You might say the streets flow sweetly through the night.
~ Xavier Villaurutia, Nostalgia for Death
David, Richie, and Raven were all together in San Miguel de Allende because Raven lived here now, and Raven was dying. I met David and Richie one night at Tio Lucas bar midway through their visit. Next day Raven drove past the three of us out walking in town and asked them later, who’s the babe? It’d been years since Lee called me Babe, and I liked it. We had one week. This created a glow around us, intensity to our time together that was a miniature, more frivolous mirror of Raven’s urgency. At the same time, we felt no hurry; the days were long.
I came here on my winter break from teaching and had created a schedule for myself because routines helped me feel more stable alone. The first few days I kept busy writing on my hotel balcony but the unfamiliar freedom of being away left me wandering streets or sitting in restaurants at odd times of day. I was learning new rhythms, the pace of the place: write early, Bellas Artes for cappuccino around 10, walk, visit the jardin around noon, Posada de las Monjas for siesta: nap, read, write, meet hotel neighbors, until at least past 7. Then slowly the nighttime streets of the cobblestone town came to life. Everyone gathered at the jardin, walking through or sitting on benches to watch the people go by. Teenagers and twenty-somethings were here to study Spanish, art, or Mexican culture. Worldly, retired Americans and Canadians came to escape winter or empty love lives, stretch dollars, or possibly, become someone else once more. In their midst: me at midlife, newlyunwed, traveling alone, for one week.
The night I met David and Richie I had been to a poetry reading (per schedule), was invited to join the poets for dinner but couldn’t handle the “group dynamics” and slipped away to Tio Lucas. I sat at David and Richie’s table in the bar where they were waiting to be called for dinner but they didn’t notice me. They were here for Raven and each other, plus (I later learned) they had wives at home and were practicing, after a number of lost marriages and relationships, being faithful men.
They paused from talking and found me there, “trying not to eavesdrop.”
“You grew up in New Jersey?”
“You’re Jews from New York? My ex is a Jew from Long Island!”
“You dance salsa? Let’s go dancing.”
We all had been at the same Ravi Shankar/George Harrison concert at Madison Square Garden in the ‘70s! It was like we’d known each other for years! I didn’t know which one to like more! Then their table was called and they politely went off to eat. Then Richie returned to invite me to join them, and so I did.
We discussed the menu, jazz, San Miguel, Raven, their wives, my ex, the midlife crisis.
One said it’s real; the other, not.
David called it, “Road not taken.”
Richie said, “Insatiable desire.”
I offered, “Paradise lost?”
David said, “Jung’s shadow.”
I told the story of Ricardo, the married Mexican Texan I’d met at my hotel two nights before. “He’s 40 years old with a toddler and a pregnant wife and comes knocking on the door to my room at midnight, begging: abre la puerta. Good thing, no is the same word in English and Spanish.”
After ceviche, more margaritas, arroz con pollo, carne y verduras, huitlacochtle (tasty black fungus mushrooms), and one shared helado dessert we agreed to meet in the morning, for cappuccino at Bellas Artes at 10.
The whole next day we walked the cobblestones, up and down the steep hills and stairs, studying views, a museum, tiendas, eating, drinking, talking. We kept meeting every day, falling in love with the place and each other.
#
On the fifth day Richie had to take Raven to the hospital and David and I sat out the afternoon and twilight on my hotel rooftop, chatting, sipping damiana, and smoking, close to an increasingly starlit sky, listening to music all over town, church bells, dogs barking, dialogs on streets below, hotel guests coming and going. Inside, we talked on opposite twin beds until three in the morning.
The air was charged after all the days and hours of languorous, revealing, verbal intercourse. Tonight we had covered (among other things) erotic poetry, the clitoris, his first fumbling experience with a college girlfriend, how it “didn’t work” and he went to the library to “study up” and they took their time and talked themselves through it until they were mutually satisfied.
“I now consider myself a pretty good lover,” he admitted, and described his wife’s body to me. “She’s not the type of woman I usually go for. They’d be more like you.”
I contained my longing, as he debated his “moral dilemma.”
With no more talking he moved us into a standing-up, very tentative hug-then-kiss where our bodies sensed each other, what it would be like, and our lips reached and searched and also held back before he pulled away then I said, “I’ll step back and make it easy for you to leave, how’s that?”
I took the step. And he left.
I went to bed with our desire: desire alone, pleasing, mutual, alive.
#
On my last afternoon in town I finally met Raven. The four of us sat at an outdoor table at the edge of the jardin and watched the people pass.
Richie said, “Ever heard the saying, man with many hats?” and pointed to a young Mexican selling straw hats, stacked on top of his head, reaching all the way to the sky. A marionette clown wheeled by on his little bicycle, mariachi music drifted around a corner, bells clanged forth from the parroquia tower, sun rays penetrated wispy clouds like spread fingers from divine hands.
Throat cancer made Raven’s voice quiet, head bowed into his neck as if surgery had reduced the distance or his ability to stretch up. David, Richie, and I ordered beer; Raven couldn’t join in because he had to consume everything through a tube. But he begged to taste and did so with a spoon then dribbled and reached for a napkin to wipe his mouth. When he spoke he was the local, and we leaned toward him to hear him better, the knowledgeable one with much to say, even as his body was slowly, as he spoke, deserting him.
“Enjoy this,” he was saying.
The old, hideous, guitar man strolled by our table and handed us a card with song titles: Cielito Lindo, La Bamba, Guantanamera, etcetera.
I handed the card to Raven: “You choose.”
But he couldn’t focus on the hand-printed words. All during our time together I watched him struggle to remain in the world with us, as he contemplated leaving it, still in his body, coughing, dribbling, uncomfortable in his posture. He knew he was dying, while David, Richie, and I fancied ourselves in the middle of life, and savored the scene, the sun, beer, good company, blissful in our bodies’ passions, hungers, and thirsts.
So we were able to pay attention to the ugly old troubadour as he sang through his stained, crumbling teeth:
que bonito el cielo
que bonita la luz
que bonito es el amor
~ in memory of Raven