Point of View: The Closest Thing
“Estoy feliz que Mexico no ha construido un muro contra nosotros!” I said to the taxi driver as we arrived at the Las Brisas hotel outside Zihuatenejo.
He laughed, as had been my intention in saying I was glad Mexico had not built a wall to keep us tourists out. On that note, we began a week’s stay at the closest thing we’ve come to paradise on this earth, there being nothing to do there but read and swim and speak bad Spanish to the unfailingly pleasant staff, a wonderfully captive audience.
And yet, even though I felt more at ease than ever with the language, to the extent that I was able to frequently get orange juice mixed in with my margaritas, and to make some headway in proposing that the name of Isaias Ochoa Hernandez, a former Las Brisas lifeguard who began protecting baby sea turtles there years ago, be added to the hotel’s history of the project, a history proudly affixed to a stone wall near the beach, it’s Mary who always received the compliments — heeding apparently the advice of my father that all one needed to say in French was thank you and goodbye, “merci” and “au revoir.”
In her case it’s “gracias” and “lo siento,” to which she adds, apologetically, “Mi espanol es muy mal,” invariably prompting her interlocutor to declaim, “No, no, senora, you speak very well! You speak very well!”
“I’m better than her in tennis, she’s better than me in swimming, and we’re tied in Ping-Pong,” I said to a waiter who had noted we were sporty. I forgot to add that she killed me in backgammon — thankful that I wasn’t that fluent.
For exercise, though, you needn’t do anything more than climb up and down Las Brisas’s steep stone stairs that lead through jungly growth to the pools, the tennis courts, the beach, and, if you’re of a mind, to the lobby, about as high up on the cliff into which the hotel is built as a sacrificial Aztec or Mayan altar.
“It was like Syphilis,” I said, panting, to Mary following one of my steep ascents. “Sisyphus, rather. . . . You know, Robert Graves [no relation] says he was known as the worst knave on earth for promoting only Corinthian commerce and navigation.”
That reminded me of a certain knave on the earth now, though I held my tongue, not wanting our bliss to go amiss.