ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part One, Chapter 38: In the Land of Dracula
A university professor and his wife buy our building, and we hold a mammoth three-day sale in our living room. What doesn’t sell — including an afghan of granny squares my mother crocheted for me — we drop off at Goodwill. We’re giving our daybed — our daybed, which holds so many memories — to a neighbor. It looks so small and forlorn, the only piece of furniture still in our living room. Then the neighbor and her friend come to carry it off.
What we decide to keep — favorite books, Cor’s Paris oil, Joshua’s train and BB gun, a mantel clock and kerosene lamp from Ernie’s childhood, a treasure chest from mine — we store at my mother’s house. Then we pack two pieces of luggage and ride a Greyhound to Chicago, then board a train to El Paso, then take buses and trains into the heart of Mexico. We arrive in San Miguel de Allende, which I chose — and Ernie agreed to although he wanted to live in Merida instead — because of its English-language library.
Just outside San Miguel’s train station, a three-legged dog comes up to us. “We can’t help you, fella,” Ernie says to him. “We’re looking for friends and a home ourselves.”
A man with stumps for legs sits on a striped woven blanket, a tin pot out for money. “Suerte,” Ernie says to him as he drops a few pesos into the pot.
We begin the downhill walk into town, Joshua and I each carrying a piece of luggage. Ernie rarely carries anything weighty. If he does, he risks angina — pain in his left arm. He has a lot of angina. He’s a candidate for another heart attack. We don’t talk about this.
“Daddy, look at that!” Joshua says, his eyes on two boys — probably younger than he is — flanking the entrance to a bank, each boy armed with a rifle.
“We’re in a different culture, Joshua.”
We pass an old man walking his donkey. The donkey’s saddlebags are full. With his college Spanish, Ernie asks el senor what’s in the donkey’s bags. The man, wearing a white tunic, white trousers, and tattered straw hat, smiles broadly at Ernie. He opens one of the saddlebags. It’s full of sticks.
Sticks? Who buys sticks off a donkey? And why? To feed a fire that’s heating tortillas? Yes, we’re in a different culture.
We rent a room off a courtyard, where two green-and-blue parrots live in cages amid big pots of bougainvillea. Our room has two beds, the width of the room between them. The next morning, Joshua unwraps himself from the white sheet in the bed across from us. “Did you hear the mosquitoes? They buzzed all night long. They kept me awake. I swatted them with my hands. Didn’t you hear them?”
Ernie and I slept through the blitz, but the white-stuccoed wall next to Joshua’s bed is blotchy with blood.
“My blood’s mixed with theirs,” Joshua says.
I think of Dracula, sucking our blood. We’ve landed In the Land of Dracula.
