An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Yucatán

My hands are sticky. I can’t remember why my hands are sticky.

Limes! I squeezed limes into my ceviche. Pushed thin slivers into my beer (Modelo Especial). Moulded plastic table with sunken beer holders. You can tell you’re in a classy joint when they have anti-spill infrastructure for the beers. The tables are slate-grey, the bottle holders a paler grey-white. The road and the pavement are the same stamped concrete, oscillating arcs pressed to look like paving slabs. Pale grey, spotted with dark chewing gum. A throng of children come past with their minders, peering at me and my laptop and no doubt wondering what the fuck exactly my problem is. Chicos I have not even worked it out myself. I have several overlapping problems. 

In México they serve their ceviche with a dressing made with tomato ketchup, so it’s sweeter than usual. Definitely sweeter than aguachile, a Sinaloan dish which I’ve had several times and each time wondered whether it was really meant to taste like this. Unlike ceviche, in which the prawns cure in the dressing, denaturing their proteins, mellowing the acid slowly - lime juice, chilli, salt, pepper, sugar, other things too probably, in Peru they call this concoction Tiger’s Milk - aguachile cures in front of you. It’s fiercely hot and fiercely sour. It’s like drinking a bowl of pure lime juice and chilli. It’s corrosive. They drop the fish or the prawns - camarones - into the liquor and by the time it hits your table, the pale flesh is already clarifying, turning pink amid the green. 

I am in Progreso. Progreso the town has subsumed Chicxulub, which is a far more interesting place. Progreso is where cruise ships dock, and ferry their braying Yank cargo ashore to spend too much on cocktails which make your teeth hurt. It has the largest pier in Yucatán, or possibly México, or possibly Latin America, the person relating the anecdote to me couldn’t quite recall. 

Chicxulub is the place where the meteor fell which precipitated the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Make your own jokes. 

I am a little away from the sea, though I can see the empty space at the end of the road. The road is lined with palm trees, painted in white lime up until about head height, to protect the trees from unpleasantness. What happens if the tree experiences unpleasantness above head-height isn’t clear. I’m sure arboriculturalists have it under control. 

Two sandy-coloured dogs ferret around for fallen food as cars make their way past - American cars, Range Rovers, people carriers. The restaurant has a painted mural on the front. Its top half is blue sky, dappled with clouds, spotted with seagulls. There is a thin strip of yellow sand, with palapas (palm-covered huts) and beach chairs. Below is the same. On one strip of wall there is something which looks like a tooth with a face - one with long roots, like a molar - but appears to be a small dog painted from the front. Perhaps a shih-tzu. 

On the other side of the road is a Super Chedraui, one of Mexico’s supermarket chains. A slash of bright orange, letters in sky blue, a painted grey wall. The palm tree beside it is full of black birds called grackles, which have an extraordinary range of vocalisations. Sometimes they trill and whistle like thrushes. Other times they sound almost like an alarm going off, electronic and urgent. Yellowing coconuts cluster at the top. It’s next to a Domino’s pizza. A sign in the window with a QR code advertises for jobs, with a caption which reads “buscamos tu talento”. We're looking for your talent. If only!

Over my left shoulder is one of hundreds of little shops selling beach paraphernalia. There is a row of bright-coloured children’s t-shirts hanging from a chain strung across the white-plastered entrance. They feature designs almost certainly made with AI. Dancing sea-creatures. Progreso Yucatán. There is AI art everywhere here, even in artisan markets. Everywhere everywhere. It’s not Mexico’s fault. Why not blast out some fridge magnets? 

How do I feel? I’ve had five beers and one plate of ceviche. The sun will set soon. There is an hour back to Mérida and I’m concerned that all of my beers will arrive at once while I stare biliously out of the window at the highway. The final bus isn’t until 10pm, so I can stay longer. Have another five beers. Live a little. Take an American bride. Flee into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s my last day in Yucatán and I’m spending it doing the same shit I do everywhere else. 

It’s hard to know if I’m substantially happier now than I was when I was in England. There are periods of misery and periods of happiness. Wherever you go, you are always you. The human mind is endlessly elastic and hoping to achieve “a sense of perspective” is like hoping to become divine. We have no perspective because we are inside of ourselves right now. This is it. We’re in the big dark red cave looking out of the windows. I don’t know if I’ve been meaningfully happier sitting on a balcony, in somewhere which we have to call paradise, than I have at times in my life when I’ve been living in the UK, enjoying a beer in the sun, reading a book, watching buses go by. I still have the same little rush of pleasure at being alive, and the same hollowness when it’s gone. 

Ultimately these are things which I am not good at identifying in myself. Without getting too Lacanian, I am mostly built of the things people see in me. I construct myself through your eyes. People close to me often tell me I seem happier, or thinner (but in a nice way), or at times in the past like I look terrible, like shit, like I have brain damage, do you have brain damage, we googled the signs of brain damage and we can’t work out if you have brain damage, you’ve gone very grey. And because I am never around anyone who knows me at the moment, I am unmoored. Do I look like I have brain damage right now? Am I glowing? I truly have no idea. In some respects my self-awareness is very finely-tuned. In others I might as well be blind. 

One thing I have noticed is that I feel very tall at the moment. Being in Mexico has made me very self-conscious. I’ve been 6’3 for a while of course, and I’m no less tall than usual, but I’ve started looking at myself in the mirror and thinking words like, lumbering, or slenderman, or I look a bit like Gru, from the Despicable Me films you know how he has very thin legs but he retains a pot belly and a kind of slouching posture too, he looks like a toffee apple if you know what a mean, something round on a stick. I’m not cut out to be looked at, and the average height here is about 4ft tall. 

An Attempt To Exhaust A Place In Paris is an experimental novella by Georges Perec, in which he sits in a café and records everything he sees. Eventually this collapses. There’s only so long you can sit and look at things before becoming introspective. See; it’s happened to me without even realising. 

The clouds are mottled grey and the wind picks up. The sun is setting.