A WOMAN OF SAN MIGUEL

Friday night I arrived a little late for a birthday party at La Fragua, an old bar next to the Parroquia church. In a side room at a long wooden banquet table, 40-odd people raised toasts to Elenita, the celebrant. She and her husband, Carlos, have a store specializing in folk art and artifacts from around the hemisphere: Mexico, Guatemala, Peru. Carlos, florid and long-haired, has a fondness for philosophy and drink. Elenita, pretty but plain by choice, her hair drawn back severely, has an almost saintly sweetness. In California they’d read as gentle, educated, ‘60s idealists; in fact, through them I’d learned more of the epochal events of 1968, when just before the Olympics police shot at demonstrating students in Mexico City’s Tlacelolco Plaza - Elenita and Carlos among them - killing many. Merchants now, they still vote for the PRD, the opposition party that never wins, and read La Jornada, the paper of the left. They champion the preservation of indigenous cultures through their work at the store, exhibiting yarn paintings and beaded masks crafted by the Huichol, peyote-ingesting indigenous people who live in the deserts north of here.

I slid into an empty seat at the far table. Margaritas seemed to be the drink of choice, and a meal of corn soup, carne asada (beef with tomatillo sauce, avocado, potatoes, lettuce and carrots), and flan. I fell into conversation with a silver-haired gringa sitting next to me.

She was pleasant enough, well-spoken, not untypical of some other retired foreigners I’d met here. Some bore surprising resumes not always evident from their appearance: diplomatic corps, doctor in Ghana, ex-director of Versailles. There would be something a little odd or different about them that they’d end up late in life in this rather remote mountain town of unusual beauty but with modest medical facilities. Some reminded me of Tennessee Williams’s or Paul Bowles’s people: odd, touching, a derelict gleam in their eyes. I surmised from this woman’s red rebozo shawl and the turquoise ring on her right middle finger that she frequented Carlos and Elenita’s store.

She lived alone, she said, in a small house on Calle Aldama. Her two American children were grown - one a doctor, the other the owner of a restaurant. They called occasionally, seldom came to visit. Her husband had passed away seven years earlier. She found herself quite alone, an American woman in Mexico, trying to meet the challenges of each day. She volunteered at the local library, helped at the orphanage on Calle Zacateros, spoke a little Spanish. Her maid, Luisa, an Otomi woman from the countryside nearby, often commented on her solitude, she said, and seemed to feel sorry for her. The woman resented this, felt misperceived. How could her maid, poor and overburdened with work and too many children, with a husband who was never there but across the border in Texas and sent scant money home, pity her, an independent woman of means with options and the wherewithal to make her life comfortable?

The week before, her maid Luisa had invited her to a birthday party for one of her seven children. It was for today, Sunday, out on the ejido, the communal ranch where she lived. The woman politely declined. Every day the maid asked, and again the woman said no. It seemed inappropriate somehow, la patrona going out to some poor ranch somewhere in the campo. But the maid wouldn’t let up, and finally the woman agreed to go, if for no other reason to silence Luisa.

“This afternoon,” she told me, “I had a taxi take me to this ranch about five miles out, off the road to Guanajuato.” At the head of our table there was laughter, another toast to Elenita, more margaritas. The noise died down and the woman continued. “There must have been sixty people, all relatives or friends of some sort - old people, nursing infants, ranch hands in boots and hats. They were poor, but there were tamales to eat, and pork and tortillas all cooked outdoors, and corn drink, and beer. Everyone seemed so comfortable together. A little band played the sweetest music - an accordion, I think, and that big thumpy bass guitar.”

“Guitarrón.”

“Yes. And an out-of-tune fiddle player, yet so marvelous and lively. Some nephew of Luisa’s who couldn’t have been more than eight played the drum.” She laughed and brushed back her hair, seeming to liven at the recollection. “Adults held the infants who never cried, not a peep. The old people spoke among each other, and younger ones sat with them and listened. There was so much…” She turned to me, her eyes shining. “warm, simple love.” She fished in her purse for a handkerchief. “It was the best time I’ve had in years,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “There’s something…criminal about that, don’t you think?”

Around us, the table was emptying as people got up to dance to the norteño band in the other room. We remained in our own quiet space.

“Where have we gone wrong?” she said suddenly. “Alone in our houses with televisions and newspapers and books and computers, crowing the whole time about how much freedom we have. The sexes are either terrified of each other or at each other’s throats. We’re frightened of commitment. We marry then divorce, preferring our private satisfactions, our careers, to enduring with one another.” Her eyes earnestly searched mine. “We’ve gone off track somewhere, don’t you think?”

She looked away, flushing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is supposed to be a birthday party for Elenita. There, you see? Selfish. Taking your attention.”

“It’s all right,” I said, grateful for the confession. I wanted to say something in return but didn’t know quite what. She romanticizes, I think. Mexican campesinos’ lives are hard: the grind of poverty, babies needlessly lost to dysentery, women to abuse, men to drink and joblessness. This woman wouldn’t dream of trading lives with her maid. Her position here, like mine, is of privilege. Yet she’d cut to the quick of something.

The Parroquia’s big bell sounded, deep and sonorous. Through the window beside our table, I could see the crowds emerging into the forecourt from evening Mass. In the next room, the band’s two-beat corrida cut across the bell’s aftertones.

“Maybe that’s why we come here,” I said to the woman. “To try to tend to the part that’s missing.”

The party was dispersing around us. We stood to go.

She looked at me doubtfully. “But it’s too late, isn’t it?”