UNDER THE FINCA

letter from from the neighborhood of the guy who wrote 'Under the Volcano'

I went to see a movie, and ended up moving to Mexico. At least, that’s what seems to have happened.

At any moment, a real estate agent named Reina will knock on the door. I called her Thursday and told her I wanted to see a certain listing with a pool. She told me she’d call me back the next day, when she had a car. She never called, so two days later I called her, and she answered the phone as if she was expecting me. How about tonight? She still doesn’t have a car, but she’s going to try to get one and she’ll call me back in five minutes. I wait for an hour and call her, amusement thick in my voice, and again she sounds like she’s been sitting around waiting for me. She’s on the Internet, “meeting people, and it seems very easy.” I laugh out loud and tell her not to expect much, but what about the car? What about going to see the house with three bedrooms and a pool listed at 55 grand? We could rent a taxi, she says, or maybe I’ll have a car tomorrow and I say Cool see you tomorrow.

Well, tomorrow is today, and by the end of the day she hadn’t called. I call her at five thirty and she says she’ll grab a cab because she’s got no car, and she met a lot of people on the Internet last night, which she’d never tried to do before, and I ask her: Do you need to meet people? “Of course not, I’ve got lots of friends, but you never know.” I tell her: “Listen, talking to you about the Internet and meeting people is muy simpatico, but I’d really like to see an actual house.” I tell her I’ve been looking at many listings in the paper, and she says, Oh, don’t do that any more, coz I’m gonna sell you one. I laugh loudly at her confidence, and she says see you in forty five which was two hours ago, and I just know that when she gets here it’s going to be a laugh.

* * * *

This is my routine now, at home in Cuernavaca, about an hour and fifteen minutes SW of Mexico City:

I wake in the morning and Delfina has a plate of fresh-cut fruits waiting on the table in the dining area above the swimming pool. Always different fruit: today watermelon, yesterday a melange of melon, pineapple and mango. And with the fruit a big glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I eat and drink very slowly, surrounded by blooming bougainvillea and palm fronds. Then I’ll walk around the garden, kick a ball or rescue bugs from the pool, take a dip if the sun is shining hot enough. The garden has huge walls, completely private, all walls covered in ivy. The jacuzzi has a cactus garden planted around it, and a cute concrete bench painted bright white in Andalucian style.

The last time I spent this much time naked, luxuriating in the 70 degrees at night or in the pool in 80 degrees in the sunshine, was when I lived in Eugene, Oregon. As I fall asleep at night with a book in my hand and birds twittering in the garden, my pale butt glows with the echoes of the Sun's radiation. Luckily the summer months are quite cool, so there are always fresh nights, blankets needed, even with sunburn drifting from your skin.

The house has three bedrooms upstairs, with balconies looking out onto the garden. Last night I used the mosquito nets for the first time and slept like a baby. The house has satellite TV, so I can watch or ignore CNN and the BBC. I bought a DVD player the day before yesterday in the Mexican equivalent of Best Buy, and found prices for electronics almost exactly the same as the U.S. But prices for everything else are usually less than half of what I pay in the Imperial City. A taxi to the other side of town, 10 minutes, is $2. Delfina’s son Juan comes on Saturday to work around the house, and he’s paid $10 for half a day. I pay him double and still get gnawed with guilt. We make plans to go house-hunting in Burgos, where there are 3-bedroom two-level haciendas with private garden and pool for less than $80 grand, and then he’ll take me to the artesania (crafts) neighborhood of Tres de Mayo, where I will point out the things I want with a secret code so he can buy them in my wake for half the normal gringo price. About this I will feel no guilt.

* * * *

Reina the real estate agent wants to know what movie made me come to Mexico, and to Cuernavaca.

Y Tu Mama Tambien.

She laughs. “Dios mio, that movie is like the plague! Are you like the woman from Spain who is dying of cancer, or are you like the two boys who want to screw her?”

I am shocked by this forthright question, because Mexicans are polite to a fault. Compared with every other Latin community, Mexico is crisp and proper, no matter what Hollywood or rednecks think. The Mexican academic invariably points to the timid manners of his countrymen to prove his country’s inferiority complex to Spain’s bearing and breeding, which is bullshit to me coz the Spaniard has the world’s deepest gutter for a mouth and revels in it. But a psychosis is a psychosis, and Mexicans suffer several.

I tell Reina I’ve come because I identify with the person who made the movie. I do not tell her I have just starred in my own psychosexual tango around the world for the past eight months, and need a blank page and a pen to recover my senses. I want to tell Reina that I am like a lizard, panting in its cave after a battle beneath the sweltering sun, trying to blend into my surroundings; the cool dark cave is my page, my wounds my story. I wish now, panting with anxiety, that I did not exist, and that my story did. But who will write it for me?

“I came to Mexico to write something, and I won’t leave until I do,” I say to Reina. Her eyes widen.

“You’re a writer? Never met one before! I always thought writers only existed in the movies . . . or in books.”

This is very funny, very poignant, a written moment, practically. Our taxi is stopped because a motorcyclist has been knocked over up ahead. I feel a gentle swell of panic, a small wave lapping against the beaches of my ambition and purpose.

“You’re absolutely right, in movies and in books are the only places you’ll find a writer,” I say. “And if you ever find one somewhere else, like in a restaurant or in an elevator, you can be sure of one thing: He’s not a writer, he’s an actor.”

Reina laughs and pulls out her lipstick. The motorcyclist is not hurt. He is on his feet. He delivers pizza. It says so on the square box on the back of his bike: Domino’s.

* * * *

Delfina comes with the house. She is now my cook and caregiver. I have known her since 1989, when my niece Aisha was born here, and I’ve been coming back almost biannually since. Delfina works from 8:30 am until 5 pm every day except Sunday. She makes $300 a month. On my first day here, I told her to leave early, by 3 pm, and that I only needed one big meal a day, lunch at 2 pm. She nodded, but she still hasn’t left before 5 pm; the servant keeps her place as a point of honor, but I am happy to note, quietly, that she no longer wears her polka-dotted maid’s uniform after my first week here. She prepares me guacamole or gazpacho or ceviche to eat at night, when I am alone. The budget for food is 100 pesos a day, or about $11. As a way of augmenting her paltry income (high by local standards), I tell Delfina the food budget will be 150 pesos a day, or about $16, and she can keep the change. She is grateful completely out of proportion to this small gesture. I tip her an extra $10 every week, and try to buy the avocados and tomatoes myself whenever I am out on errands. Since she is only preparing one large meal a day, the extra money is a considerable windfall; but despite my mathematics and her expressions of gratitude, I am still chewed by guilt.

We have long conversations every day. The first few days were filled with our views on the weather and the house and the leak in the studio from the rain, but by the fourth day I get in a swipe about the rich people (“los ricos”) who live up in the hills in their haciendas and now Delfina and I curse the rich for any and each of our problems.

Delfina’s son Juan, who comes on Saturday to do odd jobs, works in the Nissan factory, assembling cars. He does not like the fumes he breathes, but what can you do? His own son, Delfina’s grandson, will not work in a factory, he tells me, but will learn a trade in school, maybe with computers.

* * * *

There are language schools by the dozen in Cuernavaca. The internet cafes are swollen with strapping all-Americans, giggling and flirting. And health spas and an American Club. There is a McDonald’s smack in the middle of the town square, KFC and Office Depot and yesterday in the newspaper came news of Costco’s imminent arrival. There is an AA group for Americans and English-speakers. The French supermarket giant Carrefour is here, too, as is Peugeot and Seat and other European manufacturers. Spiderman in English is playing at the eight-screen multiplex.

The tourist guides call Cuernavaca the city of eternal spring.

The local people are more cautious about eating green, or unripe, fruit here than in other parts of Mexico, because it is believed that the soil around Cuernavaca is nourished by Emiliano Zapata’s blood. Zapata has been lumped by Hollywood and academia with Pancho Villa as a boisterous and stupid bandit. This characterization may be true of Villa, but not so of Zapata, who had but one over-arching goal in life: assign land rights to the Indians who work the land.

I do not eat green fruit. I walk around the presence of multinational corporations as cautiously as a rat scratching out his survival in a leper colony.

* * * *

I rack up the phone bill. One dollar a minute to the USA, or 40 cents each if I use a calling card. I call my sister in Oregon to tell her I’ve renamed the house ‘Cuernafinca,’ a sort of salute to the locale and to the breezy tropical haciendas – fincas – which seem to be critical to any fat Yankee literary success. The word is easy to say. Nicole, whose house this once was, is impressed by this literation. (That last word doesn’t exist, but it should.) Maybe I can set the place up as a sort of writers’ colony, with discreet advertisements in the newsletters writers’ groups put out across the country. No, never mind the colony, too boring. But a getaway for thinkers and dreamers and schemers, a place to create, three rooms and a garden and a cook of your own! The living room is so huge we could set up twenty tables and Delfina will win renown as the maternal force behind the coolest eatery in town, a place called “Comida Mexicana No Tipica,” and the yuppies will stretch down the street waiting to taste our special chai shakes, chilled and caffeinated, with Rashid Taha on the stereo, desert music –

Nicole listens to me rattling away, a promoter stuck on the possibilities, and nowhere does there seem to be a writer. But then if there was a writer around, a real one, his collection of imaginations his cud, you’d hear just the gentle mastications of his thoughts and not the bray of a jackass, which is what my sister hears now, as I circle naked in the garden with the phone against my ear, but she’s too polite to interrupt and ask “what about the writing?” because she’s smart as a whip and knows there is a lot of trouble in the world, much self-inflicted by the rich or stupid, but little of it is as much of a pain in the ass as writing.   

When I hang up and it’s just me and the birds, I feel the laptop beckoning, but I am repulsed as though by discarded uranium.

* * * *

On my third day in town, I watched Mexico beat Ecuador in the World Cup. I watched the game in a restaurant on the edge of the zocalo. A guard stood outside the gate to turn away anybody but paying customers. There were many empty tables, consequently. Everything stopped. No cars, no pedestrians, no shoppers, no lovers, even, in the dark nooks of the concrete forest which is Cuernavaca’s famous square. Even the teachers striking for a better wage have left their signs behind to watch the game. It is 1:30 am when the game starts, since the World Cup is being held in Japan, and it is 1:34 am when Ecuador scores a surprise goal and a huge bellow, equal parts grief and exasperation, booms throughout the town. Ecuador is a minnow, and Mexico is definitely not a whale or a shark when it comes to soccer, but it’s a hell of a lot bigger than a minnow, and now a minnow has us by the ass, exclaims a gentleman at the next table. I know he is a gentleman because he is smoking Ducados, cigarettes from Spain, very spensive. I listen to him exclaim at length, and then, politely, I say: It’s like a bullfight when the first bull screws everything up, now we’ll have a fight, and the gentleman shrugs. I am sure he is thinking, Fucking idiot gringo thinks he’s in Spain, but then I think in my own defense he’s the one with the fishy story.

I drink a beer and two cokes and sure enough Mexico kicks the minnow out of the Cup, 2-1, and looks damn good doing it. Remarkably, the team looks big, purposeful. The gentleman with the Ducados shakes my hand and slaps me on the back, offers to buy me a beer. As I walk home, the cars filled with yelling kids waving the tricolor whiz past, horns honking, Me-hi-co, me-hi-co, me-hi-co, and this goes on all night, a turbine of public pride shattering the cool, rainy night. The dogs, normally wary in a country pungent with magic, are howling themselves senseless. I almost add my own siren to the festivities when an anxiety attack boils up full steam at 5 am, and I consider calling for an ambulance. Then I think I will settle for a taxi, maybe to the airport and the first plane home, but finally I sit in the bathtub, in scalding hot water, and calm down.  

From a letter to my sister, the next day:

“Something is definitely happening to me as I get older, since the first time I remember having any kind of an anxiety attack was in 1985, and then rarely since then until 1993, when the cancer came. Now it’s like one a week, which is bad enough, but there is always a weird afterglow which lingers for hours and hours every day. I’m learning to live with it, so it’s not that much of a drag, but there is always the fear that it will suddenly mushroom into something uncontrollable. I must say, though, I didn’t feel it this afternoon, when I emerged from the pool and lay on the hot tiles while the sun drenched me. Then I felt refreshed, full of energy.”

And then to a pillar of strength I am always trying to hire as my secretary, except she’d rather write poetry than save money:

“I had another panic attack last night and ended up in a hot bath reading about the marriage of Thomas and Jane Carlyle and managed to calm down and realize my charmingly privileged situation. The city exploded last night as Mexico qualified for the next round of the World Cup, and at one point I considered flagging down a taxi so I'd have somebody to talk to, but then I was afraid I'd drive straight to the airport and that wouldn't be right. I am in a sort of exile, determined to give myself some substance to go along with the overabundant style that has always been my albatross. Happily, the words came last night, in a nice flood, 1500 worth. And if I can double this every day I can get out of here with a fine book by the end of August, no problem. Hard to believe I see this as such a stone on my heart!”

* * * *

To buy roses and azaleas and begonias for the garden, Delfina and I take a bus to a street where a campesino comes in from Yautepec with his truck full of plants. On the way there, she tells me about her daughters. One is in Spain, married with papers, working in a restaurant, and the other is in San Antonio, illegally, working in a restaurant. (One of her sons is in Atlanta, illegally, working in a restaurant.) The daughter in San Antonio was married in Cuernavaca with two kids but unhappy. She left one night without telling anybody, and crossed the river to the North. With a coyote? Delfina doesn’t know, but she expects so. The daughter’s been gone four years, is never coming back, but sends Delfina money to spend on her kids. Why did she leave? “She couldn’t stand it anymore,” says Delfina, simply, referring to the husband. It’s a Mexican success story, I say to Delfina. Un exito Mexicano. Delfina smiles coz she thinks I talk like Hollywood. But then I change from Mexicano to Mexicana: Un exito Mexicana, emphasizing the feminine element. Delfina says what all Mexicans say: “Asi es.” That’s the way it is. She is happy that I have taken her daughter’s side.

* * * *

Delfina’s brother, Pancho (a nickname for Francisco), is the gardener, and he comes every Thursday. The house is full of virulent vegetation. Blooms are everywhere in the garden and fronds undulate throughout the house. He has a nervous disorder, and sometimes Delfina finds him lying in the garden, shaken by spasms. The doctors can’t find anything wrong with him. He takes a medication, though, that combined with the sunshine makes him prance like a horse by the end of the day. Delfina pushes him into a taxi whenever this happens, and the ride home costs him 20% of his daily wage, $10.

Pancho has transformed the huge living room into a womb of frond and leaf. One side of the living room (facing north) has no wall, and is permanently open to the elements. When storms come, you can sprawl in the sofas and read while flecks of rain tickle your toes. The view of the garden and the ivy- and bougainvillea-covered walls is unobstructed except by roman columns, and sometimes by the large cotton hammock strung up between them. I have set up shop in the solarium behind the living room area. In this room, the ceiling is glass and the floor white Spanish tile. There is a quad stereo on which I can blast my Moroccan tunes, with two settings, one for the solarium alone, and one to include the speakers pointing toward the garden. So I can swim to the rock and Rai.

In the solarium I have my laptop and soon a printer ($69 Hewlett-Packard, from the local Office Depot), and monitor ($125, ditto). With this room in operation, I can dock the Mac laptop with its external hard drive and edit broadcast-quality video in a quiet and cool environment. I will hardwire the solarium for maximum electronic capacity; video editing, internet access, etc. Previously, the solarium was too hot to stand. The glass ceiling let in too much light and heat and by the time the room cooled down, it was past midnight. We bought a huge plastic canvas, green, and now the pyramidical glass structure is covered and only a faint green glow illuminates the room. But the corn plant and elephant fronds and philodendrons still have plenty of light to eat, so even this room will keep its tropical hue, despite the encroaching electronica.

* * * *

Lonely. The phone, 40 cents a minute, who cares. I call Sueraya, who knows more than anyone how the magic of Mexico can twist one’s senses.

Here is a short, unbelievable aside: She and I went to Oaxaca and drove to a small town that I told her was a Margaret Mead situation. The women, descendants of Zapotecans, never conquered by the Aztecs nor by the Spaniards and some people maintain still blissfully unaware they are encircled by a nation with a stock exchange and a soccer team and a flag named Mexico, run the town. Males are not allowed in the marketplace, and carry no money. The economy runs entirely through the women’s willingness to spend their money. Every year there are enormous parties in which the half-dozen richest women celebrate the spending of their money on a hospital or a bridge or whatever. The women are huge, bedecked with rapper-like gold, and the men are diminutive, afflicted with lisps and limps. I’m only slightly exaggerating all this, but here’s the truly unbelievable kicker, and I always use the cold truth for a punch line:

The youngest boy in every family is dressed and raised as a girl, and become known as a muxe (pron. mooshay). Muxes make the women’s jewelry and clothing (better and more colorful than anything you see in Guatemala) and are the only males allowed in the marketplace, where the coins circulate. I’ve seen a few pictures of muxes by Graciela Iturbide, but apart from that this community is almost wholly unknown. Sueraya came with me on a wild goose chase two Junes ago, and then on our first day we just happened to stumble into Borda, the man who took the portrait of Che that is now the icon we invoke to cleanse ourselves of too much Suburban consumption. We spent ten days surrounded by Amazons and Cuban poets and photographers, partying with transvestites and female federal judges, everybody drunk as skunks, in a flash flood which gave me the sensation of celebrating being alive in an over-turned cruise-ship, water, beer, gold jewelry and huge women with baleful eyes and slow smiles, a maelstrom from which we popped like flotsam back home with stories nobody could believe.

“You gotta take pictures of the Cuernafinca and the orange juice in the morning and put it on the web and then send everyone an e-mail on Monday so they get it at work and hate you forever,” laughs Sueraya. “And don’t worry about the writing, coz it’s just hard work and you know you’re going to do it because with a title like that you can’t miss, it’s perfect. Just do the work. I’m not talking about the e-mails or Anxious Mountain, because that kind of writing you do in your sleep, no problem. I’m talking about the book, about the hard work. Just do it, and everything else will take care of itself.”

The title of the novel I’ve come to write is ‘The American.’

* * * *

I love this house. The breezes, the soft rain, the birds, the blossoms and the fronds.

My former brother-in-law, the house owner, wants to sell, for not a penny less than $200,000. I think the house is way overpriced, since everything is for sale in Cuernavaca. I have been reading the ads in the three local papers, and have found many haciendas with private gardens and pools in the range of $45,000 to $125,000. I intend to scout many of these for either rent ($500 to $1200 monthly) or sale before determining my brother-in-law’s lowest price (and family member discount). There are houses on the outskirts of town that are stupendous, maybe 70 grand. But the culture of the zocalo, the shops, the lovers, the grunting buses and tinny, zippy motorbikes; I can’t be far from this, and the Cuernafinca is perfectly situated. Ten minutes walking, the Zocalo is crammed with fruit-juice sellers, newspaper and magazine stands, snotty-nosed kids playing soccer, country people (campesinos, from el campo, sharing the root of “camp” and its image of migrant poor people sleeping beneath their daily lean-tos) selling hammocks or flowers or ponchos or sombreros or ice cream. As in most Mexican towns, the zocalo is hedged with trees and centered with a small orchestral gazebo, where classical or mariachi music is performed on weekends. Cuernavaca is also the state seat, so the labor strikers and political gadflies swarm on the weekends, joining the well-heeled yuppies who flock from Mexico City’s smog.

It is essential for me to be near the action, to be able to walk up to a clot of protesters and ask ‘Que pasa’ so I can get my ear bent with the local points of view. Living in the Imperial City, with its rabid profit-protecting officials and obscenely high standard of living, skews the perspective and causes ordinary people to worry about their stock portfolios and significant others, while watching white butterflies the size of your palm is left to the precious two weeks when the boss unlocks the chains, and while the development of self is ignored with apologetic claims that “I studied that in college” or “I’d rather watch the Osbourns.” (I don’t care how it’s spelled.)

But then I am seized by fits of house ownership. Trade in the tradewinds and settle onto a root. Watch TV and raise two children. Adopt a hobby, leash myself to a pet. Make the world a better place. In that order. Yikes.

In the south of France last summer, the romance writer and I looked for a house for me to buy. 50K gets you a fab little place, maybe thirteen minutes outside a beautiful city like Carcassone. Rains a little bit in February and March. Or in the north of Spain, even cheaper with a tiny bit more rain. And in West Virginia this spring I almost bought a cabin outside Berkeley Springs, right on the river, until I found out that insurance is almost impossible because of the break-ins every weekend. So I am like a pregnant dog, circling in schizoid desperation for a place to lay my egg. 

* * * *

The World Cup is a great excuse to avoid writing. Ever since the final straw between the romance writer and me, I have refused to watch professional sports on TV. Of course I make an exception for the soccer.

The end of the romance came in room 328 of the Vagabond Inn in Sacramento, when the romance writer left to go home and watch the Osbourns on Jay Leno. We’d just seen them on HBO, and before that she wanted to watch the Real World, and as I sat there dismayed by the romance writer’s familiarity with all these idiotic lowbrow wastes of time, I realized in a flash that I have wasted at least 200 days of my life watching professional sports on TV, and on my deathbed I’ll regret every fucking second. Never again! Normally when a love affair goes sour, I find myself searching for reverse. (Ripped that off from Billy Bragg, who can sum up the man’s point of view on romance so adroitly: “Went out to let the cat in, and the next thing I know she’s talking in latin.”) But in this instance I am searching not for reverse or rewind but erase. I will forget the gorillas and the aurora borealis, but I will not forget to avoid sports on TV. For this, I will be eternally grateful to the romance writer.

42 billion people will watch the World Cup during June. That’s 280 times more than will watch seven games of the World Series, and 880 times more than will watch the Super Bowl. And yet we call the winners of our sports “world champs.” It’s hard for an American to relate to Argentina losing last week, and falling out of the Cup. The team’s players wept in shame, not frustration, because they know their shithole of a nation can’t get any lower. It’s been bled dry by the rich, and crippled by the international bankers, and the soccer team was a lodestone of aspiration for an entire country bereft of hope.

On the Mexican team the players all have Iberian names: Rodriguez, Hernandez, Morales, etc. Names which came with Cortes and Pizarro and even Columbus. Some of the players have indigenous features, but most have glamorous blonde wives and play professionally in Italy or Spain, and all of them make the sign of the cross on their chests as they stoop to grab a blade of grass from the pitch to eat as they come off the field. They thank god and Jesus, almost as obnoxiously as U.S. athletes do. But there is one exception on the tri, as the team is known, and he is the schizophrenic soul of Mexico’s soccer hopes: His first name is Cuauhtemoc, and he is hunchbacked and knock-kneed, a visionary who is unpredictably selfish and yet the best passer on the team. He has quit in a tempest, and then re-joined his mates in tearful humility; he has punched and embraced the same opponent in many games; he is the firebrand, the soul who will raise Mexico’s self-image while all the world is looking, and he is the first pilloried in the press or on the sidewalk when his team stumbles. Cuauhtemoc! His name is a reminder of the glorious civilization predating the swordsmen on horseback from Spain. Bernal Diaz came with Cortes, and wrote an eyewitness account called ‘The Betrayal of Moctezuma,’ and in it he described the Aztec marketplace with awe, dismissing Sevilla as a dirty campground in comparison, and at that time Sevilla was the brightest light in European culture.

Cuauhtemoc’s last name is, hilariously, Blanco.

* * * *

I go out to Burgos with Delfina’s son Juan and his cousin David, who has the car. We are quite a sight, because I am wearing the kind of orange pants they should have had on the Titanic and my blue Hawaiian shirt and new blue sunglasses, and David is a total punk, hair dyed yellow blond, while Juan has a tanktop emblazoned with the words “Eres equivocado” (You are wrong), but never mind the humans coz our ride is dopey. A blue ”thing” put out by volkswagen maybe twenty-five years ago, battered brittle and spray-painted aqua like the bottom of a pool, with twenty horsepower maximum, a total deathtrap, and with a horn that sounds like a cow mooing. We take the highway toward Acapulco and get off at Burgos, the new trendy neighborhood in Cuernavaca. If we continued to Acapulco, we’d get there in three hours and $30 in tolls, although not in this blue thing; maybe with a tow-truck.

We check out the houses for sale, there are a ton. But the neighborhood is too sterile for me, and we go to the crafts center at 3 de Mayo coz I want to buy a huge sun, ten feet wide, to put up on the exterior of the house. We shop and I buy a few knick-knacks to take back to the Imperial City. It’s hot, we’re wet as pigs, so we sit with a pizza and cokes in front of Gloria’s Artesania and crack jokes about the plump gringos trolling the streets for bargains. How do they get so big? asks David. Their grandparents ate a lot of doughnuts in Germany, I say, and now they’re rich and they can’t help it coz rich people eat three times a day even if they aren’t hungry. But check this out: The little shop across the street is worth how much money, I ask. Juan estimates at least 300,000 pesos ($30K). There are twelve little shops on the sunny side of the street, which equals $360,000, and two sides of the street, which equals $720,000, and that’s just this single block, of which there are at least eight in this barrio: That’s almost six million dollars U.S. just right here in this little area you can walk around in ten minutes. Imagine the centro in Cuernavaca, where a comparable area would be three times as valuable. That’s almost $20 million U.S., and there are fifty, seventy-five, hundreds of barrios in Cuernavaca, many where the median house cost is more than half a million pesos. It’s mind-boggling, the economix of civic engineering. But all anyone cares about is his own little footprint in the village, his own property. That’s what we all want to buy, the same place, Ours. But rich people have money to buy something outright, so they plonk down two million pesos and when they get tired of it they sell it for two million pesos and that’s it. But the poor borrow the money and pay four million in fifteen years to get that two million, and they pay it to a rich guy, so the poor guy pays more for property he can’t afford in the first place, and the rich guys profit a little bit more every time another poor person buys a home.

The rich don’t pay interest when they buy a house outright, and the poor do when they pay in installments. When it should be exactly the other way around! Why don’t the yuppies say I’m going to spend four hundred grand on a shitty townhouse instead of, “I got it for two hundred fifty”? David and Juan are looking at the street, trying to imagine six million U.S., or 60 million pesos, when they make 100 pesos a day. I’m still spouting: Imagine how different it would be if the kids of the rich had to start with nothing. If we’re going to have rich people, that’s fine with me, but let them make themselves rich, and when they’re dead throw their cash back into the kitty. Because we could win that race if the start was fair, and you wouldn’t catch me charging 15% interest from somebody I wanted to do business with. And if I didn’t like somebody, didn’t like the way they treat their dog, I wouldn’t loan them a cent! I’d like to see what would happen if David the punk in his thing was the millionaire instead of that fool wearing five brand names that I can count from across the street. And furthermore –

Somebody comes out of Gloria’s and politely points out that we’re blocking the view of the goods on display in the window and can we please move, and David and Juan reflexively start to obey, but I say, “Sorry, boss, we’re just sitting here for five minutes because I ate the pizza with pork and drank my coke too fast and I’ll vomit if I stand up coz it’s so hot,” and the lackey goes back in without a word. Juan is sniggering, but I point out that we’re actually doing the shop a favor coz one gringo and two punks on your doorstep will attract other turistas, a fact no matter where you go in the world, and sure enough the Californians stumble in, and David in the spirit of revolt always lingering beneath the sheepish Mexican façade adds: “Besides, the crap they got in the window is real shit, hwey, a real putamadre, junk they bring in from Taxco which you can buy in the zocalo for twenty pesos less, but that’s cool what you said about the vomitar, hwey, I gotta remember that.”

I’m in the movie. I’m an eccentric character in Y Tu Mama Tambien. The sun is hot. We’ve got the unique wheels. Nobody who knows me can imagine me at this moment, or call me on my cellular. In fact, nobody knows me except these two punks on my flanks, each ready to gag like Hamlet if a rich fuck comes and asks us to get off his doorstep. I am perfectly immersed in the moment, a pilgrim trading in his bills and paychecks for a divine purpose, something beyond Jesus, something that feels like the spirit of revolt. David points at my pants. “Where’d you get that costume, hwey? All those pockets!” I tell David I don’t care one bit for the pockets. I wear the pants to keep off the mosquitoes. The bright orange makes them seasick. And so the day goes like this, inane, harmless, and if we could find some train tracks we’d be there, wasting our time, waiting for something to pass by, something unexpected, something divine.

 * * * *

The real estate agent Reina was married, once upon a time. Lasted four years, one house and two cars. One night her husband slapped her, next day she filed for a divorce. He hired a lawyer and fought the divorce, which means he got the house and the cars and the furniture, even. But you got the important thing, I tell her, as we walk the grounds of a four-bedroom quinta with a pool. Yeah, she says, Freedom. Libertad, and there’s no price on that.

“You like the house?”
“Very nice. I like the waterfall into the pool.”
“You gonna buy it?”
“Not for 2.5 million.”
“We’ll get you a discount.”
“Too spensive.”
“You could write a lot of books in a house like this.”
“If I just wrote one book, I could probably buy it. But . . .”
“But what? It’s easy, no? You talk real proper, and you can just write like you talk, put one word down after another, just as you think it. Or even talk into a recorder. And listen to how quiet it is here!”

But I need the noise. I can’t have a guard with a gun opening a gate into a colony of BMWs and yuppie couples commuting into the D.F. every morning. My friends don’t want to come stay in a suburb. That’s what they’re fleeing from, cookie-cut normalcy, one house with a star and the next with a twist, each of them with a chain.

“Can you tell me one thing?”
“What?”
“What are you writing about?”
“I’m writing about how cool it is to be an American.”

I’d like to tell her about the best thing I’ve written recently, which was in the elevator at my friend Dave’s apartment building. I’ve been putting my graffiti everywhere with a purple sharpie: “God Bless Mozambique,” and in Dave’s elevator they still haven’t gotten rid of it, after three months. It’s a sort of badge of understanding, an apology for being too well off, using 42 times as much energy and throwing away 85 times as much garbage as somebody in Africa, yak yak, but I’ve seen the protruding bellies and fly-caked faces with my own eyes and cannot pretend I haven’t, so I write as a sort of self-punishment. Or maybe I write as a price to pay for the comfort of knowing I can do whatever I want to do, go anywhere, be anything. The price is time, that inexorable machine which rolls over all of us and leaves nothing in its wake. Only reading is as time-consuming as writing, and both of these have their rewards, to be sure, an elevation of perception and spirit but at such a cost, heavy and dense, a dwindling plutonium of soul.

To be proud of one sentence written in an elevator? This is a blasphemy on my freedom, and it will bring me trouble.

* * * *

Mexico could not overcome its envy (and loathing) of the North, according to the experts on TV, and so with a chance to do the best it ever has the team falls on its face against the Yankees and is humiliated 2-0. Last night Cuernavaca bled embarrassment, as did the rest of Mexico. Today, the voices are mute, the stain of shame palpable: To lose to the big brother who hardly cares for the game, hardly knows it, and to suffer that loss when you love that game more than ever before, when this team has won your approval and assumed your identity, has become you, taller and handsomer and faster than any team before it, to suffer this loss is more than a country should have to bear, for the very fact that the country bears it together, knows what the possibilities were, knows again as in its entire history what it means to lose, to be called a loser, especially especially by the heroes from the North, the gringos, who have everything and yet still have that one admirable quality which at once makes the American so ugly but beloved: the desire to have it all, to have more, more, to win because it’s a right, a fact of might rather than a courtesy of privilege.

I stay indoors, remembering how I shouted “Gol!” moments before the first one happened. My heart is a Yankee’s, infected with consumptive desire, aflame with ambition. The writing comes, late, and I remind myself to remember the roses and the butterflies as big as the palm of my hand. Remember the malnourished dreams of these people who would point with pride at the writer in their midst and say, “He told me he came to Mexico to write because this is where he feels inspired.”

* * * *

I don’t tell anyone about the volcano.

“Under the Volcano,” the brilliant book by Malcom Lowry, a one-shot literary comet who lived and died as drunkenly as the hero of his novel, was written in Cuernavaca, about a single day, the Mexican day of the dead, in the life of a fool. It just so happens that Mexico’s most dangerous volcano is alarming the authorities. There have been two forced evacuations (Feb and June), and lava balls as big as cars were tossed aloft at one point. The volcano is called Colima, about 280 miles west of Mexico City. Nearly 300,000 people live within 25 miles of its rim.