Under a Mexican Sky

The first term of my year in Mexico is a blur. But when I went back after Christmas, kitted out in a heavy-duty sweater patterned with outsize red snowflakes, I recall the nip in the air as I walked up the hill to school. Already the sun shone from a cerulean sky. By lunchtime it would be in the seventies. For now, as we gathered with the kids in the yard to salute the flag, the distant volcanoes shimmered in the frosty air and we stamped our feet in time with the national anthem to keep them from freezing.

On one of the days when school closed for some significant date in the country’s calendar, Peter whisked me off in his smart car to Tepotzlan. The details are hazy: I think we lunched in style at the house of an elderly friend of his. We may have visited the witches and bought chaparro amargo to ward off amoebas. We may even have climbed the mountain. One memory remains, as clear as that sky: in a corner of the market, Peter parted with a handful of coins and presented me with a carved wooden whisk. ‘Bienvenido a Mexico’ he said in his Scottish accent and translated, as was his habit: ‘Welcome to Mexico’. 

​Most days the sky was a murky soup, the volcanoes lost in smog. When school finished, we would take off into one of the nearby pueblos in our battered turquoise Beetle and feast off quesadillas and cold beer before rattling home to light a fire. We had no furniture to speak of but our house did have the luxury of a chimney and we would lie on the carpet with our books and a glass of wine. 
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Peter inhabited a different world. When he wasn’t teaching – a grand name for the haphazard way we spent our weekdays – he was an orthodontist, which must have brought in the dollars. We never really understood why he entered our orbit at all. He didn’t seem to enjoy it much, struggled to manage the students, and the meagre pay the school provided can hardly have contributed much to his lavish lifestyle. He had a flat – a proper apartment with an entryphone and a balcony and artwork – and ate in upmarket restaurants. Once we met him at the seaside. I remember an evening walk on the beach from the Hilton where he was staying with one of the Alejandros. I was wearing white ballet pumps, quite unsuitable. He said I was like Marilyn Monroe. Afterwards we went for cocktails before Alan and I returned to our hotel. The dormitory room had seemed fine in daylight. Now, cockroaches the size of mice were everywhere, stretching on the light switches, hanging off the toilet cistern, scuttling across the beds. Nothing for it but to pull the blankets over your head and wait for morning. The next day we took a boat trip to an island. Somewhere there is a photo of Alan and Peter under a beach umbrella, beneath a suitably azure sky, ocean in the background. There is another guy with them, name long forgotten, dark hair shaggy to his shoulders. All I remember of him is being impressed by the fact that he drank beer for breakfast.
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Sometimes I would take a pesero to the corner of Peter’s street. We made omelettes in his tiny kitchen. On Sundays we walked in the botanic garden before a lazy lunch in one of the swish neighbourhood restaurants. For all his peso-pinching tendency he could be very generous, letting us stay in his flat for weeks when we turned up worn out and spent up from our travels. He was a keen host who cultivated a reputation for disgraceful behaviour at odds with his respectable profession. I don’t think I made it to any of his parties, riotous affairs apparently, Peter dancing naked with his pedigree cats. We were able to return his hospitality in a small way when he visited England years later with a new partner, not an Alejandro this time, and stayed overnight with us in our north-east Cumbrian home. Predictably, they missed their connection from Carlisle but managed to persuade the train driver of the through train to make an unscheduled stop at our station. The change of context made for an awkward reunion. Peter wasn’t taken with our corner of the county, describing the grand houses on Capon Tree as so ugly that they shouldn’t have been allowed to be built.     

The news of his death, in his late forties perhaps, came as a shock but no surprise. He revelled in promiscuity in a time and place when AIDS was rife, and he loved living close to the edge. In a city already notorious for opportunistic crime, you were a likely target if you were small, fair or appeared foreign or wealthy. Peter ticked all those boxes. In one of his favourite anecdotes he was wandering the streets of San Angel in the early hours of the morning, very drunk, when he was bundled into the back of a car, beaten and tipped out into the street wearing nothing but his underpants – his shoes, wallet, watch and cash all gone. Maybe Peter’s recklessness was extreme, but we took heart from his courage. We had escaped our safe suburban lives. Here, on the other side of the world, we braved dark streets and shady bars and dodgy food stalls, passed joints from car to car as we lane-changed on the highway. We forged visas, trekked through wilderness in search of waterfalls. Once we slept in a hotel with a gaping hole in the roof and travelled home in a car held together by selotape and string. Everywhere we went, we were offered food and shelter and friendship, most from those who had least. I remember one morning, standing with friends on a remote hillside outside a wooden shack, nibbling at a tamale. There was one for each of us, probably set aside for a feast day for the entire family but brought out instead to welcome travellers. We flirted with danger but avoided confrontation. If anyone had challenged our right to be there, to explore the world as if it were a playground for our privileged selves, we would have been outraged. 

​This morning Cambridge skies are Mexican blue. I take Peter’s gift from its earthenware mug. It is a trifling thing, but precious. Elaborately hand-carved from a single piece of wood, the molinillo is a complex arrangement of perforated circles and loose rings around a central shaft, its pattern highlighted with darker markings burnt on. It lived for years in our Cumbrian kitchen and doubled as a microphone for singing along whenever Feeder’s 2001 hit ‘Buck Rogers’ was played on the radio:
 
              He’s got a brand new car
              Looks like a Jag-u-ar
              It’s got leather seats
      It’s got a CD-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player
 
              We’ll start over again
              Grow ourselves new skin…
 
Buck Rogers, I read, was a fictional American character originally conceived as a World War One veteran who fell into suspended animation and returned in the 25th century to various space adventures. Vehicles associated with him were more likely to be rockets than cars. Peter’s escapades, though often extraordinary, were essentially terrestrial and although his car was immensely luxurious in comparison with our beat-up Bocho I don’t think it was a Jag. Peter wouldn’t have cared for the song – opera was more his to his taste. But whenever I hear it now, I remember all the fresh starts we’ve attempted over the years and feel sorry that Peter was cheated of such chances.

I dig out of the cupboard some Guatemalan chocolate with cinnamon, well past its use-by date and wipe the dust off the molinillo. I hold the stem between my palms and swizzle it back and forth but I make a poor fist of it: whilst the chocolate does dissolve into a grainy mix in the warm milk, I can’t get it to froth. I drink it out of the earthenware mug. It’s very sweet and, like café de olla, deep-fried quesadillas, the burning sun, even the polluted air of El DeFe, it tastes delicious in a bad-for-you way. 

​Thirty years on, I’d like to think the world would be a less dangerous place for Peter but I’m not sure. The weekend’s inauguration is a nightmare with no prospect of waking. Hospitality seems in short supply, a fairly even split between what Pope Francis described as ‘the globalisation of indifference’ and a dedicated desire to strengthen borders and keep the outsider out. Last week’s newspapers carry reports of the fatal shooting of Isidro Baldenegro López, campaigner against illegal logging, in the northern state of Chihuahua. Such deaths are apparently increasingly common. I chat to a half-Mexican friend about his roots. ‘I wouldn’t go back there now,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t feel safe.’