As Far As The I Can See

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As Far As The I Can See - book excerpt

Chapter 1

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.

Chapter Two

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 bya 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.