When I Went To San Miguel de Allende To Study Art

As I awoke, I clearly remembered the events and the em motions but not the names. In my dream I had seen once again the time I spent in San Miguel de Allende and remembered how much the fate of one man I had met there had moved me, made me wonder about how we connect and how we could possibly forget each other. That I could not remember the names was disturbing but it didn’t really diminish how important these other memories were to me.

One of my best friends father was a serious artist and he always spoke of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. No distractions, he said. And they have everything – life drawing, silk screening, etching, tapestry, painting and wood carving classes outdoors. From the time I was a child, I had always been an artist. But my medium never gelled. I was interested in everything. I just woke up one morning and decided to go to Mexico for a year. Another friend, in between relationships, joined me three days later. It seems as if all my life I’ve been struggling to get back to what we had that year. No phones, no bills, no chores, no choices. All day, every day, was spent being artists.

When I went to San Miguel de Allende to study art, the house I rented was near to the apartment of a divorced father and son. Despondent over the recent death of his wife I learned , the father had moved with his son to Mexico. We also quickly realized the father had a serious drinking problem and was rarely home.The son was tall, thin, scruffy beard, dirty too-long stringy hair. His father was an ex-seaman, short and stocky with grey beard. You’d never know they were related.

Because I’m always talking to strangers, I don’t remember when we first met. I know we weren’t introduced, just started talking after seeing each other a few times. It may have been in one of the many bars in the neighborhood. Maybe La Fragua. The son was there almost every evening till they closed drinking and discussing literature and debating politics with a crowd. We never knew where the father was. We almost never saw them together. I would always wonder about this and think about it a I began to get to know the son.

I get high very quickly on very little. So surprisingly I don’t get high a lot. Even if the out of pocket expenses are low, I feel like I pay another kind of price and because of that it’s one I have decided I really can’t afford. It does afford me the distance of observing other’s in their cups. If I indulge even a little I really will miss this because of the overwhelming self consumption of my own high. So I don’t get high a lot. I wasn’t the night I met the boy. I would have missed his 6 ft height, scraggly beard or brown hair. I might have missed the bright delivery, the animated gestures, and the genuine perceptiveness of his conversation. The breath of topics, the quick pick up and the actual value of what he had to say might have been missed if I had had a few beers or even one. But I and my roommate were taken up by his manner. I took him to be about 24, out of college and travelling like myself to get an education. It was a little while before I made the connection between him and his father. The father had an equally breezy style but more bombastic, more mundane in it’s subject and blustery in a jock drinking war kind of way. It did not engage you the way the boy did and this style was really not meant to engage. Like the bluster of sports opponents, it was really meant to separate, to keep others at a distance, and to keep them from slowing the older man down as he drank.

The son began dropping over during the day and we talked as he helped me with chores or we shared a lunch in the garden. He told me how he constantly begged his father to return to California as he missed his friends and longed to go back to school. He was desperately lonely. It was during one of these conversations, I was stunned to learn that he was 14 years old. Even knowing it, you couldn’t believe it.

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I could have suspected what my one refusal of shelter would have resulted in. But there was never anything specific to signal me. It was the succession of days, the troubles of everyone, the day to day annoyances, the never realized threats. Like the barking dog at night, you never really see the thing that you are barking at. You kind of sense it off in the distance, an irritation you will speak about but there is really never anything to sink your teeth into. I knew he would make the rounds, there were circles of friends and acquaintances he would find some shelter with that night and many others to come. This drifting, this seeking wouldn’t end as long as the father drifted from place to place, dousing the fires of memory, killing brain cells to unwittingly achieve that refined , distilled , hard focus on the thing he was trying to forget. How we come to exist only in relief to it, seen only by contrast against our problems, turned against our thoughts and memory by each day’s light. The boy would drift and casually enter the same rituals as his father. And in casual and careless use, to dull the days and nights, he would mistakenly take his own life. In the dulling haze of pills and booze he would drift away, cease to breath and to need.

One day after only two months in San Miguel, there was a frantic knock at the door and a neighbor said the boy had taken an overdose of pills, an ambulance had come, but they couldn’t revive him. It was three days before they could locate his father who was on a drinking binge in a cheap hotel in Mexico City.

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He returned to San Miguel to bury his son, and then, in one of the cruel ironies of life, left his son alone again as I saw it, and fled from unbearable guilt to return to San Diego. Writing this after so many years, I’m still reminded of how angry I was. But what kept me from going back to sleep last night, was that although I could remember all these conversations verbatim and the impact they had on me, I couldn’t remember the names of these people who had helped me and hurt me, nor would I recognize them if I were to pass them in the street.

We should never try to calibrate someone else’s pain. We should never watch the struggle between something big and something little and not understand the plight of the little. We shouldn’t have to know the exact force that will crush nor wait to hear the fissure and cracks as they open up. We should never have the faith that the material thus exposed will turn into diamond, for diamonds are very rare. And if they try to tell you we are all either hammer or anvil, you have to ask who is it who’s doing the dirty work.

This is kind of a summary of where I am with the San Miguel piece for Bonnie. It’s pretty close. There are two narrative gaps (but important ones – how the boy became a bit of nuisance so Bonnie and her roommate have to dismiss him one night and how the father was missing for so long after the boy passed.) These will not take much to fill but are also important emmotional elements. In particular the gap about the father. But stylistically all the elements are there and some of the actual passages are quite good. Should be finished by next week