All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [92]
The attorney is gone for an inordinately long time, but this is Mexico, and while everyone else goes back to whispering in Spanish—the law office has the silent solemnity of a church—I sit there, considering that when I sign the papers, I’ll be committed. It’s a great deal of money to pay for a tiny bit of land in Mexico, especially since it’s everything I have, all that I’ve managed to accumulate writing hundreds of magazine articles at a dollar or two a word. I’m picturing fifty thousand words stacked up like bricks in that little lot. I will have nothing left in stocks or money market funds, no diversification, and PBS financial gurus will be scolding me in my dreams. I’ll no longer be able to buy expensive shoes or airplane tickets to Italy or get my hair highlighted—except, maybe, in Mexico. I’m putting all my huevos in one cesto.
Finally the portly attorney returns, with no papers, and says something I don’t understand. The elderly woman raises her hands to the skies, and her son rolls his eyes. They both shake their heads in disgust.
It turns out the attorney has done what I’m paying him for; he’s uncovered a lien against the building that, had the sale gone through, I would have been responsible for paying. Some nephew, a good-for-nothing borracho from what I can tell from his relatives’ expressions, took out a loan on the house, which wasn’t his to begin with, but the money is owed, and must be paid, before the house is sold.
Abruptly, everyone gets up from the chairs, we shake hands all around, and the meeting is over. Outside, I ask Roberto what’s going to happen next, whether I’ll get the house. ¿Quién sabe? “This sort of thing happens all the time,” he says. It could be the reason the house has been abandoned for so long, why the FOR SALE sign looks like an antique.
I’M DISAPPOINTED I can’t buy the house. Maybe I’ve dodged a big mess. And maybe the idea of buying the house, and the excitement I felt about it, alerted me to a new possibility in my life, beyond the Hippie Apartment in the Haight, which I should explore. The turquoise house can’t be the last one for sale in the centro, but I’m not going to look any farther for now. I’m going home the day after tomorrow.
To distract myself, I go back to being a tourist and visit the Sanctuary of Atotonilco, just fifteen minutes outside San Miguel. I tag along with a group and wander around the church, which, with its all-over frescoes, has been called the Sistine Chapel of the Americas. The artist didn’t have Michelangelo’s cheerful disposition, though; there’s no benevolent God surrounded by happy cherubs giving Adam a loving look as he’s about to touch his finger and awaken him to the glory of the world. Atotonilco is covered with fierce demons, dark angels, and suffering saints, with a gruesome bleeding Christ as the centerpiece. Some 100,000 pilgrims make it to this Mexican Baroque masterpiece per year, most of them on their scraped and bloodied knees or flagellating themselves. The place has woeful vibes, making me think perhaps I don’t want to be in this part of the world anyway. I’d rather be back in Italy, where the cherubs are fat, the angels are well tended, and the art makes you think that the world, for whatever miseries its lovely saints have suffered, is essentially a beautiful, not evil, place.
As the tour guide lectures the group under the church’s salmon-colored arches, I wander back to the van and chat with Martín, the driver, a short, upbeat man who is about my age. His English is excellent, but I try to speak Spanish anyway because we’re in Mexico.
I ask him where in town he grew up. “Calle Loreto,” he says. His mother still lives on the street and makes the best tortillas in town.
“I think that’s my favorite street in San Miguel,” I tell him. I have pretty much let go of my fantasy about the turquoise house on that street, but not quite.
Martín left San Miguel to work and settled back here