Leaving San Miguel

This is our last week in San Miguel. We've been here almost three months and now we have to leave. I'm not sure I'm ready. There's so much I'm going to miss. The views across rooftops with their gas tanks, gardens, washing hanging from lines, cats lazing in the sun or trying to kill each other. None of it looking anything like a Sydney or New York City skyline.

In New York most everything is grey. Here in San Miguel the buildings are every kind of red, blue, maroon, yellow, brown, orange, green, there's even one of purple. Up in Balcones, a hulking black and dark brown house stands out like a tumor: the ugliest residence in town. Perfect home for an evil overlord. (Scott calls it Casa Harkonnen.)

The view westward is of the town, and beyond, mountains. Looking out there's a sense of limitless space. It just goes on and on and on. The sky is almost as big as at home. There's nothing claustrophobic about this town. Even at street level, every time you turn the corner you're hit with another vista. Just like Dunedin, Sydney and all the other hilly towns I love best.

I'll miss the people. When we first arrived we enjoyed not knowing anyone. Loved it even. I got to talk to Scott, Sylvia and Alejandra and that was more than enough. Scott and me, we buried ourselves in our work and wrote and wrote and wrote. Eight weeks later and our novels were in the hot little hands of our editors in New York. (I finished my first sold novel here. Am still pinching myself at that.) But somehow, not entirely sure how it happened, we found that we'd met a tonne of people. Now when we walk through the Jardin we wave and smile and stop to chat. Just like the East Village or Newtown, only, well, prettier.

I've never been anywhere it's so easy to meet people before. Perfect strangers will chat to you. You end up doing it yourself. One morning over breakfast at La Brasserie I became convinced that one of the women at the next table was Australian. The second one I wasn't so sure, her accent kept changing. So finally I asked them and was introduced to Yolanda, a Sydney girl like me, and Victoria, a USian who spent many years in Australia. Both of them fabulous.

I shall miss running into folk in the Jardin, watching everyone hanging out: Mexicans in the shade, gringos in the sun.

I'll miss the food. Most painfully in Sydney where Scott makes the only good Mexican in town. There's no jicama, no good mole, no tamales and forget about proper red or green hot sauce or hibiscus quesadillas, and definitely no superb tequila except for what we'll bring home ourselves (and how long will that last?). And possibly worst of all, no San Miguel pastries. I shall die.

I've never been as chill as I am here. I come from the land of "no worries" but it took living here in the land of "no pasa nada" for me to really relax.

I loved having guests here (Gwenda, Chris, Betty and Lloyd), showing them all our favourite San Miguel things (okay, mostly, favourite foods) and watching them struggle up the steep streets (altitude here's 2000 metres—it takes some adjusting for us lowland types) that we now found dead easy. We welcomed Betty and Lloyd, and farewelled Gwenda and Chris, with an eight-piece mariachi band (two violins, two trumpets, four guitars) playing for an hour in our garden (organised by the fabulous Luz). They were amazing, but the expression on Lloyd's face when he first saw them trouping in was best of all. (Though Luz brazenly telling the mariachis it was my 25th birthday and thus garnering us an extra song was a close second—for the record I'm not 25 and my birthday is nowhere near February.)

I won't miss cactus spikes. Particularly not when they've embedded themselves in my left thigh and my attempt to extricate them has resulted in another spike being buried deep in my left ring finger. Scott managed to pull them out with no injury to himself. Cactus spikes are evil and clearly misogynist too.

I won't miss the traffic. In December when we first arrived, there were hardly any cars, but even so that was still too many for the 16th-century cobblestone streets. By mid-February the roads were clogged with over-sized four-wheel drives (SUVs) spewing fumes and frequently getting stuck trying to make simple turns. The streets here are so narrow they're tricky to negotiate as a pedestrian, let alone a tank masquerading as a car.

With the influx of people and their gigantaur "cars" came an unbelievable increase in pollution. Walking along the streets I swear I'm breathing in more fumes than in New York City. The streets here are narrower, the buildings even closer together, so the exhaust has nowhere to go but into our lungs. Almost every morning the mountains in the distance are obscured by a grey-brown haze.

If I had my way I'd ban all motorised transport from the old city, even taxis and buses. Transport within those limits would be by shank's pony, bicycle, electric wheelchair, donkey or rickshaw. Nothing else. (If only that would happen in all my favourite cities in the world.)

I won't miss the lurgies either. During our three months here Scott and I have both been struck down by the turistas twice each. Yes, we've been careful; no, we haven't drunk the water. Didn't save us from spectacular chundering and runny-poo sessions with fever and aches and groans and the whole panoply. The horror.

The lurgies didn't kill us, but every year in Mexico they do kill, particularly babies. A clean water supply more than anything else (like, say, hosting the Olympics) dramatically improves quality of life: reducing infant mortality, increasing life expectancy. Rare as hen's teeth in the third world, invisibly ubiquitous in the first.

I'll miss Luz most of all. "Maid" is not a good word to describe what she does: looking after this house and the people in it. She cleans, pays bills, organises, repairs, cooks, entertains, gardens. She's manager, gardener, sage, maid, chef, seamstress, jester, and housekeeper rolled into one. She frequently stays here until seven, eight or nine at night. (And that's not counting the times she stays back to have a drink with us. She refuses to stay for dinner because her kids won't eat without her.)

Luz is an unbelievably good storyteller and has told me many, many stories in the last month. Of her life, of San Miguel. I've warned her that I'll steal her stories and write them down. Luz laughed and told me she'd love that. So with a clean conscious I can relate that one night she scared me half to death with ghost stories. We sat drinking beer, out on the deck chairs in the bottom garden, the fountain on and glowing, wind in the trees sounding like souls trapped in limbo (Luz's simile, not mine). She told me about La Llorona who wanders the waterways looking for her dead babies.

La Llorona had been young and beautiful (as Luz spoke I couldn't help imagining her as La Llorona—pre-death, anyway) with many lovers, but she refused to marry any of them, not one was good enough for her. She became pregnant several times, and when the baby was born she threw it into the river without a hint of sorrow, returning to whoever was her latest lover.

When Lllorona died she went up to heaven, but God wouldn't let her in. "Where are your babies?" he asked. She shook her head. God told her that until she found her babies she couldn't enter the pearly gates. So now she wanders the banks of the canals, rivers, creeks and lakes crying and searching for her dead babies.

From behind she is beautiful. Long dark hair flowing down an exquisite silk dress. Sometimes men follow her, clicking their tongues, calling to her, but when she turns she has the face of a devil, eyes of satanic red. Men have died instantly from meeting her gaze, others lose all their hair and can never make love again.

According to Luz there's hardly a house in this city that isn't haunted. This house, fortunately, is one of the exceptions. Her own isn't, though.

There's a tree more than 160 years old in the yard. They're not allowed to cut it down. Men were hung from its branches in 1925. Rebels against the government. On certain nights the family hears them moaning. And if there's a storm and the lightning flashes just right, choking faces with twisted mouths show clearly for a split second, but at the next lightning flash there's nothing, just the branches of the tree waving wildly in the wind.

Inside the house the ghost of an old lady sometimes appears. None of Luz's family recognises her. She moves back and forth from the kitchen to the top of the stairs. She's lost something and searches for it, asking whoever she runs across if they've seen it. But she never says what it is. Some nights she keeps everyone awake moaning and calling out. Luz doesn't think she's dangerous.

Luz has seen devils walking the streets of San Miguel. The first time was when she was in her late teens. She and one of her sisters would go out dancing every weekend. But one night her mother told them they couldn't go. It was Holy Week (Easter) and she wanted them to show some respect. They snuck out anyway and had a fabulous time dancing with their friends until the early morning.

On their way home they crossed the cemetery and started to get the shivers, but nothing happened. Then they turned into a short street not far from home, and out of nowhere a thick mist appeared. They both froze. A shape was forming in the mist. A giant dog with red eyes and teeth. They took a step back, and the dog drew a step closer, grinning malevolently. Luz's sister started to cry. Luz took a step sideways and the dog did the same. She hissed at her sister to pray and pressed her hands together, closed her eyes and started praying as hard as she could.

When she opened them, the dog was still there, even closer. She could smell its foul breath. Her sister was still crying. Luz pinched her, ordered her to pray. She finally obeyed. They both prayed harder than they ever had before. When they opened their eyes, the dog and the mist were gone. They ran all the way home and never disobeyed their mother again. (Well, not for a long time, Luz corrected herself, after I raised my eyebrows.)

There were many other stories: tiny men, none of them more than half a metre tall, who grow from aborted fetuses thrown into the canals by factory girls; a bridge where a jealous man and the priest he murdered for not revealing his wife's confession cause car wrecks, resulting in even more ghosts gathering under the bridge with them; a woman who haunts the exact block of Barranca where Scott and I lived for the first two months of our stay here.

By the time Luz looked like she was ready to go home, I was nervously glancing around the creepily lit garden, all shadows and unclear scary shapes (aborto men?). The stone stairs scariest of all. They led to where Scott, Gwenda and Chris were sitting, drinking beers of their own, waiting for me to come up and translate Luz's stories. At least I thought they were all up there, but I couldn't hear anything other than Luz's soft, deep voice and the rustle of leaves in the trees. No church bells, no dogs barking, not even the occasional car driving by.

I'm lame, I admit it. I came up with an excuse (Hey, Luz, did I show you the photos we took of you yet?) to get her to walk up the stairs with me. The three others proved to be up there, unscathed by La Llorona or the little aborto men.
Once Luz had gone and I'd translated her tales for them, everyone seemed to think it was an excellent idea to keep telling ghost stories. Gwenda and Chris had most excellent Kentucky ones (seems to me Kentucky is one scary state. I'm not sure I'll ever be brave enough to visit) and Scott spoke of the car-chasing goat man of Salado, Texas.

In the middle of that night, we were all woken by one of San Miguel's regular and deafeningly loud cat fights. For a half second I was sure it was Luz's devil dog.

There aren't any devil dogs in Sydney or New York City. La Llorana doesn't wander their streets. They aren't cities with that kind of magic. The colours are different, and there isn't live music on the streets every night of the week, buskers who go from house to house. I will miss this place. But Luz is sure that we'll return, says so almost every day. I think she's most likely right.

San Miguel de Allende, 23 February 2004

© 2004 Justine Larbalestier

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