Always touching, embracing friends or
lovers, trying to find out what flesh and spirit are made of; they speak, hold on to your
body, each word, a bit of energy, an idea transmitted by a touch of warmth, arm in arm,
drinking songs optional, a fraternity of mind only, true friends, a la muerte*, a toda
madre*.
I recall a few days ogling ambiguity, a day or two filled with
non-Euclidean space where the light stopped, but did not end. It would happen when leaving
the city for awhile to breathe medieval air or when we'd go to the outskirts and mount a
pyramid on hands and knees, feeling what it must have meant to brush the sky with
feathered serpent wings, the spirit of El Ajusco* , almost hidden away, lived with us
mythically, carefully nudging every desire.
photo by J. Entweitzel 1967
Strange music, a street caller raffles chickens,
"Buena
suerte"*. It carries the mourner's voice along the unmoving stones of the city,
the number's lucky sequence is later superimposed on a postcard photograph of several
Mariaches, their mouths closed, eyes burning, smoldering like holes made by a red hot
poker. Behind them, a temple rises up and parked beside it, two busses, one blue and one
medieval. There's a background din of funeral song and jetliner solos overhead. In the
corner of my eye a sun calendar border bristles with telegenic tribal ritual and silvery
pesos shimmering and wavering in the mirage. I'm surrounded by cars parked in cryptic
arrangements. The skies that I travel on, cast no shadow as I fight against the
commodities of sleep. The curse of the oyster world is removed by taking a copy of McLuhan
in my carry-on; I am not a tourist anymore.
They speak no English and think in Spanish. Words belong to ears and
voices, to inscrutable singers of eternal songs whose tongue and touch go back along a
flood of progress built by arteries and veins, a mix of blood, a hybrid flower found in
nightmare gardens. Sitting along the wall are little men, each with a haunting stare,
taking his comic book seriously. Venders sort gray tortillas on a muddy grill that is
littered with everything from chili to chinch-bug. It is one big ugly-beautiful world of
undeniable children, squatting in one rainbow slum after another, coated with every left
over color of paint, proclaiming electric silence. In brocade textures of Aztec living
rooms, an arrangement of Bauhous* dreams is stacked along with Tanguy's* mental furniture;
one nineteen-fortyish world of honky-tonk and pin-ball mechanization run head-on into the
feudal age.
An accident is not reported unless the vehicles collide more than three
times and one or both are trying to get away with it. Most crumpled busses have two
crumpled drivers and a crumpled radio which blares out in spite of crumpled passengers
trying to sing above the random madness. Taxicabs run excited in the street responding to
any finger held in the air. Riders signal their willingness to share a fare for one peso,
catch a ride to anywhere that strange names are easily pronounced.
photo by J. Entweitzel 1967
Jorge and Gonzalo, an ex-bullfighter and a gigolo, prepare to
entertain me in the face of an oncoming taxi. The gore-head hangs and flexes his jacket
out in front of the car. Death passes in a whirl of Dacron victory. In chaos there is
insight, but no conclusions can be made. The media, hot and cold persist, the moving vans
run all night, exchanging a ton of this for a barrel of that, onward, outward, sprawling,
busily ant-like, silent with eyes burning.
The guitar plays, Gonzalo recites. I pick up the book and join him:
"!Juventud,
divino tesoro, Ya te vas para no volver! Quando quiero llorar, no lloro, Y a veces lloro,
sin querer."* (Ruben Dario)
I try to remember in English, but only my broken Spanish comes to mind:
Esta
lloviendo, amistad, Yo comprendo ciudad.*
Gonzalo stands before the mirror learning to use his eyes, touching,
fingering, playing guitar, moving lips in accord with pantomiming features. All seems lost
as ghostly figures walk between the eyes and mirror, Indian themes cascading over the eyes
and behind the moving, silent features. Eternal love and lust, my friend, mi viejo, sing
them now, the way your grandfathers did and remember before you sleep, before you learn to
use your eye like a hand that feels the rough nap of things and your eye like an ear that
shuts out the wild desert color of your thundering heart. Why must you learn to listen
with your eyes, to hear and hearing never to hear again. Coarsely touching, fingering
lifeless forms, the mirror takes him.
But Gorge finds a way through chaos; we meet at the door and faces
spread out like oriental fans. Que tal. Que si, que no? Qu' que, qu' que, qu' que, he
says, spraying words like soda fizz. He is awkward and bumbling unless addressing the
on-coming taxi as though it were a bull. His friendship beams like the Sun and simple
words animate his face. Mi viejo, lloviendo. Its all the same.
The four of us sit on the bed, me, the American girl, Gonzalo and Gorge.
The door stands open for the management's sake, nothing improper to hide. We groove on
that certain dull feeling that descends after two bottles of tequila as we wait for the
rain to stop, though it never ends. We let the spilled salt and lime rinds litter the
room. The naked electric bulb casts weird shadows on up-turned faces, wincing features,
the ghost of our language hovers, sometimes serious, sometimes laughing. Noises that cast
shadows of their own, fill the room with distortion. Shadows leap from one idea to the
next as each vision buzzes with its own distinctive sound. There are letters and text on
the wall, an overhanging feeling of words whose life has just begun.
We four are standing outside a temple at Xochimilco, slipping under the
shadow of El Ajusco. Again the barely audible funeral strains, and again the resounding
jet solo rumbling against the bare blue shoulders of the mountain. The gray light of
impending rain plays havoc with our senses. We run inside a small church where blood
begins to rain down and continues to fall on us. Gorge and the American kneel to pray
while Gonzalo and I observe. I feel the burning eyes pushing up the vaulted ceiling. The
blood bath continues like a Mexican winter storm. I touch the lifeless plaster forms,
feeling in the factitious quiet of God's unnatural silence, its whimpering world, flowing
beneath my feet. Jesus reels, tortured in mortar as scarred knees come to kiss the
coldness. History, like a lost and found coin, could be picked up and rubbed across the
heart, kissed up to God for a coin's worth of forgiveness. Hope, like a mere cinco* might
reconfirm a shameless plot in Heaven. With papers covering our heads we leave, but fail to
see the aching cloud that takes the steeple into its side.
I am here, searching for a life-purpose, living mythically at
twenty-three, not knowing if it comes from inside or out, nor if it can be grasped, least
of all in the search for a purpose, like a coin to be kissed, it must be given to a friend
before it can grant you any fortune. The treasure you store in Heaven is philosophical,
but what a power that is!
Let it happen through its poetry, this gaining understanding. Art and
nature suitable or not for framing, weigh upon my mind. I wait suspended, even though the
great ones felt its pull.
Why should new inventions cheapen the human experience, make us numb to
what's really going on. I thumb and frip McLuhan's pages just to keep awake.
I am running, chasing after intellect through various museums and art
galleries, running between paintings hung with hatred in their eyes. I stop and stand like
those about to be shot as I stand and look upon those about to be shot in strange
historical illustrations.
Under the proud electric solar disc the illustrated men in large
sombreros speak in futuristic voices, captions ballooning from dark, nearly photographic
mouths, articulating with almost comic book seriousness: There will come an all-night
dance of loyal machinery to ease our lives and free us from the sweat of all our labor.
As I climb the very thin air of Teotihuacan, I take a step higher,
lifting off the pyramid, forging a stronger link in the calendar of the sun where life
stops, but does not end.
Riding the tram to Xochimilco I sense the solid geometry of poverty, its
corollary springing from cautionless genitalia, hung out to dry on tedious clothesline
dreams. A white pueblo whispers her magueys and TV aerials in the same breath. Climbing a
garden to the sky, I view life as passengers do, thundering over bare blue slopes, my
dirty wandering shoes grating on the ears that dwell below.
I land safely at DIA, but no-one offers to wash my feet. I remember my
friends, hugging and prodding, touching, never to touch again. It goes with me like a
bundle, a thing of the heart and mind I carry with silence in my eyes, suspended in
judgment, dazed by self respect. I am waiting to catch another, the next real live native
heart that streaks by in a wild flash of reality.
