All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [96]
Anja asks how big the lot is, más o menos. This is where I’ve lost the other architects’ interest, when they’ve told me there’s no way to build more than one bedroom, where the subtext is that it just isn’t worth their time.
“Three and a half by fourteen meters,” I say. I drain my coffee, ready to get up and leave.
Anja lights up, clasping her hands together. “We can make a little, what do you call that, where you put your joyería?”
“A jewel box?”
“Sí, sí! We’re going to build a little jewel box!”
AND SO WE DO.
Most stories—maybe every story—about building a house in a foreign country are full of drama, disasters, crumbling ceilings, pipes bursting, thieving neighbors, insect infestations, and contractors running off with cash, leaving things half finished. But from the beginning, Anja and I have a seamless and delightful collaboration, our flurries of ideas easily settling down and taking shape.
She starts by drawing up a wish list of all the things I want in my house. This is much more satisfying than making a list of all the qualities you want in your dream man, sending your intention out into the universe so that he will magically show up. This is concrete. So I begin with the general—a great kitchen and writing studio, some outdoor spaces to sit in the sun, two bedrooms—and move on to specifics such as a knife drawer in the kitchen island, wine shelves tucked into the dining room bench, reading lights over the bed, and a napping couch in my office.
A few weeks later, Anja sends watercolor plans to San Francisco that astound me—she has managed to put everything into my little house, while making it feel spare. I show them to my friend Peppe for an expert opinion; after looking at Anja’s drawings, he tells me I’m in good hands, asks if she’s cute and single, then begins referring to her as “La mia fidanzata messicana,” my Mexican girlfriend.
But when I return to San Miguel in a few months to check in on the house during the “obras negras,” the black works, the initial brick and concrete construction, the tiny place is heaped with bags of material and litter. What have I done? The place where the kitchen is supposed to go is a dark, dank hole. Nothing of the original house, two hundred years old, is usable, except the front mesquite door and the interior doors; even the bricks are rotted through. I’m claustrophobic in the space.
“No te preocupe,” says Anja, laughing, don’t worry. Then she takes me up the zigzagging stairs, with no railing yet, to the top terrace. I have no idea what the view from up there will be. It turns out to be sweeping, with all of San Miguel at our feet. “Look,” Anja says, pointing. “You can see the Parroquia from here.”
We scramble back down to the bottom of the construction site, which I eye nervously. “Let’s go pick out tiles,” Anja says, dismissing the mess.
FROM THE START of construction, Finn insists I stay at her house whenever I’m in town. Hers is a rambling colonial place, with odd twists and turns, built as a party house for the property next door, later inhabited by elderly ladies who insisted that fairies live there; Finn’s three-year-old daughter, Tallulah, is careful not to pick the leaves off the plants because that’s where the ladies said the fairies hide. There is always a little bit of magic in the air: Tallulah and her friends Alejandra and Fernanda put on princess dresses and run around casting spells in Spanish, Finn takes her energy healer as seriously as her accountant and personal trainer, birds twitter, I play Mary Poppins songs on the grand piano for the children, and some days I think Bogart the Bijon Frise will start speaking French and Phoebe the mutt will answer back in street Spanish. Every morning I get kisses from the girls, the first of many kisses I’ll get from friends in Mexico all day long. The atmosphere feels light, feminine, twinkly, and happy.
Finn uses my visit as an excuse to throw a party, with