Time Lost

Or e’er, thrice summer gone, we first surveyed,

Beyond the azure wave and dusty lands,

This lofty place where now mine eye on domes

And towers dwells ….

Sorry.  I’ve been reading Cymbeline!  Anyway, as I was saying, before our first trip to San Miguel, we read a couple of books which Jeanne had found at Amazon (she does that: she finds tour books and so forth, then gets me to read them so she doesn’t have to).  One was Tony Cohan’s On Mexican Time, and the other was Falling in Love with San Miguel, by Carol Schmidt and Norma Hair.  Cohan was married to an artist when they moved here, and the women are a lesbian couple who also built a life

here.  Jeanne claims to have seen them around here twice.  It turns out that the ladies are right now in the process of leaving here for health reasons having to do with altitude (6400’), though they still love the place and don’t exactly relish going back to Phoenix; and local scuttle says that Cohan has been seized upon by a younger woman and has left the artist. 

Carol and Norma write very practical books and blogs about our not-so-little town: what it’s like to be gay here, and how to live cheaply on Social Security income, for example.  Tony Cohan was a writer from LA already before coming here, and the book is much more esoteric.  He writes about coming here on vacation and slowly being sucked into a different view of the world.  They eventually bought a fixer-upper and settled here for a number of years.  As his title suggests, he is preoccupied about how life here’s changes your view of reality.  I sympathize.

A couple of days ago, Jeanne and I were sitting in the jardín, as the plaza here is known.  It is a beautiful square in front of the main church (there are many, and almost all architecturally significant), the mock-Gothic Parroquia, shady with huge sculpted ficus by day, softly lit with twining lights at night, and it is the town’s social center, busy by day and crowded by night.  For no particular reason, I asked Jeanne the time.  “Twelve forty-eight,” she replied.  At that moment, the parroquia clock chimed out noon.  It is, of course, correct; as is Jeanne – but not here.  Here, there is really no such concept as 12:48: why would the forty-eight be important?

Later in the day we returned to the jardin, which is only about five blocks away.  We sat on a bench looking outwards, listening to a rather good mariachi band in front of one of the restaurants under the arcades, and not too far away there was a tuna, as they are called in Spain and probably here: student groups singing traditional songs in colorful costumes.  Children all around are playing with inflated toys and flashing lights bought from the vendors on the church steps.  Adults stand around the food stalls which sell roasted corn and other delicacies.

Were it not for all this activity, I might think we were stuck in Waiting for Godot.  “We should be going,” says my Vladimir.  We do not move.  “Are we ready to leave?” asks her Estragon, somewhat later.  She does not answer.  It appears we are not ready to leave.  Even when we do stand up, it is to take another stroll around the plaza.

At home, on our rooftop, I sit and write, rigging up an umbrella against the bright light so that I can see the screen.  I’m often distracted by the view, and take numerous pictures of the agglomeration of domes which appeared in an earlier blog, because they are to me what Rouen cathedral was to Monet, a net designed to catch the light.  I suspect Monet’s pictures are better (!), but it doesn’t matter: I just sit here and lose track of time until Jeanne’s head startles me when it appears, breathing hard, at the top of our spiral staircase.  How long have we been here?  Must be six or seven weeks, right?

We are back at the jardín.  We could not find the restaurant we had chosen for a late-night snack, so we settled for a very good pizza at La Terraza on the corner of the square.  Had we found our first choice, we would have missed it all.  The square is hopping, with at least two mariachi bands.  One of them hooks up with a large table of people next to us, and we are surrounded by the band, all nine of them: three violins, three trumpets, and three guitars of various sizes. They are very good and they go on forever.  

In contrast to the Colombian music we hear from time to time because of our family connections, all Mexican tunes, even the sad ones, are happy and infectious; whereas all Colombian tunes, even the happy ones, are plaintive and melancholy.  Much of the mariachi music is in ¾ time, but my old folk-dancer’s ear says that some are in weird Balkan rhythms, 9/16 or something.  The evening is magic, even the children as young as five winding through the musicians trying to sell gum for a peso or two are picturesque.  If you think it is a cliché to sit on a balmy evening in a beautiful setting and listen to nine tenors singing Cielito lindo, all I can say is, don’t knock it until you’ve fried it.  Go out and see what you can find in downtown Minneapolis at ten o’ clock at night, my friends.  As we leave, we bump into the other mariachi band following a white donkey and leading a young couple, a bunch of people in odd military uniforms, plus a nondescript crowd picked up along the way.  (The next day, we see the same couple posing for wedding pictures.)

I’ll tell you this.  I have lived a cosmopolitan life, as many of you know, and could take you to places in England, France, Spain or the U.S. as lovely as Baja California.  But if I had to choose a single place to settle down because of the people themselves, it would be magical, maddening Mexico every time.