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...