I just ate a half-teaspoonful of an exotic flavoring agent.
We were at a tiny, amazing hole-in-the-wall place where the menu changes every night and they love to offer weird traditional ingredients like rootbeer plant. There were fish quesadillas, with something spice-like sprinkled on the fish cuts before searing: tiny brown and yellow granules that resembled very fine cornmeal. They told me what it was and I had to ask again because it sounded like: “Fly eggs.” But it was fly eggs.
Cooked onto fish, they make a delicious seasoning. They’re harvested in lakewater, somewhere out in the jungle where they do things like that, and dried in the sun. I tried tasting a little pinch by themselves. They had a fascinating flavor: with just a few in your mouth, you can’t taste anything, you only get a little mealy crunch, but with enough of them spread over your tongue you’re hit with an unmistakable strong rich savor of ponds and fish and mud and algae and stagnant, fragrant water, such a savor as maybe you’d be advised to forgo, but totally worth trying once. Though afterwards you will want to rinse. R was afraid the flies would hatch inside our bodies. I said not to worry, because of course they won’t!
I’ve had infection lately that I picked up somehow the day after we went to a mezcal tasting at a little art gallery, which you can do here if you like stuff like that: yoga, slow food, dance, meditation, all somewhat casual and seat-of-the-pants. The pain started in my throat and I was hacking a lot and now it’s migrated on to my inner ear, and I don’t know whether to be relieved that I beat it out of the throat or alarmed that it’s persisting in my ear. With every new location we are collecting new complaints, and hopefully forging new immunities. The idea is to grow more resistant to the opportunistic bacteria and more susceptible to the virus that is language. I tried gargling with tequila, which is a folk remedy that actually seemed to do the trick and also felt adventurous.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Mateo
Mateo is the gardener. He could be sixty, seventy, eighty years old, I couldn’t say. He’s small, with short arms and legs and heavily creased brown skin. He makes very little noise and you can run into him in the garden sometimes when you hadn’t known he was there. He most courteously declines to shake my hand because his palms are covered with garden dirt. He wears a cowboy hat and seems as light as a feather. He sounds perpetually on the verge of laughter, with his broad grin and his high, thin voice, and I have to lean down close to him to hear him while he looks up into my face from under his handsome white hat. His teeth are big and white and full of tartar.
“Oh yes,” he says, “It will rain today.”
The weather has become difficult to predict, month to month, in these last years, as worldwide weather patterns of long custom crumble and dissolve in the general flux, and there hasn’t been much rain in the city this rainy season. Everyone says, Today it will rain, but then you find it doesn’t. Clouds mass up and thin out again and blow on. It gets hot in the afternoons. Mateo likes to eat avocados: a tree in the garden bears what must be ‘natural’ avocados, the pre-Columbian variety that people cultivated into the big pear-shaped ones. These avocados are shiny and round and look like black billiard balls dangling from the branches. They don’t taste that great. There’s also a grapefruit tree, but Mateo doesn’t like these on account of their bitter taste. He doesn’t remember the Spanish word for the fruit until I remind him, he calls them something in Tzotzil. His Spanish is as tricky for me to make out as mine must be for him. He can’t make the “fr” in ‘fruit’ or ‘frio’--he says ‘ruita and ‘rio--or the hard ‘g’ in ‘gusta’, or a bunch of terminal vowels, the endings of his words are more like consonants. There is also a birdlike warble or whistle just beneath everything.
Mateo wanted to know about what kinds of fruits and vegetables grew in New York. He was curious about just how far away the United States were. He was totally taken with the idea that I’d flown to Mexico on an airplane. “With the airplane, you don’t have to go all around, back and forth. With the airplane, you come straight there!” There are plenty of people in this town for whom the state capital of Tuxtla Guiterrez represents the effective edge of the world. Anyway, Mateo was right. Around six o’ clock it started pouring in thick, distinct drops from low and heavy clouds, mountain rain. The umbrella vendors prowl up and down the tourist area with their brightly-colored umbrellas and everyone tries to get a taxi. The rain lasts an hour or two, then passes on for the lowlands. The streets flood, the steeper ones becoming like salmon rills, the houses in the bottom-most parts of town having to be bailed out. The hills outside the city are safe as long as all the pine trees grow, but every year they clear-cut and develop more and more of the hillside. You can see these vast rectilinear swaths where the timberland looks like it’s been peeled away, and sown with colorful concrete cubes. The city-sized valley where we live was named by the Spaniards after a type of indigenous architecture where you use mud to plaster over a framework of thin sticks and then thatch the roof and paint a waterproof limestone paste over the mud walls. There were once so many examples of this type of Mayan house that you would naturally call the valley after them, but now all the houses are concrete and no one really remembers the fine art of the mud-and-thatch house. It’s still possible to find disintegrating mud edifices in the center of town, pocked with age and grafitti and with all the crumbled parts reenforced first with brick and pinewood and finally with industrial concrete.
“Oh yes,” he says, “It will rain today.”
The weather has become difficult to predict, month to month, in these last years, as worldwide weather patterns of long custom crumble and dissolve in the general flux, and there hasn’t been much rain in the city this rainy season. Everyone says, Today it will rain, but then you find it doesn’t. Clouds mass up and thin out again and blow on. It gets hot in the afternoons. Mateo likes to eat avocados: a tree in the garden bears what must be ‘natural’ avocados, the pre-Columbian variety that people cultivated into the big pear-shaped ones. These avocados are shiny and round and look like black billiard balls dangling from the branches. They don’t taste that great. There’s also a grapefruit tree, but Mateo doesn’t like these on account of their bitter taste. He doesn’t remember the Spanish word for the fruit until I remind him, he calls them something in Tzotzil. His Spanish is as tricky for me to make out as mine must be for him. He can’t make the “fr” in ‘fruit’ or ‘frio’--he says ‘ruita and ‘rio--or the hard ‘g’ in ‘gusta’, or a bunch of terminal vowels, the endings of his words are more like consonants. There is also a birdlike warble or whistle just beneath everything.
Mateo wanted to know about what kinds of fruits and vegetables grew in New York. He was curious about just how far away the United States were. He was totally taken with the idea that I’d flown to Mexico on an airplane. “With the airplane, you don’t have to go all around, back and forth. With the airplane, you come straight there!” There are plenty of people in this town for whom the state capital of Tuxtla Guiterrez represents the effective edge of the world. Anyway, Mateo was right. Around six o’ clock it started pouring in thick, distinct drops from low and heavy clouds, mountain rain. The umbrella vendors prowl up and down the tourist area with their brightly-colored umbrellas and everyone tries to get a taxi. The rain lasts an hour or two, then passes on for the lowlands. The streets flood, the steeper ones becoming like salmon rills, the houses in the bottom-most parts of town having to be bailed out. The hills outside the city are safe as long as all the pine trees grow, but every year they clear-cut and develop more and more of the hillside. You can see these vast rectilinear swaths where the timberland looks like it’s been peeled away, and sown with colorful concrete cubes. The city-sized valley where we live was named by the Spaniards after a type of indigenous architecture where you use mud to plaster over a framework of thin sticks and then thatch the roof and paint a waterproof limestone paste over the mud walls. There were once so many examples of this type of Mayan house that you would naturally call the valley after them, but now all the houses are concrete and no one really remembers the fine art of the mud-and-thatch house. It’s still possible to find disintegrating mud edifices in the center of town, pocked with age and grafitti and with all the crumbled parts reenforced first with brick and pinewood and finally with industrial concrete.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
On Peanut Butter
They don't eat peanut butter here!
How wild is that? They don't even seem to have an accepted term for it: most people call it 'peanut cream' (which is disgusting admittedly), but I've heard variations. I've tried to visualize myself into the state of finding peanut butter disgusting. I guess it's like taking something you're supposed to eat in a solid form, and making it into a mealy paste.
How wild is that? They don't even seem to have an accepted term for it: most people call it 'peanut cream' (which is disgusting admittedly), but I've heard variations. I've tried to visualize myself into the state of finding peanut butter disgusting. I guess it's like taking something you're supposed to eat in a solid form, and making it into a mealy paste.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Rompe-Cabezas
I was talking and looking down and thinking about something and watching the traffic and coming down some tricky concrete steps set in the sidewalk when I came suddenly to a jutting concrete overhang and struck the main part of the roof of my skull, the part right in front of the crown that you’d use to headbutt someone with, and fell down in the dust and dropped my waterbottle in the road. Across the street some little kids laughed. I rubbed it ferociously and tried to walk it off. There was a tiny bit of blood from where the concrete had scraped my scalp but I was ok and I knew, even as I winced my way down the open road eschewing the sidewalk that it would not be the last time I hit my damned head walking and I could only hope it would be as inconsequential next time. You always have to watch your footing on the sidewalks because there’s a lot of undesirable matter underfoot, in this town especially there’s dog shit everywhere, and you also have to watch out for cars coming around corners or coming up near the curb, because the sidewalks are so narrow, and if it’s not a car it might be a motorcycle coming along the gutter or an unwieldly bicycle with a bunch of people and luggage loaded on it. You might be in a Frogger-esque scenario where it’s you, a bicycle, a motorcycle, two-way traffic, and then a group of pedestrians behind you and some more ahead of you coming the other way carrying children on their backs, plus a street dog weaving through, and maybe a vendor squatting or breastfeeding and up ahead there might even be a passed-out drunk, good luck to them. You have to very carefully dance around the people who are eating the corn-on-the-cob with mayonnaise, and you oughtn’t to kick any children or HIT YOUR HEAD. I am pretty tall and so that’s one more risk factor, because in the densest parts of your typical Mexican city you will find all kinds of rusty metal rods and awnings and concrete overhangs and brutal corrugated iron edges jutting through the airspace layer that begins about at five and a half feet off the sidewalk and gets especially deadly up around six feet, just above my eyeballs but well within striking distance of my skull. There’s also the ubiquitous home security system whereby you top off a cement boundary wall with a sparkling assortment of multicolored freshly-shattered glass shards in the wickedest possible formations. I’ve seen this before in the US but only in pretty rugged neighborhoods. Here this design accent seems to top off the outer walls of even the ritziest compounds. If you are tall enough that you might be in a position to peer on tip-toe over a wall, in low light, in a state of distracted anticipation, woe unto you. The cities are full of glass-topped concrete and in the country, it’s all barbed wire, rusty barbed wire everywhere in the most dangerous permutations: low, high, half-sagged, obfuscated, buried in the dirt. There are also the dogs that run around peoples’ properties in the country. These are more savage and more frightening than the street dogs, who hardly ever bark or threaten. There are wonderful things in the woods, though, too: shacks where woodcutters live and drink beer, mountain streams with cute bridges, weird ugly isolated concrete mansions that look like Bel Air by way of Dubai, or, as if somebody had done with AutoCAD what urban party promoters do with InDesign. The hills around San Cristobal are full of new construction. It’s all silent pine forest up there, like 60s Lake Tahoe, and the only roads are the desire paths of pickups and Hummers. You must hear the cap-blasting all day from the gravel quarries. Cap-blasting and birdsong. I am happy where I am with the lizards and butterflies and just today the little victory parade down our street with a bunch of kids wearing blue luchador masks decorated with the gold puma-head logo of a popular university soccer team. Every day I learn something new in Spanish and forget something else, but maybe the trick is to keep piling on new things and see which ones stick. It’s all supposed to be good for your brain, at any rate.
Once you’ve grasped a few basic rules, you can reliably produce torturous words like “metonymy” in the target language, but just like long ago when I tried to learn French, I can never remember the word for ‘Thursday’, and so I blunder on, judiciously skirting the vast chasms of my ignorance and occasionally ascending these rare Greco-Roman lookouts, making odd impressions on my conversation partners. ‘Pedagogy,’ I’ll say; ‘Ah, or teaching?’ ‘Yes, teaching, of course.’
What is it about Thursday?
Once you’ve grasped a few basic rules, you can reliably produce torturous words like “metonymy” in the target language, but just like long ago when I tried to learn French, I can never remember the word for ‘Thursday’, and so I blunder on, judiciously skirting the vast chasms of my ignorance and occasionally ascending these rare Greco-Roman lookouts, making odd impressions on my conversation partners. ‘Pedagogy,’ I’ll say; ‘Ah, or teaching?’ ‘Yes, teaching, of course.’
What is it about Thursday?
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Birding
This morning a Tzotzil woman knocked on the door with 15 bags of soil for delivery. She had been supposed to come yesterday while the gardeners were working. I couldn't understand what she wanted at first but she wore a gorgeous electric-turquoise head-wrap and she had her kindergarten-age daughter with her. We got the affair sorted out and she and her daughter proceeded to hump the 15 bags at speed across the courtyard and down to the garden, where the owners of the house are carrying out a long-term open-ended landscaping project.
For now, the courtyard itself suffices. I take my book and I sit on a low chair-like relic made of animal skin stretched in an S-shape. You sit under the eaves of the Spanish tile roof and look between black wood columns to the blooming flowers and skinny drunken-looking cacti in the middle of the open courtyard. The street we live on happens to be one of the last cobblestone pavements in town and cars avoid it, so there's nothing to hear but the occasional wandering dog or drunk or sometimes by night marauding mariachis. Today it rained in the afternoon while the sun shone, so that you could watch shining against the courtyard's cool shadows the sunlit raindrops falling while rufous-necked sparrows needled the grass and the hummingbirds whirred down from wherever to suckle the blossoms.
They're white-eared hummingbirds, very tiny and dear and sophisticated, like expensive avian gadgetry. We've been fortunate to see so many improbable birds in this country but who can resist the garden hummingbird with its urgent metabolic extravagance? As if set in invisible slots, they slide from point to point and halt abruptly. They take one good slurp at a time and slot over like someone's clocking their waypoints with a stopwatch. Some effect a flat tuneless chirp while feeding. For little whiffs of things they're violently territorial and you can see them charge at each other, buzzing in like dive bombers and whacking the vegetation, and these little dogfights and the tuneless calls and the riverine murmur of treetops blowing were the only sounds in the courtyard while I read. One at a time the raindrops would spot the sun-warmed clay tile, where they disappeared instantly and spotted down again elsewhere.
For now, the courtyard itself suffices. I take my book and I sit on a low chair-like relic made of animal skin stretched in an S-shape. You sit under the eaves of the Spanish tile roof and look between black wood columns to the blooming flowers and skinny drunken-looking cacti in the middle of the open courtyard. The street we live on happens to be one of the last cobblestone pavements in town and cars avoid it, so there's nothing to hear but the occasional wandering dog or drunk or sometimes by night marauding mariachis. Today it rained in the afternoon while the sun shone, so that you could watch shining against the courtyard's cool shadows the sunlit raindrops falling while rufous-necked sparrows needled the grass and the hummingbirds whirred down from wherever to suckle the blossoms.
They're white-eared hummingbirds, very tiny and dear and sophisticated, like expensive avian gadgetry. We've been fortunate to see so many improbable birds in this country but who can resist the garden hummingbird with its urgent metabolic extravagance? As if set in invisible slots, they slide from point to point and halt abruptly. They take one good slurp at a time and slot over like someone's clocking their waypoints with a stopwatch. Some effect a flat tuneless chirp while feeding. For little whiffs of things they're violently territorial and you can see them charge at each other, buzzing in like dive bombers and whacking the vegetation, and these little dogfights and the tuneless calls and the riverine murmur of treetops blowing were the only sounds in the courtyard while I read. One at a time the raindrops would spot the sun-warmed clay tile, where they disappeared instantly and spotted down again elsewhere.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Why is There an EZLN?
Resentful of the pale young Europeans who breeze in for a week of backpacking and seem to drop fluently into whatever is the language of the moment.
“It’s practically the same language,” laughs the cosmopolitan Frenchman, dismissing and simultaneously crowing over his proficiency (It’s not!). Meanwhile his Dutch or German counterpart is carrying on a long conversation in plain perfect English--the instinctive English to which we had supposed our own claim was secure.
The Italian is right at home, able to keep pretty well within the boundaries of his own native idiom and still be passably understood, as though it were only a question of minding your ‘b’s and ‘v’s.
The Spaniards, of course, like the conquerors they still must deeply long to be, seem to fetishize the small differences that set them apart from their country cousins, lisping like teakettles at every opportunity and comporting themselves as blondly and as affluently as possible.
Rich Europeans in general you can hit here with a thrown stone, cavorting in richy-rich restaurants and calling for all the celebrated vintages, while freezing out the many vendors, beggars and street children who prowl up wide-eyed to their tables like so many stray dogs begging for scraps. You could do an ethnography on the restaurant culture here: once it was rugged young Italians who washed up and opened modest pasta places, then French yuppies with their pastry shops and Belgians with their waffles and chocolate, then the flush Argentines came with their upscale churrascarias, and now it's a veritable polyglot paradise of unwashed, dreadlocked fellow-travelers and the rich tourists who pity them.
I've found a place with enough books here to last me.
There are evident categories of interest in the collection:
Psychoanalysis and creativity
Jewish, Lesbian and Jewish-Lesbian heritage
Nature writing
Regional folklore and ethnography, with a heavy dose of serious anthropology from Harvard (the Chiapas Project) as well as some botany and a variety of local history, many of these warmly inscribed
Cooking
General academic stuff that looks unread (seems like gifts left by guests, many are inscribed)
Travel writing, especially by and about famous women adventurers: Jane Bowles, Josephine Herbst, Isabella Bird.
Classical music, including half a shelf on Mozart.
Everybody who comes to live in Mexico is looking for downtime and so you end up accumulating books, or you did until it became so simple to get English-language movies and television, but not everyone seems to accumulate books out of sheer love of reading. If more than half of your books are books about the exotic locale where you’ve chosen to live, you may not actually be a reader. Here, they pass the test. Most of the stuff is sterling literature in weathered editions: Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, a whole bunch of ragged Henry James, a more or less complete collection of Woolf including all four volumes of published letters, well-worn, and a bunch of scholarly works, there’s Colette obviously, some Anais Nin, Katherine Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor, Isaac Babel, Camus. Things you like to see and rarely do. There are newer books, recent American stuff like Richard Powers, a handful of Jeanette Winterson. There are relatively few books in Spanish, considering, but there’s of course a lot of Rosario Castellanos in the original: trifecta there of female heavyweight, modernist, and local author.
There’s cool stuff.
I found a slightly crumbly saddle-stapled edition of “Pomes Pennyeach” which might be worth some money. For photography, there are heaps of grand tomes, recent and classic, Mexicana and otherwise. Also right here are all the classic Mexico books I hoped to come across somewhere without paying for: the gentleman explorer John L. Stephens’s ‘Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan’ and the Scottish expat noblewoman Frances Calderon de la Barca’s ‘Life in Mexico’ (both 1843), right up to ‘Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas’ by the anthrologist and old Chiapas hand George Collier. Evidently a friend of the house, Collier inscribed this copy on January 1st, 1995, and there’s also a thanks in the book’s acknowledgements. The story around this book, combined with the frisson of having EZLN bases so close by, drew me in and I made a little study of it.
“It’s practically the same language,” laughs the cosmopolitan Frenchman, dismissing and simultaneously crowing over his proficiency (It’s not!). Meanwhile his Dutch or German counterpart is carrying on a long conversation in plain perfect English--the instinctive English to which we had supposed our own claim was secure.
The Italian is right at home, able to keep pretty well within the boundaries of his own native idiom and still be passably understood, as though it were only a question of minding your ‘b’s and ‘v’s.
The Spaniards, of course, like the conquerors they still must deeply long to be, seem to fetishize the small differences that set them apart from their country cousins, lisping like teakettles at every opportunity and comporting themselves as blondly and as affluently as possible.
Rich Europeans in general you can hit here with a thrown stone, cavorting in richy-rich restaurants and calling for all the celebrated vintages, while freezing out the many vendors, beggars and street children who prowl up wide-eyed to their tables like so many stray dogs begging for scraps. You could do an ethnography on the restaurant culture here: once it was rugged young Italians who washed up and opened modest pasta places, then French yuppies with their pastry shops and Belgians with their waffles and chocolate, then the flush Argentines came with their upscale churrascarias, and now it's a veritable polyglot paradise of unwashed, dreadlocked fellow-travelers and the rich tourists who pity them.
I've found a place with enough books here to last me.
There are evident categories of interest in the collection:
Psychoanalysis and creativity
Jewish, Lesbian and Jewish-Lesbian heritage
Nature writing
Regional folklore and ethnography, with a heavy dose of serious anthropology from Harvard (the Chiapas Project) as well as some botany and a variety of local history, many of these warmly inscribed
Cooking
General academic stuff that looks unread (seems like gifts left by guests, many are inscribed)
Travel writing, especially by and about famous women adventurers: Jane Bowles, Josephine Herbst, Isabella Bird.
Classical music, including half a shelf on Mozart.
Everybody who comes to live in Mexico is looking for downtime and so you end up accumulating books, or you did until it became so simple to get English-language movies and television, but not everyone seems to accumulate books out of sheer love of reading. If more than half of your books are books about the exotic locale where you’ve chosen to live, you may not actually be a reader. Here, they pass the test. Most of the stuff is sterling literature in weathered editions: Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, a whole bunch of ragged Henry James, a more or less complete collection of Woolf including all four volumes of published letters, well-worn, and a bunch of scholarly works, there’s Colette obviously, some Anais Nin, Katherine Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor, Isaac Babel, Camus. Things you like to see and rarely do. There are newer books, recent American stuff like Richard Powers, a handful of Jeanette Winterson. There are relatively few books in Spanish, considering, but there’s of course a lot of Rosario Castellanos in the original: trifecta there of female heavyweight, modernist, and local author.
There’s cool stuff.
I found a slightly crumbly saddle-stapled edition of “Pomes Pennyeach” which might be worth some money. For photography, there are heaps of grand tomes, recent and classic, Mexicana and otherwise. Also right here are all the classic Mexico books I hoped to come across somewhere without paying for: the gentleman explorer John L. Stephens’s ‘Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan’ and the Scottish expat noblewoman Frances Calderon de la Barca’s ‘Life in Mexico’ (both 1843), right up to ‘Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas’ by the anthrologist and old Chiapas hand George Collier. Evidently a friend of the house, Collier inscribed this copy on January 1st, 1995, and there’s also a thanks in the book’s acknowledgements. The story around this book, combined with the frisson of having EZLN bases so close by, drew me in and I made a little study of it.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
A Different Prada
The culture here, meaning language, customs, mores, is a little weird and a little foreign and difficult to grasp, but the rest of daily life is just a little more direct and real. When it rains, the streets flood. When something breaks down, you open it up and tinker with it. If a dog is following you, you pretend to throw a rock at it.
If you want to eat an animal, you have to plan ahead several years and graze and water and vaccinate the animal and keep it in a safe place with a rope tied to it. Electricity itself, which you think you’re so used to, seems more primal and potent here, more nature than technology. You can see an eager spark leap any time you plug in an appliance. When the load gets heavy, the grid shudders, and you see the lights dim and glow again like an animal taking a breath. When it’s down, it’s down. There’s always a certain part of town, where the plant is, that’s roped off and managed by a federal authority. Columns of rickety-looking transformers carry the wires up and down the hillside, in and out of valleys, across mountaintops. The lines are always draped vegetally down to individual houses, from whence an unscrupulous neighbor might steal your power like it was your daily newspaper, and inside your house you probably have more lines running around from your main connection, threading out to your light fixtures, your appliances. Where we live, there are several extinct outlets that were installed long ago and then repealed, taped over, possibly burned out or hazardous. There’s one under the couch, for example, cut right into the ancient and gorgeously worn hardwood floorboards. (You need wood on the floor because it gets cold indoors.)
Utility-wise, gas power is the biggest adjustment to have to make. Some homes have wood-burning fireplaces, but in town everyone uses individual tanks of gas to heat water and to cook with. Just as there’s only one company that sells gasoline, there’s one company that sells heating gas and the guy comes to your door to pick up your empty tank and sell you your full one. To harness the combustion power of this big old crusty tank, you have to hook up some different nozzles and adjust some valves and hoses, and you’ve got to light the pilot light in the water boiler. (The cooking range you start up with a match, as needed.) This is the part that scares me. While the blue pilot light’s going, there’s a lever that controls the volume of gas feeding its flame, and you turn it up when you want to heat water for your shower or whatever. It makes a whooshing noise like a blowtorch. Begging your pardon if this is something everyone is familiar with. I remember, growing up, when I discovered that there was such a thing as a pilot light, burning away underneath the water heater in our basement, regulated not by hand but by an ingenious thermostatic system beyond my comprehension, and I thought, My god, there’s an open flame down here, all the time? When you’re done heating water, or when you leave the house, you ideally remember to turn down the flame of the pilot light. When the stove won’t light, it means you’re out of gas. You can go outside and knock on the tank and hear the emptiness ringing. Where they get all this gas from and how it finds its way into these crusty tanks, I don’t know. The guy comes in his truck and he swaps in a fresh one.
There are a number of itinerant vendors who bring all these staples to your door as needed. They all have their theme music. Since a lot of people don’t drink tap water, there’s a guy who drives the water truck, selling garafones, or water-cooler size plastic jugs of filtered and ozone-purified water. His truck plays the “Mission Impossible” theme. The 90s techno theme, from the movie with Tom Cruise. I won’t sit here and lie to your face via blog by telling you that I don’t like that song. There are other companies selling purified water in other parts of the city, announcing themselves with different theme music, but nobody else has anything as catchy as the 90s “Mission Impossible” theme. The country is a rights-management nightmare, by the way. I noticed there are agencies that download movies and tv all day on their high-speed connections and for five pesos each will upload them to your USB drive. Even the brand-new high-end zoo we went to in Merida was bootlegging the theme from ‘The Lion King’ as bed music for a loudspeaker announcement. One case I’d be interested to get to the bottom of is the clothing retailer Prada, who have boutiques in various of the malls we’ve been to. No, not that Prada: this is a different Prada.
If you want to eat an animal, you have to plan ahead several years and graze and water and vaccinate the animal and keep it in a safe place with a rope tied to it. Electricity itself, which you think you’re so used to, seems more primal and potent here, more nature than technology. You can see an eager spark leap any time you plug in an appliance. When the load gets heavy, the grid shudders, and you see the lights dim and glow again like an animal taking a breath. When it’s down, it’s down. There’s always a certain part of town, where the plant is, that’s roped off and managed by a federal authority. Columns of rickety-looking transformers carry the wires up and down the hillside, in and out of valleys, across mountaintops. The lines are always draped vegetally down to individual houses, from whence an unscrupulous neighbor might steal your power like it was your daily newspaper, and inside your house you probably have more lines running around from your main connection, threading out to your light fixtures, your appliances. Where we live, there are several extinct outlets that were installed long ago and then repealed, taped over, possibly burned out or hazardous. There’s one under the couch, for example, cut right into the ancient and gorgeously worn hardwood floorboards. (You need wood on the floor because it gets cold indoors.)
Utility-wise, gas power is the biggest adjustment to have to make. Some homes have wood-burning fireplaces, but in town everyone uses individual tanks of gas to heat water and to cook with. Just as there’s only one company that sells gasoline, there’s one company that sells heating gas and the guy comes to your door to pick up your empty tank and sell you your full one. To harness the combustion power of this big old crusty tank, you have to hook up some different nozzles and adjust some valves and hoses, and you’ve got to light the pilot light in the water boiler. (The cooking range you start up with a match, as needed.) This is the part that scares me. While the blue pilot light’s going, there’s a lever that controls the volume of gas feeding its flame, and you turn it up when you want to heat water for your shower or whatever. It makes a whooshing noise like a blowtorch. Begging your pardon if this is something everyone is familiar with. I remember, growing up, when I discovered that there was such a thing as a pilot light, burning away underneath the water heater in our basement, regulated not by hand but by an ingenious thermostatic system beyond my comprehension, and I thought, My god, there’s an open flame down here, all the time? When you’re done heating water, or when you leave the house, you ideally remember to turn down the flame of the pilot light. When the stove won’t light, it means you’re out of gas. You can go outside and knock on the tank and hear the emptiness ringing. Where they get all this gas from and how it finds its way into these crusty tanks, I don’t know. The guy comes in his truck and he swaps in a fresh one.
There are a number of itinerant vendors who bring all these staples to your door as needed. They all have their theme music. Since a lot of people don’t drink tap water, there’s a guy who drives the water truck, selling garafones, or water-cooler size plastic jugs of filtered and ozone-purified water. His truck plays the “Mission Impossible” theme. The 90s techno theme, from the movie with Tom Cruise. I won’t sit here and lie to your face via blog by telling you that I don’t like that song. There are other companies selling purified water in other parts of the city, announcing themselves with different theme music, but nobody else has anything as catchy as the 90s “Mission Impossible” theme. The country is a rights-management nightmare, by the way. I noticed there are agencies that download movies and tv all day on their high-speed connections and for five pesos each will upload them to your USB drive. Even the brand-new high-end zoo we went to in Merida was bootlegging the theme from ‘The Lion King’ as bed music for a loudspeaker announcement. One case I’d be interested to get to the bottom of is the clothing retailer Prada, who have boutiques in various of the malls we’ve been to. No, not that Prada: this is a different Prada.
Aruga
Doing like fifty on the carreterra, we edged past an equally swift vehicle in the shape of a giant road-ready caterpillar (aruga). It sat on six wheels and was clad sumptuously in lacquered green molded plastic, like a carousel horse, with bright orange antennae. Above its headlights it grinned an enormous caterpillar grin. A sign on its flank said “Rent Me For Parties”! It was an open-cab style caterpillar, no doors or roof, and the driver was pretty young and he was leaning back with one hand on the wheel.
We were continuing north to Villahermosa for two reasons. First, we wanted to see those famous Olmec relics that anthropologists call “the colossal heads”. Second and perhaps more pressingly, because we planned to take the long way around and back up to the mountainous heart of Chiapas, using the graded highway of the western approach instead of the abominable one to the north. When you go north out of San Cristobal down to the town of Palenque, you take curve after punishing curve down from its 7,000 feet, you probably spend half the voyage traveling in the opposite direction from your destination, and you thread these curves along inclines so steep and roads so narrow it seems impossible that they’ll accomodate your bus, let alone traffic in the opposite direction, and because this road connects all the many mountain villages and hamlets, there are also men, women, and children leading animals or carrying bundles up and down the side of the road, edging along the cliff or against the steep hillside. It’s classic. For the protection of these villagers and their livestock there are hundreds of speed bumps and ‘vibradores’, and we duly registered each one. Most of the four-hour ride down I was covering my face with my hands, trying to think of the least nauseating things I could. We were ill for the rest of that day. We sat ourselves in a cafe and felt the earth heaving and shifting.
It was while taking the long way back that I was moved to give thanks for just how far the theory and practice of road-building have come.
Just as the jungled-under ruins of ancient Palenque make such a dreamy contrast to the greasy modernity of contemporary Palenque-town, the screwy road from highland Chiapas down to Palenque is so wonderfully juxtaposed with the dead-shot, black-top four-lane highway west to Tuxtla Guiterrez, the capital of Chiapas. Instead of winding up, down and around every peak and gulch, it bores right through them like justice itself. We crested a hill and I saw the road for miles ahead framed at the base of a deep and perfectly symmetrical ‘V’ of dynamited rock, more beautiful to me than any of the corbeled arches of Palenque itself. The road cut like a canyon. It flowed like a river. This is how you build a road, I thought, straight and flat and still affording big blockbuster views, a swooning red hazed-out sunset on our right as we crossed the neck of an immense mountain lake. Colossal tractor-trailers barreled by on either side. Some were carrying new cars. What a luxury, I thought, a road big enough for a truck big enough to carry a bunch of cars! Bring it on, I smiled, there’s room for all! Fiat, a strong hand, eminent domain: the land calls out for an iron will to bind it! At Tuxtla, the bus station is actually incorporated right into the mall, so you can hop off and grab a Cinnabon or watch ‘Thor’ or get your name engraved on rice in the name of progress.
We were continuing north to Villahermosa for two reasons. First, we wanted to see those famous Olmec relics that anthropologists call “the colossal heads”. Second and perhaps more pressingly, because we planned to take the long way around and back up to the mountainous heart of Chiapas, using the graded highway of the western approach instead of the abominable one to the north. When you go north out of San Cristobal down to the town of Palenque, you take curve after punishing curve down from its 7,000 feet, you probably spend half the voyage traveling in the opposite direction from your destination, and you thread these curves along inclines so steep and roads so narrow it seems impossible that they’ll accomodate your bus, let alone traffic in the opposite direction, and because this road connects all the many mountain villages and hamlets, there are also men, women, and children leading animals or carrying bundles up and down the side of the road, edging along the cliff or against the steep hillside. It’s classic. For the protection of these villagers and their livestock there are hundreds of speed bumps and ‘vibradores’, and we duly registered each one. Most of the four-hour ride down I was covering my face with my hands, trying to think of the least nauseating things I could. We were ill for the rest of that day. We sat ourselves in a cafe and felt the earth heaving and shifting.
It was while taking the long way back that I was moved to give thanks for just how far the theory and practice of road-building have come.
Just as the jungled-under ruins of ancient Palenque make such a dreamy contrast to the greasy modernity of contemporary Palenque-town, the screwy road from highland Chiapas down to Palenque is so wonderfully juxtaposed with the dead-shot, black-top four-lane highway west to Tuxtla Guiterrez, the capital of Chiapas. Instead of winding up, down and around every peak and gulch, it bores right through them like justice itself. We crested a hill and I saw the road for miles ahead framed at the base of a deep and perfectly symmetrical ‘V’ of dynamited rock, more beautiful to me than any of the corbeled arches of Palenque itself. The road cut like a canyon. It flowed like a river. This is how you build a road, I thought, straight and flat and still affording big blockbuster views, a swooning red hazed-out sunset on our right as we crossed the neck of an immense mountain lake. Colossal tractor-trailers barreled by on either side. Some were carrying new cars. What a luxury, I thought, a road big enough for a truck big enough to carry a bunch of cars! Bring it on, I smiled, there’s room for all! Fiat, a strong hand, eminent domain: the land calls out for an iron will to bind it! At Tuxtla, the bus station is actually incorporated right into the mall, so you can hop off and grab a Cinnabon or watch ‘Thor’ or get your name engraved on rice in the name of progress.
Villahermosa
Once the only thing I knew about the state of Tabasco was that Tabasco sauce was not invented there. Then I read Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” which was actually called something else in the original UK edition and now I forget what. It may be my favorite Graham Greene, it’s got everything. In his Mexican travelogues you get the impression that Greene did not like the people very much at all, but in “The Power and the Glory,” (or whatever) he uses the wickedness and fallenness of 1930s Tabasco, when a new revolutionary regime dedicated itself to purging the state of all traces of Catholicism, to dramatize the wickedness and fallenness of everybody, and the possibility of grace. Vintage Greene!
The infernally hot and literally God-forsaken landscapes of “The Power and the Glory” stay with you, so I was thinking about that during the ride. It was pleasant, though. It was one of the top bus rides I’ve had so far. After the wildly nauseating cliff circuit coming down from highland Chiapas, and then the travelling saunas that shuttle fourteen sweat-drenched tourists at a time, always at capacity, between the archaeological sites near the Guatemalan border, we were reluctant to get back on a bus, but it was pleasantly cool, everyone was chill, and the driver played lovely subdued traditional music without any cowbell in it.
With my most recent spate of stomach trouble having come and ebbed, my guts were still feeling hollow and fluttery. Also our limbs were covered with insect welts from the jungle, and I’d developed a heat rash on my neck. I’ve never had one of these before! I think it had something to do with the abrupt transition from cool weather to sultry 105-degree weather. The skin was textured and I couldn’t stop touching it.
I got my legs arranged around the seat in front of me and contorted my upper body so as not to press the damp back of my shirt against the seat back, and I gave in to the easeful sweetness of the ride and watched the countryside rolling by evenly in the late morning sun.
By bus it takes two and a half hours to travel from grimy Palenque to Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco and the commercial headquarters of the 1970s Mexican oil boom. The parts of the state we saw do not look like too much from the road. The landscape kind of reminded us of the endless flatness of the Yucatan, but with a lot more ripeness and greenery and some distant mountains. There is an element of wrack and ruin. Black bald-headed vultures sit in the trees by the road and also circle in flocks over the fields.
There is a lot of green and a lot of white heat, but naturally you have a lot of rot, a little poverty, the simple brutality of cowboys and cattle farming and slaughter, the complex brutality of the cement-block factories: the giant conglomerates that tear apart the mountains to gather the raw materials of the construction industry, and the rough and ready peasant houses all made of cement blocks. Some of the houses are the color of cement, but some are pretty fluourescent shades. Often there are optimistic bundles of rebar sticking out of the roofs, waiting for a second storey that may just arrive some day. In the context of the torrid sun and the fecund woodland, the exposed rebar bundles seem like rooftop plantings: ugly but unkillable vegetation, like the monstrously stricken banana trees along the road, with their wracked, flanged fronds drooping, the bare vines with their withered segments looking just like columns of stripped and sundried vertebrae. Wherever the trees have been removed to make a pasture, the grass grows high, thick, green. Now and again you spot a tire-track trail leading off the highway and out to a house or hamlet or farmstead. There are roadside foodstalls with handpainted signs. There was a barbecue place with a vast grill outside billowing white smoke and a big sign that said "DIOS ES AMOR" in bubble letters with a cartoon pig next to that.
The infernally hot and literally God-forsaken landscapes of “The Power and the Glory” stay with you, so I was thinking about that during the ride. It was pleasant, though. It was one of the top bus rides I’ve had so far. After the wildly nauseating cliff circuit coming down from highland Chiapas, and then the travelling saunas that shuttle fourteen sweat-drenched tourists at a time, always at capacity, between the archaeological sites near the Guatemalan border, we were reluctant to get back on a bus, but it was pleasantly cool, everyone was chill, and the driver played lovely subdued traditional music without any cowbell in it.
With my most recent spate of stomach trouble having come and ebbed, my guts were still feeling hollow and fluttery. Also our limbs were covered with insect welts from the jungle, and I’d developed a heat rash on my neck. I’ve never had one of these before! I think it had something to do with the abrupt transition from cool weather to sultry 105-degree weather. The skin was textured and I couldn’t stop touching it.
I got my legs arranged around the seat in front of me and contorted my upper body so as not to press the damp back of my shirt against the seat back, and I gave in to the easeful sweetness of the ride and watched the countryside rolling by evenly in the late morning sun.
By bus it takes two and a half hours to travel from grimy Palenque to Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco and the commercial headquarters of the 1970s Mexican oil boom. The parts of the state we saw do not look like too much from the road. The landscape kind of reminded us of the endless flatness of the Yucatan, but with a lot more ripeness and greenery and some distant mountains. There is an element of wrack and ruin. Black bald-headed vultures sit in the trees by the road and also circle in flocks over the fields.
There is a lot of green and a lot of white heat, but naturally you have a lot of rot, a little poverty, the simple brutality of cowboys and cattle farming and slaughter, the complex brutality of the cement-block factories: the giant conglomerates that tear apart the mountains to gather the raw materials of the construction industry, and the rough and ready peasant houses all made of cement blocks. Some of the houses are the color of cement, but some are pretty fluourescent shades. Often there are optimistic bundles of rebar sticking out of the roofs, waiting for a second storey that may just arrive some day. In the context of the torrid sun and the fecund woodland, the exposed rebar bundles seem like rooftop plantings: ugly but unkillable vegetation, like the monstrously stricken banana trees along the road, with their wracked, flanged fronds drooping, the bare vines with their withered segments looking just like columns of stripped and sundried vertebrae. Wherever the trees have been removed to make a pasture, the grass grows high, thick, green. Now and again you spot a tire-track trail leading off the highway and out to a house or hamlet or farmstead. There are roadside foodstalls with handpainted signs. There was a barbecue place with a vast grill outside billowing white smoke and a big sign that said "DIOS ES AMOR" in bubble letters with a cartoon pig next to that.
Flies
I now know what is meant by the expression “flies as big as dogs”. It sounds like hyperbole but it’s a poetic truth. Just as there are stray dogs that prowl idly in the open streets, there are stray flies, chrome green and the size of Christmas tree bulbs, that prowl the open surfaces in enclosed and sunny spaces like my garden and sniff their way around, heads down, one paw at a time, dragging their brilliant bulk along with every expectation of courteous treatment as fellow idlers.
They’d be impossible to kill without remorse but I draw the line at letting them palpate my skin or taste my food, and as politely as I can I wave them on like a policeman does a foreigner.
They’d be impossible to kill without remorse but I draw the line at letting them palpate my skin or taste my food, and as politely as I can I wave them on like a policeman does a foreigner.
The World's Game
The bar is stone and worn to a dull shine. The air is still but not unpleasant. The doors around the corner stay open. You get the sounds of the cars, mixed with the clinks of stacked bottles and glasses and the rustle of ice and relaxed conversation and friendly profanity and occasional cell-phone melodies that linger in your head. There is usually no music but occasionally there is shouting. In the corner of the ceiling across the room from the bar, there is a single color television bolted which broadcasts soccer and soccer only, and the soccer stretches out so that pre-soccer lasts fully as long as post-soccer, while the soccer itself, the playing of it, seems to embrace the natural life of a man in its compass, a journey of generations, like space travel, during which a file of scrubbed and smiling boy heroes degenerates into a roving band of filthy old bloody-minded cripples, driven insane by the blast of airhorns and the logorrheic drift of all the hieroglyphics everywhere enclosing the field of play. As in the game of life itself, there are well-dressed men calling the shots from the sidelines, and also as in the game of life it is impossible to be sure where any one competitor stands or what the stakes are in the final accounting. One of the artists I know is a soccer fan and he once tried to illustrate a match structure for me, but the napkin he was drawing on ripped and we gave up. He was contemplative for a while but eventually was back to shouting again. Someone else tried to explain to me how the game of soccer developed organically from an ancient and proud ritual involving voluntary human sacrifice, which seemed to me to go without saying.
Human sacrifice is a topic one learns to tiptoe around. People seem to have a complex about this having (supposedly!) happened and deny that it represents something intrinsic or endemic in the old culture. If it happened, it was a product of exogenous forces, extenuating factors. Famine. Ice age. Meteor. You sense their culpability and how it might terrify them, though it’s hard to come out and say, “Of course I appreciate that *you* were not responsible and would never condone any such thing.” I try to contribute as little as possible to discussions on this theme, and yet, it seems like it turns up often: in cinema, tv, music, body art, tasteless political cartoons.
Human sacrifice is a topic one learns to tiptoe around. People seem to have a complex about this having (supposedly!) happened and deny that it represents something intrinsic or endemic in the old culture. If it happened, it was a product of exogenous forces, extenuating factors. Famine. Ice age. Meteor. You sense their culpability and how it might terrify them, though it’s hard to come out and say, “Of course I appreciate that *you* were not responsible and would never condone any such thing.” I try to contribute as little as possible to discussions on this theme, and yet, it seems like it turns up often: in cinema, tv, music, body art, tasteless political cartoons.
Zoological Correlative
I miss the insects of the north: the praying mantis, the delicate diamond-needle, the spotted ladybug. There are ladybugs here but they have no spots, like the ghostly plastic action figures, sold loose in the market, run off as mold testers by Chinese fabricators and left unpainted. If you know what you’re looking at you can identity Batman (the ears) or the Terminator (sunglasses, the ragged flesh around the hydraulic arm) in these smooth blue or green or gray simulacra, like Platonic forms of Hollywood properties. The bugs here are larger and hungrier and while there are some truly beautiful specimens, like the butterfly as big and bright as a tennis ball, they are mostly skulking beasties. There are invasive nightgoing scorpions, serpentine centipedes, heavy-duty grasshoppers a little too eager to become locusts. These kick so powerfully at the touch that I was reminded out of the blue one day of that ‘field goal’ sequence in the classroom-desk game of paper football. There are also the amazing little herps that prey on them. The geckos run the gamut from little-finger length to about six inches and eat their young. They will crawl under doors and behind picture frames. Their cardinal virtues are secrecy and patience. The skinks in the garden are territorial and only come together to mate (I understand). Caught by the tail they cut their losses and leave it thrashing like a cool special effect. Then there are the bats, who skim the plunge pool at dusk for drowning bugs, dropping from palm fronds and describing figure-eights. They are as big as pigeons and fly as low. As with the sign-painters I get an unrequited thrill being near them.
The mosquitos deserve special mention because as rarely as you get a glimpse of them, you feel their presence all the waking day long and then again when they wake you up in bed. They may enjoy the rare tang of furiously boiling blood.They are so hard to get away from that when they are not biting you, you are always conscious of your relief. I have wondered whether it would be possible to plant some weed or spray some elixir or install some electromagnetic field and kill them all to the very last, though if this method existed I assume it would have been advertised to me. In grocery stores I inspect all the products for sale in the anti-insect section, which I once used to do only to remind myself how obliviously wicked and intolerant my countrymen were.
There are two ways to go with repellent: the natural stuff, which seems to attract bugs, maybe as a test to their courage, and the synthetic stuff, which doesn’t actually attract them but doesn’t do anything to stop them and seems like too much to pay for the privilege of absorbing exotic toxins. The strongest synthetic bugspray always comes in a shrink-wrapped aerosol can, because its manufacturers know their customers aren’t worried about the long-term environmental effects of shrink wrap or aerosol propellant.
There are large nocturnal mosquitos and smaller, banded diurnal ones. The day mosquitos are plague-ridden. Dengue is a disease like the flu (which, come to think of it, also has an evocative foreign name), a virus I think, that pirates the mitochondria and causes aches, fatigue, stomach upset, and acute photosensitivity. In my lifetime I’ve had plenty of the first three symptoms, but something about this last intrigues me, and I suspect I could find it in myself to wring some perverse delight out of staying confined all day in a dark room, listening to traffic, aching. An objective correlative. Knock on wood.
The mosquitos deserve special mention because as rarely as you get a glimpse of them, you feel their presence all the waking day long and then again when they wake you up in bed. They may enjoy the rare tang of furiously boiling blood.They are so hard to get away from that when they are not biting you, you are always conscious of your relief. I have wondered whether it would be possible to plant some weed or spray some elixir or install some electromagnetic field and kill them all to the very last, though if this method existed I assume it would have been advertised to me. In grocery stores I inspect all the products for sale in the anti-insect section, which I once used to do only to remind myself how obliviously wicked and intolerant my countrymen were.
There are two ways to go with repellent: the natural stuff, which seems to attract bugs, maybe as a test to their courage, and the synthetic stuff, which doesn’t actually attract them but doesn’t do anything to stop them and seems like too much to pay for the privilege of absorbing exotic toxins. The strongest synthetic bugspray always comes in a shrink-wrapped aerosol can, because its manufacturers know their customers aren’t worried about the long-term environmental effects of shrink wrap or aerosol propellant.
There are large nocturnal mosquitos and smaller, banded diurnal ones. The day mosquitos are plague-ridden. Dengue is a disease like the flu (which, come to think of it, also has an evocative foreign name), a virus I think, that pirates the mitochondria and causes aches, fatigue, stomach upset, and acute photosensitivity. In my lifetime I’ve had plenty of the first three symptoms, but something about this last intrigues me, and I suspect I could find it in myself to wring some perverse delight out of staying confined all day in a dark room, listening to traffic, aching. An objective correlative. Knock on wood.
Elote
From my desk I can hear gentle honking, birdsong, and the passage of buses and automobiles down the through road that crosses the city at its center, a mile to the east. The different engine types sound various chords and harmonies together as these vehicles brake and shift and speed off outside my front door. The sidewalk is narrow. Many times I have gone for a walk and taken an unfamiliar path and wound up where the sidewalk was too narrow to ignore the side mirrors of the oncoming cars, or where sidewalks disappear altogether and give way to trickles of wastewater or tracks of bleached garbage demarcating pedestrian passages alongside elevated dirt roads. The dust outside the city limits is unbelievable: in the days of carriage transport there used to be a team of horse-drawn sprinkler buggies who would wet down the streets in the morning and afternoon, which kept the dust manageable but muddied the wheel ruts, deepening and hardening the narrow troughs of the carriageway so that today automobiles with low suspension get caught and ground against the dirt until they can accelerate, which gives the traffic on the old carriageways an upsettingly violent herky-jerky rhythm and renders lethal any transverse passage on foot.
There are also motorcycles outside my door. Traditional six-cylinder cycles, single-stroke motorbikes, the occasional trundling chromed-out lowrider with banners waving, the single-person scooters that manage to take whole families out for the day and back at night, three people clinging together on a narrow seat with a child under the dashboard straddling the pedals, all four leaning at corners. The man at the nearby motorcycle repair shop, which also sells bicycles although I have never seen anyone ride a bicycle here, tells me that a family of six can fit on one of these scooters, and although I suspect he’s pulling my leg I wouldn’t be too shocked to see it, Junior sandwiched on the seat while Dad steers and Mom cradles the baby, two younger daughters making room for dad’s pedal foot and hanging for dear life onto his pant legs. I have a horror of stuff like this, I can’t bear to watch people pose near the edges of cliffs or in the mouths of lions. I guess I would feel responsible for a tragedy I foresaw: there is no “innocence” in being a bystander, I must evidently believe. I should mention the person driving the scooter will often be drinking a cola or eating a popsicle.
The sun sets around 6:30. We are coming out of the solstice and the rainy season and the days are getting sweatier. The humidity seems to affect my brain the way moisture affects magazines, swelling it up and putting stiff ripples in it. There is a corn-on-the-cob vendor who comes around in the early evening and as the days are getting longer and hotter his cries seem more and more piercing. I thought he was in trouble until my housemate explained what he was hawking. The alien word he repeats rests heavily on my addled mind, it’s so far removed from any cognate I can think of for corn or grain or foodstuff. This word has a suggestive Attic theatricality and for me it has come to connote desperation.
The Ruin is at the corner of a wide street and a narrow street. The entrance and sign face the narrow street, so that to a car passing along the wide street it looks like yet another windowless one-story masonry structure, moldering since the colonial period. A massive wooden stable door with a barred window has aged well and gives an air of crumbled dignity to the otherwise bare facade. There is very little graffiti in the city. The custom in advertising here, whether commercial, civic, or electoral, is to paint directly on the primed walls of buildings in garish, perfectly-ruled letters and symbols, over and over, and so anyone who yearns to decorate the public prospect can always find ready work. I am a conoisseur of these paintings and have my favorites in different categories, and I gawk like a tourist when I spot a painter at work with his delicate instruments.
The Ruin is what you are meant to call a bar-and-restaurant. It serves food to drinkers and drink to diners. Most of the patrons are single men who linger through both phases of custom, and for this reason, it is most accurate and more convenient to refer to The Ruin as a bar tout court.
No one has any idea how long the place has been a bar in the modern sense, because it has transitioned so smoothly from an inn and carriage house to an out-of-towners saloon to a watering hole for faintly upscale locals and some emigre artist types. The ruined part is the old stable building abutting the serving area. From a high window in the wall over the cash register you can see into the darkness of the stables, which once must have reeked with horsiness but are now full of dry and pleasantly cool rubble, with little bugs dancing in the light and stray cats laid up in pregnancy. It’s not sanitary in an absolute sense. It has the very high exposed-beam ceilings typical of plantation-era construction, and in the western alcove where there used to be a separate chamber for who knows what, the handsome rough-hewn stone pilasters on behalf of which the sole conservation attempt made has been the painting of beer logos. I sit in this bar as long as I can, as often as I can. In the world of the Ruin Obama is not the President, nor is Bill Gates the chairman of Microsoft, there are no such things as rap music or shelter magazines, and there is nothing standing in the way of eternity, an endless afternoon purged of the consequential and the determinate, a late afternoon opening onto the moonlit dusk of the truly fortunate survivors.
Despite boasts to the contrary, the artists make most of their living at a craft fair in the north of the city. Every city on earth has a craft fair and I believe the crafts offered vary only superficially from city to city, but I went along one Saturday afternoon...
There are also motorcycles outside my door. Traditional six-cylinder cycles, single-stroke motorbikes, the occasional trundling chromed-out lowrider with banners waving, the single-person scooters that manage to take whole families out for the day and back at night, three people clinging together on a narrow seat with a child under the dashboard straddling the pedals, all four leaning at corners. The man at the nearby motorcycle repair shop, which also sells bicycles although I have never seen anyone ride a bicycle here, tells me that a family of six can fit on one of these scooters, and although I suspect he’s pulling my leg I wouldn’t be too shocked to see it, Junior sandwiched on the seat while Dad steers and Mom cradles the baby, two younger daughters making room for dad’s pedal foot and hanging for dear life onto his pant legs. I have a horror of stuff like this, I can’t bear to watch people pose near the edges of cliffs or in the mouths of lions. I guess I would feel responsible for a tragedy I foresaw: there is no “innocence” in being a bystander, I must evidently believe. I should mention the person driving the scooter will often be drinking a cola or eating a popsicle.
The sun sets around 6:30. We are coming out of the solstice and the rainy season and the days are getting sweatier. The humidity seems to affect my brain the way moisture affects magazines, swelling it up and putting stiff ripples in it. There is a corn-on-the-cob vendor who comes around in the early evening and as the days are getting longer and hotter his cries seem more and more piercing. I thought he was in trouble until my housemate explained what he was hawking. The alien word he repeats rests heavily on my addled mind, it’s so far removed from any cognate I can think of for corn or grain or foodstuff. This word has a suggestive Attic theatricality and for me it has come to connote desperation.
The Ruin is at the corner of a wide street and a narrow street. The entrance and sign face the narrow street, so that to a car passing along the wide street it looks like yet another windowless one-story masonry structure, moldering since the colonial period. A massive wooden stable door with a barred window has aged well and gives an air of crumbled dignity to the otherwise bare facade. There is very little graffiti in the city. The custom in advertising here, whether commercial, civic, or electoral, is to paint directly on the primed walls of buildings in garish, perfectly-ruled letters and symbols, over and over, and so anyone who yearns to decorate the public prospect can always find ready work. I am a conoisseur of these paintings and have my favorites in different categories, and I gawk like a tourist when I spot a painter at work with his delicate instruments.
The Ruin is what you are meant to call a bar-and-restaurant. It serves food to drinkers and drink to diners. Most of the patrons are single men who linger through both phases of custom, and for this reason, it is most accurate and more convenient to refer to The Ruin as a bar tout court.
No one has any idea how long the place has been a bar in the modern sense, because it has transitioned so smoothly from an inn and carriage house to an out-of-towners saloon to a watering hole for faintly upscale locals and some emigre artist types. The ruined part is the old stable building abutting the serving area. From a high window in the wall over the cash register you can see into the darkness of the stables, which once must have reeked with horsiness but are now full of dry and pleasantly cool rubble, with little bugs dancing in the light and stray cats laid up in pregnancy. It’s not sanitary in an absolute sense. It has the very high exposed-beam ceilings typical of plantation-era construction, and in the western alcove where there used to be a separate chamber for who knows what, the handsome rough-hewn stone pilasters on behalf of which the sole conservation attempt made has been the painting of beer logos. I sit in this bar as long as I can, as often as I can. In the world of the Ruin Obama is not the President, nor is Bill Gates the chairman of Microsoft, there are no such things as rap music or shelter magazines, and there is nothing standing in the way of eternity, an endless afternoon purged of the consequential and the determinate, a late afternoon opening onto the moonlit dusk of the truly fortunate survivors.
Despite boasts to the contrary, the artists make most of their living at a craft fair in the north of the city. Every city on earth has a craft fair and I believe the crafts offered vary only superficially from city to city, but I went along one Saturday afternoon...
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