All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [88]
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