All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [94]
I drain my beer and my cell phone rings, which startles me, since hardly anyone has called me on it. I bought it right after I made an offer on the house, thinking I’d need it, and now it’ll go into the drawer at home with a bunch of other cheap international cell phones and chips.
“Bueno?” I answer.
It’s Roberto. He tells me the family has paid the lien on the building and I can come sign the papers. The turquoise house is mine.
At home in San Francisco, I’m stirring a big pot of tortilla soup, setting out plates of tamales, slicing up avocados, squeezing limes for margaritas, waiting for guests to arrive at my birthday dinner.
This year, Guillermo isn’t here. I feel his absence keenly, not only because his Peruvian tamales are so much better than the Mexican ones I bought but because he is unable to travel, still not quite himself after a drunk driver mowed him down while he was out running a few months ago. Things happen that fast. But despite the fact that initially the neurologist in the ICU lamented how bad his MRI looked and whispered that he might not speak or walk again, he is more or less out of the fog, missing a margin of intelligence that only he is smart enough to know has disappeared, a softening of the edges that actually makes him easier to be around. (It also somehow helps him fall in love, get married, and have a baby boy, named after the father he lost in the jungle, only a year later.)
The doorbell rings, friends arrive, and I start pouring margaritas. Chatting in the kitchen, I tell them the news, that I’ve bought a little property in San Miguel. Then I tell them how little.
Marc shakes his head. “You can build San Miguel’s first bowling alley.” He grins. “But they’ll have to take turns for the lane.”
“Baguettes,” Axil chimes in. “It’s perfect for baking baguettes.”
“It’s going to be great,” says Sandra, putting an arm around my shoulder. She looks at the guys. “I mean, it’s almost as wide as this kitchen.”
I take a few sips of my margarita and ask Peppe, a construction engineer, if he thinks it’s possible to build a house on a lot that narrow. He laughs, asks if I considered that before I bought it, and then, seeing my anxious face, swipes his hand over his smooth head and reconsiders. “È possibile,” he says. “Ma sarà un bel problema.” Possible, but it’ll be a nice problem.
Possible is good enough. I’m not going to worry about the house. It’s a party, I’m surrounded by my friends, and I’m much cheerier at forty-six than I was on my forty-fifth birthday.
I’VE SENT A check for the house to Mexico, and after waiting several weeks—repeatedly e-mailing Roberto, who writes, “Relax and go eat a gordita”—I finally get a receipt, a deed, and a key to the house. I have no clue what to do next. I recall Sue, a new friend in San Miguel who married her nineteen-year-old Mexican student when she was teaching English there in her early thirties, telling me that the tradition is to have campfire parties on a property where you can’t afford to build. The lot may just sit empty for a few more years, as it has for the past thirty; I’ll bring down marshmallows.
Financing construction of a house in Mexico when you don’t own anything in the United States turns out to be tricky. Some people, I realize, would have discovered that before they bought the property. When I walk into my bank on Haight Street and sit down to talk to the ponytailed loan officer, he points out that I have no collateral and nothing with which to secure a loan, because property in Mexico isn’t something the bank can easily seize.
“Dude,” he says, spreading his palms on the desk. “There’s, like, no way.”
I make some calls and find companies that do construction loans in Mexico, but their fees and rates are exorbitant, and most insist that you use their contractors, who, judging from the Web sites, build only peach-toned faux-Mediterranean villas with Ionic columns, decorated with giant inlaid seashells. My best option seems to be to open a bunch of credit cards, pay for the construction with cash advances,