I always struggle tremendously with titles for my writings, so what you see is simply a fragment of a sound which I cannot remove from my head as I type out these words in Mexico City. The full audio clip goes as follows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6wH7ixj9A0
It’s the voice of a young girl asking for people to sell their old mattresses, home appliances, and other things. She recorded it in 2004, when she was 10 years old, at the request of her father, a scrap metal collector. The recording has been copied time and again, and is now used by the majority of scrap metal merchants in Mexico City. It even became some sort of cultural icon for the megalopolis: you can find postcards with a full transcription of it in bookstores frequented by the most highbrow clientele.
This is my third time in Mexico City. Our flight got delayed for more than 11 hours (thanks American Airlines!). Consumed by the couch in our Airbnb in Roma Norte, starving and exhausted, that sweetly drawn out voice seeped through the closed windows and consoled me with its distorted warmth. “I’m back.” “It’s almost like I never left.” Thought me, an Asian guy whose Spanish is still commendable more for the valiance (/ˈbreɪznnəs/) of its emitter rather than its proficiency, whose name draws the same {frown, smile} combination of confused frustration from baristas here as in the United States. And yet, as over the top as it might sound, this place is starting to feel like another home for me, and is about to squeeze onto the same list with Shenyang, Tokyo and New York: I know I can always come here, do nothing, and be happy.
It happened gradually. The first time I came here was during Thanksgiving in 2019, when I was in my phase of looking at the world map, picking a country easily accessible from New York, and just hopping on a flight (a phase that arguably I’m still in, minus the accessibility part). I did the most touristy things imaginable: marveling at Man, Controller of the Universe at Palacio de Bellas Artes; walking until my legs gave out at Museo de Antropología; filling up my phone’s storage with photos of colorful handicrafts at La Ciudadela. Memory is still vivid of myself on the backseat of a taxi, listening to the driver’s vehement introduction of every building we passed by, responding with the maximal cordiality that my at-the-time barely existent Spanish skills could support. Fingers racing on Google Translate, I planned my counter attack. The señor at the wheel didn’t seem to care how much I understood of what he said (not a lot) and I wasn’t bothered by how little I could muster. We both had a good time.
There were, and still are, people dressed in indigenous clothing, performing the frenetic conchero dances in front of the Catedral Metropolitana. Drums are always loud. The incense smoke envelops the dancers and spectators alike. In a synecdochical way, to me, CDMX itself resembled the dances: vigorous, exhilarating, slightly intimidating. Colors, materials, cars, motorcycles, people, aromas, odors, guitars, violins, bells, shouts. I enjoyed it all, for a few days.
Two and a half years, one global pandemic, and a hundred or so Spanish lessons later, I was getting a haircut in Polanco, listening to the hairdresser talk about the few years that she spent in Shanghai. She said she liked it, but it was a bit exceso, and I understood perfectly why she said that, something that would have been totally impossible for me in my first visit. I liked Mexico City because of its rich history, forceful artwork and architecture, and its energy. I became infatuated with it after getting hold of its elusive tranquility. This time, I stayed for about a month in areas I not only did not set foot on, but barely even knew existed during my previous sojourn.
It was in August, with New York’s sophisticated torture machine of sweltering outdoors combined with glacial indoors in full swing. To a lot of people, the word “Mexico” oozes increasing level of heat with each successive syllable, but at least in the capital, nothing’s farther from truth in the summer months of the Northern Hemisphere. The temperature is never really high, and while during the day the often brilliant sunlight might bring out a thin mist of sweat on a brisk walker, it is never intolerable. Plus, the daily evening rain, so faithful that it can be used to demarcate Buenas tardes and Buenas noches, cools down the city to necessitate a light jacket for the easily chilled.
My temporary abode was on a street named Campos Eliseos, which shares the same reference involving people very good and very dead with its more famed, Romance language brethren, Champs-Élysées. It is indeed an area with beauty of Homeric proportions[1]. Everyday, with joyous anticipation, I waited to hear the raindrops on my semi-transparent roof accelerate from andante to presto, and then simply phase out gently. It was a signal, a command of supreme imperative, to lay down whatever you had at hand, to take an aimless walk in the Elysium Fields. It worked the miracle of changing my opinions about city landscaping almost overnight. I had always thought that trees are overrated, and there’s something pitiful about people crowding into patches of green on Google Maps and admiring a mere verisimilitude related to an ancestral memory irreversibly detached and banished. Mexico City made me realize that it’s not trees themselves that I dislike, but the servitude that they’re subject to in other cities that I’ve lived in. CDMX is, with no exaggeration, a jungle, which generously allows artificial structures to exist. Only tiny pieces of the sky are visible through the lush, towering foliage, while the humbler ferns, cacti, and elephant ears[2] separating the sidewalks and roads make you question which part of the world you’re in. The luxurious color of these quiet residents of the city almost seems to have been extracted by the evening moisture, and fill up the sweetly chilly air. The shops, cafés and restaurants hiding inside and behind the leaves succeed in justifying their intrusion into this green shrine with a sublime refinement in the visual, olfactory, and gustatory profiles that they present. The country’s rich, long and deep tradition in art and design effortlessly manifests in every space you walk into, every hue of lighting, every handcrafted cup you hold in your hand.
But there’s something else that makes Mexico City occupy such a special place in my heart, something well represented by the recording referred to in the title of this writing, specifically, the fact that you hear it everywhere: inside the affluent neighborhoods circling Bosque de Chapultepec, as well as among those where the less well-to-do reside. The rhythm of life, in all its beauty and all its messiness, never leaves you wherever you go. While most large cities I’ve either visited or lived in have their share of aesthetically pleasing areas, they often carry an atmosphere of sterile exclusivity. People are reduced to their functions, and the charm of these places assumes a pretense to an absolute and everlasting authority. Not here in Mexico City. I know that the streets are clean thanks to the people with their buckets of soaped water I walked by earlier. I see restaurant workers at a table picking bad leaves out of a bunch of cilantro, and I know that what remains is going on my plate in a few moments. I line up at street food stands behind people in T-shirts, suits, and uniforms alike, and eat out of a colorful plastic plate wrapped with film, in front of stately colonial style mansions and designer boutiques. The taco collapses under its own weight after one bite. Capture the fleeing fillings, and lick off the juice from your fingers, no matter who you are and what you wear.
And now, I’m seated on the street in front of a small restaurant literally called “without a name”, which also happens to be without a menu, devouring whatever the magicians at the kitchen manage to conjure up. The idea of mortality has weighed on me since I was maybe 5 or 6, but I sense its augmentation in recent years. I was gripped by a swirl of disorientation when I immediately recognized the streets I walked and shops I visited last year, with haunting lucidity. Should the memory of one year ago be this vivid, so much so that I can barely feel the passage of time, though it marches with merciless resolve towards a grim destination? Should I rejoice at this still optimistic reading on my mental faculties, or would a healthy level of oblivion comfort me, by producing in me the conviction that I in fact did live that one year, evidenced by the wear and tear it caused in my recollections? Does time truly passes equally for everyone (a source of relief) or are certain people just blessed with the enviable talent to sense it more substantially?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I stopped caring for a moment. The weather is perfect. The next dish just got served. A small group of street musicians just started playing a pleasant tune. Two artisans are selling their splendid carpet to the diners. This city adorns every fleeting moment of your life with experiences so rich and expansive, it washes away all your fears and regrets. You tear up a little bit, and look forward to what’s next.
Notes
[1] Speaking of Homeric, there is a street commemorating the blind poet himself. In fact, most streets in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City are named after writers, thinkers, and scientists across different historical eras and cultures. Following Campos Eliseos to the east, you walk past Jorge Bernard Shaw, Sócrates, Platón, succeeded by, surprisingly, Séneca and Moliere. You will eventually find the anticipated Aristóteles, converging with Galileo, with Avenida Isaac Newton nearby.
[2] I know nothing about plants. Totally just Google Lensed that one.
