Crossing The Border #16

San Miguel #16

The first morning I woke up in the Pink Palace it was damp outside. I could see that a light mist had suspended itself outside my window like a sun-drenched cobweb. I lifted myself off the single mattress on the floor and opened double glass-paned french doors that revealed the inner courtyard. Barefoot, I stepped onto the crumbling brick patio and walked over to my mother’s room, collecting red dust on the soles of my feet. Her french doors were still closed, the curtains drawn across window panes identical to the ones on my door. I turned and headed to the kitchen, whose double doors were already open to the patio. I smelled onions, flowers, honey and heard a tiny distant voice partially obstructed by radio static. Maria stood inside stirring a ceramic pot with a long wooden spoon. Her apron had smudges and spills all over it, and a corner of it had been burned. She smiled and spoke before looking over at me.

Buenos dias senorito.

Buenos dias Maria.

She served me eggs with cooked tomatoes and onions and a red hot sauce and rolls dipped in honey. Mom came in, ate with me and stood up to get fully dressed.

Remember, Mish. School interview this morning.

Half an hour later, we descended the winding hall staircase, stepped out onto the stoop, and walked down the three cracked stone steps to the sidewalk. We crossed the street, stopping for a moment to let a bicyclist pass; the bike‘s basket was full of beige rolls with a ridge down the middle of them and, as the bike passed, a roll fell out and landed on its side between two cobblestones. I leaned down to pick it up and mom told me to leave it and we walked on.

La Escuela Bilingue was six blocks away, to the end of Cuna de Allende, right onto Hidalgo for four blocks, then left onto Zacateros, where the school sign was visible up there on the right.

We stepped under the sign and entered a long alleyway, wider and sunlit here at the street, narrower and darker there as we went along, walls rising several stories high on either side cutting off the sunlight and moving closer together like a canyon. Finally we reached the end and pressed a buzzer to the right of an iron door with a large barred opening through which I could peek as long as I stepped up on the landing.

I could see what I would soon learn from a student teacher to be a long row of cypress trees. Their tributary roots lay exposed, stretching out in the dirt, peeking out from grass, breaking through cracks in cement slabs. Only a hundred feet wide, the property stretched back a quarter mile, a graduated series of slate patios and grass gardens dropping to a dry creek behind a wall at the back. As it turns out, the previous owner had spent a lifetime selectively planting—arbitrarily nurturing—one plant over the next, encouraging whatever might grow in this location but not that one, until what was left behind was a property resembling, in some sections, a formal English garden and, in other areas, an overgrown tropical jungle.

The door was opened by a short man holding a garden hose. He motioned us in with a nod of his head and pointed the hose at a single story structure with large windows encased in steel frames lining the side of the building; all but one were standing open, clean glass reflecting the surrounding greenery, iron handles turned at right angles, casting sharp shadows of themselves against a rough granite wall.

As we turned the corner, we saw another single story room connected to this one; both rooms standing alone there in the backyard, a backyard belonging to a modest single story house with a roof covered in semi-circular adobe bricks. So this was here home, then, standing there at the front of the property and connected to the street; gaging where we were standing, I realized we must have walked directly by her front door in order to reach the school’s alleyway entrance.