Warming up in Cabo

It was unrelentingly cold and wet in the Sierras this winter. A phalanx of viruses attacked us from left and right, leaving us, in spite of antibiotics, decongestants and allergy meds,  hacking and sneezing. We have been desperate for a penetrating heat that would encourage our immune systems and settle into our bones. Miraculously, today we are delivered. We land in Cabo before we even know what it means to be in Cabo, the southernmost tip of the Baja peninsula where the desert meets the sea on the Tropic of Cancer. We are at the same latitude as Algeria. It’s warm but not sultry. Feels like the end of the earth. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for the end of the earth. 

A 60-ish man with an expensive haircut wearing a spotless pink shirt materializes at the counter in the sprawling resort lobby where we have arrived bleary from the airport. He is an expert on Yankee malaise. We don’t see him coming but he knows we’re there and his fine-tuned instincts tell him just how to manage us. Soft sell. “You two look like you might be ready for drinks.  Lemonade? Really? You can have it if that’s what you want, but I’m going to throw in a splash of tequila, ok?” Before you know it, the long day of travel is behind you and you’re agreeing to meet him for breakfast, on the house, the following morning. Just to talk, no pressure. To find out about opportunities, he calls them. We are pencilled in for forty-five minutes. There he is waiting for us at one of the seven restaurants at the resort. We schmooze about our families. He has three sons in their thirties but no grandchildren. A disappointed shadow crosses his face before he has a chance to plaster over it. The more real he is, the more I convince myself I like him, but really it’s all part of his game and he’s good at it. He asks if we would mind if he ordered a fruit platter and French toast for the table. We would not mind. Two hours into the forty-five minute appointment, he starts talking about his favorite books. He mentions Hesse’s Siddhartha.  The guy is a walking algorithm. He knows his customer. If the property weren’t preposterously expensive he just might have had me at Siddhartha. As it stands, he loses interest when he realizes we’re not biting. The charm is turned off. Other fish are waiting to be fried.

It’s curious how I think I’m traveling incognito when in fact no one is fooled. A Dominican from the Bronx, several margaritas in, overhears me talking to Frank and rushes up to tell me how much she loves my Jewish accent. Not my New York accent, mind you, my Jewish accent. Always a ripe occasion for paranoia. The following day, a guy peddling beauty products tries to get me to buy a $400 bottle of collagen cream to erase the crow’s feet around my eyes. He touches my face with a mixture of fondness and greed. Then he enlists Frank in this effort, fielding the proposition that if this husband of mine really loved me he would remember that I was once beautiful and could be beautiful again with the help of the $400 cream. He even plays the Jewish card yet again, deftly switching into Sicilian when he realizes he’s barking up the wrong ethnicity. I’ve been in Cabo for three days and already they’ve got me pegged as an over-the-hill Jewish intellectual who wants nothing so much as to have her face caressed by a stranger. The only thing they don’t know about me - and this is their Achilles’ heel -  is that you can’t sell me anything because there’s nothing I want to buy except quiet and warm weather. 

All I want is the blue of the sky, the aquamarine of the fish just below the surface of the water, the gulls sweeping down over the sand, the mangoes and avocados, and the blessing of rest. There is, of course, a dollar sign attached to rest. Most people don’t get any, can’t afford it, work two jobs, care for children and sick parents. Mexicans in Cabo work long days pampering Americans resting in glamorous mobbed up resorts. There’s no way around this contradiction. To sit on the balcony overlooking the Sea of Cortez and do nothing while other people dig in the dirt, deliver drinks, drive golf carts around the property, is an extraordinary privilege. It’s a gift I’m giving myself this winter after months of wrapping blankets and robes around my shivering frame, trying to ward off the invasion of pneumonia. I am reminded that I’m just like everyone else. I want to feel healthy, I want to feel cared for. I want a respite from the bloodletting all over the world. It doesn’t come free and it doesn’t come clean.

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