When I looked out the window and saw a pilgrimage line of bare-chested men flagellating themselves with rope whips, I knew I was in surreal territory. Fine with me. Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer, said that here surrealism runs in the streets. My marriage was in shreds, and our Palo Alto home about to be sold. What better solution than to rent a poet friend’s house in San Miguel de Allende for the summer and see if any clarity emerged. The two-story white stucco house, square on a corner of Recreo and a narrow lane, was filled with books, handwoven textiles, pre-Columbian pottery, and mice.

Across the lane, flocks of snowy egrets nested in the swaying tops of trees, and catty-cornered below was the dusty Benito Juarez Park, where women still washed their clothes in a stone trough. Let the marriage burn off me, I thought. I will translate myself into a new language.

I made friends with a woman who had a child by a matador, but she did not tell the father. My daughter and niece took classes and flirted with Mexican boys who sometimes gathered under the windows imploring the “blondies” to come out. A stream of friends from home visited and left. I didn’t say I’d seen a mouse run under the guest bed at night. I bought armfuls of tuberoses that scented the hot rooms. A man on a donkey delivered milk from a tin jug. A strand of brown straw floated on top. I bought a pail then poured it out. All of us loved the thermal springs, the dressed-up mummies in Guanajuato, the promenade in el jardín at evening, the spare beauty of Querétaro. I liked riding rickety yellow buses with tin crosses and bleeding hearts and Madonnas dangling from the rearview mirror, torch music blaring.

Every day for five hours I went to Spanish class. My teacher, Raoul, was a small man in cowboy boots with kitten heels. Soon we became friends and started taking field trips to practice Spanish in larger settings. He had a friend with a low-down taxi who drove us to old churches with elaborately painted walls—and more pilgrims whipping themselves. I bought one of the knotted ropes in case I had the urge. We stopped at stands selling roasted corn with lime. We drove off-road, through hard fields, and searched for Chichimeca fragments. I found a terra-cotta plate with only a pie-slice piece missing. My Spanish, I thought, was becoming fluent.

One day, crossing an abandoned cemetery, I saw four boys playing. Their ball was a human skull. Other smashed skulls and bones lay scattered about and a stray dog crunched on, what, a tibia? As the skull punted past me, I grabbed it and ran. One minute later, it would have been smithereens. When I got home, I saw permanent teeth embedded above the baby teeth. The baby’s fontanel was not yet closed, the black lines like jagged stitching on a shroud, like the EKG of a suspicious heart, or the tracing of an uncertain economy. I placed it in the bookshelf, on top of its countrymen Octavio Paz’s and Jaime Sabines’s books of poems.

Raoul began to confess that he was trapped, would never get out of teaching Spanish to people like me who only visited like locusts in season. He cried over the fate of the Chichimeca people and took me to more stubbled corn fields to look for pottery. The trunk of his car rattled with the fragments. The house behind mine was torn down and droves of mice exited the foundations. When I came downstairs one morning, the kitchen counters were covered in hundreds of mice. I ran upstairs, screaming. Then Maria, the housecleaner, came in clapping her hands and shouting for poison. At the market we bought a brown bottle marked with skull and crossbones. We cleaned the house until the tiles gleamed and the wood shone. We stuffed steel wool in every crevice.

I was in love with Mexico, the zigzag gaiety and sudden parades and the scents and thumps of tortilla making, the powerful indigenous art, the sensibility that formed candies into skeleton shapes, the outrageous fuchsia bougainvillea, the plaintive guitars. I was dazzled by the colors and music and beneath those I felt a current of stoicism and melancholy. With my own life in shards, the pottery hunts felt like huge metaphors. I would not find the piece that completed the Chichimeca plate. This would not become my home but a place to return to in imagination all my life. Then, I needed to go back to California and take on my new reality. My Spanish wasn’t so good. After the lists of verb conjugations and vocabulary words, I wrote a line from Sabines in my notebook: Let’s see what sort of image of yourself you make out of the pieces of your shadow you pick up. I still wonder about Raoul, poking through the weeds among startled goats. What has he found?