As Far As The I Can See E-Book

Julie Heifetz

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

As Far As The I Can See is a fast-paced memoir set in a top-rated hotel in the Yucatan jungle, Mexico.

The crazy year begins after the author heads to help her friends Molly and Luis Felipe, the owners of the property. Out of work and a relationship, Julie is looking to reinvent herself. But the day after arrival, her friends take off and leave Julie to run the hotel, with no Spanish speaking ability and even less knowledge of the hotel business.

With a wild international cast of characters working for the hotel and cut off from the world, Julie ricochets from one disturbing encounter to another. Confrontations with violent employees, theft, drunken chefs and frightening talismans all have their part to play.

After a life-changing year in the jungle, can Julie reconcile her feelings and find herself?

Leseprobe

AS FAR AS THE I CAN SEE

JULIE HEIFETZ

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Epilogue

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 Julie Heifetz

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter

Published 2021 by Next Chapter

Edited by India Hammond

Cover art by CoverMint

The book is based on a true story of a year the author spent at a property in the Yucatan jungle, but all names other than the author’s are fictional.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It’s with love and gratitude that I thank my early readers for their suggestions, comments and support.  Carol Kanter, Bonnie Davis and Diane Johnson in particular have helped me stay committed to telling this story as well as I have been able to tell it.  And to Jack Ruback, who lived through this process with me, bless you for being there.

i thank you God

i thank You God for most this amazing

day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky, and for everything

which is natural which is infinite, which is yes.i who have died am alive again today

E.E. Cummings

CHAPTERONE

The humid heat nearly took my breath away as I stepped out of the terminal of the airport into the parking lot to look for Victor, Molly’s driver. I felt like I’d just returned from a trip to the moon and had finally landed: victorious and exhausted. This trip was different from all the vacations I’d taken to visit Molly. I now knew what paradise would look like. This time, I was not going for a vacation, but to live permanently on 600 acres of banana and coconut trees in the middle of the Yucatan jungle: a place that I had lusted after for so long that my heart was already there.

Victor spotted me and drove up to the front of the terminal. I smiled as he jumped out of the front seat and got out to open the rear door of the car for me.

“Hola, Senora.”

“Hola, Victor. ”

“Hace calor hoy.”

“Si.”

The tar melting on the pavement of the parking lot in the intense afternoon sunlight was a blessing compared to the February ice and cold I’d left behind in St. Louis. I would never have to wear a winter coat again. I sighed and settled into the seat of Molly’s blue Lincoln as Victor started the engine, turned up the ranchero music on the radio, and pulled the car out of the parking lot. I tingled with excitement as we started down the shoulder less highway, preparing myself for the long ride past the endless rows of scruffy trees and billboards as we headed further south. Soon, the billboards would disappear and the jungle would stretch out like the sea on both sides of the road. The tension that had built up over the past two months as I extracted myself from a lifetime in St. Louis started to fall away; I could feel my shoulders start to relax.

The wind blew warm whispers through the car window as Victor drove. I’d never have to leave again. I was inspired by the tropical beauty and the stretches of time that were the Mexican commodity. A white stucco house with a mile and a half of isolated beach that bordered the property would be my permanent backyard. I closed my eyes, imagining walking through the front door of my house again: stepping into the entryway, looking up at the high-arched ceiling, down at the marble floors, and around at the curved wall of the living room to the Mexican tile in the kitchen. I was already anticipating the warmth of the architecture and the smell of the voluptuous garden just outside the dining room wall of windows. It was a dream house, one I could never have afforded in the States.

“Agua, Senora?” Victor asked, offering a cold bottle of water over the front seat of the car to me.

“No, gracias.”

I would wait until I got home to have a long, quenching glass of water in my own kitchen. Home. How delicious. A place so remote and isolated that only those that had been told about it would know it was there, set back into the jungle a mile and a half down the road. It was a world of blue sky and the smell and sounds of the jungle and the sea.

“La musica es bien,” I said to Victor, practicing one of the few phrases I had learned recently in Spanish. He nodded in agreement and turned up the volume. I was uncomfortable being chauffeured and wished Molly could have come to the airport for me herself, but I was grateful that she had sent Victor and spared me the expense of a cab. I was riding in a car on my way to remaking myself into the person I longed to be—free from the expectations of family and friends, far from my midwestern suburban roots. I couldn’t wait to see Molly, to settle into a routine as her full time neighbor and employee. I wanted to become more like her over time: able to navigate in Spanish, preparing Mexican recipes that tasted as though I’d grown up cooking them, and reciting the stories of the native Mayans who lived on the ranch and came from little villages in the jungle. I was impatient to get started on the new iteration of my life.

I watched the scruffy trees scurry by as we travelled down the two-lane highway south of the airport, thinking that Molly and I had lived such different lives since we’d been neighbors in our early twenties. She had lived in the jungle for more than ten years, when nothing existed on her property but their house. I admired her for the risks she’d taken and the way she’d adapted to change. Now we’d be counting on each other. She would help me learn about Mexico, how to navigate the challenges of living in a foreign country. I would help by being her friend; she had felt so vulnerable after her husband’s heart attack.

The silver bracelet on my wrist jangled as I shifted positions. I remembered making the purchase last minute at Cancun airport before going back to St. Louis on my last visit. I’d never taken it off since that day because it reminded me of the ranch and my visits there, a shiny promise of more to come.

Over the years I’d visited, I’d felt I was slowly becoming part of Molly and Luis Felipe’s ranch, part of their story, especially once I’d bought my own house on the property a year and a half before. But owning a vacation home felt like riding on the link between cars of a train, straddling two worlds: the one I’d always known in St. Louis and the one that I longed for in Mexico. It was unbalanced and unsteady. Now, I could begin to take root and make the Yucatan my real home. I’d be like the palm trees that ran up and down the peninsula that had been brought from other islands in the Caribbean and transplanted to this coast by the ranchers. Like the palms that were foreigners, I, too, would flourish and grow in this soil and sun.

I closed my eyes, trying to relax until we got to the ranch, but my stomach churned from anticipation for the entire ride. Suddenly, Victor turned the wheel hard and our car crossed the highway, making a sharp U-turn. Barely visible from the road was the dirt path that led through the jungle. I sat forward in the seat to get a closer look, wondering what changes had been made to the property since my last visit several months before.

The car bumped onto the dirt path, and I felt a familiar thrill as we started the two-mile ride that would take us deeper into the tangle of trees. The stick hut that had once stood at the entrance to the property was gone, as was the gate manned by the flock of children who reached out their hands for beechnut gum or coins as payment for their help closing the gate behind the cars. The hut had been the home of the Mayan caretaker and his family, who’d lived on the property ever since Luis Felipe had bought it. I still saw the fragile house in my mind’s eye as we drove down the hand-made road into the jungle, though it had had been cleared away long ago, along with the used tires, empty bottles and cans in the front yard, which the family collected to take home to their village on their yearly visits.

When Luis Felipe started to build a hotel on this property, the first thing he did was take away the stick house from the entrance—he didn’t want that to be the first view guests would have of El Torbellino. He had his masons build a new two-story stucco house with indoor plumbing and kitchen for the caretaker’s family, intending to move them down another smaller path far from the road, with their new house hidden among the trees. But when the caretaker’s wife saw the new building designed for them, she looked up at the cement ceiling and proclaimed, “That will never work.” She didn’t trust cement, and she was convinced the ceiling would come tumbling down around them. She had lived in the jungle all her life under a thatched roof, not this new-fangled kind. So instead of moving the family into the new house with its fancy indoor kitchen and plumbing, she moved the turkeys into it. It took her two years to move the family.

I loved the caretaker’s wife for standing her ground against “progress” until she was ready. I hoped she was satisfied now, but I missed seeing the wild turkeys that used to run around her family’s yard and the smell of wood smoke rising from the open fire where she made tortillas for her family every morning. The rickety bamboo gate at the entrance had been replaced by a stucco guard house, which made me sad.

The uniformed guard recognized Molly’s car and Victor and waved us through. We crawled past the entrance into the belly of the ranch down the hand-carved road.

It was more path than road. Pot-holed after the rainy season, it wound its way surreptitiously into the jungle of the Yucatan. The dirt path, barely wide enough for one car at a time, was the one constant that remained over the years that I’d been visiting Molly and Luis Felipe’s ranch, except for the sea itself that bordered the front of the property. Passing under the cool, dark, overhanging green leaves of the palms was like entering a chapel. A renewed sense of awe came over me.

I shut my eyes and moved my lips in a silent prayer. Please God, let Luis Felipe be all right.Let me have done the right thing by making this move so suddenly, by promising to help Molly when I didn’t know the first thing about working in a hotel, when I didn’t even speak Spanish. If it didn’t work out, I could always go back to the States, though such a move felt unacceptable now that I had made it this far. I’d sold my car and my house and said goodbye to my lifelong friends and my mother. Goodbye to a harried life in middle America.

I rolled down the window of Molly’s air-conditioned Lincoln and breathed deeply, inhaling the wet, rich earth outside. The air was still as a catacomb except for the occasional calling of an unseen bird. Go, it seemed to say. But I was not going to go. I felt a shudder of excitement and pride for having made the leap.

“A mi casa, por favor,” I told Victor when we got to the fork in the path that led one way to Molly’s house and the other to mine.

“Si, Señora.”

My ochre-colored tile roof rose above the foliage of the jungle like a mirage. The house had been abandoned and neglected for seven years before I bought it from Luis Felipe, but I’d had it renovated and now it was everything I had hoped it would be and more. Most beautiful of all was that it was mine.

The car pulled up to my front door and Victor waited as I climbed out of the back seat with my overnight suitcase in hand into the welcoming humidity and smell of the sea.

I stood facing the house, admiring the green lush lawn and the voluptuous red blossoms on the hibiscus tree near the door. The French doors off of the living room were wide open and the water in the blue tiled pool in front of the doors sparkled.

“I’m home,” I said out loud to myself as I opened the front door and went inside. Every time I arrived I felt a surge of pride, greeted by the soaring arched ceiling and sense of calm and space that the stucco walls created. There were no sharp angles to the design, only round, feminine curves. The ceiling fan whirred softly overhead. The house smelled like it had just been cleaned.

The leaves of the large potted palms by the French doors still had beads of moisture from having been watered, the pink tile floors were spotless, and fresh flowers graced my kitchen table. A full jug of distilled water waited on the kitchen counter.

“Eliseo, Sebastiana?” I called, hoping the caretakers who worked for me might still be there, but no one answered.

I climbed the stairs to my second-floor bedroom, my favorite room in the house. It had rounded walls and floor-to-ceiling windows that opened to the jungle. Sleeping there was like sleeping in a tree house. The white cotton sheets had been ironed, and my new blue striped hand-woven blanket was folded at the foot of the bed. Clean towels hung in the blue tiled bathroom. I couldn’t wait to thank Eliseo and Sebastiana for getting the house ready for me when I got here and to tell them that this time, I’d come to stay.

I glanced at my watch. Crap. It was already two-thirty and the employees’ party had started two hours ago. Molly was expecting me, now that I’d be working with her in the office of the hotel they’d built and owned. I would be helping with sales, whatever that meant. I threw open my bamboo closet and rifled through my clothes to find something to wear to an anniversary party celebrating the opening of the hotel. Nothing I owned seemed right, but I had to choose something.

The black and brown rayon maxi dress with a V-neck and capped sleeves would do. It wasn’t too dressy or too casual or too low-cut, and I liked the way the skirt made my hips seem smaller. I had curves that attracted men and embarrassed my mother and made me feel the push-pull of self-criticism. At just over five-feet tall and a hundred and five pounds, I could look sexy or too heavy, depending on the outfit and the mirror. I often felt critical of the way I looked and had to remind myself that it was what was inside that counted. But I never really believed that.

I pulled off the slacks and t-shirt I’d worn on the plane, slipped the dress over my head and zipped it, found a pair of black patent sandals with kitten heels, some dangly earrings, and examined myself in the mirror. My shoulder-length brown hair curled softly at the ends framing my face. I smiled at myself just for practice, my lower lip slanting down not unpleasantly as it always did when I smiled fully. “It’ll do,” I said out loud as I hurried down the steps and out through the front door. My palms were beginning to sweat and I had that hungry emptiness in the pit of my stomach that came from nervousness, not from want of food. I was going to meet the employees of El Torbellino, the world-class hotel where I would be working. It was important to make a good first impression.

CHAPTERTWO

I took the path that led from my house through a stand of trees, under overhanging branches and walked until I came to a clearing. I stepped out into the sunlight again into a cobblestone courtyard with a circular driveway that meant I’d arrived. The warm air was still and serene as peacocks pecked the ground for food and a lone goose bathed lazily in a reflecting pond. There, beyond the pond, El Torbellino, the world-class intimate hideaway for the rich and famous, rose from the jungle like an ancient Mayan temple.

I had never gotten over the wonder of it, how something only six years old could look and feel so ancient. Large stone steps led to a heavily carved wooden door, framed by roughly-hewn, towering stone columns. It was hard to remember a time when there had been no hotel, but I had visited when there was only jungle.

There was no doorman in the small reception area. I hurried through the small lobby to the grassy courtyard in the middle of the two-story casitas that made up the collection of 36 guest rooms that lay like a string of pearls in front of the ocean. All was quiet other than the twittering of a ruby-throated tanager and the gentle rolling of the surf. I hesitated, wondering where to go, until I heard the faint strains of Ranchero music coming from a different area of the hotel grounds. I followed the sounds until I saw blue and red balloons poking their heads through the treetops, which told me I was in the right place.

A throng of people were crowded on the patio and the grass eating and drinking, everyone wearing costumes. Actually, not costumes, but uniforms; each department differentiated by color and style. It looked like a scene from a circus, a profusion of color and music; red skirts with white, short-sleeved peasant blouses and blue cummerbunds; white cotton skirts trimmed in lace with matching white lacy blouses, black pants and white short-sleeved guayabera shirts, rainbow-colored cummerbunds. The swirl of color under the cerulean sky made my head spin. I looked down at my brown and black rayon dress feeling dull as a burlap sack when everyone else was in fine linen.

I waited under the leafy branches of the trees at the edge of the lawn feeling too self-conscious to join them. A strikingly beautiful group of people with blonde hair and Aryan features stood laughing and talking among themselves on the grass, stood apart from the other employees. They were dressed in beachwear, the men in white pants and shirts and an older woman with a mane of shoulder-length curly blonde hair wearing a sarong skirt tied at the waist and a crocheted bikini top, looking as though she’d been born to the sea. Her curly locks played with the breeze as she bent over to get a light for her cigarette from a beautiful, young, blonde, bare-chested man in cropped pants. The group fascinated me and I wondered who they were, but didn’t want to stare too long.

If Mike, who’d been my lover for the past eight years, had been with me, I would have felt less insecure. He was tall and elegantly handsome and knowing I was his had made me feel younger and more attractive too. But when the relationship with him fizzled out, I felt like the scullery maid back in the kitchen. It had been more than a year since our separation, and I had to make my way through this crowd without him—I’d been hiding long enough. I had to step out and go find someone to talk to. Where the hell was Molly? I have never been good at big parties, and this one was overwhelming, a lawn full of strangers dressed in colorful costumes speaking Spanish in muted voices. Everyone looked to be a good twenty years younger than I and was beautiful. I felt like an extra surrounded by starlets and leading men.

A waiter in a tux, bow tie, and white shirt carried a steaming tray of food toward a long buffet table covered with white linen and crowded with chaffing dishes. I followed him to the table as though I were hungry, just because it gave me something to do. I focused on the silver dishes and moved down the row of selections: rice and beans, sauce-smothered chicken, rice and beef with vegetables, pork wrapped in banana leaves, and pyramids of roasted ears of corn were all arranged next to a tower of tortillas wrapped in white linen napkins to keep them from drying out. Bowls of guacamole and pico de Gallo and chips sat next to the tower of tortillas.

The waiter turned from the table with an empty chafing dish in hand, smiled at me and motioned to the stack of plates. I picked one up and helped myself to some guacamole, pico de gallo and chips. The waiter nodded, smiled again and hurried away to refill the dish. I nibbled slowly, all the while keeping my eyes out for Molly. The sun beat down on my shoulders and I wished I’d been wearing something cool like the women in their peasant blouses. A tall thin dark-haired woman appeared wearing a high-necked, buttoned-up collar, an ankle-length skirt tiered with ruffles and a flouncy matching hat. She twirled a yellow parasol that matched her outfit, like a character from Sunday in the Park with George who had wandered onto the wrong set. She looked as ridiculous to me as I felt, but that gave me no comfort.

The crowd shifted, like a curtain parting, and I spotted Molly and Luis Felipe. They were sitting together on a separate patio shaded by a palapa roof, apart from everyone else. Molly’s brown hair was swept up on her head in a chignon, her face wrinkle free in spite of the fact that she’d turned fifty-one on her last birthday. Her expression was aloof and positively regal. I was stunned to see her looking like this when she’d sounded so shaky the last time we’d talked, just two weeks before. I was surprised to see how healthy Luis Felipe looked, considering he had had a heart attack just weeks earlier. At sixty, he was a paunchier version of the swarthy Casanova who had swooped Molly off her feet and changed her life sixteen years ago. I had never seen him in anything but a short-sleeved print shirt and pajama style pants, but this day, he and Molly wore matching cream-colored outfits and silver pendant jewelry. Only a crown and scepter were missing.

Was this the same Molly I’d met thirty-two years ago when we were young neighbors in St. Louis? She had been so quiet and shy, she would barely say a word all evening and wouldn’t leave the house without her first husband. When she divorced and moved to New York, she blossomed. A few years later she took a spur-of-the-minute junket to Cancun for a week with a friend from work. When she got back to New York, she called, and I thought she’d jump right through the phone wire she was so excited. Luis Felipe, a Mexican entrepreneur she’d met at his bar in Cancun, had proposed to her. They’d only known each other for a week, but she wasn’t dismissing the possibility. I thought she was out of her mind. Three months later she’d given up everything: condo, job, friends, family, independence, everything except for her cat, and moved to Cancun. I was afraid I might never hear from her again. A year later she called to say that Luis Felipe was having a house built for them on his property in the jungle and they’d be moving soon, so I should come visit when they were settled.

Her look was serene but in charge as she stared out over the heads of her subjects gathered before her. I was floored. How could she, who had seemed agoraphobic when I knew her in St. Louis, look so confident here in this foreign land? I was the one who traveled around the country in tours of my one-person shows, first Voices and Echoes, then on to several others, including Sarah’s Song, which had been nominated for a regional Emmy. I was the poet, the writer who had fallen in love with a musician ten years younger than myself. I was the risk-taker, not Molly. And yet I felt so unsure of myself, so lacking the confidence which she projected from where she sat next to Luis Felipe; it was difficult to think she’d known any other life than the one they had forged together in the Yucatan. She was not just a friend I’d visited, a comfortable expat padding around her kitchen in a pair of shorts and sandals making the morning coffee, she was the fully-evolved Molly, transformed into the role of Patrona, the wife of the owner of a world-class hotel, with a husband who was able to make it all happen. She had held paradise in the palm of her hand until Luis Felipe’s heart attack threatened to take it all away from her, which is when she had called and offered me a job working for them at the hotel. I reminded myself that she needed me, that I was there to come to her rescue.

If Molly could reinvent herself so successfully, I intended to do the same. I’d be free of St. Louis, where I’d lived all of my adult life within two miles of the place where I’d been born. I’d be free of the people and places that reminded me of my failed marriage and my failed love affair that had shaken me to my core and destroyed my confidence. I’d be free of the six calls a day from my mother who had criticized me all of my life for not being the kind of daughter who would be her carbon copy. None of that had a hold on me here. At fifty-three, I could start my life over and help Molly at the same time.

A woman in a white lacy uniform moved across the dais to stand behind Luis Felipe. The bosom of her white blouse pressed against the back of his shoulder. She leaned down and whispered in his ear, and he smiled. Molly didn’t seem to notice, but the intimacy made me squirm. That’s when Molly saw me. She smiled and waved and walked over to give me a hug. I hoped the woman in white noticed.

“Oh, Julie! I’ve been wondering when you’d get here.”

“This is quite the celebration!”

“It’s kind of a combined Valentine’s Day and anniversary party for the hotel at the same time.”

“I didn’t realize how many people work here. There must be more than a hundred for a hotel with only thirty six rooms!”

“This is just the morning shift.”

That meant a whole army of people I’d have to get to know. Just then, a tanned, barefoot grey-haired man wearing sloppy shorts and an unbuttoned shirt elbowed his way over to Molly and me, with a burning cigarette in hand. He was over six feet tall, his face lined, his skinny chest wrinkled. He grabbed Molly with his free hand and kissed her exuberantly on each cheek, European-style. His tower of ashes teetered over Molly’s shoulder.

“Hola Molly! You look beautiful!” he effused with a French accent. “I’m so glad you are home. Luis Felipe, he really worried me. I was so depressed when he was in the hospital, but now he is looking fine. He needed to be back here. You were too long in Miami.”

“Hi Gaspard,” Molly said, backing away from his grasp. “We’re glad to be home. I want you to meet our friend, Julie.” She turned to introduce me. “Julie owns the house closest to the Carillos. She’s going to work in the hotel.”

“Hello, Julie,” he said, barely looking at me before turning back to her. “Now, Molly, when will you and Luis Felipe come for dinner? I can cook for you, now that Luis Felipe gave me my own house.”

“We’ll have to see when he’s feeling up to it, Gaspard.”

He frowned, clearly worried. “He’s well now, yes?” he asked, looking over the heads of the people standing in front of him to size up Luis Felipe.

“He’s better. He just needs to take it easy for a while.”

“I will go invite him myself.” Flicking his cigarette butt onto the patio, Gaspard padded over to Luis Felipe who was having a conversation with the young woman in white. The elastic neckline of her uniform was pulled down seductively low off her shoulders. I didn’t need to meet her to dislike her instantly.

“Gaspard can be really annoying, but Luis Felipe likes having him around.”

“And you, what do you think of him?”

“I can’t stand him,” she scowled. “He’s Luis Felipe’s friend, not mine. He came for a visit while we were building the hotel and he’s never left. He calls himself a painter, and he says he’s going to make a painting for each room in exchange for free room and board. Honestly, I don’t like his paintings either, but Luis Felipe says his work’s getting better.”

“It’s good he’s in staying in his own house, not in yours then.”

“Maybe, but he’s over at ours all the time anyway. He comes in whenever he feels like it, even when we’re not home, and helps himself to the liquor we keep in the cabinet. One day, when I came home from shopping, I found him standing over the bird cage on the patio with his pants unzipped. He was peeing on one of our parrots. He looked up when he saw me and said, “I hate zees damned birds!”

“Oh my God, Molly! What an ass! Who would even think of pissing on someone’s pets? How come he’s still here?”

“Luis Felipe finds him amusing.”

“Amusing?”

The woman with the parasol and the eighteenth-century costume waved to Molly from the other side of the lawn. Molly turned her back away from her.

“Don’t look over there. That’s Alexis. If she thinks we see her she’ll come over. I don’t want to have to talk to her now.”

“Who is she?”

“She runs the gift shop. She’s a talented fashion designer, but Luis Felipe says her books are always wrong, so they’re fighting. He won’t talk to her anymore, so she talks my ear off instead. You know her husband, Charles. He’s the one who took you to see your house for the first time.”

“Of course I remember Charles, but I didn’t know he had a wife.”

“She’s the one who made his leopard shorts and shirt to match his marguay.”

“His what?”

“His marguay, his little leopard. You’ve never seen him? Charles found him in the jungle when he was just a baby, and he took him home and is raising him as his pet The guests love seeing them together when they walk around the grounds of the hotel.”

“A leopard on the hotel grounds?” Just then, a chorus of laughter burst from the group of beautiful people at the back of the patio. Molly looked over at them.

“That’s the French Canadian family, the Lemottes.”

Lemotte was the one name I knew already. How could I forget? I stared hard at the group again. I’d been wanting to see what they looked like. While my house was being renovated, the younger Lemotte and her boyfriend were living in my house without my permission like squatters. In the middle of the construction, their baby girl was born in my built-in bed in my bedroom. I was horrified when Molly told me. I’d hired Eliseo and Sebastian after that to watch over the house until it was finished and I moved in. But seeing them in person, they didn’t look like criminals, as I’d imagined. They were just hippies like the rest of their family, as foreign to me as ancient mariners.

“Those Lemottes, they’re the most natural thieves I’ve ever met.” Luis Felipe laughed as he walked over to Molly and me.

“You mean living in my house without asking permission?”

“No, not that. François Lemotte, the older barefoot one with the hair that looks like yellow seaweed, the one in the center? He runs the waterfront. The hotel’s supposed to collect half of the money he brings in, but we never see it. We give him the vouchers, he turns them back, but we know he makes more. We can’t figure out how he gets away with it. Maybe you’ll figure it out when you work here.”

“Not if you can’t. But why don’t you fire them if you can’t trust them?”

“They’re very clever those people. They moved into a house on the property meant for employees. I didn’t know about it for seven years, but when I found out, it was too late to do anything. Squatters have legal rights in Mexico if they’re in a place long enough. I’d have to take them to court to get them out, and that would cost me a lot. Anyone who sues has to pay.”

I’d never heard of squatters’ rights. I only knew that in the US most of the time the one who starts out with the most money is the one who wins in court. I was getting a headache thinking about all of these crazy people that worked and lived on the property: Bertrand, Charles and his wife, the family of Lemottes. I felt so conservative, so normal compared to everyone else around me. What was I doing here? I’d heard enough stories about the strangers for one afternoon.

The woman in the white uniform motioned to Luis Felipe.

“Carla wants us to come to the patio. They’re waiting for me. Come, Molly.”

“Excuse us for a minute, Julie.” Molly followed him to her seat on the dais as Luis Felipe took the microphone.

“Buenos tardes a todos.” A hush fell over the crowd as though the Pope himself were addressing them. They had hung around long after they’d finished eating, waiting for this yearly address. I tried to understand what he was saying and every now and then a word or phrase that I knew jumped out at me, but I lost concentration after a while and the words were a river of sound. I could have kicked myself for not having studied Spanish before I left St. Louis, but I was always traveling then from one city to the next for a performance or a consulting job and there wasn’t time. Someday, I’d told myself. But now I was standing there feeling like an idiot, comprehending only that the voice was strong and Luis Felipe was in charge.

It hit me like the news that someone I loved had died realizing that I had, in fact, given up a great deal by moving so far from home. I had wanted to escape my midwestern bland existence and dive into adventure. But I’d lived my entire life in the suburbs of St. Louis, where my grandparents and parents had been raised, and I had felt safe and sought-after. I had graduated from the same high-school my father had gone to and my sons after me. I had life-long friendships there and a consulting business I’d worked hard to create, creating my experience as a psychotherapist, teacher, writer and public speaker. Everywhere I went in St. Louis, people knew who I was. I’d had two books published, Oral History and the Holocaust and Too Young to Remember. I’d performed my own one-woman show and had written and performed musicals with my lover and creative partner. I’d interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Shoah film project. Here in this gathering of employees, none of that mattered, not where I came from, or my parents, or my children, or my past accomplishments. I didn’t know the first thing about sales or working in a hotel. I only knew I was Molly’s friend, and that would not be enough.

It was a shock when I heard my name come through the loud speaker. Luis Felipe had switched to English and was looking at me. “Welcome to the Torbellino Family, Julie.”

He motioned me to the mic. I wanted to pretend it wasn’t me he was talking to, but now the crowd was staring in my direction. They parted to let me through. Oh God, what could I say in baby Spanish that would be meaningful I thought as I walked up to take the microphone. I wanted to sound genuine, to tell them how grateful I was to be coming to work here. I wanted them to know that I wanted to get to know them and that I was a good person. But I couldn’t fucking speak Spanish, and I struggled to say anything.

It was the height of irony. I had made my living by giving speeches at corporate meetings, by teaching adults and children, by acting in my own one-woman shows. I knew how much words matter. Luis Felipe and Molly would expect more of me than this stuttering silence, but I was mute, stupid and humorless. I could feel dark circles of sweat under my arms. My rayon skirt clung to my hips and legs like a shroud.

Take your time, Dooliebug, you can have the King of Siam if you want him, my grandfather used to tell me. But I was out of time. Luis Felipe was waiting.

“Gracias,” I said into the mic. “Muchas gracias.” And then I was silent. With a sideward glance Luis Felipe took back the microphone and handed it to Carla, who turned the volume higher on the Ranchero music that came through the speakers overhead as he and Molly were swallowed up by the worshipping crowd.

CHAPTERTHREE

Molly found me before I made my get-away from the employees’ party.

“Come over this evening for a glass of wine.” She didn’t mention my poor performance at the mic, which was a relief. A few hours later, we were sitting together in comfortable silence in their outdoor living room under a sparkling sky and a forgiving moon. The cats curled up on the cool tile floor in the middle of the room, their eyes at half-mast. Lulu, the little furry white dog, was stretched out next to my chair, her paws twitching with pleasant dreams as she slept. The slight breeze crossed the open-air room and stirred the leaves of the palms in the corner.

“I think Luis Felipe just came in,” she said suddenly. “We ought to go downstairs. He wants to talk with you.” He and I had never had a conversation just between the two of us before, and I knew it was about my job. I needed direction. I didn’t know shit from shinola about sales.

He was in the outdoor dining room, sitting under its soaring palapa roof at a marble dining table, slowly feeding crackers one by one to Samantha, his Weimaraner who was perched under the table. As soon as he saw me, he pulled out the chair next to him and waved his hand, commanding me to sit.

I felt uncomfortable in the room alone with Luis Felipe. His voice was too quiet, too controlled, and made me feel unsure of myself. Sitting side by side was more awkward than face to face.

“So, you’re gonna work for us now. You gonna help with sales,” he said, taking a cracker from the package for himself.

“That’s what Molly says. I’ll help her in the office…write the newsletter, that kind of thing…which is fine with me, but the rest of it…I don’t know anything about sales. I’ve done a lot of things in my career, but I’ve never worked at a hotel before.”

He chuckled. “Our sales manager quit two weeks ago so she can’t help, but you’re smart. You’ll figure everything out like Molly and me. We didn’t ever work in hotels either, but we made El Torbellino because we had a dream. We knew what we wanted. We would make a hotel different from other places. Not like Cancun, those big monster buildings all crowded together up and down the tourist zone. They pack in as many tourists as they can. No, El Torbellino is our home. Special guests come to get much attention, people who have traveled many other places. They can afford to go wherever they want, but they come to us because there is a special magic that happens here. You have felt it yourself. It is something spiritual, an aura.”

“Yes, that’s why I wanted to live here, to work with you.”

He turned in his chair and looked at me as though seeing me through a magnifying glass, every pore, every flaw revealed. “So tell me. What words do you think of when you think El Torbellino?”

“Intimate…earthy…remote.”

“These are good. You will use these in sales. You know our style. You know the food we love. You know the restaurant. It is the heart of the hotel. You have been there as a guest. It is theater. The food, lighting, music, the service of the waiters, they all play a part.”

I was beginning to feel impatient. I knew El Torbellino. I wanted to know what actually I was going to do, what would be required of me.

“Are there some procedures I should follow when I start work? A job description for Sales?” He scowled, annoyed by my directness.

“We are not so corporate. This is not the USA. We make something different here. We call it hand-made hospitality,” he said proudly.

“Yes, I know. I understand,” I pressed. “But…I don’t even speak Spanish.”

He smiled, amused by my frustration. “The heads of the departments speak English. Spanish won’t be your problem.” He took a cracker out of the package and passed it under the table to Samantha.

“If Spanish won’t be a problem, what will be?”

He smiled. “You’re a woman.”

I was stunned. This was 1998. I was used to working with men as a consultant for Monsanto, Barnes Hospital and Einstein Healthcare Network. I was about to say just that when one of the masons who worked for him came into the room and Luis Felipe stood up.

“Excuse me,” he muttered. “This is my head mason. He needs to talk with me.” With that, he grabbed his walking stick and followed his workman outside, with Samantha trailing close behind.

I looked around the room while I waited, remembering with longing the last time I was a guest at a party at their house. The party started at three o’clock on the patio for cocktails and appetizers and a swim in the ocean. By eight, we moved into the dining room, gathering under the soaring palapa roof around the massive mahogany and marble table; French, Germans, Canadians, Americans, plus Luis Felipe and Molly speaking multiple languages. Bougainvillea vines grew through the glass skylight and romantic Spanish guitar music played softly through the speakers on the wall. Molly effortlessly served a feast, which included two fish dishes, one of meat, plus two kinds of vegetables, rice, and Luis Felipe’s favorite chocolate cake for dessert. Everyone stayed until after midnight and left tipsy from the wine and conversation. I thought that this is the way to live.

But so much had changed since that night. The room looked disheveled now, a ghost of what it once had been. Gaspard’s crude paintings were propped up against the stucco walls, left to dry between stacks of boxes that had never been opened. Fabric samples lay in piles on two of the chairs. The once gracious dining room that had buzzed with life had turned into a storage room since Luis Felipe’s heart attack. Molly was too stressed and worried to put it right again.

I sat for a long time waiting for him before I realized my meeting with Luis Felipe hadn’t been interrupted, it was over. I’d learned nothing about my job from our talk. I’d have to wait for Molly to tell me more. I was tired anyway. It had been a long, emotional day for me, starting with the flight from St. Louis, then the employees’ party, and the meeting with Luis Felipe. It was late, and I had to get up early for my first day of work. I set down my wine glass and called upstairs.

“Molly I’m leaving. I’ll see you in the morning at nine.”

She came to the top of the stairs in her nightgown with a book in her hand. “Do you need help getting home?”

“No, I’ll be fine. Can I borrow a flashlight?”

“Sure. There’s one on the kitchen counter.”

“Good. Can you give me directions to your office? I’ve never been there.”

“It’s just on the other side of the employee parking lot. It’s a low white stucco building.”

“OK, see you tomorrow.”

I switched on the flashlight. Outside, the sense of failure I’d experienced at the party and the dissatisfaction with my conversation with Luis Felipe felt insignificant compared to the pleasure I found listening to sounds around me. Nature made up for all that had gone wrong. The night was alive with the din of frogs. High-pitched chirping, barking, and grunting like grumpy old men, they kept up their choral concert as I made my way home. So many species making music together. Stars twinkled overhead as I walked slowly down the path. There was so much to learn, so much to appreciate living here. Tomorrow would come soon enough, and Molly would show me what to do.

When I got home and into bed, my mind was still racing. Even the perfume of Plumeria blossoms from the tree just outside my window didn’t help me relax. It would be hours before dawn. In the moonlight flooding my room, I thought how blessed I was to have my own dream house, remembering the years it had taken to get there.

One spring years ago, while I was still married, my husband and sons and I came to visit Molly and Luis Felipe. It was a perfect week-long vacation. The boys loved everything about the trip; everything seemed wild and exotic: the jungle, the deserted beach, exploring little nearby villages, the parasailing. At the end of the week, Luis Felipe offered to build a little bungalow on the beach for us. My husband wouldn’t even consider it. He made the big bucks, I didn’t. So we said no to the bungalow, but it was an offer I never forgot.

After our divorce, I vowed to become both my husband and me. I’d be practical and earn enough money to support myself, but I wouldn’t give up my dreams to do it. My first year on my own I wouldn’t spend money on a new pair of shoes for myself. I worried I’d turn out to be a bag lady, but little by little I relaxed as my consulting work and success as a writer/performer grew, along with my savings. Visiting Molly became my yearly retreat, and every year I’d talk with Molly about my dream of owning a vacation house on their property, a place where I could eventually retire when I could afford to stop work.