Llama for Lunch Read online

  The extremely comfortable, but extremely cold bus was almost empty. One other woman, six men and I made up the complement of passengers. After an hour and a half’s travel we stopped for thirty minutes and continued to do so regularly for the rest of the way, probably because we had only one driver, who was closeted like a jet pilot in a curtained cabin at the front of the bus. Noise emanating from in there sounded very much like a television. Was he absorbed in his favourite soap opera? Asleep? Dead? You’d never know. Our driver had to contend with tremendous winds, rain and wet roads coming up into the mountains. We were catching the edge of a hurricane that was causing havoc further south and was spreading across the country.

  The first stop we made was at a shop that was really just a cement-floored shed with a few metal racks scattered with a meagre supply of goods. I tried to buy some provisions but the stock leaned heavily to biscuits and drinks and all I got were some ghastly sweet wafers. Back on the bus I slept off and on and it didn’t seem very long before it was a quarter to five in the morning. I snoozed again and then it was seven o’clock and getting light. There were, thank goodness, no videos on this bus.

  Approaching San Miguel de Allende the bus stopped in out-back country at a run-down farm house where an old man in a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots got off. The beginnings of the town were very ordinary looking; shabby ramshackle little square boxes of houses with flat roofs. The bus station was small but pleasing with its religious shrine and a lavatory entrance once again lit up something gorgeous – green on one side for males, pink on the other for females and in between colourful pastoral scenes painted on the walls and flowers, albeit plastic, everywhere.

  I taxied to the youth hostel where the taxi driver asked me for fifty pesos. I said, ‘No. Twenty five.’

  ‘Si,’ he said and smiled.

  The hostel was a quaint place that fronted right onto the old cobblestone street. At first glance these streets look as though they contain nothing except decrepit walls, then you notice that there are gates in the wall. The hostel’s gate had an open grille above it and a plaque in the wall that declared its identity. A big piece of wood hung down on a rope and you pulled this to ring a bell and summon help. I pulled the rope and inside the gate discovered a lovely courtyard filled with plants and flowers.

  But I soon learned that this was not the place for me. According to the guide book the hostel had single as well as double rooms. The proprietress denied this. She had one double, which she refused to let to a single. That book has a lot to answer for. But the woman was very helpful and directed me elsewhere. The San Bernado Hotel where I eventually came to roost, was the first hotel so far since I’d left home that hadn’t insisted on the money up front. I didn’t have enough Mexican pesos to pay but I was assured that this was okay. I wrapped myself in a thick Mexican blanket, fell on the bed and slept for four hours.

  3 Illegal!

  When I woke I got smartened up and went to look at the town. San Miguel de Allende is a colonial town of old buildings and cobbled streets in a beautiful hillside setting that affords splendid vistas of plains and mountains in Guanajuanto state. The entire town has been declared a national monument to protect it.

  There had been irrigation-based agriculture here since 200 BC. After the Spanish invasion, a barefoot Franciscan friar called Fray Juan de San Miguel started a mission here in 1542. Later a Spanish garrison was established to protect the road from the south to the mines of Guanajuanto, which for two centuries produced up to forty per cent of the world’s silver as well as gold, iron, lead, zinc and tin and are still important sources of silver and gold. Ranchers and cropgrowers followed the road and San Miguel grew into a thriving commercial centre where the silver barons built sumptuous homes and lived opulently on slave labour.

  San Miguel was also the home of the Mexican revolution. Ignacio Allende, who was born here in 1779, organised the uprising for independence. He was executed in 1811 before independence was gained, but in 1826 the town was re-named San Miguel de Allende in his honour.

  In 1938 the Escuola De Bellas Artes was built and in the forties painting classes at the school attracted artists from all over Mexico, the United States and other countries. This high, unpolluted place has a superb light. Writers and other arty types gravitated in the painters’ wake and from the 1950s the Instituto Allende’s Spanish courses have attracted foreign students. But I didn’t see many foreigners – they don’t come south until it is winter up north.

  The San Bernado Hotel (everything possible here was San something) was a joy. An unprepossessing walled exterior presented to the street, but once inside the immense, carved, creaking wooden doors I found a tiled foyer that opened onto a delightful courtyard filled with pots, plants, creepers and a life-sized whimsical statue of a musician complete with guitar. A red-flowered tachoma vine with a trunk like a tree wound up three storeys to cover the flat roof top and pergola. On one side of the courtyard was an extremely high wall covered with creeping vines. A fountain with a pool at its feet was set in the wall. On the other side were guest rooms that opened onto the courtyard on the ground floor or the verandah on the floor above. The courtyard and balconies were surrounded by brick arches in which stood pedestals and embossed earthernware pots that overflowed with bright red and pink geraniums, impatiens and bougainvilleas.

  The floor of my second-storey room was tiled, as were half the walls, and inset in the floor tiles, as well as in the roof of the bathroom, were thick, old embossed glass bricks, twelve inches square. You walked on them as well as using them as skylights. On my balcony I had a comfortable chair covered with leather, and an iron garden seat. From the balcony two tiled steps led up to my wooden door with its glass insets, either side of which were wooden framed windows with iron grilles. Inside, my room had fine old carved furniture, a big comfortable bed, reasonable lights and, in the bathroom, the weirdest window– it had an open hole in its centre. At night I stuck a carrier bag over it to keep out the cold.

  I should have realised when I first entered Mexico and saw containers for used toilet paper alongside the loos what the significance of this was. But the penny didn’t drop until, arriving at this hotel and throwing a wad of paper down the loo, I spent the rest of the day trying to unblock it. The antiquity of the Mexican sewerage system does not tolerate paper in its drains. Just because it was called toilet paper didn’t excuse that use of it.

  At the hotel reception desk, Dino, the resident spaniel, wandered in to have a sniff of me. I saw no stray dogs in Mexico, just a few well-cared-for pets.

  I had been practising Spanish since before I left home and had a set of cassette tapes and a book along with me. I was getting better at it and managed to say, ‘Where is the bank please?’ to the hotel receptionist. The response was a stream of instructions I failed to understand, but after walking around for two-and-a-half hours I discovered that I was billeted close to the central square, the Plaza Principal, also known as The Jardin, which is the focal point of the town. On one side of it was the seventeenth-century parroquia, a pink, sugar-coated Gothic church with strange, pointed, soaring pinnacle spires that could be seen all over town and which were a nineteenth-century addition designed by an untutored local Indian said to have scratched the plans in sand with a stick. I believe it – it looks like it was designed by a blind man and built in the dark. The clock on the church struck regularly at a quarter past the hour but never got the time right.

  I looked in the parroquia, discovering that was the word for church and not the parrots I had been asking the girl at the hotel about. Never mind. Inside the church was stupendous – just how I think churches should be – but I wondered whom the Spanish made do the building work. It was constructed of rough stone and had a huge cupola of brickwork high up in the roof, but at ground level everything was very ornate. There were several altars, the main one superlative, some magnificent glass chandeliers, pretty coloured-glass windows and a battalion of gilded statues. In the front courtyard the inevit
able fountain burbled away, surrounded by ancient trees that, by the width of their trunks, looked as though they were planted when the church was built.

  The centre of the piazza sported an elegant rotunda where on this day a band played martial music to lorry-loads of children who were massed around it. The uniforms they wore differed for each school, but the girls all wore long, white socks and looked neat and smart.

  I walked many kilometres, saw a great deal of this lovely town and found all kinds of delights. But you had to watch how you stepped on the uneven old cobble stones of the street and the narrow footpaths made of rough-hewn stone blocks. Passing windows grilled with fancy metal bars and glazed with patterned glass, it seemed that everything had the touch of time on it. I encountered wooden doors with tiled facings, carved panels and peep windows barred with simple slats and spools or delicate iron scrollwork, personalised knockers, huge hammered metal key holes and handles, overhanging ancient lights, textured walls and swinging wooden signs. It was like a living museum.

  I finally worked out that all the funny little hole-in-the-wall places that I had been walking past in my search for the shops were in fact what passed for them in this town and, once I poked about inside, I realised that they actually had all I needed. From the outside each shop looked to be merely a wooden door in a wall and the small signs above the doors hadn’t registered with me. Some of the shops around the piazza were tiny jewels packed full of gorgeous trinkets, ornaments and jewellery meant for the rich or tourists. And some were teeny cafes that contained two minuscule tables and seats for only four people.

  The central area of the Jardin was constantly being swept by women with oldfashioned straw brooms. Most things were done the old way here and, as most floors were tiled, everywhere I went someone always seemed to be sweeping or mopping – even in the big bank, which possessed a bit of carpet, a woman scraped away with a straw broom. Despite all this cleaning activity, I saw much rubbish strewn about on roadsides and empty blocks as I rode around the outskirts of town in local buses.

  I bought the local English-language newspaper and read it on a bench under the Jardin’s trees. The major news of the week was contained in a long article concerning the only person who seemed to have died lately in San Miguel. It described in gory detail how he fell down on the steps of the church, hit his head and ‘pools of blood came out’. The departed had been unidentified for a while so all his clothing was described minutely by the reporter. Then came a harrowing tale of how his relatives came and looked at him through the glass window of the morgue. There was a blow by blow account of the proceedings, concluding with the comments of onlookers outside the church who had said ‘what a good thing it was that he had just been to confession’, and ‘how fortunate for him to have died in a state of grace’. No one mentioned that going to church seemed to be a health hazard. I wandered into several churches but managed to avoid starring in the local paper, perhaps because I wasn’t in a good enough state of grace. All the churches were much the same in degrees of grandiosity and over-the-top decor.

  As I walked along I decided that the folk here must be honest. I saw vendors’ carts left unattended in the gutters protected only by a piece of cloth that had been thrown over the contents and tucked in at the corners. You wouldn’t be able to do that down in Mexico City from what I’d read.

  I was completely floored by the beauty of the town’s bank and wondered why all banks couldn’t be like this. Entering from the street through big wooden gates and a little portico, you came to the teller’s desks, which were on one side of yet another open courtyard full of natural light where flowers bloomed around a fountain. Mexicans seemed to be able to make all kinds of mundane places attractive. Unfortunately this didn’t always go hand in hand with efficiency. For some unfathomable reason the bank only changed dollars between half-past-nine and eleven in the morning. And later, between one and four, came siesta when everything shut.

  The market was just a short way down the street from my hotel. It had a big veggie section packed with many stalls of fresh produce where I bought some delicious guavas. There were also stalls that sold huge glasses of fresh juices that I tried and found scrumptious. Women sat on the ground with cactus and prickly pear fruit laid out neatly in green rows on mats. The rest of the goods were pretty ordinary – clothes, shoes and tourist junk. No one harassed me. I could stop and fiddle with the goods to my heart’s content. I sat on a stool at the counter of a makeshift stall and had hamburgerzitas – better than McDonald’s and you got chips too. The chips were fried in corn oil, not cooked all the way through and came covered with sweet tomato sauce. The hamburgerzita had a slice of ham to keep the meat patty company as well as cheese and salad.

  Street food stalls, where people sat on tiny stools alongside the gutter or walls, offered food that looked yummy. There were tacos and corn cobs grilled on braziers. After drinking my fijoa juice I watched the proprietress washing glasses with water from a tap on the wall and realised that it probably came from the canal. I’d passed the canal on my walk. It was a stinking horror of filth.

  In a small shop I bought a bag of local coffee, bananas, bottled water and laundry powder that was sold from an open drum for a peso a kilo. It smelt like Omo, looked like Omo and was blue, so I can only hope it was. Seeing some bottles of hair colour I decided that if I rinsed my hair a bit darker it might make me look more like a local. Most Mexicans look half Indian. There are 1.7 million descendants of ancient Aztecans in the country.

  And now I looked like one of them. I hadn’t meant to come out jet black like an Indian but, as usual, what I had hoped would be a light golden brown had turned out a definite light golden black. Maybe it worked. People now seemed surprised whenever I said ‘No, hablo espanol’.

  That evening I ate at a small cafe close to my hotel. When I sat down at the table I thought that the red cloth had a pattern of black dots on it but the dots, resenting my intrusion, arose en masse and flew away. The waiter casually flicked their retreat along with a tea towel. Then I saw that the whole place was swarming with flies. They left me alone, however, while I ate a solid meal of enchaladas stuffed with cheese and drank delicious fresh orange juice. After dinner I was chewing gum to clean my teeth and, good grief, there was tooth filling in the gum. Lots of it. Oh, no, not again! This had happened to me in China. Why was it that the minute I got to a thirdworld country I lost a filling?

  At seven in the morning, before it was even properly light, I was awoken by the sound of clanging church bells – and what I hoped were firecrackers and not a revolution going on outside. At first I thought that this day must be Sunday, but it wasn’t. The bells started again at twelve and I decided that if this happened on a week day, I couldn’t wait to see what Sunday brought. On Sunday the usual morning bells tolled and then at half past eleven and twelve more bells joined in and the lot went berserk. You couldn’t miss going to mass here – the bells wouldn’t let you.

  During the day I found the library. According to my map it was straight down the street, turn right and you can’t miss it, but real life doesn’t work that way. After a fruitless search I asked for help from a woman who was carrying some books. I had walked past the library twice. I had been expecting something set back off the road in a large building with a huge sign, but this library was entered through the usual heavy wooden doors in a high wall. Only a small plaque set in the wall gave away its identity. A portico led into a cobbled courtyard dotted with chairs and tables shaded by umbrellas, where a fountain trickled dreamily in the centre. Tall pencil pines fronted by flowering plants stood sentinel around the four sides of the courtyard, while bougainvillea massed with purple flowers climbed the surrounding arched walls. Under the arches and colonnades at the far end were long wooden tables and chairs. In this enchanting, peaceful spot I spent a couple of happy hours and decided it was so wonderful I could live there. I gave it my vote for the best library in the world. The Chicago Library gets the vote for the most magnificent but Sa
n Miguel’s is the most delectable.

  Cool, quiet rooms full of books radiated out from the courtyard and up a set of stone steps was a restful cafeteria in an upper courtyard filled with flowers and bird song. Up more rough-cut stone steps that took you out on the roof I found the stone office that housed the computer room. It faced the massive old stone walls and arches of the church next door, which looked like a fortress from the street. With a little help from a bystander, I used the internet to send an e-mail.

  Returning from the library, I unwittingly walked past the corner of my street and went all the way around the town and through the square to come back the way I had gone. I did this twice more before I recognised where I was. What’s new!

  Every now and then in the streets I would pass a water spout in a wall, beneath which was a sickle-moon-shaped tiled receptacle for the water to fall into. In the past people would have come there to get water. When it rained heavily, as it did some days, you would only have to stand outside with a basin.

  I found a shop that sold small, round local cheeses and bought one. I think it was made from goat’s milk. It tasted rather homemade and could have been anything, but it was okay with the toast I had been able to buy in packets like bread. My hotel didn’t run to meals, so in the morning, after boiling water with my immersion heater, I made coffee in the little metal filter I bought in Vietnam. With cheese, toast and a banana, what more could you want for breakfast? Bacon, eggs, sausages and a steak for a start.