Letter 1 - Zacha to Keira and Kelly 09/10/07

Hi Keira.

I'd written exactly this last time you wrote to me, before I was pulled out the door to the bus station in Mexico, and my life hasn't slowed down since:


"I think you meant tailors. But I like the image very much. I've eaten far too many types of food to list, mostly because I don't remember all the names. It's very good here.
We're off to see the Cervantino Festival (International Festival of Don Quixote) in half an hour. 8 hours of buses should give me enough time to read. (Buses are the trains of Mexico.) It's in the town of Guanajuato, about which I know nothing. Cuernavaca is built on a hill. Karla and James are both trai"

The story goes as follows: After three weeks in Mexico I took a plane to the UK, visited my godmother and visited Jack. From there I took a plane to Barcelona, and a train north over the border to Montpellier in France, with no idea how to find Agustina. Late that night, having come halfway around the world to search for her, I found her new mobile phone number by accident with a simple internet search. The next day I talked to her on the phone. She had gone back to Spain in June, during the student riots in France, not having been able to find any work there. (Unemployment had been part of the reasons for the previous riots, in 2005.) We talked for half an hour - where she was very impressed with my new Spanish, and when she told me that there is someone else in her life since we last saw each other in February. I went straight back to my godmother's place in the UK to be miserable for a week.
I talked to James and Karla over the internet, and decided to use my frequent fliers to go back to Mexico, and hang out in a latin country for a couple months. Which I really needed. Waiting for my flight to come around, I finished the last of my uni assignments. So I've finally finished Uni, which I found out via the net two weeks later. But this story has a big meanwhile..

Meanwhile, all the way through Europe and after my sad adventure in Montpellier, I'd been corresponding with a friend of Karla (James Pearce's wife) in Mexico, who I'd met while I was there. Pilar Angón. We both lost a lot of sleep using MSN, and after I came back to Cuernavaca from a weekend in Miami (my Dad flew me there to meet him, and the Rabbi who did my Bamitzvah a few days after I landed in Mexico City) we started going out. She's very cool, is 29, writes stories, is an anthropologist, knows capoiera, dances brilliantly and has an 11-year old daughter called Anahí who also writes stories. The first day we met, in October, she told me that she wrote stories..
"My daughter also writes stories." she said.
"Are they good?" I asked, in Spanish.
"Yes." she said, and grinned really broadly "But, I'm her mother." And her grin happily said otherwise, and that it didn't matter how much she was prejudiced in her favour - her daughter still wrote really well. Which is true. I'm trying to translate one of her stories for you called Testén. (Especially for Kelly, who'll love it.)
Since then, I've been shuttled from one family event to the next. The lead up to christmas is really big here, then christmas is really big, then new year's is really big and you go stay with family in another city for a week and a half, then Pilar's birthday was the 5th, then Epiphany on the 6th (Los Reyes - "the (3) kings") is the day that the children get their presents like in Italy. So, it's the 9th and I have some time again.
...
So, for the moment I'm here in Mexico.

love to you both (Kelly's been copied into this letter), and please tell Anna, if I'm not to late, that I'm sorry I'm not at her 30thy, because I'll be in Mexico and the buses here are crap after 9.

Talk to you soon, love Zacha.