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Travel Advisor
Day of the Dead
I want to participate in Oaxaca's festivities, but am worried about the recent floods. Can I still go? Plus: Our expert's tips on touring Big Ben's private gears and finding a teaching job at sea.
By Donald D. Groff
[10/14/99]

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It wasn't funny at the time
Lonely Planet's new anthology presents an I'm-glad-that-wasn't-me collection of delightful disasters.
By Don George
[10/13/99]

Vagabonding
Goodbye, Khao San Road
As he leaves Southeast Asia, our Vagabonding correspondent reflects on the evolution of the middle-class travel revolution.
By Rolf Potts
[10/12/99]

Publisher sponsors essay competition
Bradt Publications' contest offers a free trip for two to Patagonia as its top prize.
By Don George
[10/12/99]

A bittersweet saga in Sicily
An innocent visit to an "ancient" village fertility fest reveals a multilayered history of feuding families, conniving communists and failing farms.
By Frank Browning
[10/09/99]

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By Susan McKinney de Ortega

Oct. 15, 1999 | Marry a kind man, a man like your father, my mother told me. And I did. But nobody saw that at the time. People only recognized our differences. Julio is brown; I'm white. He speaks Spanish; I speak Philadelphia English. Both our fathers are handsome former athletes, but my father, when he coached in the NBA, owned a Mercedes sedan. His father built brick houses with his hands, lost his front teeth in a soccer game long ago and doesn't know how to drive a car. I am a writer. Aside from Mexican school textbooks, Julio has never read a book in his life. I have a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin. He was still in high school. He was my student, in fact, and I was his English teacher. I was 33 years old. He was 19.

Julio was the reason I had shaved my legs again and started wearing skirts to school, the reason I had put away my Butch Wax for crew cuts and was growing my hair out. He showed up for class with a single notebook every day at 4. My stomach did a lively quebradita when he did. After class, he waited for me halfway down the hill in a sandwich shop.

Many of my boy students fought for the privilege of walking me home, where they hoped to be invited into my single woman's apartment, where I lived alone, a condition unknown in most of Mexican society. Only now do I realize what a tantalizing figure I cut. My students dated on doorsteps, and stole kisses in the shadowy dark part of the street where the street light didn't reach. Girls were yanked inside at 10 or allowed to go to the Jardin, the town's central plaza, to meet a boyfriend only if accompanied by a little brother. I lived unsupervised.

I had survived my first semester teaching English to several classes of uninterested Mexican adolescents. I knew little Spanish, which made me a less-than-effective teacher. This was also the reason I was dim to the fact that most male students were looking at me sideways, trying to figure out how "loose" I was, or they could get me to be. And although "loose" was something I could be when convenient, I had somehow figured out that Preparatoria Benito Juarez in San Miguel de Allende was not quite the place.

But Julio -- so shy, unaggressive, awkward, gorgeous -- Julio, fingering the edge of my desk nervously to ask what kind of music I liked, a midnight black curtain of hair falling down the side of his face, Julio I couldn't resist.

Twice he managed to utter that I should go dancing with him. One day after class he took a black string and bead cross from around his neck and put it over my head. The next time he asked me to go dancing, I said yes. I brought a friend to the disco so it wouldn't be a real date, but by the end of the night I had my face pressed against his completely hairless brown cheek. I felt like I was nuzzling a baby; his skin was so soft and the sensation so pure.

After that we walked every night to the Jardin and sat on a plaza bench, touching at the shoulders and pulling away when someone we knew passed by. I wanted more. But I couldn't bring myself to say so, and Julio didn't ask for sex. I was beginning to understand that girlfriends were worshipped, their honor upheld with fistfights. Gringas were light and pretty and willing and good for something on the side. Where did that leave me? I wanted to be willing and worshipped. But I was perceiving that in Mexican society, a woman was one or the other.

By mid-December, I was ready for vacation. A buzzy elation took hold of students as they turned in their last exams and spilled out of the Prepa and down the hill. Julio and his brother, Xavier, had signed up for a school-sponsored trip to Mazatlan, a Pacific resort town. I had turned in my grades and saw a pillowy, blissful week ahead. I would stay home, sleep late, write and have no other plans.

The bus loaded in front of El Instituto Allende, where a lot of North Americans studied Spanish and painting. That semester I occupied a teacher's apartment on the grounds. Julio and I hugged behind some plants on El Instituto's patio. He went out to the bus.

I strolled outside five minutes later, pretending I had just happened upon the group on my way to the corner store. Looky here, the school trip. And there's that Julio Garcia and his brother. Julio wore a New Kids on the Block T-shirt and looked about 15. How could he be the one to to make me feel like not only ripping his clothes off, but carving our initials in wet cement?

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