October 18th, 2017, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico:
The ancient beggar woman slumps on a doorstep in a flowered cotton dress and apron, her eyes on the ground and her frail hand cupped in supplication. Every gringo writer who comes to San Miguel tries to turn her into a poem. They can't help it. Their bleeding hearts are sticky as flypaper. They can't just pick the flies off and flick them into the gutter because each one would tear a few sinews of muscle off with it. Nor can they let the flies fester and become infectious. Their only option is to turn each one into something beautiful.
The beggar woman is like a Bob Dylan song. None of the gringo poets know what her real story is, and no one is offering an explanation, so they must apply their own profound interpretations. Writers, too, fear the unknown. They use words to iron out uncomfortable glitches like the old beggar woman, to unravel her fraying existence and re-knit her into something they can cope with.
In their poems, they turn her gnarled knuckles into wisdom, her downcast eyes into humility. They give her children and a husband and a home (where these things are now, who knows...) They give her the prettiest, kindest smile with which to sooth their disconcerted hearts as they hand over two pesos.
But what if that smile is trained and practiced, made of layers and layers of paper mache meant to bandage decades of open wounds so they won't bleed her dry?
If I were in her position, I would loath every gringo who presumed to know or understand me just by looking at my face. But I wouldn't show it. Like a Wal-Mart cashier, I would plaster over my contempt with a fake smile so that I could get paid. I would let him feel good about doling out his bathroom change to the poor and downtrodden because I would be tired and I'd figure the real story was worth a lot more than 2 pesos.
Or maybe if I was the ancient beggar woman I wouldn't blame the gringo poets for wrapping me lovingly in their naive interpretations. Maybe I would understand that they HAVE to turn me into something beautiful, because without their day jobs, they'd probably be begging from a stoop too. If they had chosen decades ago to let go of the system and really live as poets, the world would would have let them fall, and they would have hit the ground hard and shattered.
Maybe the beggar woman understands that they need her to be the poem so they can convince themselves they weren't afraid to be poets.
But what if this full and beautiful life that the gringo poet imagines for the beggar woman is nowhere close to her reality? What if, when she was eleven, her uncle raped her and she stabbed him in the neck seven times and fled and has been living on the streets ever since? What if she ended up pregnant and knew she couldn't take care of the baby so she had a back-alley abortion and left the mangled fetus in a garbage can? What if, when she was still young enough and strong enough to run, and still too proud to beg from gringo poets, she stole to feed and dress herself? These, too, are things that happen to women. Not because they are monsters, but because life is a monstrous thing.
Even in your ex-pat paradise, life can be a monstrous thing. Not for you, because you chose a pension over poetry. And you want to believe that everyone else in the world had that same choice, because you don't want to feel like a cop-out. But in reality, perhaps you're something worse than a cop-out. Maybe you're just a gentrifier who is actually making life worse for that old beggar woman. You don't want to think about it, but they're raising the rents because of you, and the higher they go, the less she can buy with the two pesos you just handed her.
In the end, the gringo poets of San Miguel write their own familiar lives onto the old beggar woman because they're terrified that their retirement utopia might not be as gorgeous as they all imagine, and that, to the locals, they might be an invasive plague rather a benevolent gift.
They turn her apron, the badge of a workhorse, into fond memories of baking bread with granddaughters. They turn her frazzled gray hair into a saintly halo. They turn her silence into inner peace, when maybe she's just biting back rage because she knows that no one will ever recognize her life of constant struggle.
Maybe, behind that sweet smile, the beggar woman is seething because she knows the gringo poets will never ask for her real story, not just because they're afraid to destroy their utopia, but because they can't, because they never bothered to learn Spanish.
All she will ever get for her trouble is the knowledge that some gringo poet is using his pension to self-publish a book of poems that aren't even true, and that his misrepresentations, no matter how few copies are sold, will still earn him more than the two pesos he is handing her.