An artist traveling
in Mexico stopped in SMA for a day. He had $200 in his pocket. He
was on his way home. It was 1985.
After settling into his $5 a night room, like most tourists, he
found his way to the Jardin. He sat on a bench in the late afternoon
sun, looked around, and thought, “this would be a nice placed
to live.”
He noticed a little gaggle of girls sitting on the Jardin wall.
He pulled out his small sketchpad and started to draw. When he was
finished, a man asked him how much he wanted for the drawing. $20
the artist told him, and the man fished out a twenty-dollar bill.
The artist was pleased with himself. In just a few minutes he had
increased his net worth by 10%. He decided to stay a few days longer.
The next evening the man found the artist and told him he had shown
his drawing to two guys who were starting a gallery. Their names
where Isaac and Carlos. They wanted to know if he would do ten more
for the same price but bigger.
Now he had doubled his wad. He thought he might stay a little longer.
A few days passed and someone told him about an apartment for $45
U.S. He thought he would take a look, just out of curiosity.
There were eight apartments with sliding glass doors that looked
out on an overgrown garden. One large room downstairs with a big
fireplace. A stairway led to a big loft upstairs where there was
also a fireplace. There were a few basic pieces of furniture.
He thought it was beautiful.
As he peeled off $45 in pesos from his dwindling wad, the plump
lady who took care of the apartments asked if he would like to keep
the maid.
“Maid,” he repeated. This was a new concept for him.
He was introduced to a short stocky woman with sparkling eyes and
a hopeful expression. Her fulltime salary was $8 a week. Certainly
not exorbitant, but it would almost double his monthly nut for the
apartment.
“She will have a hard time finding another job,” said
the plump lady.
He said yes.
Although not a messy person, he had never lived in such a clean
house, including his mother’s.
After about six weeks his money had dwindled considerably. He was
never much of a cook, and he was eating out at least twice a day.
He figured when his funds dwindled down to a Mexico City bus fare,
he would leave. When that day was near at hand however he started
to regret his lack of frugality. He figured he had another three
weeks, then his rent would be due and it would be over. His landlady
Mrs. Cohen who owned the brass shop on Relox was very nice but he
didn’t know if she was nice enough to let him slide on the
rent.
He told Anna he couldn’t pay her and she said that was alright,
that she would wait until he could. She went back to mopping the
floor for the third time.
A week or so later she commented on the fridge, the fact that there
was never anything in it. Half seriously, he told her that was no
problem, that he was dropping in on friends around mealtimes. The
next day he found a large pot of beans, an equal amount of cooked
rice, and a stack of tortillas wrapped in a clean towel.
In addition to not paying her, now she was feeding him.
In a wild gamble he had brought some paints and a small canvas board.
He painted a portrait of a tough crazed woman named Karen who hung
out at La Fragua and would occasionally dance with him. He always
carried a small photo album with him and made a point to sit at
a large table in La Fragua. When someone asked what he did, he would
tell them he was an artist. If they asked him a question a about
his work he would take out his little album of his paintings back
in the states and invite them to his studio, hoping he could sell
them a drawing. This had worked a couple of times.
His painting of Karen was barely dry when Jan and Charles, two friends
of hers, bought it for $300. He was rich again. He paid Anna her
back pay and a small bonus and paid Mrs. Cohen her rent.
Between that day and Christmas, four months later, he sold three
large paintings. Will and Martha Sloan were two of those people
and Martha commissioned him to paint her portrait for considerably
more than $300 and went on to buy more major works, allowing him
to stay in SMA. She was the first of several San Miguel patrons.
Come Christmas, having decided that Anna was a part of a profit
sharing corporation, he gave her $300. Her eyes wide, she told him
it was a lot of money and she didn’t know what to do with
it. He told her to save it and opened an account for her and explained
how she could get to it if she wanted to.
Anna lived with her father, her two sisters and her father’s
new wife and kids. Her father bought and sold animals that he kept
on his tiny plot of land. The land was low, shit everywhere, and
come rainy season it flowed into the house despite the three sister’s
efforts to keep it out.
One day Anna told the artist she had taken her money and bought
a piece of land with her money. An old man who was mad at his family
was selling off pieces of his land cheap to poor people. Several
months later, she invited him to see her new house. Three years
had passed, and each year he had given her $300 for that rice and
beans. That was only $900. How could she have bought land and built
a house?
The land turned out to be a tiny lot on a hill at about a 45-degree
angle. Anna and her sisters had spent months digging into the side
of the hill until they had a flat part for one room. Four 4x4’s
for corners, lattice stripping and tar paper for the walls, lamina
roof and a shower curtain for a door. Inside on the packed dirt
floor was the wood table and four chairs he had given them and a
few pots and pans. No bathroom, no water, and I saw no beds. They
were so proud of what they had done.
“No shit,” said Anna in English just as he had taught
her.
“No shit,” I repeated as the sisters grinned widely.
They said when it rained they would sit on the table with their
feet on the chairs as the water, clean water, rushed down the hill
and through their house.
They took a walk around the new neighborhood made up of the people
who had bought land from the old man. They stood by a stream that
cut through the new settlement. Here there was shit. Quite a bit
of it. Anna reminded the artist of the day she had asked him if
he could buy her 12 chickens. The chickens had been for a political
rally for a candidate for mayor who had promised to cover the shit
stream. He had won the election, but not covered the stream. He
remembered Anna coming to work each day with a long stick with a
banner on it. But now she said she was finished with politics. She
also said she was afraid the stream would make the children sick.
The artist got a girlfriend and Anna worked for the two of them
for five years. When the couple parted ways the girlfriend pleaded
to keep Anna. The artist explained to Anna that his life would now
return to great economic uncertainty since he would be poor again
and that she would be more secure living with his X who had money.
She loved his X’s dogs and cats very much and agreed to stay.
The artist told the X she had to keep paying Anna the $300 each
Christmas and she agreed.
A few years passed and Anna took the artist to a new Colonia, San
Luis Rey, off the road to Dolores, just outside of town. She had
bought a nice piece of land under a government project. A couple
more years and she showed him a pile of bricks. A couple more years
and Anna produced an architects drawing of a wall, a room, and a
real bathroom, her first.
Anna now has a three-bedroom house with her two sons and sells sodas,
potato chips and cooks out of her front room.
Just shows what a little bit of help can do for a person. She still
works for the X, mostly watering the garden. Sometimes she’s
seen holding her hand in the flow of clean water, just staring at
it. |
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