In the Galería
de Todos Santos there was a painting by an American named Derek Buckner.
I'd found it propped against the wall in the back room, the paint still
fresh. It was a curious tableau: a man in a turquoise skirt and a brick-red
fez; another man, also in a fez, his smile a slash of white between
a mustache and a goatee, arms spread wide as if to say Voilà!; a woman
with smooth red hair pinned into a topknot, her rose-colored dress catching
the light of morning sun, the dappled shade of trees; another woman,
wielding her tambourine like a weapon, chastising a dog. These exotic
characters stood around a table, the dog with its paws on the edge of
the tablecloth. Plunk in its center, like a soup tureen, sat a flying
saucer.
The painting was titled “The Visitors.” There was a
woman who wanted to buy it, but the Galería de Todos Santos was asking
two thousand dollars. It was worth it, she acknowledged. But she was
remodeling her kitchen and she had to buy a stove.
“Who needs a stove?” the gallery owner said. His name was Michael Cope,
as in “I can't,” he liked to say. He was blonde and apple-cheeked, Danny
Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen. He was from L.A., a refugee of corporate
life, a painter himself. He placed his arms akimbo.
Todos Santos had once boasted a prosperous bourgeoisie
whose fortunes were built on sugar. With water from a spring, they grew
the cane, milled it for its juice, then boiled it down to a syrup in
great cauldrons with orange peel and spices, which was then poured into
molds to make the hard cones of panocha. But in 1950, the spring slowed
to a trickle and the mills closed, one by one. The few families
that remained in Todos Santos lived by hunting turtles and sharks. The
spring revived in the early 1980s, but now the water was used to irrigate
tomatoes, papayas, mangoes. The ruins of the sugar mills, their rusted
machinery and brick smokestacks, dotted the tiny town of 4,000 people.
Most of the streets were dirt.
The air in the Café Santa Fé was cool, the tables were of pink marble.
Nuevo flamenco played on the stereo, intricate and delicate as fluttering
gauze. I sat out back under the pergola in the garden. I spread the
napkin — a great flannel-soft square — across my lap and ordered lunch:
rosemary focaccia, lobster ravioli with basil, roasted new potatoes
and mesquite-grilled dorado drizzled with balsamic vinegar and olive
oil.
“We don't need food,” Michael said. “We need art!”
What had brought the first big spending visitors to Todos Santos, however,
was the food — specifically, lunch at the Café Santa Fé, an Italian
restaurant on the plaza. Todos Santos was only an hour north from Cabo
San Lucas on the highway, a narrow shoulderless pavement threading through
a wilderness of cardón and cholla cactus, the sea on one side, the sierra
on the other. Cattle browsed around the cholla cactus at the edge. Sometimes
they wandered into the road and stood there chewing their cuds. Every
ten miles or so was a clump of palms: a fishing village of cinderblocks
and thatch-roofed adobes, a roadside stand offering Tecate beer and
cold Cokes.
Todos Santos seemed like just another of those villages, although larger,
with a gas station. It also had a stoplight and a grocery store. A few
Americans lived here, some in an RV park, others — many of them artists
— in the old downtown, which was no more than a plaza with a white-washed
theater and the requisite church, around which clustered a few blocks
of 19th and early 20th century brick townhouses and shops. Some were
newly renovated, painted bright fruity colors, but many remained empty,
their rotted wooden doors padlocked, roofs caved in.
The restaurant was full: Americans up from Cabo for the day, most of
them. The women were in espadrilles and linen; the men sported Rolexes
and baseball caps embroidered with the names of golf resorts.
The owners of the Café Santa Fé, Paula and Ezio Colombo, had just returned
from Paris. “We took in a fashion show,” Paula said when she stopped
by my table. “Oh! And a film opening, and the Francis Bacon show.” She'd
been a fashion model once herself, an African-American covergirl for
Essence and Seventeen. That was more than twenty years ago, but Paula
still seemed girlish, fine-boned and bubbly. Ezio, a thick-waisted fellow
in the background, striding like a worthy burgher between his bar and
his kitchen, was a painter from Milan.
As I was leaving I saw the gallery owner, Michael Cope. He was having
lunch with two of his artists: Robert Whiting, who also owned the new
Todos Santos Inn, and Gloria Marie V., a petite woman with long straight
chocolate-brown hair. She wore a straw boater with silk flowers bunched
at the brim. Birds were singing, something rustled in the thick matt
of bougainvillea over the pergola. Their table was a still life: goblets
of chilled white wine glistening with condensation; a vase with a sprig
of desert wildflowers bright as raspberries.
If I were a painter, I thought, I would have liked to paint that.
