All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [86]
“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