All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [84]
“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