Artichoke
an excerpt

Monique/1

Sun blazing down through my hair to my scalp, hot enough to broil my brain. A Guadalajara afternoon, white hot, in the Sunday antiques market, with its topless stone pillars. Heat, pure white heat, pounding on my head. I think how easy it would be to hang a roof off these pillars. Nothing fancy, just some canvass sheets. How easy it would have been to wear a straw hat with a deep brim or to buy one right now. But, no, burning hot and dizzy, I’ve walked the length of the market twice bareheaded.

I cross Juan Manuel against traffic not so bad on Sunday, headed for a small tree giving off some big shade. There’s a fonda behind me where I could get a refresca; a ballgame blasting from inside there, and loud men drinking beer. Well, Mexico is a loud place, although Mexicans are not often loud. It’s the church bells, the fireworks, the roosters, the music, the games, the barking dogs in the night.

Not unlike New York, Guadalajara, or any city where people still live most of their lives in public; public spaces used by the public. From the first, I have not felt in a foreign place when I am in Guadalajara.

I stay where I am with my eyes on the back of the vendor’s stand in question. It may take some time for Miguel to reach that stand, but when he does, I will know. I will stand in this blessed cool beneath this tree and wait for Miguel to find that particular stand, find that photograph. He won’t miss it. He’s seen the match of it on my desk for as long as I have known him, which is a long time.

There is another photograph over there in the only box of vintage postcards, right on top. Miguel is here for the postcards. He could find cheaper in New York, but there is always the hope with postcards, and the logic that Mexican postcards should, although they never do, cost less in Mexico. Sun-beaten, I lean against a parking meter. And I wait. He takes a long time getting to it, Miguel.

The vendor is now at the curb behind his stand talking to a pretty woman with full thighs. She looks a decade younger than he, but the man is not older than 35, with ropy muscles in his arms and a fine set of shoulders on him, a full head of pitch black. Through the gaps in rushing cars, trucks and buses, through the frequent spurts of black exhaust, I see them take hands and come laughing across the street. Neither of them wears hats, but she holds an open black umbrella in her free hand, as they cross the street.

They pass me close by before they enter the fonda. He’s already forgotten me and doesn’t say hello. His market stand with its old posed photographs of Mexican families, armed federales in village streets, ex-restaurant ashtrays, rusted cowbells, 1940s movie posters, and the box of postcards with the few faded photographs slipped in, all forgotten for the sake of her thighs. Well, who could blame him but his wife at home in a mountain town with their kids and the chickens she sells to support his antiques endeavor. A man must be free to do what a man will do, he would say.

Watching for Miguel, I see an American man in the market, his head wrapped in a towel as a turban against the sun. He speaks to two other men whom I know and hope Miguel doesn’t recognize. I like them all, but we would have to go to lunch, and I just can’t today. They are walking in the direction of where I last saw Miguel. I always move ahead of him, when he’s shopping, because sometimes I see things he doesn’t see. Miguel may not see those men at all, but if Miguel sees what I see in that photograph, I will be sure it’s my mother and me.

It was taken the day before she left home, if it is what I think it is, and not a mirage. She was wearing the blue house dress with the square white buttons. My great aunt had taken those buttons from a dressier dress and sewn them onto my mother’s house dress to better contain my mother’s ample breasts. I always wished my mother had left behind the breast gene with me, but she had not.

A house dress is a garment American women wore into the 1960s, simply cut and buttoned down the front, loose for ease of movement. It’s what I think of when someone says, “Nothing fancy.” As its name indicates, a house dress was worn at home, while doing housework or bathing babies, but could be worn to the grocery store or the post office or a neighbor’s house for coffee. House dresses were succeeded first by jeans and then by gym suits. I am not sure anymore what American housewives wear when they are at home. I don’t know a single one.

Monique/2

He already has the picture in his hand and is looking around for the vendor. The vendor of the stand next to that one, who will turn out to be the brother of the original vendor, comes and takes Miguel’s money. Now Miguel is looking around for me. When he does see me, I wave and point up at the tree, as if it is the reason I am on the other side of the street.

Miguel waves, starts forward, and hesitates. He gives me the small sign of “momentito,” the thumb and index finger of one hand a quarter inch apart. Then he continues looking at the goods at the remaining stands, but I can see he is distracted. He comes back to the man whom he paid for the picture and talks to him, struggling to be understood. After a while, Miguel nods as if he has learned something, and crosses the street.

Miguel is not much of a Mexican except for his first name and half his blood. His mother, a beautiful Albanian-American, returned from a week’s vacation in Texas with some girlfriends, carrying the seedling Miguel with her home to Brooklyn. There was, soon enough, a stepfather who didn’t like the boy’s first name but gave him his last. So, I had to teach Miguel the sign for “momentito” and the quick, sideways wag of one finger for “stop bothering me” to direct at beggars who persist; it works very well, although it’s not needed here, I understand, as much as it is in other, poorer parts of the Republic. Miguel has been to the south of Mexico and he says he can make good use of it there. I can only say there are fewer beggars in Guadalajara than there are in New York City.

“So, let me see your postcards.” We are in a taxi taking us to the Catedral, which Miguel has yet to see and can’t miss.

“Later,” he says, staring out the window, quiet, wondering how he can show me the photo of my own mother and my own self that made its way to Guadalajara before I did.

While he explores the vast interior of the Catedral, I find a shady arcade and sit, smoking, watching for him to reappear. As hot as the sun can be, the shade is always cool; not just cooler, but cool. I wish my great aunt were still alive, or that I had asked more questions when she was. But she would have said, as she often did, “Some things are better left unsaid.” I could be the daughter of an ax murderer and I would never have heard it from my great aunt Mary, who died just as I started college.

She had been widowed in the 1940s, Aunt Mary, and we both lived on her pension from Proctor & Gamble. P&G was the employer of choice in those days, promising its employees a job for life, and while Aunt Mary lived she wouldn’t hear a word against them. But they’re gone now, too, P&G. So much for corporate promises, Aunt Mary, luckily, did not live to see broken. Yet I have the memories of company picnics, volleyball games, and holiday parties, a scholarship to New York University, and I appreciate having had these things from P&G.

It’s just too bad they left the old neighborhood a wasteland when they went. Aunt Mary would defend them had she lived to see them go. Ivory Soap is Ivory Soap, I would tell her, if she could only hear, wherever it is manufactured, now in some ex-Soviet republic, for all I know. We might have been better off paying the Russians to keep fighting the Cold War and kept our manufacturing base at home.

I don’t have a clear understanding of how it works, (globalization, I mean), but I can tell you NAFTA has raised prices in Mexico. A television that costs $300 in New York costs twice that in Guadalajara. A used paperback book you might pick up for $2 there costs $12 here; the same for a new trade paperback book costing $8 in the U.S. Worse, when you buy a straw hat thinking some Mexican peasant made it with her own hands, it turns out to have been made in China.

What was it all about, anyway, the air raid drills, the fallout shelters, the dives under the schoolroom desks, the however many young lives lost to Vietnam? The Communists won the Cold War, apparently, but we don’t admit it. We’ve gone on to worse trouble than Allen Foster Dulles and his brother ever could dream up.

God, I can’t think about it anymore.

I miss Miguel coming out of the Catedral, because I am busy counting the architectural styles on its city block-sized edifice. Miguel finds me and we walk a while through the crowded Centro streets. We go into the Liberty Market, but it is too confusing or we are too confused, so we walk some more.

He flags down a taxi at the Mariachi Plaza to take us to the bus station. Miguel could walk another five hours and be happy, so I know he is distressed. The cab driver talks us into a ride all the way to San Antonio Tlayacapan for $250 pesos; roughly a hundred pesos a mile. The bus would only cost $60 pesos for two the whole way, but we’re ready to be at home.

I’ve rented a house for a few months, maybe more, from a Mexican landlord who has hung gaudy sprays of yellow beaded lights from the boveda ceiling in the sala. I’ve thought of replacing them with ceiling fans, but I put it off for my friends from New York to see the lights when they visit. Miguel likes them; maybe he is more Mexican than I thought. My landlord is very proud of those lights and he is very kind. I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I guess I will keep them; unless, maybe, I stay forever.

Monique/3

The Guadalajara cab driver has missed the turn for the Libremiento and drives through Chapala, past the plaza with its lacy gazebo said to have been a gift of the Empress Carlotta. It then turns right at the traffic light at the corner of Hidalgo. We pass the Hotel Monte Carlo on the lake and very steep streets on the other side of the road, some just stairs going uphill. Miguel looks up to the church, but there are no crawling penitents in sight. At certain times of the year true believers crawl on hands and knees all the way up the hill to the church seeking a cure or forgiveness. Miguel is dying to see it, but he has been unlucky so far.

This Lourdes district in Chapala is where I had wanted to live, but then the hillside has a tendency to slide down into the street far below. It would be my luck to be living in a house that went down with it. There are huge piles of stone along the roadside, formerly part of the massive retaining wall, that tell me it probably wouldn’t have been a good idea.

Very soon we are in Riberas Del Pilar, and next up comes San Antonio Tlayacapan, where I live. The name means, “Place which gives to the gods.” If not to the gods, it gives to me peace and beauty. Here, people keep to the old ways, and wouldn’t want to modernize if it were given them. There are a few oddball foreigners living in the town, but it is mostly off the gringo circuit, except for an Italian restaurant and a luncheonette I eat at frequently and which manages to bridge both worlds.

San Antonio is a smallish village built around a plaza and church, as they all are, and except for the fireworks at the break of day, followed by the workaday noise of a village, is reasonably peaceful. My friend, Elena, tells me the fireworks mark the Stations of the Cross, or something. The church bells, too, are very insistent and early, but I like to hear church bells in the morning. I like that on Holy Thursday people go to seven churches. Why seven? I don’t know. Located below the Carretera, the minor highway that runs from Chapala to Jocotepec, the village is far enough from the mountains to make it unlikely they will fall on my house, yet near enough to give a beautiful view past the lemon trees in my walled garden.

Miguel goes straight for the liquor cabinet. He pours two small brandies, not because he likes brandy, but because he likes the color-spattered snifters I bought in Tonala. I take the drinks out to the garden while Miguel goes into my study. He returns with both copies of the photograph, one framed and the other not, but identical. He places them in front of me on the wrought iron table that is cemented into the ground. I know I am supposed to be surprised, even shocked, but I feel like tormenting Miguel, who has drawn this thing out so long, as if I have not.

“How odd,” I say. “They look so similar.”

“Similar! They’re the same picture.”

“Do you think so?” I stand and tell him I am going to my room to lie down a while, thinking “Poor Miguel,” but unable to stop myself.

I hear the front door close and lock at some point in my sleep. Miguel is here on vacation. He has to see things, buy things, do things. I try to think about my mother, why she left me, how she left me, but my mind goes blank when I try. It’s easier to go back to sleep. Later in my sleep I hear him return and go into his room. It is still dark morning when he taps on my door to say he is going to take the bus back to Guadalajara today.

“It doesn’t run in the dark,” I say, but he leaves the house anyway.

Cleaning shrimp is a pain in the ass, but Miguel likes shrimp, so I buy some from Horacio, the fish man from San Blas, who comes to the door. He has a brother who does the fishing. Horacio drives in the middle of the night from the coast to sell fish fresh from the Pacific Ocean here door to door. This custom of messengers running inland from the coast with fresh seafood was begun by Montezuma, or so I’ve read.

Horacio’s face is always on the verge of sadness, even when he smiles. If I say I don’t need any fish one day, his heart breaks across his face. Some days he has fresh oysters; never the briny Atlantic Ocean oysters I love, but I can’t turn these down, for Horacio’s sake. He always has a woman in his car, who I address as Senora and who never gets out of the car. She is there, I gather, because Horacio cannot calculate the sale himself. He takes my choices around to her side of the car, she adds them up swiftly, and I pay whatever she says, always a fraction of what it would cost in New York.

Any number of people come to my door besides Horacio and his adding woman: the bread man (the pan man), the gas man, his truck announcing El Gaaaaasssssss, the water man, various other men selling puddings and cakes, a knife sharpener who announces his imminent arrival with a mournful whistle from blocks away, but only one woman.

She carries a doll entirely wrapped in a blanket. You can see this is not a living infant in her arms, but she tells you she is the mother of four and her husband has left her alone. The first time, she gives you a note someone has written for her in English. I would give her a peso or two just for inventiveness, but one day I saw her in front of Tom’s Bar in Ajijic as I was passing. She had with her the swaddled doll and a live girl of about five. She may not have recognized me, the mother, away from my house, because she held back and sent the girl ahead to beg money of me. I couldn’t refuse the child, but since then I refuse the mother with her toy baby.

You do have to be careful, as a foreigner, about these things.

One night I was in the plaza in Ajijic watching some amazing Tarascan dancers from Michoacan slap their feet against the tiles, thinking they must have the most powerful feet on earth. It was some festival occasion, of which there are many, and the plaza was filled with celebrants and vendors selling everything you can think of to eat or drink or wear or to outfit your house. You can buy all these things from the same people any Wednesday in Ajijic, Monday in Chapala, or Thursday in Jocotepec, at the weekly tiangues, but without the music.

In the dark plaza strung with tiny party lights and squares of intricately cut paper lace, fireworks castillos towering overhead, I particularly like the eggshells filled with confetti. If someone wants your attention, they can buy one of these confetti-stuffed eggs and crack it over your head. Everyone laughs at the victim, who is forced to laugh at himself. Mexicans are blessed with this two-way sense of humor. Those who can’t take it, don’t have what it takes.

This night there were young boys selling bubble mix with large frames to blow large bubbles. I had just sat down on a bench in front of the smaller church. One of these boys left his bubble post and came up to me. He spoke very fast and my Spanish was not enough to keep up, but he was obviously asking for money. If he had brought the bubble mix and wanted to sell it, I would have bought some, but he had not, so I pretended no understanding of what he wanted.

An old gentleman with a remarkably erect spine and sitting on the next bench to mine, let loose with a stern lecture on this boy that sent him sharply back to his bubbles. Not wanting to corrupt the boy, knowing the local sentiment against begging, I bought some bubble mix and gave it away to a mother with children, and walked off. I don’t know if this met with the old man’s stringent requirements for village honor or not, but he did not shout at me.

All to say that gringos throwing money around, even in these minute amounts, offends the local sensibility which respects and demands hard work. So I have become more Mexican in this way, which is to say I give away almost nothing and pay only for something in exchange: fish, bread, water, labor, a mop or a broom.

Monique/4

I’m just glad Miguel didn’t insist on dragging me with him again today to Guadalajara. I can take only so much shopping before I turn nasty. Having spent an hour cleaning shrimp to atone for being mean to Miguel, I take a cup of coffee and my laptop out to the garden, where there is a soft breeze ruffling the banana leaves.

The slant of the late day sun throws light and dark across the mountains starkly outlining their contours in deep green, this time of year, and black. There are Indios living their traditionally isolated way in those mountains, but the forest is so thick on the slopes, there is not a hint of them from here. On the lower slopes are the fraccionamentos, as they are called, housing mostly Canadians, many Americans, and some Europeans, along with Guadalajarans wealthy enough to own weekend casas. Below the mountains is a chain of pre-Hispanic villages, situated along the north shore of Lake Chapala, which, despite the gringo invasion, remain Mexican in culture; at least, so far.

My maid, Santa, asked me how many gringos I thought there were here. She always blushes when she says the word, but she knows I dislike being called Estadosunidoiense, and maybe thinks “gringo” is more polite. I told her what I had read, about 3,000 of about a million foreigners total living in the Republic. She shook her head sadly, yet was shocked when I told her some 2 million Mexicans a year entered the United States. She had no idea, although her husband is there working in Indiana. Having a maid and a gardener is foreign to me, but here, if you don’t hire locals, if you do the work yourself, you are seen to be cheating somebody out of a job; fine by me who hates housework and wouldn’t know a garden tool from a spatula.

I check the time left on my battery. I need to buy a spare one for when this one runs down, but it lasts through an hour and a half of work. I took a course in digital layout to be able to earn a living wherever in the world I wanted to be. I lay out book interiors for New York publishers using Adobe software and email the finished product to the client. It’s a living. I don’t claim to be creative about it. I have a stock of templates I use again and again, so it’s only my time I sell, but it’s my time that means most to me. Checks are deposited automatically into my Citibank account. I withdraw whatever pesos I need from ATM machines here. After the battery runs low I will have to plug back in at my desk inside, but for this hour and a half, working conditions are lovely here under a bluest sky, and I am too busy to think or feel or wonder.

The shrimp sauce over pasta is pretty good, I think, and Miguel agrees. He outright rejected the oysters in fresh lime juice and a bit of olive oil flavored with cilantro, so I had them all to myself. The wine, for Mexican wine, is not too bad. After a few glasses, Miguel broaches the subject.

“So you never heard where she went?”

“You know I never heard where she went.”

“You never asked?”

“You know I never asked.”

Miguel raises his brown eyes to the high boveda ceiling before pouring more wine for both of us. He looks above my head to the painting he bought in Barbara’s Bazaar. He had bought it for his Park Slope apartment, but it looks so good where it is now, he is leaving it for me. He takes a good long breath and sets down his glass.

“I don’t understand, Monique. Didn’t you want to know?”

“I wanted to know where, yes, but I didn’t want to know why. If I asked where, I may have been told why, and I did not want to know. Do you see?”

“No.”

“Something happened.”

“Of course, something happened. A mother’s not going to just leave her kid with no explanation and for no reason.”

“But I don’t know what it was, just something bad.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because if it hadn’t been something bad, I would know what it was. It would have been talked about like anything else that happens in life, in a family, in a neighborhood, just ordinary talk. Kids would have yelled it at me in the street, had they known, which they did not, so it must have been serious.”

“That’s it? That’s the whole thing?”

I don’t say anything, but I start clearing the table with some noise. What does he want me to say? What does he want me to do? Why can’t he leave me alone? He doesn’t even try to help me after I cooked him dinner, but sits brooding at the table like some goddamned patriarch. I set out grapes and softened cheese and sit down again.

“What about your father?”

“You know he died in the war before I was born,” I remind him. “You know all of what I know.”

He stirs himself to get two Frangelicos. He says he wants me to ask him what he did today, so I do.

“What did you do today, asshole?”

He laughs. He tells me he went to a bazaar near Minerva Circle owned by a cousin of the vendor who sold him the photograph. It’s this cousin’s merchandise the two brothers sell at the Sunday Antiques Market. The three are partners in clearing out estates of mostly gringos who die here or want to move away without lugging their household goods back home. Old Mexican families might sell off an aged relative’s estate in order to put a house up for sale. The cousins pack it all up and cart it off, and what they can’t sell for good money on eBay, they use to stock the store and the market tables.

Miguel takes a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, a Chapala address written across it. Chapala? She was in Chapala? My mother was in Chapala? When? How? Why? And why am I here only five miles away? What brought me to this place, besides the exquisite climate, or who, and why?

“Easy” Miguel says. “Not your mother. It was a man, an old man who died and this guy cleared the place out. There was nobody else, he said so. I was wondering about your father?”

I get up and go into my study. I open a drawer where I keep the few photographs I brought with me to Mexico. I take out the one of my father. I put it on the table in front of Miguel. We both look at the impossibly handsome soldier in uniform. What was it about that generation, they all looked like movie actors in their black and white studio portraits?

“He never came back, Miguel.” I light a cigarette. “He didn’t make it,” I add, which is how Aunt Mary always said it.

It is Miguel’s turn. He goes to his room and comes back with a slender stack of postcards. They all carry the same image of the Ivory Soap factory on the salt marsh, where Aunt Mary worked. They are postmarked Elizabeth, New Jersey, just a ferry’s hop across the Arthur Kill at its entry to Newark Bay. There is one postcard every year Aunt Mary lived until she died and I was gone from there, living in a room in an apartment on Jane Street and studying world literature at New York University.

“Let’s go out,” I say.

We walk through the dark and dangerously cobbled streets along the Camino Real, turn left a block and right to La Bodega. The Mexican owner greets us and escorts us to a table along the patio. His gringo partner, his wife, is behind the bar. The music is just starting, some progressive jazz, that is loud and pervasive, and diverting. We drink a string of martinis and reel our way home through La Floresta in pitch black. We can hear the horses blowing in the stone corral, can’t see them, but smell their rich dung all along the Camino Real. There is Cuban music blasting from the hotel on the lake and Miguel demands to go hear it, but I assure him we will hear it from the house. Miguel trips and scrapes his knee on a sharp cobblestone. I make it home to San Antonio Tlayacapan in one piece.

Monique/5

Miguel has only one day left to his vacation. We have breakfast at Mario’s and then arrange an early call for the next morning to the airport with a cabdriver in the plaza. We sit on a bench from which we can see the Chapala bus come along Rafael Corona to make the turn past the plaza. The local buses are always crowded, but Miguel and I get a seat together. There is a father and son who sometimes board the bus together. The father plays guitar and the son, about eleven years old, the accordion. The son sings like an angel and I wish they would come along today so Miguel can hear them, but we get a man raising money for repairs to one of the churches. Miguel, as always, gives too much money.

“I forgot to tell you,” he says. “The guy said the house was across the street from the American Legion Post.”

“I know where that is. It’s a popular place to go. They have a restaurant there.”

“Open to the public?”

“I believe so, but you’re a veteran, aren’t you?”

Miguel was in the Navy, stationed in the Persian Gulf long before the recent wars, between college and law school. “I’ve never been to an American Legion Post,” he says. “Do they let Catholics in?”

“You’re with me,” I boast, although I have never been there either. “We can get off now. That’s Morelos over there.”

Mexico doesn’t start as early as Miguel or I do, and there are stores only now raising their steel fronts. The stucco-coated brick buildings are flush along the sidewalks with no room for trees along the narrow streets. Here and there along our way, women are outside scrubbing the sidewalks in front of their houses and stores, tossing the soapy water into the gutter.

The memory of this morning task comes to me, housewives and shopkeepers scrubbing sidewalks, but I don’t think it’s done anymore in New York. This is one of the mundane, 1950s-type things this country retains and we have lost; this and families out together at night, generations of them, at a church dance, sitting on benches as children play, or just walking around the town.

The house is painted green, a washed-out green that reminds me of government. From the front, it is styled somewhat like my own rented house, but much larger. There is an indented space for a car to park. On either side rooms jut out, forming an enclosure gated in wrought iron. This is where I have my front patio with the heavy wood furniture cut from a Michoacan tree. I bought it especially for the patio that is meant for a parked car.

One front room, like mine, too, is likely to be the kitchen, because I can see a roofless adjunct that would be the utility area. I can’t see beyond any of this, because there are dusty Venetian blinds covering all windows, but there is possibly a courtyard with rooms opening onto it. The house is not very old, maybe 1950s or 1960s, but looks to be Mexican in structure.

Miguel rings the doorbell on the house, but nobody answers. I turn around to look across the street at the American Legion Post. It is said to be the largest membership south of the United States. It is a large property for the middle of a town, with a white wall around the whole thing, and a formal garden I can see through the open gate.

This is when it happens that a roof dog immediately above where we are standing goes mad.

We have time enough to look up in response to the sudden howls of rage when the large brown dog leaps. It is caught midair by its collar and long chain attached somewhere; hangs itself, in front of our upturned eyes. I feel foaming spittle smack my face. The dog’s flat tongue is flailing from the side of its mouth. There is a quick struggle, while we listen to the scrape of its fingernails in a desperate scratching scramble on the stucco wall, the clank of the chain on the tile roof, and then dead silence as the dog hangs over the street.

A small crowd surrounds us for the spectacle. An old woman repeats, “Trieste.” She looks at me and shakes her head. I think, “I didn’t do anything,” but she pats my arm sympathetically. She says again, “Trieste.” This is more than can have been expected. Animals, like death, are more easily taken for granted in this culture than my own. But, of course, she feels for me, not the dog.

Suddenly, we are alone, Miguel and me, wondering what happened to the people. But here is a policeman in a black uniform and matching hair. He asks to see our papers and we show them. He wonders aloud as if to himself, “Just passing on the street?” Then he tells us to go.

We walk in traffic. We are both a bit dazed. We find a wall overlooking Lake Chapala in Christiana Park and sit down. Miguel is sad. Dogs make him think of his mother’s dog. His mother’s dog makes him think of his mother. He misses her even years after her death. Well, I miss my mother longer than he misses his. I am so petty lately, I can’t stand myself.

I start thinking about the American Legion Post. There’s nothing to be done about the dog. The police will have it taken away. Miguel really isn’t the best person I know to escort me into the post. I think of a half dozen people right off who go there regularly for drinks, to dance, play chess, do charity work.

Miguel’s only qualification is that he was a veteran, but so are these other people. I know a woman, in fact, who is a retired secretary of the C.I.A., probably better than a veteran. She is in my Spanish class. I always wanted to hear about her job, but it’s not the kind of thing one can ask. I imagine she will go with me for a drink at the American Legion.

I can go by myself. Veterans’ posts are not foreign territory to me. My aunt’s gentleman friend belonged to several and would take her for a dance or card game on Sunday afternoons. They would always take me with them. I can smell old beer, as I think of it, and hear the sound of the polka. My feet want to dance, as I think of it. But I want to go with someone who will talk, someone who has been in these parts a while, who knows his way. Suddenly I know the exact person to take me to the American Legion.

“Let’s go shopping,” I say to Miguel.

He is anxious to find another gift for his sister and she has asked that he bring home Mexican vanilla. Miguel has already shopped away more than my monthly rent on this vacation, but he is always ready. His plane leaves early in the morning, and I will miss him, although I have never had trouble being alone without being lonely.

“I wonder if anyone had been feeding that dog,” I say.

“At least he’s not feeding on us.” Miguel is looking on the bright side now.

I actually buy myself a fruit bowl. It is square, a muddy orange ceramic with blue and red fruit. It is cheap, because it is part of a set of dinnerware that’s been discontinued. It is beautiful. I sit outside on the low wall in front of the church. I am happy about my fruit bowl, yet an old woman pats my arm and says, “Trieste.” I am not, I want to shout, but she is an entirely different old woman to the one of the hanging dog. I smile and say thank you. She moves on. I go back into the store, which is named Mexico!, and hustle Miguel.

Monique/6

A man named Patrick returns my phone call. He is a nice man I struck up a conversation with over breakfast at Jose’s in Chapala. I’ve seen him there a few times now and we always talk for a while. He has been twenty years in Chapala, having come immediately out of the Army on his retirement. He will be in Puerto Vallarta for a few days this week, but we make a date to have lunch at the American Legion Post next Tuesday.

The postcards: I have them spread out on my dining table. In the 1950s and early 1960s, they are addressed to my mother in Mexico City. In the later 1960s and through the 1970s, they are addressed to my mother in Guadalajara. Then there is the one to Chapala, only one postcard to Chapala, because that year Aunt Mary died.

Miguel only bought the postcards because of the postmark, Elizabeth, New Jersey, where I had told him my aunt used to take me to buy school shoes on Avenue A, and the images of the soap factory on the edge of the salt marsh. It was only on the bus coming home, as he studied them, he divined the shortened “Mrs. V. Sant” to Van Sant. There’s no reason he should have seen that right away. And, of course, Miguel saw the one postcard to Chapala, so he is not as oblivious as his friends may think he is.

Every card is addressed, “Mrs. V. Sant.” My name is Monique Van Sant, an only child: father Harold, deceased; mother Anna, disappeared; guardian Aunt Mary Summerfield, the one who sent the annual postcard. The mailing address on the last of them is not the old man’s house, but a post office box in Chapala. She was here by 1983; Aunt Mary knew she was here by then, knew enough to change the address, and then my great aunt died.

I still own Aunt Mary’s house. I would give it to the historical society, but she never trusted they would take care of it. Family homes of friends of hers had been turned over to the society and left to rot in the damp air off Newark Bay. I can’t sell it, because nobody who would buy it would leave it standing, and it’s been there since 1693. Aunt Mary would roll over in her grave if I let her house be torn down.

There used to be a lot more of them, and not that long ago, these small wooden houses, unpainted and weathered, that looked as if they had grown out of the ground. They would have had high stockade fences surrounding them to protect the inhabitants from Indian raids, at one time. Inside the floors were uneven, the kitchens grown in stages over the centuries, the bathrooms cold shacks slapped onto an outside wall, no closets in the bedrooms, and knockers instead of doorbells.

They are all gone now, except for Aunt Mary’s, and I can’t bring myself to do anything about the house except to rent it out to a couple who looks after it. There is one small room I had shoved cartons of her belongings inside and padlocked. I have to think there are postcards or letters from my mother in one of those boxes, at least those with her changes of address. My aunt would never have a telephone and only took electricity after mid-century, but I suppose my mother could have phoned the grocery store. No, she wouldn’t have; the neighbors thought of Anna as dead by then. The neighbors were dead by then, the entire neighborhood dead.

I remember emptying the bureau of her papers, not having the heart to go through them, and thinking her cousin the lawyer would have whatever was important. I was in love at the time and didn’t want to be bothered: Couldn’t be bothered to look for traces of my own mother in that bureau. As I grew older, fell in and out of love several times, I thought more about the past, and I guess it is the ordinary way of things. But I never went back to the old house to look through the boxes. I never went back there after burying Aunt Mary.

This peculiar place, there on the edge of the great marsh, on the shores of Newark Bay, part of New York City yet apart, is where I was born and grew, struggling to get out, until I went. I remember showing Miguel a picture of the old house once. He said it reminded him of old houses in Gravesend, Brooklyn. I had laughed: Gravesend, perfect. My mother must have felt, as I did, that it was all too small, too slow, too saturated with time. Is that it? Did she just have to get out of there, get out into the world, to live, to see, to breathe?

I don’t know.

I look at Anna’s picture and see it is misleading. She was more stylish than that house dress, wore lipstick called Tangerine, straight skirts with spiked shoes. She smoked Lucky Strikes and drank Manhattan Cocktails. She went to jazz clubs with a group of young women she called “the girls” after work at the International Nickel Company. She went to nightclubs with men on weekends. She took late night drives with perfect strangers to Philadelphia for a cup of coffee and excursion boats to Rye Beach. She was a young and beautiful widow in the 1950s, wore her hair in a French twist; attuned to her times, she was rarely at home in her house dress. I look at Anna’s picture, see her ash blond hair already shot with gray in her early twenties when she left, and I see my own, her high cheekbones and clear skin, and my own, her thick ankles and mine, her blue-washed eyes and strong smile, mine.

Monique/7

I need passport photos to upgrade my visa. I have time, but I am looking for any excuse to go to Chapala. I don’t know why I think I need an excuse. I am free as a bird to go where I will. Should I meet up with someone I know, I want to have a predetermined reason to be there. I am anxious not to talk about any of it. It’s trouble enough that my mind races on this unknowable track without my mouth doing it, too.

The officially sanctioned photographer has a storefront on Avenida Moreno across from the bus station. The front room is painted beige and decorated with black and white photographs of the town. They are quite good, as good as some I have seen published in La Tempestad. Perhaps these won’t be as ugly as the usual passport photos. On that happy thought, I sit down in a plastic chair, one of those cheap white patio chairs that are everywhere now in the world.

The photographer pulls back a black curtain and steps out. He is maybe 70 years old. His hair is full and white, cut in a slight pompadour, and he has a brush mustache. He is dressed in a khaki colored suit that is well tailored, a white shirt and black string tie. He is a handsome old devil with some mischief in his eye. He looks at me as if he is wishing he were even ten years younger than he is and shakes his head. He tells me there is a problem in his life and asks if I would come back another day. This, too, is Mexico.

I walk to the plaza and stroll around to Jose’s for lunch, but once I have the menu in front of me, I decide to go alone to the American Legion post to eat. I can’t wait for Patrick to return from Puerto Vallarta, and I can always go again. It is only a few blocks walk.

I look up at the roof of the house where there is a new dog. There is also a sign on the house: “Se Vende.” I don’t remember seeing it there the day the dog died. I write down the name and number for the real estate agent. The door opens and a Mexican maid comes out. She is holding one of those long straw brooms that are so good for sweeping tiled floors.

“Buenos dias,” I say.

“Buenas tardes,” she corrects me. I will never get it straight.

In my poor Spanish I ask her if she had worked in that house a long time. She looks puzzled for a moment, but answers: No, she had lived next door for eighteen years. No, no Senora Anna ever lived in this house. I can’t think of what to ask next and cross the street to the post. I get up the front walk and think I should have gotten the old man’s name, at least, but when I turn around, the maid has gone back inside.

I can’t possibly eat. My stomach feels stricken by red ants. If I were a cat on a hot tin roof, I would be Elizabeth Taylor. I walk out to the street. A tan station wagon is now parked in front of the house. A woman is at the wheel looking at a legal pad, holding a pen she taps lightly against her forehead. She is biting her lower lip. She is American or Canadian, I think, maybe her first listing. I cross the street and say hello. Real estate agents are the same everywhere, sharks smelling blood. She gives me a big smile and swims out of her car.

The house is not as I had envisioned. It is dark and gloomy, and if there had ever been a maid here, she hadn’t worked very hard. There is no courtyard, just a boring box of rooms that open into each other. I try to wipe some dirt off a back window with the side of my hand. The real estate agent is embarrassed as she should be. She hadn’t wanted to put up the sign before the house was cleaned and repainted, but her Mexican boss had insisted.

“There’s a casita,” she points out hopefully.

I decide I will string her along and tell her there’s no need for me to see the casita, so I can come back another day. I tell her instead, the house isn’t right for me.

On the way out, I say, “You know, it’s an odd thing, but I feel like I have been inside this house before.”

She is not interested, but says, “Really?”

“Oh, I know, the Fonseca family, is this where they used to live? About five years ago?”

“The owner’s name was Sant.” She is already moving toward her car. “He built the house, so it couldn’t be.”

“When?”

She is getting into her car. She looks at me over the car roof.

“When what?”

“When was the house built?”

This is a reasonable question to pose to a real estate agent, and she is starting to irk me.

She pulls out her listings and finds the right one. “In the 1980s sometime,” she says. “They are not very exact here about these things.”

She waves goodbye and pulls away.

Why wouldn’t Miguel have told me the dead man’s name was my own? Who was the dead man? Did my father have a brother? Did my mother live in this house, after all? And if she had, why had the maid lied to me? Had my father really died in the Korean War?

Well, that was enough right there.

I had stood at his graveside with my mother, holding her hand like a precursor to John-John Kennedy, the day my father went into the ground. I had visited his grave on Sundays, cleaned and planted it every spring with my Aunt Mary. The American Legion had posted a flag on his grave every Veterans Day, and probably still do.

I look across the street and see Patrick.

“I left a message with your maid,” he calls to me. “My business in PV fell through.” After a minute, he adds, “Monique? You look like you could use a drink.”

So here I am, finally, inside the American Legion Post in Chapala. We are in the bar and it is dark and shadowy. I can’t think of a single thing to say to this man.

Patrick is a jovial fellow and fills any silence with a joke ordinarily, but just now he is examining my face in a serious way. A hard look comes into his blue eyes and around his mouth. He has decided something about me. He puts some money on the bar for the drinks.

“Whatever you’re up to, Monique, leave me out of it.”

“I’m writing an article,” I say quickly, “about veterans who retire to Lake Chapala.”

He walks out. I watch his back. The bartender comes over and says, “What’s up his behind?” I shrug and start off the stool. The bartender is still talking. “You sure look like somebody used to come in here.”

“I do?”

“Yep, you sure look like Virginia, used to live across the street. Sitting on that stool, you’re the picture.”

My mother’s name was Anna, I try to say, but it doesn’t come out.

“Came to a bad end, Virginia, but she was a lady.”

“What happened to her, Virginia?”

“In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He looks down at my drink.

“You having another?”

He’s finished talking.

“My mother’s name was Anna,” I say.

“You say so.”

He takes the two glasses, still full of ice and whiskey, and walks to the other end of the bar.

I go.

Monique/8

I spend the next few days at home watching my big front windows nervously, waiting for a pipe bomb to come flying through the glass. The homey air of the American Legion Post had turned sinister so suddenly, but I don’t doubt it happened. I was all nervy, it’s true, and sometimes my imagination tricks me, but this had not been one of those times.

I can’t stand myself anymore. Locking the house, I walk to the plaza for the bus, thinking the photographer may have passed his personal crisis by now, and I can have my new passport photos. He has no regular hours posted, but there is a yellowed sign on his door saying he will be back at 1 P.M. I have given up wearing a watch since I’ve been in Mexico. I like the freedom, but sometimes there is a cost, like today. Well, 1 P.M. will come sooner or later, so I sit on his step in the shade of the doorway.

Chapala is having one of its busy days, traffic is thick on the ground, and shoppers clog the sidewalks. There must be a band in the plaza today; actually, two bands. I can now hear them clashing out their separate tunes in more and more volume. It is an oddly joyful clamor and music is everywhere in Mexico. Nobody calls the police, who would laugh at the idea of a noise complaint, in any case, and probably arrest the complainant.

A woman in Indian dress walks a step behind her husband. He is dressed in the white pajamas with a sash at his waist and a wide straw hat on his head. His clothes are blindingly white from having been dried on the grass in the sun. The woman who dried the clothes is all color in her dress. Her black hair hangs straight down her back. A large covered basket is balanced miraculously on her head and, though short, she walks tall as any runway model.

Sitting here reminds me of a stone slab behind my Aunt Mary’s house and down toward the water. There was an abandoned coal yard down there, which had been the business of one of her ancestors who lived in the house. Somebody at some time had dragged the stone slab to the top of a small mountain of coal that had been left behind when oil came into use.

My mother used to carry me to the top of that pile of coal, both of us blackened with dust, so we could see the Manhattan skyline in the distance past Bayonne. It was the old skyline with needle-top skyscrapers, the one that thrilled the world, beckoning. Patrick and the bartender at the American Legion may have recognized “Virginia” in me, as I sat on her favorite barstool, but it is sitting on this stone step that convinces me Anna had been here before me. I no longer feel afraid.

The photographer is stepping through traffic and is caught on the tree-lined island in the middle of the street. He is watching me as I rise and I know he sees Virginia, but I am ready for him. I am ready for all of them, come what may. I was right. The photos are much better than the ones on my passport. I show the photographer, Senor Marcellos Bravo y Diaz, and he suggests we cut them out and replace them. I laugh at this subversive notion, but he doesn’t, and I wonder how many times he has done just that.

“Senora, I am about to have a small comida on my patio. Won’t you join me?” He asks so courteously that I do.

He holds my chair as I sit. The patio is actually a courtyard to a large house on the next street. A maid immediately brings a tray with two pitchers, one of lemonade and one of Margaritas. He pours the Margaritas without asking, but drinking in the afternoon never seems so bad here.

“Delicioso,” I say to the maid after tasting mine.

She smiles politely and then speaks in Spanish, addressing him as Don Marcellos. He nods in agreement to whatever it was. When Mexicans speak to each other, it is very fast.

“My daughter,” he says, glancing at her back as she goes into the house. “I would have introduced you, but she doesn’t care for women.”

I realize there is a facial resemblance, but the skin color is very different, hers Indio and his Caucasian, or almost.

“Why would she address you so formally?”

“She likes to think of herself as a servant. Her mother was the same way, my third wife, the only one to give me a child. But her mother has the excuse she actually was a servant when I married her. This one, she is just obstinate.”

“It seems very odd to an American.”

“Both of them, when referring to me, the husband and father, they would say El Senor. Is El Senor at home? Would El Senor care for a coffee? Drove me crazy when there were two of them, but now there is only the one, it makes me nostalgic and I rather like it.”

“Old fashioned, I guess.”

“Nobody can blame me for that. I wanted my daughter to be a modern woman, go to university, read great authors, and live in Paris! This one, she has never even been to Guadalajara. She visited Jocotepec one time in her life to see cousins there.”

“My great aunt was the same way. We lived across the bay from Manhattan, this great city, and she was never there even once.”

“Yes, I think some women are cut out this way. My daughter would never leave her mother, and now she won’t leave me. Ah, but I will appreciate it more soon enough.”

“Have you always lived here in Chapala?”

“Not I. I have lived many places, always in Mexico, except for a year in Havana, but none of my wives cared to travel.”

The food, a garlicky shrimp soup and avocado salad, is very good. There is a light custard for desert, and while serving it, the daughter speaks again to her father. He looks past me to his house, wipes his mouth, tossing the napkin across his plate, and stands.

“Por favor, Senora Monique, someone annoying person is here. It will only be a moment.”

As they are crossing the patio, I look over my shoulder. It is a man who bows and says, “Excellency” to the storefront photographer, who takes his arm and leads him inside the house. Mexicans are a very formal and dignified people, as a rule, but this goes farther than anything I’ve witnessed.

Smiling, I get up and walk to what was once the casita and is now the photography studio. The door is standing open. I want to see again the photographs on display in the front room. There is a short, dark hallway we had walked through, but coming in from the bright sunlight, I am almost blinded. I see dimly a light switch and turn it on. There is a second display of photographs along the walls of the hallway that I had missed.

These are very different. No National Graphic type shots of small boats on Lake Chapala, or of Guadalajara’s Centro and splendid fountains, or the Braniff Mansion up the street, or Chapala’s famous railway station in its brief service to the friends of the late dictator, also, I realize, named Diaz. I know what they are, these photographs. They are all in black and white and identified with white ink by location. They are postcard images, no question, from early in the century; the original photographs for what are called real photo postcards.

El Senor’s shadow falls into the hall. He is relaxing against the doorway, lighting a cigarette, and inhaling with enjoyment.

“My uncle,” he says. “I was never so talented.” He shrugs and flips ash into the yard. “The great day for postcards was in the past when I came along.”

“They’re marvelous,” I say truthfully. “If you ever go broke, they’re worth a fortune to the right collector.”

He laughs and says he’s been broke and they’re not worth that much.

I notice a book under his arm. He says he wants me to have it: The Mystery of Capital by Hernando De Soto. I read the subtitle: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. I don’t know what to say or why he’s giving me this book. Naturally, I thank him.

“It will tell you why you shouldn’t be thinking of buying a house here. We will talk it over next time.”

So, there will be a next time. I thank him for lunch and again for the book. He is closing the door behind me, reaching for another sign saying he will be closed until sometime or other. I turn to face him, but I have to push the door open a little.

“How did you know about that house?” I ask, mildly curious.

“In Chapala, everybody knows everything.”

He laughs pleasantly, closes and locks the door.

Monique 9

A few days later, Santa comes into my study. She has heard that I want to buy a house in Chapala. She takes the bus to me from far western Ajijic and walks from here to her next client in La Floresta. It would make her life difficult, she says, although Senora Monique is una buena persona, whose employ means everything to her, and she herself would never leave, not even to join her husband in Indiana. Santa and I enjoyed breakfast together only an hour ago and never mentioned this topic. She has not left the house nor have I. But she is genuinely upset and she has definitely heard this news in the past hour.

“El Gas,” she explains. The man told her when she was cleaning bird shit off the front step to tell me that house in Chapala has two tanks and will need twice the gas. “So, you see, Senora Monique, that house in Chapala is not a good idea.”

Santa often gives me advice of this kind, where to shop, how to order, what to say that will bring the cheapest prices. She thinks nothing of interrupting whatever I am doing for these involved discussions, which take so much time because of my poor Spanish. I don’t feel like it just now. I tell her she is absolutely right and turn back to my computer.

“Bueno,” she says, and goes out to disarrange my furniture, which she does every week as she cleans.

A while later, she must still be upset, because I hear her leave without saying goodbye, but soon the lock turns again.

“Senora Monique,” she calls, “to see you is El Ambassador.” The door slams and she is gone.

I give up what I am doing and in the sala is Senor Marcello Bravo y Diaz.

“Ambassador?”

He kisses my hand.

He shrugs it off, “Oh, these Mexican people, titles are everything.” He says I should join him for lunch at the Hotel Chapala Real where Cuban music often plays. He has enjoyed Cuban music since the 1950s when he was, for a short time, in diplomatic service to Mexico.

“1959, I suppose?”

“The very year. Alas, it was all over too quickly.”

His car is parked outside, one of those cars I can never tell apart from other cars, and a modest one for a former ambassador, even to Cuba. We decide to walk and enjoy the day. Passing the long wall bordering a very large property that adjoins my small house, he remarks on my landlord’s business acumen.

“The only one in my family to make money and keep it.”

My landlord is his uncle, apparently, but he is younger, so I am confused.

“That scamp! That’s my cousin Humberto who collects the rents for our uncle. He owns nothing. He thinks he will inherit, but we shall see. Our uncle is almost one hundred years.”