Mexican Paradise
by Gaither Stewart
June
2000
As I watched Hubert Elmer Bachman
walk toward me from the other side of the park in his queer
gait, jerky and mincing, leaning slightly forward and
balanced on the balls of his feet, it occurred to me that he
was unlike other Gringos here in that he hadn’t chosen
to live in San Miguel Allende at all. He was an exile. And he
hated his life here. At home in Brooklyn, Hubert had been an
ordinary man, who, as he said, had lived in most
extraordinary circumstances, in what for most people would be
a no man’s land strewn with land mines and booby traps.
Yet, Hubert once told me, it had seemed like an enchanted
kingdom where even cold realities were somehow magical --
even if, as he expressed it, gloriously predictable -- and
promised to be eternal. Instead, his gods, as he called his
former bosses and his familiar enemies, had shuttled him off
on a journey into an unknown and unwanted world. His Mexico
was not an enchanted land but his own hell.
San Miguel just didn’t count in Hubert’s scale of
values. It was populated with ordinary people who had lived
ordinary lives in Kansas City or Charlottesville but who now
were convinced they were living on the dangerous side of life
here on the frontier of civilization. I often recalled his
wry grin and speculated on what he meant that once
you’ve associated with gods, mortals are so
insignificant.
No sooner had we sat down at a green iron table in his
flagstone patio than the doorbell rang, loud, insistent,
exigent, four or five times. Rage flashed across
Hubert’s face. “Quien es?” he shouted. No
answer from outside. “Quien es?” he yelled again.
No answer.
Disgust and fury at home in his eyes, he stood up, his hands
on his hips. After a hesitation he opened the gate and spoke
to a wizened old Chichimec I could see standing on the street
with his hat in his hand, surrounded by three tiny dark
children and four skinny donkeys.
“No, gracias, nada tierra,” Hubert said softly. He
didn’t want any dirt today, he hadn’t wanted any
yesterday, nor any of the days before when the same man rang
that same long and hard ring at his gate. He gazed severely
at the old man who stared back at him fixedly and then added
in English, “and I will not want any wood either when
winter returns.” He slammed the door violently enough to
make even the donkeys jump and trot away.
“I can’t take it anymore. Every morning the same
thing. I know his ring. It’s infuriating that he never
answers. He hears me very well. The Indio just wants to see
my face and lift his white cowboy hat in deference to a rich
Gringo. I’ve even dreamed about him. Crazy old man! Just
because I once bought a load of dirt from him. It’s as
if we had some kind of relationship or something.”
It was already hot. The insidious sun was burning black.
Everybody said that the sun was guilty of the madness of the
town. But, it would rain again in the afternoon. The August
days were muggy that year, unnatural at 7000 feet, surprising
since the coldest winter local people remembered had lasted
until March. Hubert had worked for months cutting and
uprooting plants and small trees and replanting and reseeding
his garden ruined by the unusual freeze. Now young vines and
bougainvillea were climbing up the exterior walls of the
house. Water in a little pond under a tree was still and
murky. It had been raining hard every afternoon for the last
month.
“Paradise!” he snickered. “Eternal spring! I
hate this climate. If I have to put up with this rain, then
I’ll take Brooklyn! Give me Prospect Park anytime over
this phony Ju?rez Park. This is not real
life. It’s all illusion. Like those papier maché Judas
figures in Holy Week.” Nostalgia for Brooklyn had soured
Hubert’s San Miguel; he hated the constant fiestas, holy
days, the Great Revolution parade, the Day of the Dead. He
passed his waking hours and his daydreams in the grasp of
images of his former “real” life where nothing was
illusion - not even dreams.
When I commented that the good climate was the reason so many
Gringos spent the winters here, he looked at me speculatively
with his close set eyes and said sardonically that that was
not the real reason Americans came here.
“They come for the cheap cost of living and servants
… and to escape their placid lives in the States. There
have to be lots of compensations for the contaminated water
we’re always boiling, the chronic bronchitis and the
amoebas ... the eternal dust and this shitty climate.”
Hubert walked around a bit, a troubled look in his eyes. He
checked that the gate was securely shut and threw a pebble in
the fountain. “How I detest the word expatriate,”
he said. As far as Hubert was concerned, San Miguel Gringos
didn’t even qualify as expatriates -- even if they liked
to think of themselves that way -- since they ran back home
at every opportunity: Christmas, their daughters’
birthdays, summer vacations. He, instead, was an exile. And
he claimed that the weather that others praised so much was
responsible for the hopelessness of his situation. The
climate was part of his punishment, the price he was paying
for making wrong choices back in Brooklyn.
Moreover he was always complaining about the language. He
detested Spanish. It was the silent “h” that
irritated him most. Even his Mexican wife -- for me still one
of the great contradictions of his life in chaos -- had
problems with his name because of that “h”. She
either dropped it where it belonged or put an “h”
where it didn’t belong. He winced when instead of Hubert
Elmer she called him “Ubert Helmer.” It irritated
him. He cared about his full name and wanted to be called
properly, Hubert Elmer Bachman, as he’d been known in
his law practice in Brooklyn. His parents and siblings had
after all made sacrifices for his education and law school.
He needed his full name. “Ubert” was demeaning.
Clumsy. Undignified. That unpronounced first consonant in
“Hubert” was emblematic of his condemnation to
eternal silence, far from Prospect Park and Bensonhurst --
emblematic of his exile.
He’d only learned to say nada tierra and nada le?ato
protect himself from the donkey salesmen who rang his bell
twice a day, as he said, just to see his face -- there was
something about Hubert’s narrow, almost emaciated face
and sunken close set eyes and long blond hair and his angry
English language that fascinated the Indios, as if he were
some kind of blond god from the North -- maybe he was
Quetzalcoatl resurrected.
Hubert had heeded the advice of one old-time resident that
“Spanish is not necessary here” and despite his
wife’s admonitions, adamantly refused to learn the
language. If he’d spoken any foreign language, he said,
it would’ve been Italian -- or Sicilian. If he had he
probably wouldn’t be here today. His life would’ve
turned out differently. He’d have been on the winning
side, back there in Brooklyn, among the victorious clans
today.
“Why should I learn Spanish?” he said to his
friends when they teased him about his total lack of effort
or even interest for learning the language. “My
wife’s Spanish is enough.” It wasn’t that he
didn’t have the time to attend one of the many excellent
language schools in San Miguel. He could have enrolled at the
Allende Institute or one of the courses for foreigners
offered by the University of Valle de México or engaged a
private teacher. But for him learning Spanish would be
acquiescence to his condemnation to eternal exile.
Instead he spent his time moping around the house, reading a
bit, gardening, or occasionally sitting on the benches in the
Jard?n chatting with other Gringos actively engaged in
filling up their days – the ones who had convinced
themselves that they were enjoying a fascinating, even a
risky life in a borderline country but who in reality missed
“back home.”
Hubert seldom talked about his pre-exile sentiments. He never
wrote nor received a letter. He didn’t keep a diary.
If he felt like an iceberg in San Miguel, his isolation had
begun in Brooklyn when his employers were defeated by the
Italian speakers in territorial wars and he was tactfully
sent to California, and subsequently to Mexico. The victors
had nothing against him. They might have kept him -- were he
Italian. But they were generous, he said, and gave him an
adequate retainer and requested that he leave the country. He
should keep quiet. In all his years here he’d maintained
the low profile as ordered. Once, drunk at Thanksgiving
dinner, he confided to me that marrying Renata was really
part of his front -- although he’d almost gotten used to
her.
It was true. The Hubert that people here saw was a stranger.
Only his deformed name remained. The rest of his story was
submerged. Not even his wife knew where he really came from
or suspected his isolation and solitude. She was only aware
of the superficial aspects of his Mexican life – she was
irritated that he refused to learn Spanish and would never
take her to the United States. Not even one shopping trip to
New York. Those things were important for her big family and
strained their already-strained marital situation, which
however didn’t seem to disturb Hubert. And for those
reasons she regularly packed her bags and
“returned” to her parents’ home in Monterrey.
But how could he reveal to her that he was forbidden to set
foot in the United States? he asked. The victors were afraid
he might be arrested and talk about them -- and indeed he
knew a lot. Therefore he was wary, constantly jittery, his
nerves raw. He once said he was afraid of some Rosenkrantz
and Guildenstern spying on him. That was when he told me
wistfully about the time in high school when he’d played
the role of the Ghost in an abridged version of Hamlet. The
best time of his life, he said.
A breeze was blowing gently down from the Chorro, over the
back wall of the patio, rippling the long leaves of the palm
trees. It sang through the dancing drapes of the open doors
of his house, up the stairs and out the rear windows,
spreading calm across the lower quarters of the town. Yet you
knew it would be short-lived. After lunch clouds would begin
gathering, appearing mysteriously from beyond the Sierra to
the east. By four or five the thunder would rumble over the
Baj?o and lightning would strike around the artificial lakes
and the parks and the rain would pour for half an hour or
more.
“Ubert! Who was eet?”
Her voice rising on the last word of her question, Renata
stepped through the drapes and joined us at the table. She
was carrying a silver tray with espresso coffees and sugar
and cream. His wife was an intelligent woman but she had
problems with that silent “h” that hung like an
iron curtain between them.
Renata was white, upper class, rich, educated, apparently
with nothing in common with the Indios like the dirt vendor
or the working class mestizos. She said that sometimes she
felt like a foreigner in her own country. Hubert thought of
her that way too. What, she said, did she and her
entrepreneur father have to do with a country of dark-skinned
illiterates? She could have said she felt like its colonizer.
“No one,” Hubert murmured.
“What do you mean,
no one? I heard the long ring.”
“No one. Just the dirt vendor, with his donkeys and
children.”
“Oh,” she said.
Hubert said “no one” but in fact he was always
talking about the identity of the real Mexican. If he had to
live here, he said, he wanted to know what country he was in.
Yet he apparently did nothing to get acquainted with it.
“Poor old man!” If he raged at the invasive ring
and concealed his real feelings about everything, I knew he
felt compassion for the plight of that dirt vendor and his
herd of little donkeys and gang of children. He was saddened
by the web of poverty and ignorance that hung over the lower
town. At times, when he was pissed at Renata, he said he
could identify more with them than with rich white Mexicans,
for they were the real strangers in their own country -- as
he now was in his. In fact, he reflected, he was two times a
stranger, in his own as well as in theirs. Several times
he’d read to me quotations from the Franciscan, Juan de
San Miguel, the founder of San Miguel de Allende 450 years
ago, who sang his canticles of love in order to
baptize-civilize “the naked, pagan, rat-eating,
Christian-scalping, uncivil, dirty dogs of Chichimecs.”
“Well, Ubert, you are a fine person to speak. 'Poor old
man!' you say. You shout so mad every time he rings.
You do not have to hate him.” “Ate
eem,” she pronounced it, her voice
rising charmingly on the last word of every sentence, which
seemed to grate on Hubert’s raw nerves.
“What do you know?” Hubert said, turning away from
her and observing his own image alongside ours reflected in
the picture window outside which we were sitting. It seemed
he was about to jump out of his skin. “How can you
know?... I’m fifty years old and still I don’t even
know who I am. We’re just props. Those are the real
people … out there.” He waved his thin hand vaguely
toward the gate and beyond. He meant the people down in the
San Juan de Dios quarter and those in the never-completed
houses and the shanties on the hill on the road toward
Atotonilco and Dolores Hidalgo, which a sign identified as
“Olympus” and under which some Chichimec satirist
had written with black paint in sprawling letters: “home
of the gods.”
That September, in an attempt to jolt himself out of his
apathy, Hubert on a whim joined the town’s amateur
theater group -- the old hands were always on the lookout for
fresh volunteers -- and was given a minor part in a play
written by a local playwright. His talent was immediately
recognized. When the imminent drama professor from the
University of Tennessee, George C. McCormick, who, wintering
in San Miguel as he’d done the last three years, began
casting "Waiting For Godot", the first part he
assigned was Hubert as Vladimir.
McCormick found that Hubert’s stage presence, his
character, his frame of mind, his solitude, the hopelessness
of a man waiting for an absent god written in his eyes,
reflected Beckett’s world on the outer edge of existence
-- “if not a world beyond extinction,” he
pontificated from his director’s chair one hot
afternoon. Moreover he thought Hubert Elmer looked like the
romantic Vladimir.
On opening night the two front rows spontaneously rose to
their feet and cheered after Hubert-Vladimir on front stage
sighed and expressed his own personal resignation with
Beckett’s words, “Off we go again,” and the
curtain fell.
From the front row I could read it in his face: Hubert’s
Godot would not come tomorrow either. He
would never come to Hubert’s wasteland. Up there on the
stage Hubert’s isolation was eternal. He was too
demoralized to even talk. Beckett suited him just fine.
In the past months Hubert had found a substitute for a
missing life. Taking his curtain call there on the barren
stage in his wide tramps shoes, his clothes in shreds, his
hair standing straight up, his beard fuzzy, and a puzzled
look in his eyes, he was a study of human immobility in the
face of the disappearance of the gods. He was alone. Yet the
sudden discovery that he was a natural actor had changed his
life. He’d found his escape hatch.
In a way, he told me in those days, he’d been an actor
all his adult life. He had to be to survive as long as he did
in that ambiance of semi-legalized criminality and the
vagaries of the law, to defend one before the other, without
ever knowing where he truly belonged. In a rare indiscretion
in his dressing room before the curtain went up he told me
that he often looked in the mirror and asked himself,
“How can I know if I’ve ever been true to myself, I
don’t even know who I am.” He said that no one
recognizes the complex self-deceptions one engages in to
escape the sad truth of self-knowledge. Like his hiding in
the wasteland under the guise of an expatriate. Each time he
dressed for the stage, he felt like the matador
dressing in a hotel near the arena, slowly, meticulously, as
if for the final act. Each act might be his final one. No one
knew that feeling more than he, condemned to exile and never
certain if that was his final punishment.
“And for what?” He said that he liked the Vladimir
role but envied Estragon each time the tramp tried to escape,
turning his back on the danger and saying, “I’m
leaving.”
Professor McCormick was so enthusiastic about Hubert-Vladimir
that he’d telephoned a Mexican drama critic in Mexico
City who once studied with him in Knoxville and advised him
not to miss “his” Beckett and to “spread the
word.” A star was being born and he wanted to be the
midwife. The critic sat in the first row together with two
friends from the theater and cinema world of the Mexican
capital.
Now residents of the art town of San Miguel, many of whom at
home never frequent theaters or art exhibits or chamber music
concerts, are particularly reverent in the face of any
manifestation of art and creativity. Once they arrive in San
Miguel they are mysteriously transformed into artists and
connoisseurs of the arts. I don’t have to describe the
emotion that swept over the entire Peralta Theater, from
Instituto Allende students in the hot balconies to the front
rows packed with art lovers and theater critics and musicians
and journalists and writers, when Hubert-Vladimir and
Estragon -- the latter played by the local painter Allan
Crillon -- engaged in Beckett’s famous, wry, sparse duet
set outside of all time, while the desert space of the
setting floated through the theater like music from the
universe.
“... so we won’t hear all the dead voices,”
says Estragon.
“They make a noise like wings,” says
Hubert-Vladimir.
The duet goes on: “Like leaves. Like sand. Like leaves.
They speak all at once. Each one to itself. They whisper.
They murmur. They rustle.... They talk about their
lives.”
“To have lived is not enough for them,” Vladimir
says.... “To be dead is not enough for them.... They
make a noise like feathers.”
“Like ashes,” says Estragon.
“Like leaves,” says Hubert-Vladimir with a sigh.
Total silence reigned in the theater. Spectators seemed to
have stopped breathing. I stared at Hubert. The song of the
universe was written in his eyes. The echo of the eternal
wanderer. A song from the after-life of man. As if it were
his last gesture. All is futile, Hubert was saying, while
Renata beside me cried.
****
Hubert was indeed a fine actor. No one who saw him as
Vladimir would doubt that. Who is he? the critics asked.
Where did he come from? What’s his theatrical
background?
“Why is Hubert Elmer Bachman hiding in San Miguel?”
wrote the suspicious critic of a small arts magazine in
Mexico City after hearing from his colleagues of
Hubert’s extraordinary Vladimir and examining his
photograph made by a San Miguel photographer, which began
circulating among art desks of Mexico’s major
newspapers. Soon after, an interview in the local weekly, La
Atenci?n -- which caused no particular
stir in phlegmatic Hubert -- landed on the desks of big
national newspapers.
However even Hubert was astounded by an interview with him
published on the first page of the culture supplement of the
Sunday edition of the influential La
Reforma, with a 6” by 4”
photograph of him as Vladimir in center page, all translated
to him by a now proud Renata. Now she had something to
telephone home about.
And as usually happens in the world of journalism, one
interview led to the other. Gringo or not, no cultural desk
in Mexico City could not report on Hubert’s
"Waiting For Godot." Hubert’s once quiet
street in the Guadiana quarter was animated by huge trucks of
television teams arriving from Mexico City. The reporters
were delighted by the arrival of the donkey salesman and his
children and Hubert’s shouts of “Quien es?”
from inside the patio.
However there was a downside to the extraordinary changes in
his life. The more Renata was excited by the notoriety, the
more Hubert gave himself over to speculation. He worried
about echoes from his gods in Brooklyn of his sudden fame.
How would they react? This was not the low profile they
counseled. Was there some concealed danger to them in the
publicity surrounding “their man in Mexico?” Hubert
feared he would be called to some accounting.
But since fame breeds more fame, as the performance was
repeated in the next weeks, theater barons from Mexico City
flocked to San Miguel. The Peralta was eternally sold out.
Professor George C. McCormick achieved an undreamed of
renown. And Hubert wondered what he was to do.
Since he loved gin, a hangover from the old days of his
Brooklyn gods who admired gin, and the very significance of
gin, we often sat at Tio Roberto’s over gin and tonic,
martini cocktails and even Hemingwayian Montgomerys and
discussed the meaning of life.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Hubert moaned late
one January evening. The Mexican winter season was in full
swing. The front room of the bar was dark. Salsa music
sounded from the restaurant in the patio. Hubert was morose.
“They’ve offered me to do "Endgame" in
the English Theater in Mexico City,” he said sadly.
“Even movie feelers are arriving ... from the United
States too. Can you imagine!”
“You have something special,” I offered. Hubert in
that moment was the least vain, the least ambitious person
I’d ever encountered, the most unlikely actor one could
imagine.
“It’s all so weird,” he said with his habitual
sigh. “There’s lots of money involved, you
know.”
“That’s always welcome.” I offered.
“I don’t need it,” he said laconically.
“But there’s more to it than that,” he said.
“I’m afraid!” Then, grinning, “I’m
leaving.”
****
But he didn’t leave and never again seemed to want to.
In February in the English language theater in Mexico City
Hubert played Vladimir alongside a well-known American actor
in the role of Estragon, achieving the same success as in San
Miguel. American journalists and movie and TV producers went
to see for themselves this by now widely publicized
American-Mexican actor. The “phenomenon,” they had
labeled him. The upshot of it all however was that the
enthusiasm of Mexican TV and theatrical producers cooled when
it became known that Hubert spoke only about five words of
Spanish and could not possibly attain sufficient knowledge of
that language this season, while for reasons of personal
security Hubert had to reject any offers that required his
presence in the United States.
Unfortunately neither went down well with Renata. She
demanded that he speak Spanish, immediately, and continue his
booming career in the capital. Or, as an alternative, that
they accept the offers in the United States. She
couldn’t understand when he refused both.
It was hardly a surprise that an empty house awaited him when
he returned home after six good performances in Mexico City.
A disappointed Renata had left only a note that he liked to
show somewhat gleefully to his friends as proof of her
perfidy:
Dear Ubert, I have returned home for
good.
You can call me when you learn to speak Spanish
or when you are ready to take me to New York.
Sincerely yours,
Renata
Hubert was as if liberated. Part of his front had fallen. He
was on his own. His life was full. A new Hubert, alone and
apparently fearless, began partaking in the delights of San
Miguel for the first time during his exile. The March days
were splendid, perfect for swimming at Taboada or the Hotel
Puertecita, outdoor lunches every day and languid evenings
under Chinese lanterns swinging in the breeze. Hubert
continued in the amateur theater, studying drama and learning
new roles and broadening his general background.
We were all surprised when at parties he began speaking
halting but improving Spanish -- despite or because of Renata
he’d enrolled in an accelerated beginners course at a
language institute near his house. The newspaper vendor at
the Jard?nwas
confused when the famous Gringo rejected the English-language
The News and asked
for La Jornada; he
was probably the only Gringo in San Miguel to read that
left-wing daily.
His favorite expression at every problem or threat -- Renata,
Brooklyn, the climate -- became, “I’m
leaving,” accompanied by a wide grin. “If I have to
live in the wasteland, I don’t need a wife. Especially
not one like Renata – who only dreams of New York.
Incredible,” he said, “the amateur theater here is
all I really need. It’s Beckett too, and Vladimir. I can
wait here. Or abandon. Just as I like. It’s the
substitute -- for all I lost. For my missing life.”
One late morning we were sprawled on deck chairs in his
flourishing garden when the loud insistent ring from the gate
sounded through the house. Hubert grinned, stood up, calling
“ya voy, ya voy,” I’m coming, and strolled
casually to the gate, which he opened gently and said to the
old Chichimec with a smile, “Gracias, hoy necesito un
poco de tierra.” I do need some dirt today.
The other nodded
gravely to his children and made to introduce one of the
dirt-laden donkeys into the garden.
