All Around the Houses

When I go out walking, I may meander and wonder and dawdle and stray off the beaten path but in my everyday existence, I like to get to the point. A reader described my writing style as ´economical´, which I took as a compliment and think is very telling.

I am often asked if I have adapted well to life in Mexico. I try to be polite. Really, I assume I am doing alright, even though there remain things that I may never get the gist of entirely. Many of those mysteries are borne of the workplace. Too much hierarchy. Too many lines that must be followed and never crossed.

Take for example, an absurd situation that occured today; The director asked if I would be able to invigilate an exam on Friday, to which I replied that I couldn´t. I later received a phone call from someone who had heard me say at the meeting that I couldn´t do it. She said that the Director had asked her to phone me to see if I could invigialte the exam. I confirmed that I still couldn´t, that what I had said only hours before was still true. She then asked who I thought might be able to do it. I gave the name of a colleague. She proceeded to ask me to ask him if he could do it and then for me to tell her his answer.

Is there ever any need for such behaviour? The director has a phone in his office and could have spoken directly to my colleague, therefore eliminating five steps in this ridiculous process.

Or take the joy that is renewing a Mexican visa. This time I went to the immigration office six times. As they only open from nine to one, I had to take time off work six times. I had to give them copies of documents that they already have several copies of and duplicates of duplicates. They asked for a copy of my rental contract, which doesn´t exist, so I bought a blank one from the paper shop and filled it in with some real sounding details. They didn´t at any moment check if it was genuine.

And house buying becomes a nightmare of never ending papers, stamps and signatures. It is so difficult to know if the sale is all above board because if somewhere along the line a signature is missing or a stamp isn´t right, it could invalidate the whole process. While I am very sure that the deal we are involved in is fine and dandy, I don´t know how I could ever be one hundred percent certain. It is such a maze, it is difficult to find anyone who really knows.

My theory is that this tendancy to create a trail so long that you don´t know where it starts or ends is precisely to create confusion. The more confusion there is, the more doubt is spread and so it is easier to dodge responsibility for anything. If two people are involved in something and it goes wrong, it is easy to proportion blame. When six people are involved, blame is much more easily avoided.

So it is that if the deal goes through with this house, we may live constantly wondering if one day the long lost half cousin of Uncle José will turn up to claim the land on which our house is built. A friend told me that on his wedding day this was exactly what happened to his in-laws. Someone came, with photos of the house interior, claiming that it was his.They told the distant relation to go away and haven´t heard from him since. That was five years ago.

One benefit of the labrynthine legal system is that any claim to land would take a life time to resolve, if it ever found a conclusion at all. We shall bite the bullet and hope that nothing crawls out of the paperwork.