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?