On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel - Hardcover

Cohan, Tony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767903188 ISBN 13: 9780767903189

Publisher: Broadway, 2000

Synopsis

When Los Angeles novelist Tony Cohan and his artist wife, Masako, visited central Mexico one winter, they fell under the spell of a place where the pace of life is leisurely, the cobblestone streets and sun-splashed plazas are enchanting, and the sights and sounds of daily fiestas fill the air. Awakened to needs they didn't know they had, they returned to California, sold their house, and cast off for San Miguel de Allende. On Mexican Time is Cohan's passionate, evocatively written memoir of how he and his wife found a new home and a new lease on life--in this charming sixteenth-century hill town.

In an alternately humorous and poignant narrative, Cohan recounts how they absorb the town's sensual ambiance, eventually find and refurbish a crumbling 250-year-old house, and become entwined in the endless drama of Mexican life. From peso devaluations and water shortages to the romantic entanglements of their handyman and the local legend of a man who was "killed twice," On Mexican Time captures the indelible characters, little tragedies, and curious incidents of life in a distinctive Mexican town. At the same time it enfolds readers in the delights of one of the world's most desirable travel destinations.

Brimming with mystery, joy, and hilarity, On Mexican Time is a stirring, seductive celebration of another way of life--a tale of Americans who, finding a home in Mexico, find themselves anew.

About this title

About the Author

Tony Cohan is the author of the novels Canary, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Opium, a Literary Guild Selection. His essays, travel writings, and reviews have appeared in books, magazines, and newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. His work as a lyricist with pianist and composer Chick Corea and others can be heard on a number of albums. He divides his time between Venice, California, and Mexico.

From the Back Cover

"For Tony Cohan, Mexico is a place where the human spirit breathes freely in prolific forms--some sad and funny, some bizarre and touching, all sharply rendered by his alert eye and graceful prose. What a pleasure it is to be guided through this good story of a couple making a life there."
--Michael Ryan, author of Secret Life

"A brief escape from the hectic life of Los Angeles to a small Mexican town slowly and inexorably changes novelist Cohan and his artist wife. Cohan is poetic in his descriptions of the vibrancy of life, the serenity of the pace of activity, the simplicity of priorities, and the attentiveness of human relationships in Mexico. Humorous and enviable for the adventure and sheer joy of adopting a new language, culture, and lifestyle."
--Booklist

"With breathtaking skill Tony Cohan evokes Mexico's mystical depths and America's thirst for soul. He blurs the line in the sand we call 'the border,' revealing the richness of life we miss by being distant neighbors."
--Soledad Santiago, author of Streets of Fire

"Like Mexico itself, On Mexican Time is a spectacle of sights, scents, and sounds. Shaped by Cohan's imaginative and vivid prose, colors, aromas, and sounds leap, waft, and resonate from the page."
--Sandra Benitez, author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers and Bitter Grounds

From the Inside Flap

eles novelist Tony Cohan and his artist wife, Masako, visited central Mexico one winter, they fell under the spell of a place where the pace of life is leisurely, the cobblestone streets and sun-splashed plazas are enchanting, and the sights and sounds of daily fiestas fill the air. Awakened to needs they didn't know they had, they returned to California, sold their house, and cast off for San Miguel de Allende. On Mexican Time is Cohan's passionate, evocatively written memoir of how he and his wife found a new home and a new lease on life--in this charming sixteenth-century hill town.

In an alternately humorous and poignant narrative, Cohan recounts how they absorb the town's sensual ambiance, eventually find and refurbish a crumbling 250-year-old house, and become entwined in the endless drama of Mexican life. From peso devaluations and water shortages to the romantic entanglements of their handyman and the local legend of a man who was "killed twice," On Me

Reviews

A thoughtful memoir of life in a once-quiet, now tourist-infested town in central Mexico. Like so many other gringos, novelist Cohan (Opium, 1984, etc.) first traveled to Mexico to escape from a busy, money-obsessed life in the United States, where he and his Japanese-American wife, an artist, had achieved a success that left them feeling drained and unsatisfied. Like so many others, they found in Mexico the makings of a sun-drenched Never-Never- Land forgotten by time and commerce. That dreamy place, however, soon took on a hard-edged reality as the Cohans settled into San Miguel de Allende, a town popular among literary expatriates ever since Vance Packard and Neal Cassady moved there in the 1960s. They had, Cohan relates, to get used to the Mexican way of doing things, which involves considerable paperwork, busywork, and no small degree of official corruptionthough, Cohan is quick to point out, among ordinary citizens he found almost nothing but kindness and generosity. The months he and his wife spent remodeling a weatherbeaten old house give him a useful peg on which to hang the latter part of his narrative, in which the pidgin-Spanish confusion of the newcomer gives way to a more seasoned knowledge of the long-term innocent abroad. A good writer, Cohan avoids many of the clichs into which foreign observers of Mexico fall, although he occasionally utters sweeping, universalizing statements (Mexicans are curious at most, never hostile) and apparently believes that there is something ennobling about the poverty that so many Mexicans must endure. For the most part, though, he is a clear-eyed chronicler of the daily life of San Miguel, a history-rich town in a country that few Americans have known, or cared much aboutuntil now. Much better-written and much more illuminating than the usual travelogue. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Not just a story of one expatriate's attractive lifestyle. Cohan picks up--and passes on--a lot of Mexican history and culture. His prose is appealing.

In 1985, novelist and travel writer Cohan (Canary; Secular and Sacred) and his wife, Masako, traveled on a whim to the colorful Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende, where fireworks sputter from wooden towers on feast days, "mariachi singers' plangent howls" season the air, "cats roam the rooftops unimpeded" and "history, religion and ceremony soften the effects of change." Lured back for repeated visits, the Cohans finally made their home there. Casual yet studied in tone, this ode to Cohan's adopted town and nation devotes much space to San Miguel's legends, ancient and modern. The local nunnery's founder, who turned worms into butterflies, may be more fiction than fact. Cohan's acquaintance Ren?, though, is real enough: the story of the murder that the locals believe he committed dominates a disturbing chapter called "The Man Who Was Killed Twice." Hospitality vies with inefficiency to make Cohan's Mexico a place of surprising ease and random hazards: "Mexican buses are reliable, cheap, and safe," but Mexican highway patrolmen demand bribes or worse; a friend of Cohan's dies when a hospital can't get her blood type. The Mexican day seems to last longer, and "nothing happens between two and four." Cohan also presents less serious downsides to his calmer Mexican lifestyle, explaining why it took him so long to get a verandah built on his 250-year-old house. The last few years have seen San Miguel become a destination for hip tourists: Cohan's pleasant account of its former obscurity may send his fans to further crowd its streets. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A brief escape from the hectic life of Los Angeles to a small Mexican town slowly and inexorably changes novelist Cohan and his artist wife. They progressively drift into a permanent life in San Miguel de Allende, exchanging a hotel room for a rented cottage and finally "buying" a 250-year-old house, badly in need of repair, and resettling their lives. Cohan is poetic in his descriptions of the vibrancy of life, the serenity of the pace of activity, the simplicity of priorities, and the attentiveness of human relationships in Mexico. Cohan and his wife find much to feed their artistic souls in this small Mexican town, inhabited by expatriots of several nationalities and intentions, all trying to integrate themselves into Mexican culture or, at least, configure an amalgam of their former and current cultural milieus. Cohan ties in the intricacies of foreign relations between the U.S. and Mexico, and the travails of water shortages, earthquakes, and currency devaluations. Cohan's account is humorous and enviable for the adventure and sheer joy of adopting a new language, culture, and lifestyle. Vanessa Bush

In 1985, fiction writer Cohan and his wife fled the sterility of Los Angeles to visit the town of San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico. They fell in love with the place and its people and decided to make their home there. They bought and restored a house, made new friends, and developed new tastes and habits. Not a book on Mexico, this is instead an engaging story of two creative people and how they find happiness as expatriates. Cohan's style is readable, entertaining, and light. Recommended for public libraries.AGwen Gregory, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Twenty-One-Day Ticket

JANUARY 1985. THERE IS NO AIRPORT directly serving San Miguel de Allende. Boarding a midafternoon bus from Mexico City's north terminal, I watch the clotted capital become desolate factory outskirts, then dissolve into cultivated swaths of agave cactus, sorghum, bean. The air softens. Musica estereofonica raises sweet laments. A Virgin of Guadalupe pendant sways from the driver's mirror between decals of Che Guevara and Rambo. A tossing reverie must have become sleep, for when I next look out the shadows are long, the hills closing in. Along the roadside, farmworkers materialize out of the air, then recede back into dusky earth. Little roadside shrines whiz by, candles lit within. Old stone walls run to nowhere. Clusters of black birds wheel, then swerve toward the horizon like iron filings to a magnet. I look over at Masako, her head pressed to the window.

A sudden sharp descent causes me to grip my seat. A dying sun sets ablaze a little town nestled on a hillside. We debark in a dusty clearing among stray dogs. A half dozen scruffy kids vie to carry our luggage; I wave them off. A taxi driver in a clean white shirt offers to take us into town. Anxiously I counter his figure by half; nobody's going to rip me off. Shrugging, he agrees, as if to say: If it's that important to you.

We step through a canopy of bougainvillea into a cool, flower-flooded patio. I enter a hotel office where earlier I'd called to ask, "Do you have a room?" and been answered with "Maybe." I'd bridled at the insouciance, with its echoes of being put on hold; but as our luggage slumps onto a tile floor in a high stucco room overlooking a shady garden, I ease, forgive.

We walk through a dimly lit town of roseate Moorish walls. A tuneless band plays somewhere. Church bells stun the air. I see a ghost or a barefoot woman walk by smiling, a bucketful of calla lilies on her head. Through the open door of a church, I glimpse a wooden Jesus in a wine-colored velvet robe. Cobbles and narrow, raised sidewalks force me to notice where I place my feet, imposing a minuet with each passing person.

In a small, thronged plaza, we sit on an iron bench gazing up at a quirky pink church, its serrated spires embedded in a full complement of stars. These strolling, chatting, laughing citizens don't seem to realize the TV they're missing at home. I war with the evening's sweet lassitude, trying to keep it all outside, avoiding eyes. I feel repeatedly for my wallet, my passport. Vainly I fish for the summarizing blurb, the snapshot, the quick hit.

Drop it, something whispers. Just let it all go ...

Our Spanish-style house was in an area south of Hollywood known in real estate parlance as "Hancock Park adjacent," an attempt to bind it to the million-dollar neighborhood close by. We'd bought it with money made writing words and music, designing clothes, and making art. We were busy, successful, tired.

An uncharacteristically cold January, and we kept the heater on all day. A book of mine had just come out and I was trying to get a grip on the next one: a story about a dwarf writer in a South American prison and an American lawyer attempting to free him. I was spending afternoons at the Amnesty International office downtown, poring through prisoner files, reading about the dirty war in Argentina, atrocities in West Africa, slaughter in East Timor. I was bringing home books with names like Torture in the 1980s. Masako would look at me oddly. She herself was painting large, grim self-portraits, acrylic on canvas.

At dinners I listened politely to friends' conversation about the price of real estate, projects in development, notable recent crimes. After a cultural night out I lay in bed reviewing the drive there and back, the parking experience, where I put my keys—the event itself barely recalled. I left messages on machines; they were returned in kind. Surrounded by art, music, information, and food, I saw, heard, thought, and tasted little. A series of robberies and killings had erupted in our neighborhood: first the Bob's Big Boy murders, in which the victims were executed; then a robbery at a favorite restaurant two blocks away, the customers mugged and herded into a freezer; then a break-in at the house next door. In a moment of grave personal defeat, I installed a house alarm system with an "Armed Response" sign stabbed into our lawn, a blinking "command center," "perimeter defense," "panic button," and roving patrol cars. We were wired for apocalypse: Blade Runner was no longer a metaphor.

There were days when I'd find myself hurtling down freeways toward receding destinations of evaporating worth, suspended between the fantastic and the mundane, between wide acclaim and abject defeat. Somewhere, I'd missed a turnoff.

Cold, anxious, trapped inside our house, we'd taken to bed early one night to keep warm. Masako was leafing through an issue of Gourmet, a Christmas subscription from a friend. I was with Bruce Chatwin in Patagonia. The Gourmet magazine represented to me the very complacent consumerism we'd once scorned, now breaking through our "perimeter defenses." In youth we'd both traveled widely on shoestrings, lived in Europe, North Africa, India, Japan. Now we had the money but no time. Instead we read about it, recounted old experiences, festooned our dwellings with Third World artifacts, talismans of trips once taken.

"Look," Masako said, holding open a double-page color spread.

Warm rose-colored walls, azure sky, red bougainvillea. A scalloped fountain, a courtyard restaurant, a sandstone church spire.

"Isn't that where Mina and Paul go?"

We'd known them separately in Berkeley before we met, then again in Los Angeles together. Mina makes and teaches independent films; Paul is a painter best known for his surrealistic record cover paintings for avant-garde rock bands. Years earlier they'd fled bad marriages and run off together to Mexico. They still returned there every summer. When asked about it, they always grew vague.

"San Miguel de Allende," the caption said, "in the mountains of central Mexico."

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0767903188
• ISBN 13: 9780767903189
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304