Innocents in Mexico

Chapter 13

            That night, I sliced chicken breasts and sauteed them with green, yellow and red peppers, garlic, onion and carrots.  I sliced potatoes and boiled them, then added them to the pan.  While they browned, I made a salsa of the mangoes and sweet onions I’d bought in the market. 

            No bread tonight.  We remained firm in our resolve. We had been very bad about bread and pastries, which were so cheap and good in the town shops and markets and even cheaper and better in the large bakery at Gigante.  Here bread, rolls, pastries, donuts and cakes were piled in bins or displayed on large trays.  Customers walked around with tongs and pizza trays, choosing what they wished, then stood in line to have them bagged and tagged at the cash register. The first time we had visited, we had filled up two bags and the total came to about $2.  The store was so close that we couldn’t even walk off the calories by walking to get them. 

            We tried to eat by candlelight on the unwalled patio off the kitchen.  I kept lighting candles, but the wind kept blowing them out.  We had begun to notice a pattern in the weather.  Hot days gave way to cool windy evenings.  At 9, all the doors in the house blew shut, the trees were swaying, and I pulled on a long-sleeved t-shirt against the chill. Then by 9:30 it had warmed up again and the wind had died down.  By 10, it was dead still and I had discarded the long-sleeved shirt.                       

            Today, Bob went to town to replace the large stretched and framed canvas we had lost off the top of our car in the desert.  Then we went back to town in the afternoon to look at a possible long-term rental and to shop in the market. As we waited for Susan at La Conexion, a continual stream of people ducked in and quickly out again, having grabbed their mail from their boxes. There were several of these mail delivery places in town.  Your address was a mailbox in Texas.  Then they bulk shipped the mail UPS to San Miguel so the mail never went through the unreliable Mexican postal system.  They would also accept faxes and would print out three pages of e-mails a day for customers. 

            Bob pointed out a stack of videos of San Miguel piled on the counter.  We hadn’t noticed them before.  A few minutes later, a small neatly dressed woman came in.  She left and came in again, smiling at us both times and talking to a woman in the computer section of the room.  She had a genteel air, and when she smiled and talked, she resembled Jessica Tandy.  When she came back in our direction, she spoke.  “Have you noticed the video?” she asked. 

            When we told her we were just commenting on it, she said, “We’re having a viewing here tomorrow night at 6.  It’s the first viewing.  You should come.”  She then told us of an earlier video about San Miguel. 

            ‘”Were you in film production before you came to San Miguel?”  I asked her.  Something she had said had given me the idea that this was her video.

            “Oh, no, I’m just a woman who knows how to talk and has a lot of money, so I get things done!”  she told us, giving  me the impression that she had bankrolled or produced the video.

            In the Jardin, we ran into Lisa, the girl we met in the bank our first day.  We told her we’d rented a temporary house, thanks to her, and showed her the pictures we’d taken of it that we’d just picked up from the photo store.  Lisa lived in a motorhome parked at a friend’s house and was preparing for a showing of her works which would occur while we were back in the States.  She breezed away from us through the Jardin, on her way to her daily errands.

***Note: If you are still reading these daily chapters, would you please leave a brief note in comments to tell me so? I am wondering if I should keep posting them or retire them for the time being. If enough people are interested, I’ll keep posting them.