How Paradise Affects the Memory
Frequent SLM contributor Rick Skwiot writes both fiction and nonfiction; what he’s after is truth. In his new memoir— San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Memoir of a Sensual Quest for Spiritual Healing—it takes experience, memory, and imagination (not to mention women and tequila) to dissolve his North American angst. “Instead of cluttering their psyches with the debris of envy, hypocrisy, or regret,” he writes, the people of Mexico “exposed their sins and shortcomings, often with humor and a lack of self-consciousness or contrition that astounded me.”
You stayed in San Miguel de Allende 25 years ago. What surprised you, when you started remembering and writing about it?
How susceptible I was then, how much it all affected me. Living back here for so many years, I had redeveloped a gringo veneer. The other thing that was surprising to me was the schism between my memory and the journal I kept then, which was more on-the-spot reporting. I had remembered things differently than I had written about them. It made me start thinking about not only my own mind but how memory fluctuates and expands and moves about.
Which reality do you prefer—the one your imagination has elaborated, or the purer documentation?
The former. I’m very intuitive, very emotional. So the hard facts of things are not as important as the way they affect me. In my personal life, too, I want to get at what the truth is, whatever takes me there.
So what took you to a little town in Mexico called San Miguel de Allende?
I was going down a road in life I didn’t like very much. I had married in college. That didn’t work out. And I had spent three aberrant years in the corporate world, doing PR for AT&T of all people.
Oh, my.
Yeah, truly. I wasn’t being myself. That’s what made me so vulnerable. I had this compulsion: I had to do something to change myself.
It’s interesting: You felt so driven to take action, yet the solution turned out to be passive, even indolent.
Yeah. There’s this Mexican philosophy where you just let things happen to you and take advantage of the moment and drop what you are doing if a friend comes by. There’s much more spontaneity.
Mexicans say, “Gringos do not live in their bodies.”
Yeah, and I think that’s become exacerbated now, because we have so much passive visual stuff we’re always focused on, and our work has gotten a lot more physically passive, and we’ve gotten more estranged from nature. Plus we’ve got this whole history of Puritanism and the Protestant Reformation and everything that drove the beginnings of the United States. A denial of physical pleasures runs very deep in this country.
Your book makes it pretty clear that sex, and the sensuousness that surrounded it, helped transform you. How?
The way we are abstracted and living in our minds a lot, sex is one thing that takes us back to what we are all about. Primal urges and feelings, love and affection and family and procreation, all these instincts are blended. It’s our chance to be animals again. It’s the most affecting thing we do to get back in touch with nature. It does get us out of living in our minds. Not only is it transformative, but it’s transcendent. We move out of daily routines and everything else when we are in someone else’s arms.
A woman you knew in Mexico said, “Ay, Rick. You try to speak our language and live like us. But you will never be a true mejicano if you can’t make love with people watching.” Can you now?
Metaphorically, yes.
What did you leave behind, when you retreated from gringo culture?
A lot of guilt. A lot of self-criticism. I learned to forgive myself, and to forgive other people.
So what did you jettison first?
Being self-assured and closed down socially. A lot of prejudgment. We’re descended culturally from the Brits, and we have this thing where we judge people by the way they look or speak or smell even. That you had to get rid of pretty quickly. Mexico is a different land, and there’s not that much focus on style as there is on substance.
What was it like when you came back to your “cold, gray, cerebral existence” up north?
Hell.
Why did you come back?
A lot of it is just being ambitious as a writer, and trying to feed myself. I don’t have a trust fund.
You write about finding a neighbor’s dead body, and how she haunted you, ashen-faced, for the next three nights. What do you make of that, 25 years later?
[He sighs.] I don’t know. I go back and look at that section every time I reread the manuscript, and I still don’t know what to make of it. I don’t discount any possibilities. I guess the Mexicans taught me that.
In Mexico, death is not only ever-present, but it’s treated lightly. How did living there change the way you thought about death?
Ultimately, I stopped fearing it. And I think part of that was simply because I’d started living.