By

JOHN SCHERBER

        

EXPATS IN A DIFFERENT WORLD

         One of my favorite house museums is the Gene Byron Museum in Guanajuato, the capital of the same state in México. It lies in the close-in suburb of Marfil, one of a string of silver ore processing haciendas that were mostly owned in the middle of the last century by a group of Canadians.

         They had been originally built to extract the silver from the ore coming from the great Valenciana Mine, the largest and most productive in the world, not far away. As the technology changed, these estates lost their purpose and their value and fell to ruins. When the Byron property was purchased in 1954, there were no roofs left on the main, two-story building. Burros were housed on the lower level.

         Gene Byron was a Canadian actress who was born in 1910. She first came to México in 1942. There, sometime later, she met the man she married, a Spanish pediatrician named Virgilio Fernandez. Born in Spanish Morocco, raised in Seville, he was eight years younger than Gene, and he had gone to medical school in Monterrey. He had been in México since 1939. Together they restored the main building into a long, two-story residence to house their creative life together.

         Gene died in 1987, at the age of 77, from a smoking related illness. This was one of many things Dr. Virgilio told us as we sat with him near the entrance on this visit. I had heard he was still alive, but I did not expect to meet and talk to him at the age of 97. Here he is with my wife, Kristine.

         Later we toured the house, left as it was when Gene died twenty-eight years ago. She was a woman determined to leave her mark on life. The house is full of her paintings, including this self-portrait:

         The only painting on the main floor that is not by Gene Byron is this portrait of the young Virgilio Fernandez.

         As well as art, she was a designer of stone carvings and crockery, and of the gardens that front the long façade, graced by a series of arched windows. The metalwork that appears throughout the house, the light fixtures and sculpture, is all hers.

         The house was often filled with creative people. Garth Williams, the illustrator of children’s books, died in Marfil in 1996. He was famous for his iconic illustrations of Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and many others. Another frequent guest was Fletcher Martin, the American painter who studied with the great Mexican muralist David Siqueiros. He retired to Marfil in 1967 and died there in 1979. Artists and writers of that era knew of this house and visited it when they came through, almost like a pilgrimage site. The home of Gene Byron and Virgilio Fernandez was the center of the artistic and intellectual life of the Guanajuato expat colony in the 20^th century.

         As I walked through those rooms today I felt I could hear the echo of those voices. It was a different time for México and for expats. I believe there was less emphasis on retirement and more on living than in today’s colonies in San Miguel de Allende, Lake Chapala, and the beach communities.

         This great stone house, built in the sixteen hundreds, continues as a center of living culture. Every Sunday there are concerts on the second floor, now one long hall with a vaulted ceiling, since the bedrooms have been removed and a grand piano waits on a platform at one end. The vestibule at the concert hall entrance was once Gene Byron’s painting studio.

         When we left we stopped at the gatehouse to say goodbye and to thank Virgilio Fernandez. It was not hard to imagine him wandering through that hacienda, every square foot of which must speak to him of those rich and rewarding times, both the hours and the years. Since silence fell, he has been its stalwart guardian, and has endowed it in his will. He and Gene had no children, but they have left us an ageless memorial to their life and times.

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WRITING UNEASY RIDER

By

JOHN SCHERBER

WRITING UNEASY RIDER

         After writing twenty-four books I am once again part of a writer’s work group here in San Miguel. Seven working writers meet once a week to offer critiques of each other’s work. This is not the kind of group where the members are given a prompt, followed by twenty minuets of rapid writing, and the comments may only be positive.

         All the material has been read in advance before the meeting. This is a setting where anything goes, within the bounds of normal supportive civility, but a thick skin is a useful garment to wear, since we are all committed to tell the truth of our reactions. This is how we improve our work.

 Martina

         The obvious benefit is the criticism from other writers. This is not the same as an editor’s view, and that’s good. My experience is that many editors are failed writers and tend to have a formulaic approach. The phrase we want to hear most in this setting is, “This part (or character) isn’t working for me,” followed by the reasons why, and possibly a hint about what might work better.

         But there are also other benefits. One is the need to be insightful about what others are doing, which requires a thoughtful commitment to understand both their premise and their technique. This is particularly helpful and challenging when what they are doing is something that absolutely has never occurred to you. Stretching to understand it, to generate insight into what would improve an approach you have never considered for yourself and never would, has the benefit of allowing you to return to your own work with an expanded perspective. You have stepped out of your own bubble. We can improve not only our ability to critique other writers, but also ourselves by doing this.

         In this group several are doing memoirs, one a romance, another is working on a thriller, and I’m writing the fourteenth mystery in my Murder in México series, titled Uneasy Rider. The romance, the thriller, and the mystery all fall into the category of genre fiction, which is often thought to be formulaic (and too often is), but my experience with mysteries is more flexible. To me, detective fiction has an opening with a crime and a closing with a solution. That’s as much definition as I require. The area between, essentially the entire book, is open to the sky and may contain any set of elements at all that advances the story. The fundamental skills that apply are little different from those in literary fiction. The needs of pace, plot, characterization, and writing skills, are all the same, and this open-ended feature applies to romance and thriller as well.

         Uneasy Rider is mainly set at an upscale equestrian property near San Miguel that I call Rancho Aria. The occasion of the story is a murder, but like much of fiction, the subject is the truth. The process of investigation is that of uncovering the truth on the way to solving the crime, but as the reader discovers, little of this falsehood is the cause of the murder, it only appears as if it might be. As one of the main characters, Maya Sanchez, says, “All masks are off now.” This is the book of mine that has been making its way, chapter by chapter, through the writer’s work group.

         I am now in the final revision phase, and the group will be going through the later chapters and helping me get it right. I am aiming at publication in the second half of October.

         More than some of the others in this series, Uneasy Rider is a whodunit. It has some deep psychological roots in several of the characters that I found challenging to develop. I believe that while we may see someone across the room or on a bus that we would like to use in our story, the character and makeup of the person who emerges on the page comes largely from our own mind and experience. While we are specifically no one that we write about in fiction, we are also everyone, including the villains.

         So here comes Uneasy Rider. It’s been a stretch for me, as many are. Someone once asked my painter/detective character, Paul Zacher, how he knows when a picture is finished. He replies that he sets aside his brush when it stops fighting him. I learned this from my own painting, and it is no less true of writing.

         I wanted to call this piece Uneasy Writer, but I didn’t, because I am more excited than uneasy, and the fight on this book is not quite over yet.

         Excuse me while I step back into the ring.

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AN EXCERPT FROM 'A PLACE IN THE HEART'

By

JOHN SCHERBER

AN EXCERPT FROM A PLACE IN THE HEART

Here's an excerpt from my Chapter Five book on the expatriate experience, San Miguel de Allende: A Place in the Heart.

His house is built on an uncleared cemetery. His youngest daughter disappeared headfirst through a TV screen sometime back. On sunny summer afternoons rotting corpses bob like apples in his swimming pool. Is it all in his mind? Absolutely, and there’s more where that came from.

         The mind in question is that of Hollywood producer and screenwriter Michael Grais, author of the screenplay for Poltergeist, his first big success. It was followed by Poltergeist II and eight other successful films. The unassuming and ironic Grais confesses to being sometimes too frightened to watch the films made from his own screenplays.

         Jennifer Grais is a healer and former back-up singer for Jackson Browne. Many of her days are spent on the back of her white gelding, Solo, wandering the hilly trails and arroyos outside San Miguel. Connecting with nature is critically important for her.

         The Grais’ escape from Hollywood to San Miguel came by a road somewhat less well-traveled than most. They started by spending a month in India, unaware that going there opened a door that was an exit from their lives in Los Angeles. It didn’t take the entire month for them to realize they couldn’t go back home in any permanent way.

         When it was time to return to the States, says Jennifer, “we were ready to live somewhere else, we were fed up. Michael especially was really burned out in Los Angeles. He just felt like he couldn’t escape Hollywood. Everybody thinks the same there. Even in this beautiful canyon [Topanga], a lot of the people are in the movie business. They’d ask, ‘How far up the hill do you live?’ It was that hierarchical. At first I thought they were really interested in where our house was, but I realized later they only wanted to assess how high up the hill we were.” It was a metaphor for rank in the film community. “There really was no escape from that mindset. It was very isolating.”

         But while the trip to India initially held no suggestion of escape from Los Angeles, it did highlight some things that were missing from their lives. “The experience in India was very mind-expanding,” says Michael. “We were with people from all over the world. I realized how much I missed communicating with people other than those who were talking about the latest film grosses or whatever the constant conversation is in Hollywood, which is only about money.”

         “Or about stars,” adds Jennifer, “what actresses are doing.”

         “Or what Britney Spears is up to,” he adds, “what underpants she’s wearing.”

         “But it was amazing watching him in India. There were park benches and people would just gather around them and there would be somebody from Brazil or Africa. It was so stimulating, and he was so quiet and isolated in Topanga Canyon on the hill. But there he was like the Godfather, entertaining on the park bench, cracking everybody up. When he came home from all that stimulation and camaraderie, that was when it just snapped for him.” A serious look comes over her face; she is seeing it all. Again the turning point moment.

         Michael nods, seeing it too. “And then I said, ‘This is beautiful, but it’s a beautiful cage,’ and I can’t live in it anymore. I said, ‘We’re moving, and I don’t know where.’”

         Jennifer surfed the Internet in search of a place that would restore their lives. “I was looking for a community that would be similar to what he had experienced [in India].”

         She had not found the same lack of community in Los Angeles because she had never sought it in the same way. “I tend to isolate [myself]. As long as I’m in nature and have a few animals and can do some healing work I’m pretty fine. It was nurturing for me. It wasn’t nurturing for Michael, and I wasn’t in the business in the way he’s in it, so I could withdraw.”

          No place in the States seemed right. Every place she looked at was either too far away from an airport, or too isolated in general. “I just couldn’t find any place that seemed easy, was walkable, that would make life better.” Friends had told them about San Miguel, knowing about Jennifer’s love for old buildings and culture. They came down for a week to look at it, and they’ve been in San Miguel ever since, with brief interruptions to rent their Topanga Canyon house and arrange their move. “When we came here, it seemed to answer a lot of those questions,” she says.

         “Every place we looked, no matter where we looked,” says Michael, “and we looked from the east coast to the west coast, [we found that] basically life in the States is the same everywhere. You live in a house, you get in your car, you drive to your office, you get back in your car, you drive back to your house, watch television, go to sleep, get up, and do it again. There’s almost no city that’s different; everything looks the same now.”

         Now they live in a city that is radically different. When he left Hollywood he had either produced or written the screenplay for ten successful films and had done extensive television work as well. Although he has recently offered a workshop in writing for films, Michael has moved away from screenwriting himself to focus on two novels.

         “The longer I’m here, the longer I’m away from that environment, the more comfortable I feel. And the more I realize how mentally enslaving it was being in that environment. It was incredibly limiting, just to be on top, to have a movie in production, to drive the right car, to live in the right house, to be at dinner with the right people, friends with the right people. You’re always working.”

         One of the first things they discovered about San Miguel was that, while it was a fine place to work, it was not a place that was about working. While the Mexicans are a hard-working people, that virtue is not at the top of their list.

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AN EXCERPT FROM THE DEVILS' WORKSHOP

By

JOHN SCHERBER

AN EXCERPT FROM THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP

The only question remaining now, in the entire life of Mark Sands, was how long it would take him to hit the sidewalk twenty-seven floors below. Funny how your life could be reduced at the end to a single point, with no dimension but speed. After his first startled shout he almost seemed to be slightly removed from his own plummeting body––perhaps it was a way of not feeling the terror.

         That Sands, at fifty-four, was a realist, partly accounted for his success as a money manager, not that it would save him in this situation. As his body accelerated, he felt his mouth twist into a grimace. The wind clawed his navy pinstriped suit jacket back over his arms, but he didn’t cry out again. As he passed the Jacobsens on the twenty-fourth floor, neither of them looked up from their sofa. Sands’ neatly trimmed silver hair stood up like a halo behind his head, every strand rigid.

         Sands had come back from a long business lunch at 3:30. His wife, Megan, was not at home. After a couple of martinis, he didn’t feel like going back to work, and the stock exchange was already closed. When he paused in the vestibule of his condo, he checked the phone messages and found nothing of interest. Walking into the dining room, he was about to set the mail on the table when he noticed the children, eight of them at least. Shocked, he stopped when he saw another one still emerging from the painting on the wall, one foot reaching outward over his antique buffet. But they weren’t children, they were only small, and it seemed to Mark Sands, rather dirty. It was only a first impression, but he would never have another.

         There was a moment of shocked silence. One tapped the shoulder of another who had not noticed Sands come into the room. Soon they were all watching him in silence, their eyes narrowed, waiting for his next move. Mark Sands felt a sense of horror and insanity rush over him. His hair stood up on the back of his neck. This did not correspond to any reality he knew. Not sure how to react, with the mail still gripped in his hand, he took a step back. The nearest of the small people dipped his hand into his pocket and withdrew it palm upward. He blew across it with a knowing grin. Mark Sands was engulfed in a powdery cloud that glittered in the afternoon sun. What an odd effect, he thought. How could this be a weapon? He lost consciousness and fell face first to the parquet floor.

         He regained consciousness after only two or three minutes, filled with terror and helplessness, but unable to move his limbs. Many tiny grubby hands lifted him over the parapet at the edge of his broad veranda, thrusting against his back, his arms, his buttocks. The fingers on his calves were sticky, lifting his skin as they moved. He knew exactly what they were doing, and he tried to struggle, but his eyes were just clearing and his limbs were still heavy and unresponsive. Then came the sudden shift of his weight on the parapet, and he went over the edge. His sense of horror was not muted by the fading effect of the drug in the powdery cloud he’d breathed.

         Painters were working on ladders on nineteen, and Mark Sands was still accelerating. People on the sidewalk were growing larger, almost like real people now. A man stopped and pointed upward at him. His mouth was open as if he was shouting, but Sands heard no sound but the rushing wind.

         A woman at her desk on the eleventh floor looked up and screamed silently as he passed. Mark Sands’ jacket came free of his arms and drifted away above him at a gentler pace, moving out over the traffic on Fifth Street.

         How had the little people emerged from the painting over his buffet? It was his Rafael Cantú masterpiece, The Last Supper, the prize of his collection. And they were the characters from the painting. He recognized the odd, ragged leather outfits. Had he been murdered by these nightmare versions of Christ and the Apostles? Mark Sands’ fingers clutched wildly at the rushing air as he approached the sidewalk. It flew toward him like something that had been waiting there his entire life.

         His final thought was that he would feel nothing when he hit the pavement. As usual, Mark Sands was right.

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