The Mexico Diaries: Agua Caliente

Early this morning there was a knock on my door. There stood Bulmaro, a screwdriver in one hand, a pair of pliers in the other. “It’s okay now,” he said, snarling his lip in a brash Marlon Brando way.

“What’s okay?”

“El agua caliente.”

“Really?”

He shrugged, as if to say, Of course…don’t be ridiculous. If I say I have fixed it, I have fixed it.

He motioned me to follow him outside my condo to where a little concrete hut houses my hot water heater. He opened the wooden doors and pointed. “Mira.”

I looked. The blocky little heater, full of rust and corrosion, was bubbling away. Bulmaro touched it, burning his fingers, to prove that it was indeed hot.

“What was the problem?”

Bulmaro reached into his back pocket and took out a little box of matches with a drawing of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the top. “El fuego estaba apagado,” he explained. “But now it is okay.”

I thanked him profusely, not bothering to ask why he hadn’t lit the pilot light yesterday when he was here and I’d first noticed that I had no hot water or, even, why it hadn’t been lit over a week ago when I’d asked Señor Rivera to check and make sure everything was in working order. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Bulmaro had come over early in the morning and lit my pilot light and now I would at least be able to have hot water. My purifier still sat moribund under the sink so I could not drink the water, but at least I could bathe in it. As Señor Rivera would have said, “Already we are working on everything.”