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 Where we live, there are several extinct outlets that were installed long ago and then repealed, taped over, possibly burned out or hazardous.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.