Consider This, Senora by Harriet Doerr

It was now that Ursula, nearing the end of her days, discovered at last what life is. She could hear the voices but not the words of her guests. They spoke in shallow waves that rose and broke, subsided, and rose again. Occasionally, someone laughed. Frances had lit two lamps, and as people moved about, their shadows came and went on Ursula's bedroom wall. She found herself enjoying this silent company.

Our lives are brief beyond our comprehension or our desire, she told herself. We drop like cottonwood leaves from trees after a single frost. The interval between birth and death is scarcely more than a breathing space. Tonight, in her house on a Mexican hill, Ursula Bowles listened to the five assembled in her sala and thought she heard the faint rustle of their days slipping by. She could see now that an individual life is, in the end, nothing more than a stirring of air, a shifting of light. No one of us, finally, can be more than that. Even Einstein. Even Brahms.

Then the widow slept.

Sue Ames, an American artist, decides on a whim that she wishes to buy a parcel of land in the small Mexican village of Amapolas. An American businessman, Bud Loomis--running from the taxes he owes in California--decides to do the same, and since neither of them has the funds to do so on their own, they decide, despite being strangers, to buy the lot together. Bud is keen to separate it into lots to be sold, but Sue only wants to live out a half-buried dream. Alas for Bud, Amapolas is too out of the way, too obscure to be transformed to the Mexican suburb he imagines, but a few lots are sold, one to a German pianist, then one to another American, Fran Bowles. Then, next to Fran, her mother Ursula, who has come to Mexico to die near the town where she was born.

Some authors really do write variations on the same theme over and over. Like Stones for Ibarra, Consider This, Senora is a story about white "North Americans" who try to make a life for themselves in a small Mexican village, to the bemusement of the tolerant locals. It might be easy enough to blame Consider This for being too much a pale imitator of that other novel--it isn't as good, it's true--but then again, if you see it perhaps as a sequel to that novel, a collection of ideas that didn't make it into the first edition, it becomes nearly as wistful and affecting. The prose, so clearly a word-by-word homage to the pastoralisms of Willa Cather, is just as powerful.

What sets Consider This apart, perhaps, is the novel's treatment of death. In Stones for Ibarra, the husband's illness is something that comes on suddenly and without warning, interrupting the life the Norteamericanos have planned for themselves. But in Consider This, it's Ursula Bowles, the 79-year old widow, who comes to Amapolas to die. ("In late summer, Ursula Bowles, accompanied by a drumroll of thunder, lightning, and drenching rain, arrived in the Mexican village where she expected, sooner or later, to die.") It's no coincidence that the Amapolas bluff where Ursula lives looks down on the panteon, the cemetery. Early on, Doerr introduces the reader to an old woman named Goya, who pretends to be deaf and who is never seen without a goat tied to her waist. The goat, we are told, once belonged to her son, and when it was sold, he went to visit it, and was hit and killed by a truck. Deaths like that happen in Amapolas; they are grievous occasions but they are not ignored or treated as if they are anomalous, just as when the goat gets to close to the edge of the bluff, and topples over it, along with Goya herself. To die here, for the widow Bowles, might be not just to return home but to look death in the face as it approaches.

Now that I think about it, that "widow" part matters, too: Bowles is a widow, and Sue Ames, the land's half-owner, is a divorcee who is constantly battling unbidden thoughts of her former husband, Tim. Ursula's daughter Fran is a lovelorn fool who lets every man she falls for lead her far away from the home she's said she desires. These women come to Amapolas looking for a life away from the wreckage and disorder of love. But the contracts of love are built here, too, as with Bud Loomis, who lets his mind off his money just long enough to impregnate his beautiful--and much younger--house maid. What a contrast, I suppose, to Stones, a novel about an already established couple who come to Mexico to try to live out a shared dream.

It's entirely possible that I would prefer Consider This, Senora to Stones for Ibarra if I'd read them in opposite order. They are, after all, extremely similar books. But I don't think so: Consider This is missing something of the spark that made Stones for Ibarra such a heartbreaker. But when the writing is so lovely, it's hard to complain about getting more of the same.