January 2023. Ajijic, Mexico
“You must stay a very long time. This is the Hacienda San Pedro. I hope you will like it”. Thus, in the twilight, we saw the apricot facade, the open loggia, the garden and the lake, the fallen figures and the upright ones.
“But it is lovely,” we said. “Lovely, lovely”.
“It is yours,” said Don Otavio.
The main and only social area of our hotel, doubling up as a bar, restaurant, reception and general sitting place with plastic chairs, is an enclosed courtyard just below the Moroccan yellow-stained window of our bedroom. At breakfast a trickle of five fellow hotel guests appear from rooms and move about this space, milling about slowly to inspect the food put out on display as is the way when presented with a buffet. Although this bar claims to serve alcohol and has some half empty bottles visibly in stock lined up along the wall, there is a suspicious feeling that they haven’t been touched in about five years. The bar, like the hotel itself on the whole, remains mysteriously unattended, to make sure no Covid is spread.
On the tiled table surface of the not-in-action bar bowls and plates containing breakfast are laid out and the predominant colour is white. Seven white-shelled hard boiled eggs, a plate of white cream cheese, a bowl with white cream cheese, currant studded slices of bread on a white plate, another plate of cheese, a bowl of pale iced butter and a toaster. We look around at our hotel friends. A blonde American woman in her sixties has spent a long time hunched over the small water feature in the corner inspecting two terrapins fighting in a bit of water swilling about the basin. An Austrian man with a white plait leading to belly-button level and a squeaky lisp is busy warning everyone that his wife’s bag was stolen off the back of her chair and that nobody is safe. We sit down in an isolated corner with identical boiled eggs but sense an unfortunate conversation brewing with a man nearby. Soon we are hearing that the man is from the Shetland Isles, lives with his mother, and migrates to warmer climates during the winters, since his UV lamp doesn’t lift his mood sufficiently during the three hours of daylight. This year chose Mexico instead of his usual Bali or Thailand, but says he will never come again because of the “astronomical” costs. This is a theme that bounces about all the expats here: other expats are raising the prices, they complain, and ruining the place. After telling us for ten minutes or so about the horrific stomach illnesses he’s contracted he calmly stands to leave us to the eggs that we haven’t been able to touch.
I take a walk down to the lake and look at the pier whilst S works in the room. Someone is waist deep in the lake with a net and a smiling Mexican man is sitting on the steps of the pier sipping on a Corona in the morning sun. We speak for a while though it’s hard to distinguish what he’s trying to tell me with his very earnest eyes, a sort of muddy brown blue. I notice he has clean rows of perfect teeth. His name is Miguel and one thing I do get is when he looks at me very intensely for a moment and asks, with a crooked smile, “wouldn’t you be happy if you could sell your farm for tons of money?” This is said in reference to the many foreigners in Ajijic buying up plots of land in the surrounding hills, as they did his family’s farm not long ago, leaving Miguel to move down into the streets of Ajijic with nowhere to live. When I walk back into town from the waterfront, S is already in the Lake Chapala Society grounds, where we had agreed to go that morning, to continue our research by speaking to real-life modern day Ajijic Americans. The Society, set up by expats, is made up of a few squat adaptable buildings — town hall, library, cafe — set within a botanical and lush gardened enclosure on the intersection of two street corners. An American woman and young Mexican man keep guard at the entrance, both wearing Disneyland sun hats and sitting behind a desk covered in a sheet and taking names of those who enter. As I sign mine I overhear the young man trying out his English. He is just about to finish college, he tells the woman, who is barely listening, after four years of studying Communication. “Well it’s all downhill from here!” the woman barks from underneath her cap with a rasping laugh, to which the boy looks downcast, his American dream crushed. There is a library in the grounds that reminds me chillingly of secondary school. Nevertheless we enter to get some local information about Sybille Bedford.
The officious balding middle-aged male librarian - the one who exists in all countries and places and time zones - is motionless and has a strong whiff of knowing much more than we ever will. At the mention of the author’s name he briskly sweeps over to a desktop computer and inputs the information and announces with conclusive flair that “someone called Sybille Bedford once wrote a book called A Visit to Don Octavio” and that it isn’t available in the library. We say that we’re in fact not looking for the book but for information on the author, and, after a frown of annoyance at being contradicted, the man strides away. We presume he means us to follow and are led to the memoir section, which the librarian points at with an angry outstretched arm. After spending what we think is a decent amount of time at the bookshelves for him not to be more enraged when we go back, we return and slink over to the female librarian instead. As we secretly ask whether she has ever heard of Bedford the man, furious now, overhears and interjects: no, nobody has ever heard of her; she is not well known; there is no point asking anybody; the library has spoken. He suggests we check Wikipedia instead.
Back at the hotel we leaf through the book on our beds, tracing Bedford’s descriptions to try and locate exactly where the place might place. It is hours by donkey, brief by boat, with the lake on the left. We realise we have to start somewhere and decide to set off for San Martin, a town we deduce as being about two hours by donkey ride from Ajijic in 1953 and twenty minutes by car in 2023. After taking a wrong turn and winding up at a bright orange farmhouse (not the “pale apricot” shade we are looking out for) we ask a man passing by on a motorbike where we can find “Hacienda San Martín”. Though he is keen to direct us “towards the monks” instead, we manage to move on and draw up, hearts a-flutter, to the back part of a house showing deep red and white peeping above a stone wall and large black iron door. This is the hacienda we’ve seen in the photos, and both have a chillingly moving moment of feeling we might be here. Nobody seems to be around except a dog attached to a lead and pulling down the tree behind it with its straining frenzy to maul us (the branch he’s attached to looks worryingly like it might snap). A wiry, rakish man emerges from a house behind and tells the dog, with a perfect Texan accent, to “Shut the hell up”. This is Raul, or, as he later confusingly tells us to call him, ‘San Martín’. Raul San Martín, with his white wife beater and rollie cigarettes, doesn’t seem to be a caretaker or connected to the house but offers us up lots of information on the nine brothers who once owned it. Spanish family, he tells us with a swagger, massacred during the revolution. Each had a house and each was burnt down, except this one. This seems plausible: Don Otavio came from a large Spanish family whose money seemed to have dwindled during the revolution. We go back and forth with Raul SM on who and where the owner is and how we might get in, which he seems to think is impossible. His first explanation is that the owner is a woman in Guadalajara who comes every other week, then a woman whose husband died seven years ago, and finally a woman who lives here permanently and is here now. We stand realising that a chat seems to want to continue in the burning heat whilst the dog on the chain slavers.
“Where you from?” Says San Martín.
“London,” S says.
“Oh yeah. London in New York state right?”
“London in England”
“Yeah yeah. London. In Spain right?”
“London in England. In the UK”
“Oh yeah yeah. With the king right?”
“The Queen, yeah”
“Yeah, yeah, Queen Isabel. And she died in a car crash right?”
“Well, her daughter-in-law Diana died in a car crash”
“Diana, yeah. She was a drunkard, right?”
We feel the conversation isn’t progressing and Raul San Martín, sensing we might be getting restless, quickly offers us drinks: anything we want, warm beers all day or night, he’s got a whole trunk full. We look at his shady house and the salivating dog and mumble excuses and are stumbling into the car before we realise Raul San Martín is almost getting in too. The sun is scorching, we are lost, everything is getting odd, but we finally manage to set off without Raul San Martín in tow, leaving him as a small figure with the snarling dog, get back onto the motorway, and soon find ourselves driving through endless raspberry farms.
Passing a picker who looks at us suspiciously form underneath his cap, we draw up to the front gates of the house and stand staring at it for a while. This must be the place, we feel. We stand with our noses pressed to the iron gate and analyse the big red walls stretching out along a balustrade with white arches. There are discrepancies, but we focus on the signs we’re looking out for: apricot coloured walls and lime trees. A very small, very old woman appears on the other side of the garden. A long moment passes as she limps towards us with an unfaltering gaze and smile. After what feels like ten years she is suddenly standing right opposite us on the other side of the gate, still with a permanent smile. How she knew we had arrived, why she’s so seemingly calm about seeing us, what she expects or what we’re about to discuss, is all a mystery. She has a deep sort of patience to her, a total openness to the world and its many situations. Unfazed by my camera we ask her whether the house was ever owned by someone called Don Otavio. Instead, the woman tells us that the house was abandoned but it was rebuilt as it once was, and that she has been here for forty-five years -- just about close enough to perhaps know about its life in the 1940s and 1950s. I ask about the colour - she says that the house is this colour, but we feel that we can see faded apricot inside. We ask about the rooms: there are fourteen she tells us; in the book there are eight. The tennis court is faded and abandoned, so too is the vegetable garden that she says her late husband planted, God Rest his Soul. Crucially, she tells us that there were once lime trees, but that they are now all gone: S is thrilled by this. We ask to see inside and she tells us with a perfect smile we can’t enter as she doesn’t have the key (at almost the exact same moment we see a man behind her opening the gate) but that we can come on Monday to Tuesday, and she can show us round. She is so charming and perfect. There is Don Otavio’s old world elegance here, and Soledad’s innocence.
Feeling we are exhausting this ageless woman we decide to l drive back to Ajijic, past the endless raspberries, leaving with the feeling we’ve found what we set out to look for. This would be proven wrong, but for now we were happy, letting ourselves be lured into a restaurant with views over the lake. We eat melted cheese and thick tortillas and S checks the trees with her tree app. It is Jacaranda season, when most of Mexico turns purple. That night we go to see an ex-ambassador, Marco, and his peaceful and intelligent wife Tules at their hillside house for drinks. The sky turns lilac, orange, red, and all three and more over the hills as the sun goes down behind them. The cats prowl as Marco and Tules tell us stories of living in Castro’s Cuba.
Today, we started to think about the workings of an author's mind: the embellishment and fictionalising, and how memory is not accurate and perhaps doesn’t need to be. Nothing matched up with Bedford’s description but we had imbued the house with what we wanted to see, and if we left it at that we’d have believed that we had realised and achieved our ‘revisiting’. But that is what is so beautiful about A Visit to Don Otavio, and Mexico: reality is here waiting to be described but inviting you to heighten it, knowing it is almost beyond belief and needs to be exaggerated to be believed.