Mexico

 

I’ve been in Mexico for a month. The truth which I’ve been trying to avoid is: Mexico feels like Mexico. Mexico looks like Mexico. Mexico has been, give or take, what I thought Mexico would be. 

I don’t think this is a problem. I love Mexico. Everything about it that I thought I would love, I have. And I don’t think you can live your whole life surprised in any case. I suspect it’s because Mexico (partially by coincidence of proximity to the USA) has managed to develop such a clear visual and auditory language through TV and film that I’ve already seen a hundred scenes set here. Some of them are natively Mexican and some of them are Yank prestige TV drama about cartels, but they’ve all spent a lifetime filtering through my head. 

One of the reasons I’ve not written anything about it so far is that every line that starts to form becomes trite almost instantly. This probably isn’t Mexico’s problem so much as me feeling completely spent about travel writing. Street food, cacti, Aztec ruins, mezcal, brightly-coloured colonial streets, thick vegetation, wide deserts, cold beers, tiled churches and dark coffee, blah blah blah, shoot me in the head. I love it here but don’t ask me to talk about it.

This sounds like some kind of end-of-the-rope weariness, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m as happy as I’ve ever been. I do some work, I do some writing, I go for a walk. I buy a coffee and a pastry and I practice my Spanish. The sun is out and the world is good. This is a beautiful country and the people in it have yet to be anything but warm, accommodating, funny, a little too funny at times, happily cutting, patient but in a brusque kind of way; listen, people are people everywhere. But they’re good here too. 

I’ve gone off tacos. There’s only so much grilled meat I can handle. My long degraded vegetarianism might finally be making a comeback. This isn’t because I still bear the scar tissue of about four separate bouts of churning guts but it isn’t not because of that either. They call it Monteczuma’s Revenge which is obviously funny in passing. I throw away one pair of underwear because I trust a fart under inauspicious circumstances. I enter the shower almost fully clothed. Other nights I don’t quite have the relief of shitting myself so instead I writhe in gassy agonies. 

Gas is a strange thing. It stretches from the small of your back to somewhere below your heart. Gas can make you think you’re dying in seven distinct ways. Gas is pressure. It is a part of you pushing against another part of you, stretching and distending. These muscles weren’t meant to move in this direction. Is it your kidneys? Is it your heart? Are you dying? Are you dying of fart? Will it tear you into so much wet meat? Will you burst open like a Yorkshire pudding? No! But you will feel like you’re about to, until you let out a fart so long, slow and mournful that it sounds like the start of the Last Post. And sometimes you shit yourself. 

When I was younger I would occasionally read things along these lines, stories of adults at war with their bodies and I would think: yeah right idiots. It’s not that bad. 

It'll happen to you.

In Mexico City when I was crippled by my first bout of gastrointestinal agony I spent the day trying to work and write and forget that I had a body, but my apartment was directly above a tortilleria. If you weren’t already aware, Mexico runs entirely on corn. Below my window was a corn processing plant. Baking, rendering, selling. Taking away semi-rancid offcuts. The air was thick with corn. The last thing I ate - and which I was at that point holding responsible for the sickness, though after consultation it was almost certainly the papaya - was corn tortillas. For at least a week or two after I started feeling better, the smell of any corn would set me off. And the smell of corn is fucking everywhere. 

For the sake of this still ostensibly being a travelogue, here are the things I have done.

• I took the early bus to Teotihuacán, where I climbed the Pyramid of the Moon as the sun rose and the mist fell. The sky was full of hot-air balloons. The city was almost empty. I visited the museum and I had meat and eggs. 

• I went to see the Lucha Libre, where extraordinary feats of athleticism and physical comedy were performed by people somewhere behind a metal ramp which was blocking my view almost entirely. 

• I woke up before dawn to ride a kayak out across freezing black water to reach a lagoon in Xochimilco, where I paddled in silence and watched the sun come up over Izztacíhuatl, the Sleeping woman. 

• I travelled to Xalapa in the cloud forest. I saw colossal Olmec heads in the museum, and I saw the pitted holes in their faces to which creepers had once clung while they lay half-submerged in the soil. 

• I came to Puebla and then cartels set fire to large parts of the country, so I stayed in Puebla, with its pretty colonial streets, painted houses, art galleries and pungent, spicy, baffling food. 

Aren’t you listening? I told you.

I shat myself.

Pay attention.

It’s good. I like Mexico. Some days you watch the sun rise from the top of a mountain. Some days your guts are twisted. Some days those are the same day. Mi español no es muy bueno, pero estoy aprendiendo poco a poco. Mañana voy a Cholula. Me haré un tatuaje de un sello tolteca si puedo programarlo. Si me encuentran muerto, díganles que fue mi estómago el culpable. Díganles que morí sonriendo.

xxx