The Chapala “Lakeside” in the 1960s, of course, was a very different world than it is today.
The mountains shouldering the then very poorly-paved road from Jocotepec to the village of Chapala was the domain of wild animals, campesinos, a few pasturing cattle, petty criminals on the run and young lovers eloping against their families’ wishes.
This latter was the bane of all Mexican parents, whether of slim means or well-to-do merchants. It didn’t have to be added that such families were also Catholic – everyone then said they were Catholic – and a great many actually were.
Thus the nightmare for a modestly successful owner of a small store in, say Ajijic, was to have his l4-16-year old daughter “va a la montaña” with a 17-year-old son of one of Lake Chapala’s many fishermen. Or worse, the male teen-age product of a parent considered a ne’er-do-well, and/or well-known as an ambitious tequila aficionado. The familiar ambition to be solidly middle-class, Mexican pueblo style, ruled the dreams of many small business folks – now passed their own sexual surges of adolescent dreams.
Today, contraception has meant that all this has changed. But vastly far from the accepted impulse for Lakeside teen-agers in the 1960s. Thus, the montaña lure – and fear. Once a girl went into the hills with a boy, she was considered “spoiled” morally. She carried that reputation well into adulthood – unless she went to “visit” relatives in another rather distant pueblo or family members in United States. And this was still occurring when U.S. vets began to come to Lakeside to live.
A good number of young girls got jobs as criadas (maids) with the gradually changing North American population here. And many of these young ladies, whose parents, though suspicious, were enchanted by the generosity of these gringo newcomers. Many of them were successful artists, photographers and writers. Among them were authors Willard March, Norman Mailer (in Ajijic) and Lysender Kemp (in Jocotepec), the latter proving himself a genius translator of the unparalleled analysis of Mexico, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” by this country’s cultural and political biographer – and later winner of the Nobel Prize – Octavio Paz.
And true, several young Mexican damsels were dazzled by the charms of the “quaint,” often “irresistible” war-time tested gringos.
And there also were foreigners who in turn were beguiled by those young Mexican maidens.
Spencer Adams was an early Korean vet who claimed he’d received the fastest wound stripe in U.S. Army history. Fresh from infantry training at Fort Ord, California, he’d been assigned to a heavy weapons company – specifically commanding .30 caliber machine gun crews. Reared in Kansas, he was mustered out sporting a touchy wishbone that for some time had felt as if a mula had kicked it.
He had no desire to return to Kansas. The GI Bill would get him into Kansas State University later on if he wished. Currently, he was teaching himself Spanish with help of several Mexican acquaintances, and a carefully selected small library on Mexico that he had put together before heading south.
Conveniently, one of his most ready teachers was the maid of his neighbor, a stiff Mexican-German widow rumored to have killed her husband not long before. The wily neighbor was an ever-helpful bruja, who deftly cured Spencer of various fevers that seemed to live off of gringos, and of course the most famous of Mexican illnesses — a cluster of ubiquitous forms of diarrea, all traveling under the sobriquet, la turista.
Silvia “Chivis,” Spencer’s new bruja friend, recommended as a maid an about-to-be 16-year old “Yoli” Yolanda Rios. She was a shy but lively teacher. Spencer got on relatively easily with her father, Anselmo (Selmo) Rios. Spencer talked Kansas agriculture to this grower of corn, squash and beans. Selmo had been sharply reluctant to allow his daughter to work for a gringo military vet. But the more he talked about Korea to Spencer the more at ease he became with his young daughter’s employer.
Selmo, though he was careful regarding his politics, was fairly candid with this gringo about his distrust of Mexican rulers, both nationally and locally – state and municipal. And he was impressed that Spencer had been wounded, but didn’t whine or brag about it. Spencer didn’t mention it at all.
In those days, Lake Chapala was relatively clean. Some scientifically-prone older gringos, with the cooperation with some University of Guadalajara professors, had recently devoted a long stretch of time testing the Lake’s water. A demanding job. Mexicans, and especially the area’s many fishermen, working the lake with giant redes, reported no particular illnesses. (That would come later, when more towns bordering the long river channel feeding the lake were infected with sour chemicals.)
Thus Spencer could borrow canoes and row far away from the lake’s beach to do his swimming where the water promised to be the cleanest. Which is how Selmo and his family learned of Spencer’s chest scars. Selmo was careful about asking about them. And Spencer, when pressed, spoke of them in a way that made them seem consequential in the past but no longer – a natural result of a military service that had now become negligible.
He was surprised when Yoli wanted to touch them, but was afraid if she did she would somehow hurt him.
(This is the first of a series.)