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By Root 597 0

buying the house. Was it, as Delphine said, that I had come to San Miguel de Allende and fallen in love with the place? But I fall in love with places all the time and have never considered buying a home—except in San Francisco, where a divorce and a dot-com boom, ancient history by now, priced me out of the market. Or in Italy—which I’ve known as intimately as a lover, the wonderful and the infuriating, and where I’ve learned the language well enough that Italians don’t always recognize me as American. But buying a little place of my own on my favorite Sicilian island has always been a fantasy too far out of reach, something I felt I could never do alone, and here in my forties, I am alone.

So why Mexico? I could say Mexico is the new Italy, now that the dollar can be used as toilet paper in Europe. Mexico, too, is full of gorgeous buildings and piazzas, rich history and art and remarkable cuisines. But really, Mexico is Mexico.

Then is it like settling for second best just because I’m in my forties and it’s getting late? Instead of the smart, funny, good-looking guy who is well read and easygoing and heads outdoors whenever he can—an entrepreneur who loves Nabokov, Scrabble, Barolo, and bicycling over the Golden Gate Bridge, say—I’m going for the guy I’m not wildly in love with but who is okay, maybe the best I can get here in middle age, me with my extra fifteen pounds and countless imperfections and tendencies toward … impulsiveness? So if I can’t have Italy, I’ll settle for Mexico?

No: whatever drove that crazy decision to buy the house, it wasn’t resignation. It may be fate, magic, or stupidity, but the only person I seem to be listening to is the ten-year-old in me, who is thrilled with the idea of buying a little house in San Miguel, right near the mercado.

THE NEXT MORNING, after draining the ATM for the day, I have to tell someone what I’ve done. I start with Sandra, who will be easy. She is enthusiastic in general and loves Mexico in particular; since she lived next door to me in San Francisco for years, she understands that I can never afford to buy a place there but would like to own something, somewhere. She’s photographed textiles in Chiapas and the Day of the Dead in Pátzcuaro, and now says she can’t wait to visit San Miguel. “Fantastic,” she says.

Buoyed, I call my sister Cindy.

“Wow,” she says, surprised. “It was such an impulsive move. Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Of course,” I say. “I have plenty of experience being impulsive.”

Cindy laughs. I can almost hear her shaking her head, marveling at what crazy thing I’ve done now. She’s used to me calling and saying I’m off to Vietnam on a bicycling trip or need to go to Argentina next week. Then, more seriously: “Have you thought it through? Do you think it’ll be a good investment?”

“Definitely,” I say, even though when it comes to the math, permits, or construction, I haven’t actually thought it through at all. I made this decision on intuition, and I’m assuming it’ll eventually work out. I don’t really want to think about it in terms of an investment.

“It’s a great investment,” I say and come up with some reasons for why that could be true: it’ll be easy to rent, since it’s walkable to everything, and the historic centro, including my little lot, is about to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in San Francisco, it’s that in an architecturally charming, culturally savvy city with no room to grow, sooner or later real estate is bound to go up. San Francisco is out of my price range, but the smallest house in San Miguel is not.

“So how small is small?” Cindy asks.

I hesitate before answering, because it sounds so ridiculous. “About eleven and a half feet wide.”

“Huh,” she says. Concerned.

“It’ll be cute,” I say. I’m not worried about living in a really small house. New Yorkers live in small spaces all the time. The narrowest house in Greenwich Village—a converted alley where Edna St. Vincent Millay lived—is only 9.5 feet wide, so at 11.5 feet wide, this place is positively spacious.