and how much of them Montezuma received in tribute each year and what a parchment-bound Vulgate Bible feels like, book worm trails and all. I saw a collection of photos (not prints of photos) of Mexican churches taken by Frida Khalo’s father, an engraved map of Mexico City and surrounds when it was in the middle of the lake and reached by causeways and fifteenth century stories of the missionaries who brought Christianity to Ethiopia. I could go on.

One isn’t trusted around rare books in the US. I once (barely) got into the stacks of the Yale University Library even though supervised by my daughter who had access as a student. And the really old and valuable stuff isn’t there anyway, it’s over in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and you aren’t getting in there without a letter of introduction from your academic advisor. Zacatecas is a good place to be reminded of how pleasant a society Mexico can be.