Area Woman Blows Gasket (13 page)

Some Thoughts on Being an Immigrant

Recently I have been pondering the function of language in an immigrant's life. Shortly before I left for Mexico, I had an
opportunity to speak to some New Canadians— which is what Old Canadians who work for the government call immigrants nowadays,
in our revised political rhetoric— and they told me about how difficult the transition can be, from living as an Old Yugoslavian
or Old Rwandan or what have you to becoming a New Canadian.

The gist of this dinner party conversation was that being a New Canadian can be highly alarming, notwithstanding the fact
that many Old Canadians perceive New Canadians to be living indolently and contentedly off of the welfare state. But no, say
the New Canadians, in fact they are often humiliated to find themselves back at square one, driving cabs or selling fruit,
getting lost and stammering apologies in broken English. They hasten to add that they are grateful for the refuge and the
freedom, but much is displaced in exile, including one's basic sense of competence.

Maybe I understood abstractly what they were getting at, but now that I am in Mexico the lightbulb has been really switched
on.
Ding.

"Senora!"
exclaimed the big grinning customs officer at the airport upon my arrival. "How can j'hou be Mexicana? You don' even speak
Espanoll"

Well, true. I tried to tell him that I'd forgotten how, but I couldn't remember the Spanish word
for forget.

I do know some vocabulary, but it tends to come out as an inscrutable mixture of Spanish, French, and stutter. I recently
inquired of a fellow Mexican:
"Qu'est que c'est la palabra por . . . uh . . . por . . . uh . . . conoce
Scotch tape?"

This was actually, technically, a trilingual sentence, which ought to have earned me some points, except that it managed to
project what New Canadians would call an aura of rank stupidity. Language is a major obstacle, in this sense, because until
you are fluent you cannot surmount people's perceptions of you as really kinda dumb. The identity crisis is swift and merciless.
In a matter of days, you go from being an eloquent and confident person to a goof in a clown suit with foot-long shoes.

Today I answered a question in the affirmative by conflating French and Spanish and saying
s'oui,
which would be tantamount to a New Canadian saying "yesh," as if they'd just slurped up half a dozen shooters. And the listener
cannot help it: When somebody says "yesh" or
"s'oui,"
you think they're inebriated, disabled, or mildly insane. I know this for a fact because one night after I returned to Toronto,
I was in a bar when a young Mexican man from the town of Toluca, ironically not far from Tepoztlan, asked to join me. I said
no, I'm working, but he joined me anyway and wanted me to know that he was an architect by training, even if he was just now
working in a restaurant.

"It is difficult to have aspirations here," he said. Then he raised his hand in the universal gesture of stop, to command
my attention. "Consider: what is your definition of asthma?"

"Asthma?" I repeated, uncertain.

"Asthma." He nodded solemnly.

"A breathing condition," I ventured.

"Exactly," he said, and he lifted his baseball cap, ran a hand through his hair, then replaced the cap, sighing. "I only dream
in the day. This is the problem."

No, amigo, that's only one of the problems.

There are occasions when I say things that I am convinced are perfectly correct, in Spanish, yet for some reason they still
elicit uproarious belly laughs. In puzzlement, I try to deconstruct my errors afterward with my dictionary. This is how I
realized that when I wanted to go horseback riding one afternoon, I inadvertently announced my need to hire an onion, while
on another day the casual assertion to a cabdriver that I would show him where I wanted to go was, in fact, the declaration:
"I am monstrous."

There is an upside to this quandary, though, which is that you lose all vestige of your own prejudices about people because
without command of the language, you are completely undiscerning.You can get along famously with absolutely anyone, be they
oaf or Nobel laureate.

I had an incredibly engaging conversation with a local cactus farmer, days after the death of Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees,
whose music this man was playing in memoriam, on a tinny radio hung from a jacaranda tree. I was so stimulated by the task
of figuring out the past tense of
die
— as in, "it's so sad that Maurice Gibb DIED," rather than "it is very tragic that Maurice Gibb deaded," or "what a shame
that Maurice Gibb will have deathed"— that the farmer might as well have been Noam Chomsky forcing me to defend my position
on the fallacy of global activism at the grassroots level rather than a sun-wizened man in a worn sombrero, squinting in the
light and waiting patiently as I struggled to avoid saying, "Hello, I am monstrous. What a sadness that your singer has died-ed."

A Word About Ambition

Today, as a New Mexican, I've been thinking about the downward slide of ambition in an immigrant's life. It is often said
that immigrants are ambitious to provide a better life for their children. But what about themselves? New Canadians have told
me about how they get bogged down in the challenges of an unfamiliar landscape and take years to feel free enough to pursue
loftier goals. I understand that now. The abstract daydreamy ambition I entertained all the time in Canada has been distilled
in Mexico into a very modest and specific ambition not to inadvertently plow my car into a herd of cows.

Of course, I also try to avoid donkeys, schoolchildren, possums, and piles of rubble as I rattle along in a sedan that can
no longer drive over a green pea without juddering. The roads here are cobbled together with large chunks of volcanic rock,
which means that driving the children to school involves clambering over terrain that is so marvelously bad it wouldn't be
fit for a Humvee, let alone a Chrysler Shadow that regularly stalls and casts off parts.

Due to the conditions, all Tepoztlan traffic progresses at the pace of minus ten kilometers an hour, with cars creeping all
over the road to find the least-menacing chunk to ease over before they arrive, every two blocks or so, at the SPEED BUMPS
that some authority ordered built— I assume— for the purpose of bolstering a nephew's struggling cement business.

For no particular reason, one sometimes comes across an actual paved stretch of road, which all drivers immediately zoom over
like supercharged Indy racers, causing the aforementioned dog collisions. In any event, the whole process of "commuting,"
which in Canada provided time for rumination, was now as demanding of my concentration as a pinball game. The same proved
true for cafes. What better place to write, daydream, and scheme than a cafe, you might ask. But I was dealing with this ridiculous
sort of
Groundhog Day
problem in the local cafe, wherein I would go in and order a cafe Americano, and the woman served it to me black, and I had
to wait for her to be free again— periodically flailing my arm in the air— so that I could request milk, which she would,
at length, bring over with this pointed expression on her face, so that I'd spend the rest of my time wondering what she was
thinking. Some weeks went by before I realized that cafe Americano in Mexico just means black coffee.

Once I had slapped myself on the forehead and sorted out that problem, I turned my attention to figuring out what a Mexican
centime was worth and whether or not I owed a tip, and if so how much extra for tormenting waitresses by repeatedly ordering
black coffee and then asking for milk.

A Polish friend of mine remembers that he spent a solid eighteen months when he first arrived in Canada just trying to figure
out what people were talking about in the
Globe and Mail.
Another friend was so baffled by urban transit signs that she became agoraphobic. A third got so bedeviled by the lack of
familiar reference points that he had a panic attack, which he mistook for a coronary. When the paramedics came, he later
told me, they checked his vitals and then asked him how long he'd been in the country. Apparently, this happened a lot.

Being unable to take the ground beneath one's feet for granted is a major impediment to being ambitious. Multitasking is definitely
out. I used to be able to walk with my toddler, for instance, and take a cell phone call. Here, my eyes are frantically peeled
for scorpions, donkey shit, and mongrels. Consider every parent's warning to their toddler about not touching strange dogs.
In Mexico, the dogs all look like a canine version of Pigpen in
Peanuts,
lost in a swirl of dust as they slink along the littered underbrush on the sides of the roads. If one of them gets hit by
a speeding taxi, the others act as if they've found an all-you-can eat buffet.

Thus, telling a toddler not to pat the doggie roughly translates into this: Geoffrey, get back from the snarling, half-starved,
germ-infested cannibal. He might not be in a good mood.

Puppies pose a particular dilemma because you don't want your child to think that a puppy couldn't be an angel, but when I
hesitated for a long moment when Clara wanted to play with one, a Mexican mother came up to me and said: "What does your daughter
want?" I think that's what she said. Maybe she said: "Shame about our soccer heroes losing to those dirty-pig Argentineans,
don't you agree?" At any rate, I replied in Spanish: "She wants to play the dog like a violin," which wasn't what I meant.
The
senora
looked at me as if I was insane and made it clear that only bad, reckless mothers hesitate about letting children approach
stray dogs.

Soon enough one craves the familiar, if only to boost one's confidence in small decision making. So it is that finding a frozen
package of McCain Superfries in the Cuernavaca Superama elicits a ludicrous cry of delight. /
know what these taste like and how to make them!

This is why immigrants establish their Little Indias and Chinatowns and so forth— because they need a little corner of the
world that isn't baffling. To that end, I'm thinking of establishing a Little Canada here in the town of Tepoztlan.

It could be like a block-long neighborhood where nobody makes eye contact or says anything loud, and all the stores have huge
blocks of cheddar hanging in the windows, with bins outside full of maple fudge and President's Choice "Memories of Butter"
brand margerine. You'd walk inside the stores, and they'd all have black-and- white TVs behind the counters turned to the
Air Farce, with a space beside the Royal Bank ATM along the back wall for an air hockey table. At the Beaver Hut Diner, you'd
find framed pictures of the owner posing with Celine Dion or with Michael Ignatieff in a tilted sombrero. "Fabulous tuna casserole"
would be scrolled on the picture, along with the celebrity's signature. During the World Cup, all the Canadian-Mexicans could
gather in Little Canada to watch Wimbledon or have a health care debate.

And so ends the story of how Patricia Pearson, writer and journalist, became the satisfied proprietress of a cheese shop in
Mexico.

Serenity with a Full Complement of Spies

Lately I have been spending mornings at a language school, in order to improve my ability to fight with my landlord, who has
been evincing an odd, anal-retentive approach to his plants. I sit at a plastic patio table beneath an orange tree with my
instructor, a faintly mustachioed, sandal-clad linguist named Sylvia who runs her small school like an extended family barbeque,
with her boyfriend, her son, and a cousin on staff, and an elderly mother who can often be found weeping soundlessly about
widowhood in a corner of the office. In between exasperated arguments with her relations and frantic attempts to organize
field trips for twenty schoolboys from Denver, Sylvia has been teaching me how to say to Fernando: "What do you mean, you're
charging me twenty-five pesos for a stepped-on plant?"

I have always been deeply uncomfortable with landlords because they make me feel self-conscious, as if I'm about to get in
trouble but can never predict for what. This self-consciousness in turn leads to all manner of curious predicaments. Once,
in college, my landlord came into my apartment to check on some plumbing while I was sound asleep, buried under my duvet.
Given that it was noon, and he had no reason to expect me to be in, he was unaware of my presence on the futon, when he sat
down on it to make a phone call, placing his rear end approximately four inches from my face. Now this is one of those situations
that you simply cannot get out of unless you act swiftly.

Crucial minutes passed, in which I was too shocked and embarrassed to reveal myself to the landlord, and then my chance to
sing out gaily "Oh, excuse me!" was lost forever. One does not lie for five minutes with one's nose next to a near-stranger's
bum and then suddenly emit an airy exclamation. There was nothing for it but to lie deathly still, barely breathing and praying
to God that my landlord held his position and didn't sit on my head.

After two and a half centuries, he finished his phone conversation and left, and I vowed to myself that I would buy a house
as soon as I possibly could.

A happy decade followed, before I re-entered the humiliating realm of the tenant.

Relations began amiably with Fernando, of course, when we first arrived— no hint yet that he suspected us of rank vandalism.
Early on, he and his partner invited us over to lunch. Their house bordered ours, and they seemed to have developed both properties
as a dream project, an infatuated meeting of two lovers' minds— Fernando being an architect and Philip a landscape designer.
It never seems to have crossed their minds that a house with real inhabitants might bring them rental income, true, but RUIN
EVERYTHING.

We first felt a faint breeze of dissonance when we went to lunch at the appointed hour of two and noticed that they lived
a remarkably clutter-free existence in a round gabled home with sparse furniture, few objects, and perfect floral arrangements.
At first I wondered if they'd hidden their stuff, preparing for a photo spread in
Architectural Digest
or something, but I eventually learned that they were not the sort of people who owned any stuff, lest the stuff impinge
upon the aesthetic of walls and floors and gardens. Philip, the landscape architect, was a grandfather from Maine with a thick,
drooping mustache and easy smile. He favored short cut-off jeans and flip-flops, and seemed happiest puttering amongst his
prize tropical flora, with a packet of cigarettes hanging precariously out of his dress-shirt pocket. I cannot recall how
he hooked up with Fernando, a patrician architect with aquiline features and a silver beard, who sported white linen shirts,
sleeves rolled up, and chinos. But they were clearly a smitten couple.

The pair had a fine, glossy-coated rottweiler named Luna who tended to amble over to our side of the bamboo gates and scarf
down large wheels of Oaxaca cheese grabbed straight off the table. You could hear Luna at night in her pen, her deep, gulping
rottweiler bark providing a base note to the squeals of terrified pigs at the slaughterhouse across the road. At first, we
felt we had pet ownership in common, what with Luna and Kevin smelling each other's bums on a daily basis. But it soon grew
apparent that, in addition to being a consummate cheese thief, Luna's job was to pure-breed puppies and to serve as a cheap
alarm system. She never went for walks, received little attention, and wasn't permitted inside their house under any circumstances.
Indeed, it would have been insanely unthinkable, like inviting a cow into Tiffany's. Thus the seeds of Fernando's exasperation
with us were germinating.

Fernando generally resided in an elegant home in Acapulco, having been raised as an upper-class
rico
in the Yucatan. When he wished to communicate with us, he spurned e-mail or the telephone in favor of dispatching Mario the
gardener or Abondia the maid, with a note written on embossed stationery. At lunch, he and Philip served paella. It was a
neighborhood guest list, to introduce us to people of merit on Camino San Juan. Not the neighbors who lived in the shrubbery,
but the nattily attired sociologist from down the road and the health food entrepreneur from Mexico City who chain-smoked,
and a smattering of other relaxed yet elegant folk for whom Tepoztlan was a weekend getaway. They all imbibed red wine followed
by cocktails as they lounged, first on the veranda and then on the lawn, in the long, boozy luncheon style of Mexicans. The
Gatsby-esque atmosphere was charming, yet also impossible, really, for us to partake in after the orange soda ran out. Geoffrey
began digging in the flower bed with his dessert spoon.

Inasmuch as our own sophistication ended abruptly where our dog and two children began, it seemed a matter of necessity to
conceal this very fact from Philip and Fernando. What is the point, they might well ask each other angrily, of furnishing
a swimming pool patio with white-cushioned chaise longues if the cushions are destined to be covered in small children's footprints?
Why on earth import a rare cactus and place it just so in a desert garden if it merely lures a little girl armed with craft
scissors? And the pool itself— the spare, turquoise "splash pool," as Mexicans call the foreshortened, shallow-ledged pools
in which they enjoyed double shots of Jimador— how could it be so boorishly despoiled?

I was helpless where the pool was concerned— I do have to say that in my own defense. For Geoffrey began running a continual
science experiment designed to address the abiding query of the (two-year-old) human mind: What floats? What sinks? On any
given morning, particularly when Geoffrey had gone about his experiments after dark and escaped notice, the pool contained
what appeared to be the entire contents of a yard sale, replete with espresso maker, stegosaurus, wooden spoons, tea bags,
my bra, and anything prized by Clara, in particular Penelope, the battery-operated talking dragon. I constantly apologized
to Mario, whom I'd find early in the morning, stoically and gracefully fishing the yard sale contents out with his pole, bent
over the water in the one T-shirt he owned, his olive-skinned arms reaching for waterlogged toys and submerged barbecue tongs
as he lived out the theme of a Luis Bufiuel film without comment.

Every now and then he would glance up at me and smile shyly, a beautiful young man with the classic features of a Nahuatl
Indian, high-boned and almond-eyed, his hair dark as onyx. Little did I know that Mario was dutifully reporting back to Fernando
about our transgressions, acting as an undercover operative who had infiltrated tenant lines.

Landlords are not supposed to know what tenants get up to until tenants leave, said tenants having madly scrubbed and polished
the premises to leave no trace of their lives. Landlords remain blissfully ignorant, provided their tenants aren't engaging
in serial murder or pet hoarding. (As I write, a woman in Wisconsin has just been evicted for keeping seventy-six ducks in
her apartment. It is this sort of person, this sort of owner of seventy-six ducks, whom I wish Diane Sawyer would interview
with that concerned and puzzled knit to her brows. "Why seventy-s/x ducks?") Anyway, in Mexico, the rules are different. You
get to be spied upon every single day by the "gardener" and also by the "maid." It is said here that the walls have ears,
a situation compounded by the striking absence of physical walls, so that said gardener and maid can observe you eating dinner
in your dining room, and watch you cooking quesadillas in the kitchen and file eyewitness reports of your six-year-old using
the antique chest of drawers as a nest for the blind and hairless newborn opossum she has found ejected from its dead mother's
pouch on the side of the road.

Thus it was that Fernando dropped by one afternoon with a pool maintenance man and explained to me with a tight and condescending
cheerfulness that pools filled with appliances and toys tended to run up filtration repair bills, which naturally I would
be expected to pay.

His greatest angst, however, arose over the treatment of Philip's plants. This was a predicament to which I was doomed when
I rented the house on the Day of the Dead with a swollen head and a hangover, and not the faintest passing acquaintance with
the difference between rhododendrons and thistles. I had never noticed the plants at all, and I first realized Fernando s
anguish because of Kevin. My dog has a psychotic habit of nosing large stones around and then chewing and snapping anxiously
at the grass surrounding the stone, as if frantically attempting to free it from its grass . . . trap? . . . before the stone,
or "egg," perhaps, or "small, hard, inert puppy" is . . . killed? By cats? Or captured by the enemy? In any event, Kevin has
been doing this all his life, and it was never more than just ridiculous behavior until the grass belonged to Philip and Fernando.
Then it became the source of whispers, rumors, mounting tension, and finally a note on embossed stationery: Kevin was to be
tied up.

Shocked, for the lawn was mostly perfect, as Kevin rarely finds the right sort of (sacred? egglike?) stone to set him off,
I considered pointing out to Fernando that the issue here was just a bunch of fucking grass. Happy, easygoing, growable grass,
versus a dog free to move more than five feet in any direction. But I held my tongue and even let it plague me with acute
self-consciousness, finding myself rushing at Kevin and squawking like a frenzied hen to make him stop it, stop it! until
one afternoon, noting that we had refused to tether our dog, Fernando upped the ante. I was furnished with a bill for 250
pesos "for the plant that was destroyed."

This ominous and entirely ambiguous note was delivered via Mario, and offered no further elaboration, as if I knew exactly
what plant was meant because I had just had a thunderous party at which several large men got hammered and crashed over backward
into a tub of hydrangea. I immediately began scouring the garden in a huff, searching for some sort of plant catastrophe and
wondering whether this bill was meant as a replacement cost or a fine. Was I being slapped at financially for failing to display
appropriate reverence for all this delicate, intimately imagined greenery? Or punished for Kevin?

I interrogated Mario, deploying my newly acquired ability to speak in the past tense:
"Donde esta la planta que fue destruida totalmente??"
Mario professed innocence,
"No se, senora,"
and when I read out the charges brought against me, he shared a sidelong smile, a sign that he agreed that Fernando was being
a snob and a goof. Mario allowed that while Geoffrey did tend to shear off the tops of certain plants and pour coffee on others,
while Clara was fond of sprinkling flower petals into the lily pond, as far as Mario could tell, everything was at least still
alive.

Vindicated, I planned to storm over to Fernando s
casa
and have it out with him about his preposterous bill for an imaginary calamity, but then I worried that he might retort in
various verb tenses that I hadn't yet learned, like the past imperfect or the present imperative, and I wouldn't know what
he said.

One day, I found a kitten in my dishwasher. I discovered her after trying to figure out where the meowing sound was coming
from in our kitchen, a problem that vexed us for a good eight hours. When we narrowed it down and finally freed her, she scrammed
out of the room and shot across our lawn.

The next day she got herself stuck on a ledge somehow, up inside one of the chimneys. More sleuthing, followed by pity and
a dish of milk.

Then she couldn't get down from our plum tree. Ambrose refused to come to her rescue again, so I dragged a chair over and
clambered up, climbing a tree for the first time in years. The black kitty eyed me curiously and timidly for a time, and then
began to purr, rubbing her neck and head against the bark. It struck me that she was engaging in ploys for attention. I don't
know anything about cats, but I figure if you're the size of a pinecone and living alone in rural Mexico surrounded by starved
dogs and vultures, you probably court attention. At any rate, I could hardly transport her down the tree with both hands without
falling myself, so I sent Clara running dutifully and excitedly back to the fed-up Ambrose.

"Daddy, you have to come!" I heard her declare. "Now Mommy is stuck in the tree. Our own MOTHER!"

This is how it goes, creatures big and small blowing through our house, bees the size of trucks banging against the window,
coatis taking bites out of the bread, geckos getting caught in the barbecue, spiders in the bathtub, fleas on the kitten,
lice in the children's hair, stray dogs of all sizes scuttling under Fernando s flimsy gates and doing cannonballs into the
swimming pool. You lose your fear of the creatures after a while and soon simply tend to their needs.

By the time another feral cat gave birth to a litter of four kittens in the shower stall of the guest bathroom, it was nearing
the end of our sojourn in Mexico, and I no longer cared about Philip and Fernando and their vision of fine living. They had
drawn the wrong lessons from the landscape surrounding them, I had come to decide. They were aspiring to beautify and control
nature the way that we more northern North Americans had been doing so obsessively, with so many products to assist us, and
for what? We dress our dogs in booties and scoop up their poop, blow-dry their fur, read their minds, and don't give a rat's
ass that thousands upon thousands of their southern kin are emaciated and struggling for bare survival.