Baja Diary: Of Mice and Mr. Gomez

In the morning we had sausages and eggs for breakfast and turned to.

We had driven down to our Baja house meaning to stay six days, and we were going to stay, even though the refrigerator wouldn’t work and the house was full of mouse droppings.

My wife undertook to clean the kitchen, washing down every shelf and cleaning the range and the refrigerator. I did the bathroom cabinets and my desk and the chest of drawers in the back bedroom and the night stands in the front. There was no place the mice hadn’t penetrated, no surface they hadn’t desecrated. I felt no compassion for them.

It was hard work. “What is the mystique of this place?” my wife asked.

I knew what she meant. We should have felt dispirited, finding the house so dirty and having to work so hard to clean it up. But we were exhilarated.

“Maybe it’s because we’ve put so much into this house,” I said, “and it’s ours.”

Of course it wasn’t really ours. Maybe the house was ours, but the land wasn’t. It belonged to Romulo Gomez, our landlord and guru in all things related to life in Baja.

In mid-morning there was a knock at the door. I looked out the window and saw four dogs. Usually there were five. It was Gomez.

“Buenos dias, “ he said, with his usual bonhomie.

He seemed glad to see us. I was glad to see him. I told him about the mess we had come upon, and about the refrigerator.

“Now that you are here,” he assured us, “the mice they will go away.”

He lay down on the kitchen floor and tried to start the refrigerator. He went out to his truck and brought back some tools. For three hours he worked on the refrigerator. At one point he drained a cup of water out of the fuel line. ‘You aren’t going to be able to fix it, are you Gomez?” I asked, always the pessimist.

“I am going to try,” he said.

The night before, we had found a box of fireplace matches with about 15 matches left. Gomez used all that we hadn’t burned. He gave up for the time being. He said he knew where he could get some parts the refrigerator needed. He would be back. I knew he was going to cannibalize some other refrigerator. It is all a question of priorities.

He came back later with three boxes of kitchen matches, a broom, a flashlight, some fresh tortillas and two filets of white fish. Gomez the provider.

We worked all day. The house had been restored to some degree of cleanliness. That night we read by the fireplace, listening for mice.

We were still at work the next day when Gomez came back. He had brought a girl with him, a girl who lived in the valley. She was to do our floors. My wife felt dispossessed, but she gave her the mop. She mopped while Gomez worked on the refrigerator.

Again he worked three hours, again without results. In the end, he gave up. “It is finished,” he said. We were disconsolate. The refrigerator was the one amenity that had never failed us. My wife gave Gomez some pork chops and chicken to put in his freezer and he left us again, trailed by all but one of his dogs, a fat Weimaraner that decided to stay.

“I think there’s something Gomez wants to talk about,” my wife said. “He seems always on the edge of it.”

“I know,” I said. “Money.”

He came back the next day with a large filet of halibut, two bottles of wine and a small piece of paper which he handed me with studied indifference. It was a handwritten bill: “Paint iron bars, fix bars on window, replace window and screen (broken in burglary), installation water heater, plastering outside and inside, replace roof tiles around the roof and chimenie, and cut all the brush around the house. 1988 taxes and water, $495. 1 butane, $20, work on house $380--$895.”

At least he hadn’t charged us $60 an hour for working on the refrigerator. My wife wrote a check.

We had previously discussed the possibility of selling the house, but no one mentioned it. We were in residence for the moment, and that spoke for itself.