Traveler
(Part II: Paris)

            In the summer of 1976, my mother no longer knew what to do about Lalo’s problems. She had already sent him to live with my father as well as with my grandmother to see if someone other than she could manage to help Lalo. Neither of these experiments had worked out. Lalo had come back home to live with us but was still getting into trouble regularly; so much so that my mother had had to make good on her promise to ground him in Mexico while I went to Davenport, Iowa in the US to spend the holidays with my mother’s family.  It was during this time that a painter friend of the family, who was living in Paris, suggested to my mother that she send him to France with her. There, she said, he would learn to stand on his own two feet, get away from the “negative influences” his friends in Mexico represented, and finally face up to reality.

            My mother decided it was worth a try; she bought Lalo an open two-way ticket in case he needed to come back home, and arranged things with my father so that he’d send Lalo’s share of the child support to him in Paris.

            After a short time in our painter friend’s home, Lalo started living on his own. At first, everything worked out pretty well. He got a tiny apartment that was actually too expensive because it had a private bathroom, took French classes and studied music at the Conservatoire de Paris. Later that same year, though, Mexico had the first of many future devaluations.  All of a sudden, Lalo’s money was reduced to half of what he was getting. He got rid of the nice apartment, rented a garret room in a building where he shared a bathroom with the rest of the inhabitants of his floor, and started trying to make ends meet. Because he couldn’t get a formal job, he began to play the violin in the Paris Metro.

            During his time in France, he also got a chance to travel to other places in Europe. One of the ones he told me about was a trip to Amsterdam. Pot was decriminalized in the Netherlands that year, so Lalo thought this was his chance to buy some. On his way back to Paris, the train stopped at the border and an inspector got on. Naturally, he was caught trying to smuggle the pot in but, luckily, because it was such a small amount, they only confiscated it and let him back into France. He told me those were some of the tensest moments in his life; he thought he might wind up in jail or banned from France, where he had all of his things, including the round-trip plane ticket.

            One afternoon in the summer of 1977, around the time my mother and I were getting ready to come back to Mexico after having lived in the States for about a year, the phone rang. When I picked it up, I heard Lalo’s voice on the other end. He asked if my mother was home, I said no, and he said he’d call back later. When my mom got home, she was amazed, shocked and angry all at the same time. “What do you mean he said he’d call back later? He’s in Paris and doesn’t have a dime! How’s he going to call back?” But, sure enough, he did call back later. He had been taught by another foreigner how to “trick” the public phone boxes into letting him call anywhere in the world for as long as he wanted for the price of a local call. He and my mother talked for hours, while he told her all about his life there and described the sunrise over the city. It was then that he decided to go to New York.

Susana Olivares Bari