November 2009

My neighbor, Donna, had a cocktail party Saturday to celebrate noche de brujas. Donna wore a green felt witch’s hat decorated with papier mache chiles, onions, and tomatoes—her pico de gallo witch’s hat, she called it, something she’d concocted at a mad hatter’s party her tango class held that afternoon at Recrero Palace where Donna goes to dance.

She won first prize. She was, she said, pouring herself a glass of red wine, the maddest mujer viejo in San Miguel. She took a slow drink of her wine, her bony hand, covered in amber bracelets jangling against the glass. The party had just started but she was already a little drunk. Donna likes to spend her afternoons sitting in her very pleasant courtyard beneath a lemon tree—the only one I’ve ever seen in Mexico—drinking beer with ice out of a teacup as a prelude to cocktail hour. The watery beer, she says, eases her into it, it being cocktail hour.

Donna is in her seventies. She came to San Miguel de Allende by bus from Memphis more than 40 years ago, before anyone had heard of it, before it became “the Mexican Santa Fe,”as she says derisively. She opened a little B&B after leaving her first husband.

Donna no longer endures pretty conversation, if she ever did. Shortly after I moved in next door, I invited her over for dinner and towards the end of the meal, just making small talk, I asked her about her ex.

“It’s none of your goddamn business,” she said sharply, slamming down her fork. “I’d like to enjoy my postre without having to answer your fool questions, if you don’t mind.”

Later, I’d told that story to someone who’d known Donna for a number of years. She told me that Donna’s first husband was bi-sexual and abusive. Evidently his bi-sexuality wasn’t the problem.

Donna has a daughter, Gloria, who runs the front desk of the B&B in the mornings. I asked Donna one time, after she’d had a fight with her daughter about a guest who’d taken his meals at the inn but not been charged, why she and Gloria fought so much. She waved a hand dismissively.

“Gloria looks just like her goddamn father,” she said.

That would be the second husband, Fernando. He was still around somewhere, though the stories about him varied. Someone told me he was very ill. Someone else said he just pretended to be ill, that he’d been dying of one thing or another for fifteen years, always coming back to Donna for money when he was broke so he could pay for some miracle treatment in Mexico City. Everyone rolled their eyes when they mentioned the “miracle treatments” in the same breath as Mexico City.

Two brujas at Donna's noche de brujas party on Saturday. Photo by David Lansing.

I didn’t really know anyone at the party except Donna, but that’s always the way it is in San Miguel. People are always coming and going. There are the ones who have been here for a month or so, still talking to realtors and trying to decide whether they prefer the neighborhood of Atascadero or Los Frailes. And there are the middle-aged women from Houston or Tulsa whose husbands are bored with them so they come here and take painting classes at the Instituto. Many of these women, with plans to come down for a week or maybe two, end up staying here for months. Or longer. I suppose some, like Donna, never go home.

Mary Morris, in her wonderful book Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Along, which, unfortunately, is out of print, writes about coming to San Miguel in the mid-80s and going to a party like this, or maybe it was a bar, and being asked by a stranger if she was an artist or a writer because everyone who came to San Miguel was one or the other. Nothing much has changed except now instead of painting bad watercolors many of the women make jewelry.

I finished my drink and went over to say goodbye to Donna. She was arranging the main table in the dining room with various alfeñique—sheep, skulls, witches. It was quite festive looking.

“Leaving already?” she said.

“I’m afraid so.”

She patted me on the arm. “Smart man,” she said. “Get out before the brujas start casting their spells.”

I wasn’t quite ready to go home. I walked up Aldama to the Jardín, passing little devils with blackened faces and angelitos in communion gowns wearing chiffon wings. “Hjallo-queen!” they cried, running up and thrusting their hands at me. Not trick-or-treat, like in the states. Just “Hjallo-queen!” But, devil or angel, I had nothing to give them.