By listening to her queries and guessing at the meaning of her hand gestures, I soon figured out the words for "open" and "shut," and this made matters worse, for it encouraged her to think that I understood Spanish perfectly and was on the verge of translating the works of Cervantes. She stopped trying to speak English altogether. No need!
"La bla bla de bla bla, tonces, bla bla-ista, si?" she asked.
"Okay," I said, after a long, frog-mouthed pause.
She fired up a drill and began shaving off the tops of all my fillings, for reasons that she had probably just explained but that eluded me entirely. In truth, they continue to elude me to this day, those reasons, but at the time, all I was thinking was: "Please don't let her hit a nerve, please, please."
After ten minutes of paring down all of my teeth, she stopped and put on a pair of sunglasses. "La bla bla de bla bla. Claro Patricia?"
I gave a noncommittal nod.
She whipped out a batonlike object, flipped on a switch, and began to pass the baton slowly back and forth along my lower jaw. It made no sound. It never touched me. Just slowly waved back and forth. Well, I thought to myself, that's what I would do if someone interrupted my Dia de los Muertes celebrations and had neither dollars nor pain. Remove their fillings and wave a wand over their head. Then I had an epiphany. Aha: the powder and air. When I spoke with her on the phone, she must have said POWER and air, which must have meant air-powered air, or . . . maybe . . . power in the air. That was it. Power in the air.
"Laser," she explained, reading my expression. "The laser will calm your dollars for now until your dentisto at home can do the work necessary."
She was a LASER dentist, you see, not primitive at all. On the contrary, very cutting edge. What a first world snob I had been. This kind of dentistry has been practiced for only ten years or so. According to the Canadian Dental Association, lasers have a number of useful roles in dentistry, none of which relate to what the Cuernavaca dentist did to my mouth. But lasers can be used in root surface treatment, the treatment of gingivitis, to strengthen tooth enamel, and to seal fissures or sterilize the site of orthodontic work.
"Dentists should be properly trained in the use of this equipment," the CDA warns in its official position on laser dentistry, "because of the inherent risk connected with its improper use. Educational requirements for the use of lasers in dental offices and facilities should be such that proper and safe use of this equipment is assured, and should include theoretical training, clinical training, and a meaningful examination to ensure competence."
I quote that in order to reassure readers that wand waving is not taken lightly here in Canada.
At any rate, by sheer and staggering coincidence, two days after I saw the dentist in Cuernavaca, I woke up with my face so swollen on one side that I appeared to have elephantiasis. As a matter of fact, it was possible that I did have elephantiasis because, why not?
At breakfast, mouthing pan dulce and slurping coffee, my travel companion and I went through the same conversation.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. Just need some Advil."
The garden in which we were seated was exquisite. Lush green lawns faced the sheer cliffs of the Tepozteco volcanic range, where one could see an ancient Aztec temple atop a ridge. Fountains burbled. Flowers bloomed. Music played, dreamy and quiet. Alas, owing to PostTramautic Stress Disorder, I would never return.
An hour later I was in the local health clinic, which was deserted on Sunday at church time except for la doctora, a calm, quiet woman in jeans who led me into a clean examination room and beheld my face without alarm. El elephan-tisio was now differentially diagnosed as una problema con su dentista. My jaw was infected, she suggested, and it would take some time for the swelling to abate.
This was deeply disturbing, for a number of reasons, including the fact that I'd planned to reconnect on this holiday with a long-lost love, who would now bring new meaning to the phrase "Why, you've changed!'
"Things are different, now, Patricia," I could imagine him saying, "we're different. I'm married now, a father. And your left eye has disappeared from view behind a fold of skin."
I contemplated this scenario as I bent over with my pants down and la doctora injected steroids into my bum. She also gave me a prescription for Cipro, arguably a more suitable antibiotic for anthrax contamination than dental infections, but it did the trick. Particularly when combined with cerveza, it had the salutary effect of making me decide to rent a house in the town and move my family to Mexico for six months.
In my next dispatch from the frontiers of thoroughly ruined holidays: why, if you have two small children, a dog, and three cats, you should not inhabit a villa that was lovingly designed, furnished, and landscaped by two gay architects from Acapulco.
A Simpler Life at Casa Patsy
"You're going to Mexico for six months?"
This, generally, the astonished question one gets from friends when one announces that one is going to Mexico for six months. Depending upon the friend, the word emphasis might change, from "you're going to Mexico?" to "you're going to Mexico for six months?" — with one or two people locating their adamant incredulity squarely on the "you're going," as in "you, Patricia Pearson, are going to Mexico for six months?"
The only reason I can imagine that going to Mexico for six months is so surprising is because most of my friends are parents now and tend to assume that they have signed their lives over to an international consortium of petting zoos.
But, I try to tell them, I have a quest. I am blowing a gasket and I need to find simplicity. Go away media. Go away malls and pop-up ads and choices and false expertise. Shoo. I want to move to a wild, rugged, and beautiful place that is warm and languid, with no Fox TV or SUVs. Where my children can be exposed to village life, to the importance of community ritual, to the reality of poverty. Where they can discover a world wholly unfamiliar with John Ritter's last hurrah as the voice of Clifford the Big Red Dog.
"But why Mexico?" the friends ask, as if Canada's boreal forest would do.
The idea of going to Mexico came to me when I was reading a newspaper in Starbucks one day and discovered that the Mexican government had changed its laws on citizenship. It used to be that if you had Mexican citizenship, you could not carry a passport from any other country.Viva Mexico! Thus, although I was born in Mexico City, when my father was posted there, I had to renounce Mexican citizenship at the age of twenty-one in order to remain a Canadian. In 1998, however— as I was discovering in the newspaper over a vanilla latte— the Mexican government repealed this law, primarily in order to encourage Mexican emigres to the United States to move freely back and forth and to invest their dollars back home. Ay caramba! In their wake— surprise!— came me.
Needless to say, the daughter of a Canadian diplomat was not the intended beneficiary of the law, but I'm harmless enough. And it was my birthright. After all, I came into the world hearing muttered Spanish and was first held by Mexican hands. "Una ninaV1 was the very first observation made about me. I was conceived, conceptualized, and announced in Mexico. What could be more fitting than a return to my first hurrah?
My bid for serenity began in a snowstorm at five in the morning after a sleepless night of worrying that I would sleep through my alarm, compounded by even more extreme worry that I would never fall asleep at all. Which indeed I did not. Among the many useless notions that blundered like fat drunks at a frat house party through my mind all that night was that, if I ever wished to deprive Ambrose of sleep, in order to more effectively interrogate him about where he left the car keys, I could just tell him that he had to catch a flight at six on the following morning. Really, this is all one need do— to spouses, or prisoners of war. You don't have to be inhumane. Simply tell your captive that they have an escape opportunity at dawn on the following day, but that no one will be available to wake them up. Nothing works better.
I finally lurched out of bed vibrating with stress before the alarm went
off, and next faced the quandary of having to trudge through foot-deep snow in my ready-forMexico running shoes as I swept my car free of its new white winter coat. The drive to the airport, in blowing snow with fishtail slush on the highway, was raggedly tense. I felt bitterly jealous of Ambrose, still warmly asleep in the house, who was scheduled to come a few days later with the children. If a blue fairy had appeared just then, warm and affectionate and confident like the fairy in Pinocchio, and said, "What is your wish?" I would have said, "Bed."
But she didn't appear, and when I parked at the dropoff lot, snow billowing around me in the darkness, I encountered two men engaged in irritable verbal fisticuffs, fuck you— no, fuck you— fuck this. Kevin climbed into the airport shuttle with me, and the woman behind us bellowed, "Oh for God's sake, a dog," as if Kevin were the last straw. We all proceeded in hostile silence to the terminal.
Deliver me please, God, from Canada in January at dawn. From a people disheartened by weather and darkness and SARS and the prospect of war.
Seven hours later, warm as toast in my ski jacket, I found Kevin's cage at the Mexico City airport amid pieces of luggage. He cried with relief when he heard my voice. I didn't need Rochelle Gai Rodney to discern what he was thinking. After he recovered from the shock of flying cargo, followed by an hour in a minivan on hairpin mountain roads as we steered clear of Mexico City and went over the volcanic rim to Tepoztlan, Kevin turned into Jack in The Nightmare Before Christmas: What's this? What's this? What smell do I find here? What's this, a donkey on the ro-oad. What's this? Horse poo? And there! A cat with one le-eg. What's this, a swimming pool for meee?"
My dog explored while I, exhausted, sat at the long wooden table in my open-air dining room, gazing out at a large garden filled with the cactus, hibiscus, and plum trees that encircled our swimming pool. Beyond the garden lay a wild valley full of honeysuckle and magnolia trees. Or, that probably wasn't right— more likely it was forsythia and mango trees. Or jasmine and pine trees. Actually, I didn't have a goddamn clue what I was looking at, but it was pretty and it smelled nice.
Raising my gaze, I found myself staring at a jagged hill— bare and craggy at its summit. The hill was close enough to shoot at, if one were so inclined, and thus we would come to watch the vultures who nested there and who otherwise wheeled noiselessly above us, waiting for one of our pets to be poisoned by the landlord. About which more later.
On very clear days, from our bedroom balcony we can see Mexico's largest active volcano, the magnificent Popocatepetl, which is an ancient Nahuatl word meaning "we don't much care for vowels." The volcano is perfectly cone-shaped. From its tip streams an extraordinary plume of steam and gas because Popocatepetl is volatile these days, and keenly watched by volcanologists.
When Ambrose and the children arrived, we settled into an extremely basic routine. Geoffrey wandered around naked, placing his Carnegie Collection dinosaurs at various strategic posts in the shrubbery, while Clara and the dog swam in the pool, and Ambrose came down with some combination of malaria, Ebola, and dengue fever, retreating to the bedroom, never to be seen again. I wrote stuff, and followed news on the Internet about the Bush administration's mounting impatience with the rest of the world for their failure to see the threat from Iraq. The Security Council needs to "stand up and be counted," I remember Condi Rice saying, as if all of its members, which included Mexico at the time, were cowering and blubbering like "girlie men" rather than offering valid objections to a hurried and precipitous invasion.
Unsettled, I walked down into town to read the Mexican papers that are sold in the square and found myself gazing in wonder at a magazine cover that featured a fat naked man slumped over dead on his toilet. This was a true crime magazine. These are extremely popular in Mexico, so don't get the idea that a people committed to family, community, and church aren't also fond of seeing fat naked men dead on toilets, because they are.
Indeed, I would be remiss if I suggested that there was less sensationalism or clamor in Mexico. It is just that their ruckus is different. On a typical morning in Tepoztlan for instance, you awaken not to telemarketers, pundits, and TV ads, but to an incessant overlay of barking dogs, backfiring trucks, squealing pigs, chirping crickets, crowing roosters, clanging brass bands, and exploding firecrackers. By midafternoon, I might add, when most other noises have calmed down, the firecrackers are still going off all over the arid highly incendiary landscape. They are meant to scare off the devil, and maybe they do. The also cause me to poke myself in the eye with my mascara brush. Sundays, naturally, are the worst. Ash Wednesday through Easter are insufferable.
The town of Tepoztlan has been written up by anthropologists as a classic Mexican pueblo. It is where the famously drunken author Malcolm Lowry situated Under the Volcano, his brilliant novel about a diplomat's self-destruction through drink. I could certainly see the route to excessive drinking here, with tequila for sale in all of the corner stores, and corner stores the preferred business venture of the citizenry, who simply knock off their living room walls to proffer tomatillos, Cheetos, and booze. The trouble is that getting to a corner store from our place involved a steep ankle-twisting cobblestone walk downhill past packs of matted wild dogs and starved sullen cows, with roosters hopping sideways to avoid the hurtling taxis and collectivos, vehicles that stir up a dust so thick it renders your pants unrecognizable.
"Honey," I might announce to the prone and perspiring Ambrose, "I'm just gonna trip and limp to the corner store after I change into my rubber overalls and spray myself with Cow Be Gone, do you remember where you put the Fuck Off Scary Dog repellent?"
And then off I'd go, returning about an hour later, red-faced from heat exhaustion, prepared to quaff the entire six-pack of Modelo beer that I'd just purchased on the spot.
The siesta, you must know, is a classic Mexican pueblo ritual, invented to sleep off the beer and sunstroke entailed in one's initial foray to the corner store, or office or factory or what have you, before daring to resume the rest of one's daily affairs. Interestingly, the Mexicans possessed no livestock whatsoever before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, which means that they owned neither mules nor horses and had to go everywhere on foot. I'm fairly certain that this would have left them red-faced, exhausted, and drunk at least once a day, and I'm not entirely surprised to learn that the average lifespan in that time was twenty-seven years. After that, their feet were just blistered stumps and they had to lie down.
We in more northern climes should rethink our roman-ticization of the siesta and, while we are at it, stop pining for the spa and the pedicure. A simpler life begins by counting one's blessings.
The Neighbors in the Shrubbery
Can blessings include a car?
I've been wondering about this because a simple life can actually get rather complicated when the nearest decent supermarket is twenty-five kilometers away. Granted we flew down thinking in terms of margaritas and tranquillity, with some vague idea of home schooUng lamely tacked on to the fantasy, but after seventeen trips to the farmer's market to buy as many boxes of Cheerios and juice as could fit in our knapsacks while we puffed and gasped uphill to our mountain retreat, we began thinking: No. Not quite right. We need a car. A car for bulk shopping and stray-horse protection and for . . . making the children go away! This latter thought occurs after a spell of nonstop shrieking that suggests that my children need a more concrete routine.
Car. School. Car. School. Car. More beer. Some tequila. School.
This, my mantra in the meditative ambience of Tepozdan.
We quickly locate car and school, and I am transformed into a mutant suburban mom, driving the kids to their petite Beatrix Potterish escuela in our newly acquired and irredeemably ancient 1989 Chrysler Shadow, popping into the Superama for fruit rollups and beer, dashing into the Woolworth's in Cuernavaca for piiiata supplies, before returning to my idyllic house in order to hastily become an author contemplating the universe under the volcano, after whi
ch I jump back into the Shadow and scoot back to school to be this week's volunteer parent at the dog-neutering drive.
Lest I feel overwhelmed, I have noticed a poster in town advertising a Friday afternoon meeting for Neurotics Anonymous. I am tempted to go, if only to discover whether they have merely misspelled "narcotics." But, the truth is, I don't feel tense, for it isn't like that. There are arrangements to be made, and loud bangs driving mascara wands into my eye, but there aren't any choices. Tepoztlan has only one bilingual school. The end. We met one person who had a car for sale. Here's your dough. We don't know a soul, so there goes the need for a datebook in which to pencil in lunch dates. We receive no phone calls. Ever. We never have mail. There are no billboards. We possess no TV. There is little public sanctimony and even less health hysteria. Geoffrey stands in the car as I drive. We crack open cans of Modelo beer as we walk. Kevin can poo on the street, and nobody cares if we don't have a Baggie, this being a town where untended animals outnumber people by a factor of two to one.
Despondent, as I sometimes am, when I feel homesick or worried about world affairs and head lice, I step fully dressed into the swimming pool, my dress floating up above my body as I sink in the cool water. The spontaneity of this limpid gesture cheers me up, and I tiptoe-walk through the chest-high water, engaged in the rescue of drowning butterflies.
Mexico has changed since the 1960s, when my mother still remembers going into a restaurant bathroom and finding, for toilet paper, a box of spoiled ballots. But it hasn't changed that much. There is a Wal-Mart in nearby Cuernavaca and a flourishment of Internet cafes in Tepoztlan, as well as some highly sophisticated restaurants and shops catering to the Mexico City weekenders. But, on the whole, materialism and status consciousness have not yet insinuated themselves as a dominant value. Nor— for better or worse— has political debate beyond the sophisticated circles in urban centers.
Area Woman Blows Gasket Page 11
