Area Woman Blows Gasket (12 page)

A Simpler Life at Casa Patsy

"You're going to
Mexico
for six months?"

This, generally, the astonished question one gets from friends when one announces that one is going to Mexico for six months.
Depending upon the friend, the word emphasis might change, from "you're going to
Mexico?"
to "you're going to Mexico for six
months?"
— with one or two people locating their adamant incredulity squarely on the
"you're
going," as in "you,
Patricia Pearson,
are going to Mexico for six months?"

The only reason I can imagine that going to Mexico for six months is so surprising is because most of my friends are parents
now and tend to assume that they have signed their lives over to an international consortium of petting zoos.

But, I try to tell them, I have a quest. I am blowing a gasket and I need to find simplicity. Go away media. Go away malls
and pop-up ads and choices and false expertise. Shoo. I want to move to a wild, rugged, and beautiful place that is warm and
languid, with no Fox TV or SUVs. Where my children can be exposed to village life, to the importance of community ritual,
to the reality of poverty. Where they can discover a world wholly unfamiliar with John Ritter's last hurrah as the voice of
Clifford the Big Red Dog.

"But why Mexico?" the friends ask, as if Canada's boreal forest would do.

The idea of going to Mexico came to me when I was reading a newspaper in Starbucks one day and discovered that the Mexican
government had changed its laws on citizenship. It used to be that if you had Mexican citizenship, you could not carry a passport
from any other country.Viva Mexico! Thus, although I was born in Mexico City, when my father was posted there, I had to renounce
Mexican citizenship at the age of twenty-one in order to remain a Canadian. In 1998, however— as I was discovering in the
newspaper over a vanilla latte— the Mexican government repealed this law, primarily in order to encourage Mexican emigres
to the United States to move freely back and forth and to invest their dollars back home.
Ay caramba!
In their wake— surprise!— came me.

Needless to say, the daughter of a Canadian diplomat was not the intended beneficiary of the law, but I'm harmless enough.
And it was my birthright. After all, I came into the world hearing muttered Spanish and was first held by Mexican hands.
"Una ninaV
1
was the very first observation made about me. I was conceived, conceptualized, and announced in Mexico. What could be more
fitting than a return to my first hurrah?

My bid for serenity began in a snowstorm at five in the morning after a sleepless night of worrying that I would sleep through
my alarm, compounded by even more extreme worry that I would never fall asleep at all. Which indeed I did not. Among the many
useless notions that blundered like fat drunks at a frat house party through my mind all that night was that, if I ever wished
to deprive Ambrose of sleep, in order to more effectively interrogate him about where he left the car keys, I could just tell
him that he had to catch a flight at six on the following morning. Really, this is all one need do— to spouses, or prisoners
of war. You don't have to be inhumane. Simply tell your captive that they have an escape opportunity at dawn on the following
day, but that no one will be available to wake them up. Nothing works better.

I finally lurched out of bed vibrating with stress before the alarm went off, and next faced the quandary of having to trudge
through foot-deep snow in my ready-forMexico running shoes as I swept my car free of its new white winter coat. The drive
to the airport, in blowing snow with fishtail slush on the highway, was raggedly tense. I felt bitterly jealous of Ambrose,
still warmly asleep in the house, who was scheduled to come a few days later with the children. If a blue fairy had appeared
just then, warm and affectionate and confident like the fairy in
Pinocchio,
and said, "What is your wish?" I would have said, "Bed."

But she didn't appear, and when I parked at the drop­off lot, snow billowing around me in the darkness, I encountered two
men engaged in irritable verbal fisticuffs, fuck you— no, fuck you— fuck this. Kevin climbed into the airport shuttle with
me, and the woman behind us bellowed, "Oh for
God's
sake, a dog," as if Kevin were the last straw. We all proceeded in hostile silence to the terminal.

Deliver me please, God, from Canada in January at dawn. From a people disheartened by weather and darkness and SARS and the
prospect of war.

Seven hours later, warm as toast in my ski jacket, I found Kevin's cage at the Mexico City airport amid pieces of luggage.
He cried with relief when he heard my voice. I didn't need Rochelle Gai Rodney to discern what he was thinking. After he recovered
from the shock of flying cargo, followed by an hour in a minivan on hairpin mountain roads as we steered clear of Mexico City
and went over the volcanic rim to Tepoztlan, Kevin turned into Jack in
The Nightmare Before Christmas:
What's this? What's this? What smell do I find here? What's this, a donkey on the ro-oad. What's this? Horse poo? And there!
A cat with one le-eg. What's this, a swimming pool for meee?"

My dog explored while I, exhausted, sat at the long wooden table in my open-air dining room, gazing out at a large garden
filled with the cactus, hibiscus, and plum trees that encircled our swimming pool. Beyond the garden lay a wild valley full
of honeysuckle and magnolia trees. Or, that probably wasn't right— more likely it was forsythia and mango trees. Or jasmine
and pine trees. Actually, I didn't have a goddamn clue what I was looking at, but it was pretty and it smelled nice.

Raising my gaze, I found myself staring at a jagged hill— bare and craggy at its summit. The hill was close enough to shoot
at, if one were so inclined, and thus we would come to watch the vultures who nested there and who otherwise wheeled noiselessly
above us, waiting for one of our pets to be poisoned by the landlord. About which more later.

On very clear days, from our bedroom balcony we can see Mexico's largest active volcano, the magnificent Popocatepetl, which
is an ancient Nahuatl word meaning "we don't much care for vowels." The volcano is perfectly cone-shaped. From its tip streams
an extraordinary plume of steam and gas because Popocatepetl is volatile these days, and keenly watched by volcanologists.

When Ambrose and the children arrived, we settled into an extremely basic routine. Geoffrey wandered around naked, placing
his Carnegie Collection dinosaurs at various strategic posts in the shrubbery, while Clara and the dog swam in the pool, and
Ambrose came down with some combination of malaria, Ebola, and dengue fever, retreating to the bedroom, never to be seen again.
I wrote stuff, and followed news on the Internet about the Bush administration's mounting impatience with the rest of the
world for their failure to see the threat from Iraq. The Security Council needs to "stand up and be counted," I remember Condi
Rice saying, as if all of its members, which included Mexico at the time, were cowering and blubbering like "girlie men" rather
than offering valid objections to a hurried and precipitous invasion.

Unsettled, I walked down into town to read the Mexican papers that are sold in the square and found myself gazing in wonder
at a magazine cover that featured a fat naked man slumped over dead on his toilet. This was a true crime magazine. These are
extremely popular in Mexico, so don't get the idea that a people committed to family, community, and church aren't also fond
of seeing fat naked men dead on toilets, because they are.

Indeed, I would be remiss if I suggested that there was less sensationalism or clamor in Mexico. It is just that their ruckus
is different. On a typical morning in Tepoztlan for instance, you awaken not to telemarketers, pundits, and TV ads, but to
an incessant overlay of barking dogs, backfiring trucks, squealing pigs, chirping crickets, crowing roosters, clanging brass
bands, and exploding firecrackers. By midafternoon, I might add, when most other noises have calmed down, the firecrackers
are still going off all over the arid highly incendiary landscape. They are meant to scare off the devil, and maybe they do.
The also cause me to poke myself in the eye with my mascara brush. Sundays, naturally, are the worst. Ash Wednesday through
Easter are insufferable.

The town of Tepoztlan has been written up by anthropologists as a classic Mexican pueblo. It is where the famously drunken
author Malcolm Lowry situated
Under the Volcano,
his brilliant novel about a diplomat's self-destruction through drink. I could certainly see the route to excessive drinking
here, with tequila for sale in all of the corner stores, and corner stores the preferred business venture of the citizenry,
who simply knock off their living room walls to proffer tomatillos, Cheetos, and booze. The trouble is that getting to a corner
store from our place involved a steep ankle-twisting cobblestone walk downhill past packs of matted wild dogs and starved
sullen cows, with roosters hopping sideways to avoid the hurtling taxis and collectivos, vehicles that stir up a dust so thick
it renders your pants unrecognizable.

"Honey," I might announce to the prone and perspiring Ambrose, "I'm just gonna trip and limp to the corner store after I change
into my rubber overalls and spray myself with Cow Be Gone, do you remember where you put the Fuck Off Scary Dog repellent?"

And then off I'd go, returning about an hour later, red-faced from heat exhaustion, prepared to quaff the entire six-pack
of Modelo beer that I'd just purchased on the spot.

The siesta, you must know, is a classic Mexican pueblo ritual, invented to sleep off the beer and sunstroke entailed in one's
initial foray to the corner store, or office or factory or what have you, before daring to resume the rest of one's daily
affairs. Interestingly, the Mexicans possessed no livestock whatsoever before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in
the sixteenth century, which means that they owned neither mules nor horses and had to go everywhere on foot. I'm fairly certain
that this would have left them red-faced, exhausted, and drunk at least once a day, and I'm not entirely surprised to learn
that the average lifespan in that time was twenty-seven years. After that, their feet were just blistered stumps and they
had to lie down.

We in more northern climes should rethink our roman-ticization of the siesta and, while we are at it, stop pining for the
spa and the pedicure. A simpler life begins by counting one's blessings.

The Neighbors in the Shrubbery

Can blessings include a car?

I've been wondering about this because a simple life can actually get rather complicated when the nearest decent supermarket
is twenty-five kilometers away. Granted we flew down thinking in terms of margaritas and tranquillity, with some vague idea
of home schooUng lamely tacked on to the fantasy, but after seventeen trips to the farmer's market to buy as many boxes of
Cheerios and juice as could fit in our knapsacks while we puffed and gasped uphill to our mountain retreat, we began thinking:
No. Not quite right. We need a car. A car for bulk shopping and stray-horse protection and for . . . making the children go
away! This latter thought occurs after a spell of nonstop shrieking that suggests that my children need a more concrete routine.

Car. School. Car. School. Car. More beer. Some tequila. School.

This, my mantra in the meditative ambience of Tepozdan.

We quickly locate car and school, and I am transformed into a mutant suburban mom, driving the kids to their petite Beatrix
Potterish
escuela
in our newly acquired and irredeemably ancient 1989 Chrysler Shadow, popping into the Superama for fruit rollups and beer,
dashing into the Woolworth's in Cuernavaca for piiiata supplies,
before returning to my idyllic house in order to hastily become an author contemplating the universe under the volcano,
after which I jump back into the Shadow and scoot back to school to be this week's volunteer parent at the dog-neutering
drive.

Lest I feel overwhelmed, I have noticed a poster in town advertising a Friday afternoon meeting for Neurotics Anonymous. I
am tempted to go, if only to discover whether they have merely misspelled "narcotics." But, the truth is, I don't feel tense,
for it isn't like that. There are arrangements to be made, and loud bangs driving mascara wands into my eye, but there aren't
any choices. Tepoztlan has only one bilingual school. The end. We met one person who had a car for sale. Here's your dough.
We don't know a soul, so there goes the need for a datebook in which to pencil in lunch dates. We receive no phone calls.
Ever. We never have mail. There are no billboards. We possess no TV. There is little public sanctimony and even less health
hysteria. Geoffrey stands in the car as I drive. We crack open cans of Modelo beer as we walk. Kevin can poo on the street,
and nobody cares if we don't have a Baggie, this being a town where untended animals outnumber people by a factor of two to
one.

Despondent, as I sometimes am, when I feel homesick or worried about world affairs and head lice, I step fully dressed into
the swimming pool, my dress floating up above my body as I sink in the cool water. The spontaneity of this limpid gesture
cheers me up, and I tiptoe-walk through the chest-high water, engaged in the rescue of drowning butterflies.

Mexico has changed since the 1960s, when my mother still remembers going into a restaurant bathroom and finding, for toilet
paper, a box of spoiled ballots. But it hasn't changed that much. There is a Wal-Mart in nearby Cuernavaca and a flourishment
of Internet cafes in Tepoztlan, as well as some highly sophisticated restaurants and shops catering to the Mexico City weekenders.
But, on the whole, materialism and status consciousness have not yet insinuated themselves as a dominant value. Nor— for better
or worse— has political debate beyond the sophisticated circles in urban centers.

"What do you think of the Americans invading Iraq?" I asked one taxi driver who spoke English. He considered the question,
tilting his head, knitting his brows, and then after lengthy reflection, he answered me with a slight apologetic shrug of
his shoulders: "Nothing."

The taxi drivers play penny poker on the hoods of their VW bugs and affably but resignedly allow us to interrupt them with
a fare, ferrying us along the cobblestones with crucifixes and Smurfs swaying madly from their rearviews.

When we walk along our road, called Camino San Juan, friendly women chat with us from their half-completed cinder-block houses
in the brambles. I have no idea what we and they are discussing, but gestures and warm smiles suffice. What is compelling
and unusual about the town, as I think on it now, is that the barriers aren't as pronounced— between inside and outside, work
and family, self and community, life and death, weekend and weekday, rich and poor, nature and civilization. There is a sense,
however difficult to measure, of being connected to everything vital around you.

In the evening we often wend our way up San Juan as the sun begins to edge toward the horizon. The warm light thrown upon
the cliffs above us and to the east is stunning, like the suffused reds and rusts of the Grand Canyon. Clara might find a
horseshoe or a dead snake— and, once, a puppy that we brought home. Geoffrey collects fallen hibiscus petals. Kevin wanders
into the corner store proprietor's living room, behind the racks of candy and scarfs down the cat's food.

Life has a fluid immediacy, that preoccupies and consoles.