ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part One, Chapter 39: The Mexican Mirage
In San Miguel, we make two friends.
One is Bob — whom we instantly call Roberto. We strike up a conversation with him in the jardin and talk so long that we get hungry, so we move our conversation to a pizza parlor frequented by gringos. Over slices of pizza, he tells us he owned a laundromat in California. “Then I was diagnosed with cancer. After my treatment, I decided not to hang around a hot laundromat the rest of my life, collecting dimes and quarters and inhaling soap-powder fumes. So here I am.”
Both Ernie and I hear the word cancer but neither of us asks Roberto what kind of cancer, what kind of treatment, how he feels now. We pretend he didn’t say it and we didn’t hear it.
At the English-language library we meet Monique, a dark-haired, dark-eyed French woman probably in her sixties. She helps us apply for library cards, then invites the three of us to her casa. “Come around seven,” she says. “You can meet my cats.”
Monique welcomes us with cheeses out and candles glowing. One of her cats, a gray with blue eyes half-closed, sits in her lap on a wicker sofa. I sit at the other end of the sofa, and Ernie and Joshua are across terra cotta tiles from us. It’s cool. Monique has a silk shawl about her shoulders.
“Life is cheap here,” she says.
Ernie nods. “I know. We found a furnished two-bedroom casa for one-fifty a month.”
“I don’t mean that kind of cheap. . . . People disappear here, and no questions are asked. Or if they are, there are no answers, only shrugs.” She looks at Joshua. “Your son is beautiful. Watch over him. Watch out for him.”
Is she talking about kidnappers? Or predators? I’ve never had that kind of worry before.
Monique strokes her cat. ‘I met my husband in Paris after the war. He was a big red-headed Irishman. Pat O’Connor. I moved with him to Chicago. I taught school, and we raised our daughter there. Then he died — way too soon. What was I to do? I wasn’t drawn to Paris. My mother is dead. My father was a career diplomat and now lives on the island of Martinique. Martinique has black sand and voo-doo. I’m not fond of either. If I’d taught school one more year, my pension would have doubled. My daughter begged me to teach one more year, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Not another day. So I came here, to San Miguel. I speak four languages. I have Mexican and Canadian and English and American friends. And I have my cats.”
I want to ask Monique if she is happy, but I don’t. We are all escapees. Roberto from dull work and cancer. Monique from job burnout and the loss of her husband. Joshua from school. Ernie and me from . . . what? What are we running from? Money problems? Work we don’t like? Boredom?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
If we’re running from anything else, I don’t know it.
