December 16

The man at the front desk here is 62 and rides a bicycle for sport. He too has as much English as I have Spanish, but he hasn't been able to help me in my quest for a place to live. Maybe he didn't understand me when I asked him the day I checked in. I'll try again.

I will also check out all the websites listed in The People's Guide to Mexico, including their own. I'm not getting anywhere by looking for "se renta" signs. But I am seeing neighborhoods that I would like to live in. There looks to be a mixture of housing for the wealthy and the poor in them, but not to the extremes one could imagine. But I will need help from someone who can speak Spanish.

I'm three pages into El Viejo y el Mar, underlining every word I have to look up and filling the margins with their one-word definitions. I have to guess at some, maybe most, of the grammar, but it is making sense. The book, new, cost $3.60, and the translator isn't named; I suspect that it is a very bad translation, but I'm still getting some of the feel of Hemingway from it.

After I entered the above I went to the library and looked at those websites, and a few more, and got nowhere. I had seen them all, or ninety five percent of them, and they were of no more use now that then, including the new ones. So I posted a message-in-a-bottle on the Mexico Connect bulletin board, and despondently returned to the hotel. I wrote down a couple of sentences in Spanish and recited them to the desk clerk, who called the Tamaulipas Office of Tourism, and put me on the phone with a woman who spoke no English. She got the hotel phone number from me, somehow, and said that someone would call me back.

Nobody called me back, but at 2:40 Ruben Valero came to the hotel and asked for me. He is a man in his thirties, who works for the Oficina de Turismo, and his English is adequate. He began with a spiel about the attractions of Tamaulipas, asking what my interests were, and I said bicycling, which is one of his interests as well. I interrupted the sales pitch and told him that I simply needed help in finding a place to live. He suggested a cabin out of town, and I said that would be OK as long it had electricity, hot water and a kitchen and cost no more than 3,000 pesos per month. Ruben, and his girlfriend, spent the next three hours with me, driving me way the hell up in the mountains, where there was a cheap cabin that we never looked at because I would have to hitch a ride once a week into Victoria for groceries and email, and I'm too old for that.

The mountains are wonderful, and there are ranchitos in them that are what the rest of us should be living in, and ruins of old haciendas that looked a lot like the ruins of the Franciscan missions in New Mexico. We met along the way some of Ruben's mountain-biking buddies, two of whom are the local champions, of which one was selling oranges on the side of the road. He gave us a bag of mandarins. Ruben was on his cell phone half the time, and drove like Erin thinks I do. His speech is peppered liberally with chingas and cabrons. I kept asking him if he really wanted to spend this much time, and he said no, it was his job, don't worry. His girlfriend is very cute and much younger that he, and spoke very little English.

When we got back to Victoria he took me to the neighborhood I had been looking at, where he knew a lady who rents rooms. A "room" here is a kitchen-living room, a bedroom and a bath, furnished, with utensils. She showed us one, which was much like the places I rented as a student, and smelled of mold, and was dark and depressing, and was one of eight in a barren compound. It would cost about 2,500 pesos per month. I liked the terms, and the lady, who said I should teach English, and I said I would if she would teach me Spanish, but I didn't like that moldy smell. We drove to another place, in another neighborhood, but we didn't look at that one because there were soldiers living there and Ruben says to stay away from soldiers and cops. He told me about a good restaurant near the hotel, and said he would look through the Sunday classifieds for other rooms, and I still have an option on the first one until noon tomorrow. Ruben can see " se renta" signs much better than I can, and he called a couple more places, but they wanted $2,500 unfurnished and the tenant pays the electric. He gave me his cell and office numbers and said he would call tomorrow. Ruben is a fucking saint.