la perdida

This time last year I was unloading my luggage at the Mesón de la Merced in Querétaro, México, in preparation for spending five months as teacher, camp counsellor, mom, chaperone, cultural interpreter, immigration consultant, dance instructor and cockroach exterminator to a group of fourteen undergraduate exchange students.

Last January 2nd I spent all afternoon learning how to acquire and operate a phone card, taking my first uncertain steps through downtown Querétaro in search of a working public telephone. Finally, around 11 p.m. Mexico time, I called my future ex to let him know I had made it. He wasn't home so I left a message. I tried his cell phone. He didn't answer.

Hey, it's me, the message said. You know, your spouse? Yeah, so that foreign country I was flying to today, I made it safely. Um, I'm not going to have a phone number for a couple of days at least, so I'll try e-mailing you one of these times as soon as I have access to the Internet. So, that's it I guess. Sorry I missed you, hope it's because you're doing something fun. Catch you later.

It was two weeks before we spoke.

As I write this a new group of students is discovering Querétaro for the first time, being soothed by the mild weather, the fragrance of the orange trees and the babble of the fountain in the patio of the converted convent where they'll stay tonight. Tomorrow they'll meet their host families; these must be at least steps one through 27 in Querétaro's conquest of their hearts and imaginations.

I've been back now for nearly as long as I was there and still there are mornings when I pause before I open my front door, hoping against hope that when I open it I will find not a dreary, Kalamazoo winter on the other side, but a clean, bright Querétaro morning, the streets alive with people, music everywhere, pale purple jacaranda blossoms littering the pock-marked sidewalks. It's an irrational, momentary failure to accept being back that I haven't got past just yet. As painfully wistful and nostalgic as it is, when I do get over it I will have lost something.

Coincidentally or perhaps subconsciously I chose today to use my Christmas money: a graphic novel called "La Perdida" by Jessica Abel about a gringa unstuck in Mexico City. Her narrator visits a Mexican neighborhood in Chicago hoping to score some decent tacos. She writes:

"All I wanted was a little taste of it, just to feel it a little bit. I can't shake the feeling that I've ruined something precious. That I lost something there. I want to search for it...But I'm an exile. I can never go back. Can you be exiled from a country that isn't your own? I don't think you can. So I'm simply 'not permitted.' That doesn't sound half so bad.

But I feel like an exile."

The introduction is all I've allowed myself to read for now, since I have so much other reading to do, but I can already tell this one will be by my bedside for a long time to come.