Mexico City @ January 2011
Day 1
Opening your eyes within absolute darkness of the night is always an astonishing, even often banal, experience. At 3 the world is supposed not to be ready for you and vice versa, in case you once went into the depth of your dreams. At 3 AM is a displaced external world, in my case today Mexico City (MC), even more astonishing to Open your eyes in front of a window, leading you in frame of an unique scenario of slowness and colors smoothly into the birth of the sun over the horizon.
MC has been appearing before my eyes, calm and noisless, embedded in forgetness.
Finally I tried to find out, what makes this place a moloch, as all mass media reports are continuosely making us to believe, what makes this place to gangster' s paradise, as any documentary is trying showing us a almost endless quantity of evidence. MC might the hell on hearth. What I have found, was multiple web sites narrating the mythical power of indigeneous godnesses, the meaning of sun, the archeology of sacrifice, the specific semantics of pyramides, and the radicality of reluctance toward the deadh, including a more radical conviction of life as a continuum. A dedicated museum to the Mexican ars moriendi in central MC is standing for this radicality, which we do not know at all in Europe. We do not know any form of transcendent radicality in old Europe any more, you remember the Night of bartholomae? Those days are gone irreversiblly.
Finally I was lost in multitudes of touristic nonsense sites, about charm of old markets, which are by the way neither old nor real markets, just fake for visitors.
Beyond statistics, this aversive format of knowledge, it is difficult picturing MC as an hell surrogate on the earth. So let ' s go out and look at/into the real.
The taxi driver took me to Izazaga finding a strange place called casa virreyes. Twenty something, wet hairs, sun glass, a cool guy. On the way, driving with a constant velocity of 80 kilometer per hour, bypassing all obstacles, as other cars really are, he was talking to me in the same tempo, in which he was driving, and in a biutiful ( the Mexican expression for Schönheit) accent, with the result that I did not understand a word, while listening to aweful mariachi songs attacking me from backside boxes.
It was a sunny, calm Sunday.
At Izazaga, a grey, sleepy building, open door policy, a more sleepy watchman listening to radio inside, as almost have seen here in MC: lost in his dark blue uniform in XL size and lots of emblames and codes and signs of his chest and arm. He did not have any reaction seeing me coming into the house. The hall, a step higher, had a visible cloud of dust in air, more imaginative than real, more scenic than touchable. Some isolated standing chairs and deep tables in room and a bar and computers in front of windows. Beyond the bar a young girl was sitting and looking at a screen, next to her, a teenage boy, 15 or 16 in age, reading a comic. The entire scenery seemed to be arranged, well choreographed, naturally, but for whom? After asking them for a room, they give me a key, requiring to go upstaires and to see the room, may be you don't like it, she said. I went to the 6th floor with the watchman, which was not willing to wake up, therefor wandering with me between his two dream sequences. I did not like the room, even it was the original copy of any motel room of any American movie of any adventurous pictorial narrative. No, I should go somewhere else. After asking the girl for a cab, to bring me away, I had to wait in the dustful hallway for 20 minutes, reading magazines on body building techniques from 2003 and on sailing and yachting from 2007, lying on tha marvelous tables. Some minutes later, two men came downstaires in the hallway, positioning themselfes on those marvelous chairs and opening their laptops. I believed, and I believe it even just right now, having seen one of these men in Paris at the airport CDG, waiting for the same flight, as I did there. A flight booked for AirFrance, expecting the AF menue of food and the menue of entertainement tools I was expecting to experience with AF, however, it turned out, that this flight AF 006 will be performed by AeroMexico. You know, what this means, well, a small Boeing airplane, with ZERO entertainement, and some food, amazingly with Italian withe wine. However, I recognized the man, opening now his laptop while sitting in the dusty hallway of casa virreyes. The other man, who obviously did not know him, was maybe ten years older than him, let' s say 65, did all same ritual- like movements with his laptops. I was just informing myself about body building arts and crafs in the beginning of this millinium and about yacht industry in Northern Europe, which mad me happy. Immediately, they started to talk to each other with a classical starter, which includes always the question, if the WiFi is working well with his PC?. Yes, it did work well. I, personnaly, was absolutely involved with all those biutiful bodies of 2003 and the color of their skins, so bronzed, amazing. The two men, assumingly 55 and 65 years old, speaking in American accent, seemed not having any reason to delay the process of exchange their solid, stable and consensuel informations on geopolitics. After stating, that his Economist subscription was an nice and useful idea, the younger one has asked the older one about his point of view on events happening in Northern Africa and Yemen. I mean, I was astonished, touched and perplexed, listening to two well educated American men, even the older seemed having a slight and almost unhearable Hungarian phonetics, which might change the entire choreography and arrangemnet of this very theatralic scene. Yes, said the one I believed having already met, with his laptop, in Paris airport CDG, the situation is out of joint, I don't really know, what will come, if the people on streets achieve some of their goals. He was worrying about the dark side of revolutions, obviously. Nobody really knows, what happens, if revolutinaries achieve their goals. Not even those, who are in action. The answer of the younger man, who was certainly deeply originated in American countryside, was more interesting than the general and correct statements of the first one, he said: that is not the issue here, Sir, as all good Americans are used to call folk they don' t know and don' t want to get to know, no Sir, the isssue is the following: do they understand what they want? He meant the revolutionaries in Northern Africa. I tell you, and believe me, I know what I am talking about, they have no clue. It is just rage, fury and poverty. Sir, I know, what is happening down there, nothing. They, he meant the outburst youth of Cairo, Tunis, have no idea of our system, of democracy. He keeped talking, down there there is no individual existing, nor individual freedom is the goal. Individuum does not exist there, so what they want at all? He was asking. My drive came in and called after Gregor Samsa.
At noon, I was arrived at Hotel New York, close to the monument of revolution and to the plaza de La republica, without aiming to be here. I just listen to the taxi driver, who could not find casa conde, where I had to go, at least I intended to go because of their nice artistic images of the homepage, so now I am in New York in MC.
At the afternoon, I was just browsing Paseo de La Reforma, an endless boulevard in central MC, build by emperor Maximilian for his wife' s promonades, thus just for fun and for eternal love of an emperor. Significantly, it is mentioned almost evreywhere, be it tourist guides, historical reviews and, I guess without being sure about it, even in the sayings of the people: the emperor Maximilian has had build a large, endless boulevard with statues, heros on horses, fontaines and biutiful trees just for love, nothing else than a love.
Sun, shadows, trees. A lot of bicycles on the boulevard Reforma.
Having a coffee in a small shop, tired and hopeless, I see a remarable sentence written on the bar : "te voy a quittar el sueño" , I mean so much for coffee, but OK.
It is a nice, calm Sunday afternoon.
I was picked up later by my dear friend Ignacio Reyes M. there and we were cruising through the many town barrios, being told some nice anectodes by him.
We made a short stop after a long car journey at his apartement in the very West/North part of MC, in front of "panteón civil de dolores", a marvelous view on fusion of nature and contemporary anesthetic architecture. A positive suburb with gated communities at the edge of the megapolis Mexico City, infiltrated by motorways, inhabited by powerful automobiles, a landscape with white stone buildings, park slots with a lot of Maserati and Porche and unbelievable solitude.
We picked up a friend of him by the American hospital and drove to downtown, while the mild sun of this biutiful Sunday afternoon was falling apart.
