Leaving San Miguel: Taco Memories

At sunset, the light softens on the spires and church domes across town. The evening sky from the rooftop is washed and chalked with soft clouds. Life in the barrio grows quiet in the brief interval between the workaday afternoon and the social nighttime. Church bells begin to toll across the roofs, some anonymous verger switches on the illuminated cross atop La Parroquia and it is officially eventide. 

On some obscure signal, the first strand of birds appears, strung out across the sky, looping westward to roost in the Presa, the reservoir at the edge of town. Behind them another ribbon of birds, furling and folding in on itself as if blown along on a high breeze, hundreds of white-faced ibis flapping along the sky in loose ranks. Each morning they make the same short flight eastward over the town, over the hilltop in the middle distance, to some unseen feeding ground, and back the same way each evening, ribbon on ribbon of ibis. By May they will be nesting in wetlands in Colorado and Wyoming and Montana.

White-faced Ibis



Oblivious to all of this, the long-tailed grackles on the roof across the street are guarding from some insistent kingbirds a puddle of water that has collected atop a water tank; other kingbirds are harrassing a solitary woodpecker in a nearby tree, the woodpecker uncharacteristically minding his own business for once. Everyone, it seems, has a job to do and no one capable of doing it without a mild ruckus.

On the last evening in San Miguel, I walked the three blocks through the darkened backstreets to the bright lights and conviviality of Tacos Diana. Tacos Diana is one of those frequent outposts of the informal economy of Mexico, a small lunch counter on wheels that disappears each day and reappears each evening lit up like a Polish church in the doorway of the ferreteria, the hardware store on Orizaba. Ranged along the counter beneath an awning are some stools, some earthenware bowls of lime wedges and jars of salsas rojo y verde. The offerings are basic - tacos, tortas, gringos and something called a 'volcanes', a crisp corn tostada piled with either chopped beef or chorizo beneath a glaze of melted cheese. Healthy stuff served with pride. The vegetable courses consist of a fine chop of onion and cilantro, bowls of pickled cucumber and carrot slices, and grilled jalapenos.

The chef is a large congenial fellow who works beneath a thick shock of black hair. His wife and helpmeet stands at his side working the grill, which is basically a round platter over a gas flame with an outer trough around a raised middle. The meat and onions are cooked down in the trough where the grease from previous courses has collected, then drained and kept warm on the raised center. When a customer orders, say, three tacos, the proprietor of the establishment sets corn tacos out on a plate, garnishes them with onion and cilantro, sets the meat on a round wooden block hollowed with use into a shallow bowl, and with a knife of venerable provenance and a deep-curved blade that exactly fits the bowl of the chopping block, he chops it fine and assembles the tacos. Some lime, some salsa, a couple of whole jalapenos, and Bob, as they say in Mexico, is your uncle (Bob son tu tio").

This does not begin to capture the ambience of Tacos Diana, the anchor, icon and masthead of which is the stolid wife of the owner. She is in her own right the atmosphere of the place, every bit as substantial as her husband and with a kind of natural glower, all business and clearly no nonsense where he is all cordiality and blessings. Diana, for whom the business is named, is the daughter who stands at her father's right hand, setting up plates, collecting money and dispensing change when she is not seated on the steps of the nearby tienda in congress with her friends and their friends and a good portion of the neighborhood who prefer to bundle themselves against the chill and stand around in lighted spots chatting, trying out their English on the customers ("Jalapeno not too spicy for you?"), eating ice cream from the bright little storefront and generally cutting up like human beings with social business to transact.

But I am loyal to Tacos Diana, and for this reason: on my final evening in San Miguel, when my face, familiar by now, appeared within the ring of light, the mistress of the place looked up at me and - faintly, but definitely - smiled at me. It was the moon peering slyly from behind a cloud. I must return to San Miguel.

Biking San Miguel, or Skinning Your Cat

Every street in San Miguel is roughly the width of a single conveyance, is expertly and generously paved in cobbles, intersects nothing but a hazard of blind corners, and either terminates in an abrupt and terrifying uphill or commences in an abrupt and (even more) terrifying downhill. The last skateboarder (probably an urban legend) reportedly perished on the cobbled downhill from Calle Hospicio into El Correo when the vibrating projectile he clung to intersected a bus simultaneously in three places. This urban terrain is extreme.

Bicycling is possible in San Miguel, given that bicycles have the advantages of tires and brakes, with all their damping and modulating possibilities. But the accommodations required for riding the notorious 'pave' in the Tour of Flanders are as nothing to those required to navigate the narrow tracks of San Miguel. First, be prepared to dismount and walk your bicycle up the hillsides on the east side of town.There is no escaping this - even the fabled Cippolini was heard to mutter an unbecoming Latinate noun while attempting the hellish slope of Calle de Huertas in a gentleman's wager.

The cobbles do not suit the uncompromising frame of the typical road bike. High pressure tires are impossible. The only bikes that really succeed here are old steel-framed, mostly rigid mountain bikes, tires maintained at a pressure some purists might deem flabby. That old nostrum of bicycling magazines, "vertically stiff yet laterally compliant," will not work in San Miguel - these streets will eat the bike and the proud old fool who dares too much. Even the native San Miguelenses, experts (if there are such) in navigating these cobbles on two wheels, vibrate themselves by in a kind of ethereal blur as though they are mere auras passing in the street. The local cycling confrerie dresses in a manner calculated to preserve as carefully as possible the integrity of each rider's foreordained allotment of hide. Heavy cotton and denim trousers are de rigeur, the absence of lycra shorts and $90 PrimalWear jerseys is both palpable and uplifting.

The serviceable working machine - the cargo bike, the velocab, the delivery cycle - are as uncommon around town as the expensive road bike. Two wheels here are, much as in the United States, a fate reserved for the exigent and the sinner. This specimen of a working bike (below) is the only example of its kind I've spotted in nearly a month, and always with the mysterious roll of rattan roped to the rack. (I'm not actually certain of its function, nor that it's actually rattan, but my only other guesses are pork rinds or a large mat for rolling sushi.)

One other thing I should mention that is paramount to survival. San Miguel is, like much of the surrounding country, a dusty place. A fine film of dust collects on the streets. The cobbled and flagged streets are in some instances older than the century, worn smooth by years of rubber tires and a lapidary film of oil. Each morning the housewives and cleaning ladies of San Miguel sweep a cascade of soapy water from every rooftop and sidewalk onto the pavement, making a treacherous paste of soap, fine dust and oil across flags and cobbles already polished with the traffic of the ages. Even by the standards of a professional downhiller, it is a white knuckle ride from the Salida de Queretano down into El Centro on one of those polished, soap-slick tracks, and no guarantee that you'll still be wearing the skin you left home in at the bottom.

Three Magics Day

Yesterday, I went shopping, it being a Mexican Holiday and I having vowed to observe as many of those as do not pass my notice. Cec and I, having lunched on some superb fish tacos, were walking along January 20^th Street (Calle de 20 Enero) about eight steps from turning the corner into our own street, when a small, dapper and extremely affable young man bounced out of the doorway at number 24 and into our path on the sidewalk, like a refugee from some PlayStation screen. He was already in full voice, “I want to show you please come in I make I want to show you my shop I make jewelry I want you to see it please come in . . . .” The sign at the doorway buried on this obscure sidestreet read “Joyeria Eclipse,” which seemed somehow better to me, I recall thinking to myself, than “Joyeria Acme.” Cec was already got the better of and was headed through the door announcing her intention not to buy anything. You can already see where this is going. “No no you don’t buy anything I want only to show you my jewelry I make.”

The shop was the size of a large appliance crate and contained a tiny glass-topped counter with various cardboard fingers and bustiers for the display of rings, necklaces and the more modest lines of jewelry. He began immediately with a disembodied cardboard finger, slipping a ring from one onto Cec’s finger. You are off on the wrong foot, young fellow, I thought, never afraid to mix a metaphor in an extremity, if you see what I mean. Cec would as soon wear a ring in her nose as on her finger, not being one for adorning hands or wrists. Still, the pieces on display were disarmingly simple, pleasing to the eye, easy on the taste, and clearly handmade by this young man who had found neither surcease nor respite in his conversation. Another ring, too large this time, Cec steadily praising his work while firmly demurring to purchase any. 

From merely showing and describing his handiwork, the fellow made a devastating first gambit: he glibly introduced the Tradition of the Christian Nativity, to wit: “Today is a Mexican Holiday, el Dios de Los Tres Reyes Magos – the feast of the Three Magics who came to bring gifts to the Nińo Jesus.” It was not the reminder of timeworn tradition that so enchanted me as the idea which suddenly materialized, in his apt translation, of three ‘magics’ – a perfect gloss on the always puzzling word ‘magi.’ That hard terminal ‘c’ that bathes our Anglo-Saxon tongue in glottal substantiality and emotional closure seemed to me, just then, to finish the word to perfection and bear its whole meaning. I imagined the three magics, no more just three hapless, better-late-than-never tourists arriving for the quickly cooling festivities, after dark and past Someone’s bedtime, bearing a cut-glass cheese plate and duplicate toasters (“Oy, Melchizidek, was danken zu?”). No, these were ‘magics,’ wise men learned in astronomy and astrology, in metes and bounds, in surveying and navigation, who could measure out the heavens and follow any star to the very point on the earth directly beneath it (which I freely confess I’ve never mastered, the buggers keep moving off the faster I drive.)

Then, a second gambit: the young jeweller quietly cited the Moral Exemplar Within the Gospel Tradition: “The Magics gave the gifts to the little Jesus because they loved him.” And with blinding speed the clincher, the genuine kayo punch, the Moral Drawn From Holy Writ: “And so today is a day in Mexico to give some gifts to someone you love.” Cec, left to her own devices, would have let me out of this pretty easily.  I spotted the obvious equivocation, the too facile logical move from ‘Someone’ to ‘someone.’ Still, I felt outmanned, outnumbered, outgunned. There were three of them, not even counting the jewelry maker; and even if they all dressed like Bette Davis in a dressing trailer on an MGM backlot, they had more than gone out of their way to bring along stuff that sounded to me like it was going to be re-gifted as soon as they were back on the one-lane camel track to Lebanon, Missouri. 

I spied a green agate stone in a plain sterling setting. It was simplicity itself, integrity of design, beauty of workmanship and modest taste in the pairing of materials. What about that one? Cec gave me the what-are-you-thinking look. My hand was by then in my pocket, thumbing the wallet, riffling the careworn edges of bills. I merely shrugged: “I love this guy.” Cec laughed, German giggled, not unbecomingly. Then he hit me again, harder this time: “This ring I charge two hundred pesos in El Jardin they ask five hundred pesos for something like it but only today it is a holiday one-hundred-fifty pesos.” He was asking all of eighteen dollars American, without a fight, for lovely materials, his own careful craft, plain good taste and honest sweat. I was undone. I handed him a two-hundred peso note.

He was delighted, then nonplussed. No, I had no fifty-peso note, he would have to go out of the shop and get some change. He rushed out, leaving Cec and me just enough time to pilfer his entire stock and get around the corner for home. We sat quietly in the corner on a low automobile seat requisitioned for customer service until he returned with the change and sent us on our way with his sincerest benedictions and best wishes for a blessed Feast Day of the Three Magics.  I am nearly certain ours was his only sale of the day. 

German is the rare artisan whose work reflects exactly what he is himself – ‘simple’ in the best sense, as in ‘not susceptible of further refinement.’

At Death's Door, Pending Autopsy

An old joke goes, "He was at death's door, and they still managed to pull him through." I've been pulled every which way in the last week, through death's door both ways as far as I can tell, having lain in the grip of 'la gripa' for over a week. It isn't what you're thinking - it's been a perfectly dry and orderly siezure of the respiratory function with no graphic, projectile or otherwise ill-mannered results than my emergence from this trial bleary-eyed, far more surly than is my usual wont, wishing for a not undignified end and wondering why in the name of all that's reasonable and civilized I traveled to this distant outpost of sunny hospitality to fall into such a state of misery.

The course of this protracted indisposition has not been unrelieved by other compensations. More than one friend has sent to my notice the same YouTube clip of a weather-induced fracas in my hometown (a nameless spot in the darkening middle of the cultural spectrum somewhere to the north). A young man was standing on the moderate slope of a suburban street freshly greased in light snow, recording with his cell phone a series of slow motion collisions as they developed - eventually about 20 cars in a single pileup, stacked like a shoal of frozen carp along one curb, collecting one casualty after another as it slid down the street frontways, sideways, backwards, providing the while a delightfully artless, charmingly naive, benignly profane and gleeful commentary on the proceedings. His delight increased with each addition to the heap, heightened each moment by his having been on the scene and filming from the start. He was both cameraman and color commentator and (with due attention to his current breadth of adjectives) he may have a future in broadcasting (which is the old-fashioned word for "media").

These scenes undeniably warm the lonely days of those who have escaped the ravages of the northern winters for more hospitable places. How else account for the popularity of the Weather Channel? Its largest audience and the backbone of its considerable revenues rests in the retired classes who have gone south for the rest of their lives and who, as a bit of perverse nostalgia, watch the weather to see how their hapless and less fortunate acquaintances are suffering this season. Of course, those patterns are less reliable than they used to be in the palmy days before climate change (or "climate change," depending on your preferred school or "school" of thought). Winters in Mamaroneck or Port Jervis can be fairly benign in an off year, while the hurricanes season in your newly-adopted abode can be an awning shredder for the record books.

As I said, I am not certain which way I went through death's door, whether I was pulled through by my feet or headfirst. I must have gone through it however, since I know what hell will be. Those who go to Hell will find themselves lying with a pounding headache in a dimly lit room just above a street in a Mexican town, hearing the same car alarm go off seven successive times in ten minutes just below their open windows. 

In fact, as I write just now in my upper story room, a car alarm is going off below in the very street where I have taken temporary refuge and where I hope to regain my shattered health. There is no escaping the car alarm in this country, of that I am now certain. In fact, the very notion that it is an alarm is an alien idea here. It is rather a welcome sign that one's car is in at least partial working order. It is a signal to a proud and grateful owner: "Your car is ready for your entry." Or, upon arrival, "You have successfully exited your car." And depending upon the level of assurance any particular car owner requires, the alarm can be turned off now, upon a leisurely arrival at one's doorstep, or in the morning. It doesn't really matter, because it's not really meant to alarm anyone about anything.

Hell is Other People's Latest (First) Novel

Describing his expatriated compatriots washed up in Calais (which, as any Chinese schoolchild can tell you, a traveller must have gone through off the Channel packet in her way from 19th-century London to Paris), Charles Dickens writes, "He met new groups of his countrymen, who had all a straggling air of having one time overblown themselves, like certain uncomfortable kinds of flowers, and of being now mere weeds. They had all an air, too, of lounging out a limited round, day after day . . . ."

There is a tranquil air in San Miguel, as in Calais, of Dickensian expats trying to fill in the blanks -  elderly gentlemen sporting stringy ponytails, one spotted astride a $30,000 Harley, another driving through El Centro in a red '66 Mustang, convertible top down, two accountants in search of a character. One gets the impression that this is a place in which the preprandial cocktail hour creeps daily nearer the diurnal meridian in continual small increments.

What prompted this turn of mind was a snatch of conversation I heard on the street earlier that day. A pair of Americans came out of the midtown Starbucks and passed me on the sidewalk, the man advising the woman in impeccable Texas English, "Well, you can't kill 'em all off in the first book." Setting aside the prospect that he was speaking in tongues or metaphor, it was one of those vignettes that invites the normally healthy imagination to fill in the blanks, much like those schoolroom exercises in which we were given a picture and asked to write a story about it. The context is easy to imagine. 

Are any words more dreaded on the afternoon cocktail circuit than, "I'm working on my first novel"?  An authoress manque, a writer of mysteries (he did imply both that this was her first novel and that it will not be her last), arrived in an exotic locale for inspiration, local color, the invention that novelty and diminished inhibitions bring with it. After all, why not? Hemingway sitting in the Clos des Lilas writing For Whom the Bell Tolls has probably inspired more legions of the quasi-talented, the nearly-inspirable, the average, to attempt something similar in whatever dusty outpost is still remote enough to have just one Starbucks. I was in college with a fellow my own age who had in a previous incarnation taken up boxing, a la Hemingway and Norman Mailer, and gone off to a garret apartment in Paris to write a novel. The novel never appeared so far as I know, but one of the neighbors ate his cat, thereby giving him a brief tale to tell. Where would a novelist be without the neighbors, after all?

For Whom the Bell Tolls is all well and good, more than recompense for all those dishes of cafe a la creme and Pernods and Lord knows what else Hemingway drank in the extended act of creation. But I foresee, in San Miguel, the unheralded and largely unwanted emergence of an amateur Mexican sleuth of mysterious but undoubtedly aristocratic extraction, with a stable of thoroughbreds, a garage full of Hispano-Suizas, Alfa-Romeos and other suitably hyphenated pre-war autos, a cellar full of Clos de Veugeots '28 and Hermitages '37 (each bottle rescued from the chateaux of ex-Vichy collaborateurs), a humidor full of pre-Revolucion vintage Habanas, a bespoken five-star chef in residence at the hacienda, a vintage mahogany Chris-Craft runabout berthed at the marina - in short, all of the appurtenances requisite to the man of taste who wears his wealth lightly and never as a burden.

I could go on. Were I to go on, I'd have to write the whole bloody thing up and there would be another first novel. . .


. . . more to follow.

Happy or Not, It's Here

An unaccustomed calm over San Miguel this morning. The sun shines across the rooftops, the streets are disarmingly quiet, the usual prevailing racket of some infernal foundry eerily silent - no one hammering on a piece of sheet metal, no one's auto alarm going off, the fireworks spent, only the occasional buzz of a passing motorbike, the toll of a bell and the voice of the dove is heard in the land. Even the municipal dogs are asleep, mirabile dictu. And little wonder, since the entire populace was in the streets all night. They take Feliz Ano Nuevo seriously in Mexico.  Even the toddlers were out at three a.m.

I don't think I've been awake and upright to usher in the new year in two decades, jaded as I am of resolutions, excessive noise, contrived expectancy and fresh starts. But San Miguel from a rooftop on New Year's Eve, looking out towards La Parroquia and waiting for the fireworks to commence at midnight is sufficient to remove the dust from the weary traveler, thirst from the parched soul, mist from the rheumy eye, and to raise the gout-ridden from his solitary cot of woe. The old parish church is lit in its own surreal pink glow, a wierdly elaborated candle shining across the entire city. As the church bells begin slowly to boom away the old calendar year, its wild roccoco belfries are lit again in sudden blooms of incandescence. Firework blossoms in green, red, and blue flare upwards from the pavements around the steeple on glittering stalks of light, the illuminated cross at its finial engulfed in wreathing smoke, all the surrounding colonias looming about like a city under siege - sparkling, smoky, crackling with small arms fire and the boom of heavier ordnance, all the incendiary commotion carried along by the diapason of the bell tolling midnight. 

The custom of the country, as the bell sounds the new year, is to eat a single grape for each toll of the bell, and to make a wish as each grape goes down. After wishing for world peace, I wished for a pony, to be able to play Kachadourian's "Fire Dance" on the piano, to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven's Ninth, to be able to memorize the entire table of the elements and Martin Luther's 95 Theses . . . and then I just couldn't think of any more wishes. I suppose, all things considered, not being able to think of anything else isn't a bad start to the new year.