Another umbilical cord around the globe

For: Javier Brandoli (text and photos)
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These four years of Mexico have passed quickly because in Mexico I have learned that there is a certain vital vertigo. Everything happens quickly despite passing very slowly: earthquakes and hurricanes, the revolutions, the man on a bike of the tamales who is never still and the love. It has never been easier for me in any of the countries I have lived to find someone with whom, after five minutes, you seemed to know them from a lifetime. It started in an airport taxi, where after turning down a street where there were puddles and tacos, the driver crossed himself as he passed a brick church, turned his head and started listing my extended family. I got out of the car with the concern of not being clear with whom we would marry his spinster niece, thirty-seven years old, Marianita.

Mexico is badly counted as a journalist because it never fits you in the title or in the subtitle that even the deceased kindly said good morning to you. There is a man under my house, Marcelino, that she makes two hours of transport each day to come wash the cars parked on the street with a rag. He greets me every time he sees me with more enthusiasm than my family and friends when I return to Spain every twelve months.

When a Mexican invites you to lunch or dinner at his house, he is obliged two days before fasting.

There are countries that do not deserve their people. Mexico is one of them. A bad country populated by a lot of good people. The Mexican opens the door of his house with generosity. Doesn't pretend to look shiny, pretend to look like yours or get offended. I quickly learned that when a Mexican invites you to lunch or dinner at his house he is obliged two days before fasting.

They work, they work as I have seen few towns. You always see people on a scaffold, making food on the street or selling useless things at all hours. The need made virtue. In an overpopulated country where the social classes are established believing the rich to be generous because instead of giving a decent wage to their workers they offer a generous tip, competition is not letting yourself be defeated, not for others, for life.

Un mexicano de las «clases medias y bajas» trabaja 20 hours as a waiter, driver of an Uber and helping a brother-in-law who works around the houses fixing other people's arrangements. He sleeps at work when they leave him and eats whenever he remembers that he must be hungry. No problem, the density of street food stalls that emerge from the trunk of a car from which a couple takes a pot that would serve as an Olympic pool, is proportional to the hunger of a people that feeds by decree every two hours. En ocasiones llegué a preguntarme si el apetito no será el gesto «identitario» de los mexicanos por encima de los mariachis, tequila and its sadness for the defeats of the soccer team.

Llegué a preguntarme si el apetito no será el gesto «identitario» de los mexicanos por encima de los mariachis, tequila and its sadness for the defeats of the soccer team

And in the midst of that social system of difficult balance comes the Mexican surrealism and imagination that has the power to be transversal to Diego Rivera, Iñárritu, and the prison system through which the most dangerous drug trafficker in the country escapes through a tunnel that seems to connect his cell with the Teotihuacán pyramids. Here a father announces on social networks that he is going to celebrate the 15 years of her daughter killing a goat and they show up 3.000 people to the banquet in which they ended up having to go to the health and police to avoid disorders.

I also discovered the things that I did not like. In that I did not give myself away as Spanish; here that phrase is said as the things that I liked the least. He is not a taboo, a forbidden word that attacks. If you go to the restaurant and ask for a bottle of wine and they don't have it, el camarero regresa y te dice», le voy a quedar mal y se la voy a dejar a deber». It's not that I don't have it, is that he will have it but not now, and the misunderstanding is solved by returning the letter and avoiding all the bad drink of having to hear the word No. In a week I have had a communication person on the phone several times swearing that the answer to my request was sent to me when I hung up. Never arrived, they almost never came, and you learn to live on a fragile border with a rule that you have to understand so as not to go crazy: everything that is not a yes is a no.

And yes, there are other things that I liked less (See how everything sticks?), but they are light in my balance of wants and rejections. How can you not have fun in a country that Disney invented a children's film that deals with death? How not want to decipher a country with unpronounceable volcanoes are lovers? How not a surprise that pays street musicians to brighten their spicy foods because they like people mourn and laugh at the same time? How can we not admire a place that when you see her insides shaking more hands than rubble?

How can you not have fun in a country that Disney invented a children's film that deals with death?

I will also miss the explanations of the guides of the monumental areas. Sound geniales. On my first visit to Calakmul our guide came upstairs on a jungle walk at five in the morning and ended up confessing to us that there were jaguars on his own ranch, ghosts and, in your basement, he had found two Mayan statues. When asking for photographic references, He showed us a photo of the fence of his ranch and quickly raised the surveillance post next to a pond., where we were trying to see a feline, with a confused phrase after never having stopped talking: «Los jaguares no se acercan si oyen ruidos».

Mexico will stop being my home on Monday, and from that moment I will remember when I interviewed Fernando del Paso and he told me that Mexicans do not break the umbilical cord and that is why when they go abroad it hurts more, because it pulls. Humbly count on one more umbilical cord dancing around the world. Already pull and I'm not gone yet.

 

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