Life Style Refugee – The Ajijic Blog

On Thursday, June 24 of the year 2010, at approximately 2:30 pm, a Mexican man was rude to me. I know the time and date because, in a country that values courtesy as much as Mexico does, to be treated badly by a salesperson is on the level of a total eclipse of the sun.    I don’t think I’ve ever even met an impolite Mexican,  so bumping into a rude salesperson had a lot more impact than if I was shopping in New Jersey for example, or Paris.

Traffic around here is kind of a separate category, of course. To the uninitiated, drivers in these parts might seem a little rude. But then, to the uninitiated, professional wrestling might look like fighting.  Once the new motorist in Mexico understands that driving is a sport, like paintball,  the existence of rules of engagement become clear.

Generally speaking,  Mexicans are  gentle and well mannered to a fault.  So you could have knocked me over with a feather when the kid in question, an employee in a local furniture store who was obviously having a psychotic break, started having a big conniption at me. I stood frozen in horror as  he made a spectacle of both of us,  hopping around like that cowboy cartoon character Yosemite Sam and hollering nonsense about how business is done in this country, using one hand to hitch up the brown polyester pants that kept slipping down to pool around his thick soled shoes  while he stabbed the finger of his other in the general  direction of my bosom.  He was short, too short for the pants,  and way, way too short to be feinting and jabbing in the neighborhood of any obstacle so formidable as my bosom, especially when it’s corseted up for a day in town.

” Do I want you to call the police? Is that what you said?’  I couldn’t believe my ears.  ” Dude, get a grip on yourself! Why would you call the police? I just want to buy a refrigerator! Stop jumping around!” Behind him, Bruno twirled a finger at his temple in the universal sign for crazy, and mouthed the words “World Cup” at me.

I don’t think it’s FIFA fever though, as rampant as that is.  Everyone around here is in a pretty good mood about World Cup*.  I felt a momentary cold twinge of  sadness when it occurred to me that maybe we were going to start experiencing hostility from the local folks over the whole Arizona thing, but in general our hosts here are able to separate us from our knucklehead countrymen up North. No, I’m definitely leaning toward psychotic break.

I have been re-introduced to the joys of good manners since we moved here. Etiquette of the kind that I remember being taught from childhood books, and that was later replaced by “entertaining.” It’s a lovely thing, elegant and satisfying for it’s own sake. It makes you remember that civilisation has more to offer than making money and humiliating retail personnel.

There is a wave that is used, a gesture that seemed somehow aggressive before I was familiar with it, like something Ralph Camden might do with his hand as he bellowed “To the Moon, Alice!”   It involves a carefully calibrated rotation and the use of the back, not the palm, of the hand. It is a gesture of respect and acknowledgement.  Now that I’m used to it,  I am thrilled whenever I receive such a wave, which strikes me as being as  refined and dignified as a court curtsy. I like to give it, as well, and my arm has a bobblehead quality to it as I rotatate and wave my way around the village.

If I have the blues, a stroll to my village plaza is a guaranteed cure. The friendly nods, the tip of cowboy hats, the knots of villagers who sing  “Buenas Tardes” in unison, that cool hand gesture when I let a driver have the right of way, the  gracious bows delivered by old abuelas in their flowered rayon skirts and mantillas and knee high support hose. No matter how sour my mood when I leave the house, immersion in the good manners of my village will soothe me.

So what went wrong in  the furniture store? It was just a negotiation that took a nasty turn, and I extricated myself  as handily I could.  The price on the appliance didn’t match the one in the computer, it was one of those things, and I admit I got a little pompous. The salesman was out of control, and although it’s hard to resist the desire to one up an opponent in that kind of confrontation (I’m a big one for rearing back and puffing up my aforementioned rigidly corseted chest and saying something stupid like “Do you know who I am?” as if I might actually  have some leverage in a Mexican furniture store, which I most certainly do not).  I knew the event was an aberration, so it was easy for me to avoid getting caught up in it, to let it go.  In addition, as empty as the threat was, I wasn’t about to let the police get involved, even though we both knew they probably would have delivered a beating to the guy for calling them and interrupting their poker game.  I’m less interested in being right than in being happy,  and  keeping a low profile, in my opinion,  is one of the secrets to a contented life in Mexico.

On our way down the street to purchase a refrigerator at Coppell, the arch rival of Muebles America (oh, come on. it’s one thing to rise above, but I wasn’t about to give any money to those cretins) I said to Bruno, “Wow, that guy was  having a really bad day.”  “Eh,” Bruno responded with a shrug. “He’s probably from California.”

*they were when this happened, I should say. The Argentina match was yet to be played

I fear that I must be harboring  unconscious  hostility toward my husband, buried deep below the tickled affection that is all that I’m aware of when I look at him.  What other explanation could there be, if not a wide streak of passive aggression,  for travel plans that year after year  either bring us home the day before the village fiesta begins, or have us scheduled to depart the day after it ends? This year Bruno looked at me, unbelieving, when we got home just in time for the first barrage of cohetes in the plaza a block  from our house that announces the beginning of the nine day spectacle. I couldn’t believe it myself. After a week with two college girls in Puerto Vallarta and a long drive home, the last thing we wanted to hear was the communally owned loudspeaker system crackling to life with  brassy ranchero music .

Yes, I know I sound like a party pooper.  But listen, a Mexican village fiesta doesn’t have romantic guitar trios on the stage playing “Cielito Lindo.“   I wish. No, to get the village whipped into a party mood, thirteen or fourteen flashy Mexican men decked out in leisure suits over nylon shirts depicting lurid desert sunsets will take the stage and arrange themselves into a big brass section that features, for the love of God, an effing sousaphone.  And that is along with trombones, trumpets, clarinets, saxes, snare drums, cymbals, and an accordion,  and the music they play is….well, if you can imagine a salsa band and a polka band both playing  simultaneously, you’ll be in the ballpark.  I like  guitars and I like Mariachi music. I like Cumbia and Salsa and Bolero. I’m actually kind of a Mexican music aficionado. But Jesus, when they get that sousaphone  involved, and the squeeze box, when they start mixing the traditional Mexican folk music with German oom pah pah,  I draw the line.

My friend Anita gave me a pitying look  at my birthday lunch yesterday—  I showed up wearing all the largesse showered upon me by my darling friends, the earrings and fans, rebozas, a necklace to hold my reading glasses. Wanting to show my gratitude, I draped it all on myself until I looked like a dowry being delivered to some far eastern court, but the finery couldn’t hide my exhaustion.  When she heard me describing how I had heard the rattle of the Aztec dancers outside my gate, and been too apathetic to even investigate she nodded wisely and observed that “The bloom is off the rose.”

But no. My love affair with Mexico is as passionate as ever, it’s just that I’m getting old.   This curmudgeonly attitude toward music signals my age more powerfully, I think,  than the network of creases and lines on my face that bear witness to a whole lot more than sunbathing. But even if I still had my taste for loud discos and rock concerts, a Mexican fiesta patronales is in a class by itself. It not only the music. The whole nine days of  fireworks, rides, the peddlers stalls filled with smuggled and pirated goods in colors that make you squint and throw your hands to your eyes in the manner of shielding them from a nuclear explosion,  the barking dogs.  By the time the parade danced down the street outside my house, I was numb.

In my defense, it was the last day of this annual jamoboree,  and it had been extended for tw0 days to accommodate the weekend. I was sitting lethargically on an ottoman in my living room, too exhausted to think of anything to do when I heard  the gourds  rattling–from their sound, I guessed they were at the top of our block. There was plenty of time to get to my gate to see the desfila, and I felt guilty for not being able to muster up the energy to go look.  I love the miniature Friar Tucks in their brown  robes that represent our St. Anthony. I love the teenage beauty queens in hoop skirted prom dressed waving from the back of some uncle’s pick up truck.  I especially love the indigenous dancers wearing feathered headdresses and moth eaten leopard skins  and, bringing up the rear, our village band with it’s beloved tuba playing a bouncy mash up of who knows what.  Really, I love all these things, but on this occasion, I had just had it.

Not to worry! In high school, my Dad would comfort me during the meltdown of one of my great loves by reminding me that boys were like buses , another one comes along every twenty minutes. Had we lived in Mexico then, he could have freshened up the analogy by using parades. And there is indeed, another one coming along, if not in twenty minutes, certainly very soon. I might organize one myself, just to celebrate the end of the fiesta.

Oh dear. Beach vacations have historically had the  ability to cast a spell that drenches the lowest rung of  service workers in sex appeal, transforming restaurant sailors with fish sticks on a tray into navy seals and fishing guides that wear bathing suits as underwear into rock stars. That’s just the way the beach is, and although, with the wisdom of maturity,  I am mostly immune to the condition these days, (inoculated, no doubt,  by the dozens of  unsuitable love affairs that made my youth so much darn fun ) given the right conditions I can still feel symptoms.  Going to Puerto Vallarta with two dazzling brand new college graduates constitutes the right conditions.  Celebrating their achievement with a sunset ride on a pirate ship that has an open bar and boy dancers doing sword fights, well,  all I can say is that the wisdom of maturity has no place on a pirate ship.

Some years ago, my older step daughter was shopping for a formal,  an event which inspired the first of many moments of the vertigo that comes from aging ungracefully, when you realize civilization has actually made some dramatic advances in your lifetime. It occurred to me that neither the fabrics that prom dresses were being made of, nor the lingerie to go with them, had been invented when I was in high school. I had the same sensation on the pirate ship. Boy, there was nothing like that around when I was looking for it, I can tell you that! Good looking Mexican twenty somethings swooping around with daggers in their teeth and a deejay spinning Sex on the Beach (with it’s compelling chorus;  ” Champagne! Mojito! Tequila! Boom Boom!”)  while the sun sets in the Pacific and fireworks are sent up off the bow. If you can imagine a higher goal than getting one of the swashbuckling staff to run your panties  up the mast along with the Jolly Roger in a situation like that, I defriend you.  Not my panties, obviously, because I’m past all that, and also because my foundation garments are made of stern stuff these days.

It turned out that my darling girls  are themselves made of pretty stern stuff, and had no problem whatsoever keeping their wardrobe in place . They don’t have anywhere near the degree of toxicology required to get up to shenanigans like I did back in the day, and it turns out, they have wisdom of their own. But they still felt the love! By the end of the week the three of us were exhausted from falling in love with ATV drivers, zip line tour guides, waiters at Senor Frog’s, jet ski rental clerks, time share salesmen, and of course pirates whose English vocabulary consisted of the word “Yar”.  Which, looking back, they may well have thought meant “Nice to meet you.” My husband watched all this with amusement. And amazement, I’m sure, that his middle aged wife, charged with chaperoning his precious daughter, could regress so horribly into her own round heeled and rum soaked juventud.

Luckily, the girls didn’t travel back to my village home with me. The first week of June is when my village celebrates its fiesta patronales, the nine day hootenanny celebrating St. Anthony de Padua,the saint for whom our pueblo is named.  And although I hate saying good-bye to any of my step-children, I  admit that I’m relieved not to be gambling with my precious baby’s virtue on some of the characters that are loitering around the village square right now, especially not if she’s got margaritas and pirates on the brain. The enchantment of our week at the beach is powerful enough to make even the wretches who operate the tin tilt-a-whirl that travels from village to village for fiestas  look kind of  sexy, and if there’s an animal out there more raffish and uncouth than a Mexican carnie, I’d like to meet it. But only in broad daylight.

I’m glad the fiesta is here, although these parties are normally a hideous thorn in the Gringo side, with their 15 piece bands cranking up at 11:00 at night and drunken cowboys napping on the sidewalks. But I know what it’s like to rejoin the real world after a vacation like the one we just had, to cry all the way home on an airplane, to wake up surrounded by responsibility instead of ocean.  I didn’t have to suffer the shock of re-entry because I live in Mexico, and when the band took a break to allow the stage to be set for one of the endless beauty contests or  raffles for pick-up trucks that go on night and day during fiesta time, the DJ took over.  With his help, on my first night home, I was lulled to sleep by the catchy rhymes— “Mama, she say roly poly, Papa, he say holy moley,”— of  this song,  number one on the pirate ship hit parade.

If you are actually checking here to see if I have updated, Thank you! Some of you have checked in to see when I’ll be back in action, and the answer is Monday, June 14th. See you then.