20 September 2017, 1:06pm (personal essay / fragment)
From Ciencias Street, Escandón, Mexico City
Hans is rolling and smoking cigarettes like a chimney. Like an Argentinian parrilla―those ones for bbq-ing like you mean it. He’s listening to gothic-gospel music (lo conocí today) without any words, so I don’t know if it’s in Spanish or English, or ancient Germanic x. He’s looking at what looks like an Excel spreadsheet on his laptop. Something he has offline, cuz we’ve been wi-fi free for 24 hours now. I don’t know what he’s looking at. I-Tunes, I bet.
He’s on the other side of the living room which is too far for me to see, and also, he’s not really named Hans, though I didn’t know this till I lived with him for three months. Marcelo is his real name. But he’s tall as shit and blonde as shit and everybody has always called him Hans. Even when he was a kid growing up in Patagonia, he told me.
Nico is looking at old pictures of his family. Polish grandparents, paternal side. And childhood pics of his dad and uncle. While my own grandmother was ten kids in and stockpiling for another U.S. depression, his grandmother was paying the beach photographer for Uruguayan resort pics of herself in the fullest, blackest, one-piece bathing suit I’ve ever seen. The pics are helping me to understand the Latin American jet-set class of 50 years ago, which makes them especially interesting I suppose. As is trying to imagine the beach photographers of those days. Who were they? What were their lives like?
Nico’s bedroom door is closed, but I can still see him thumbing through pics. Also letters in Polish. His Jewish grandparents got out of Radomski before WW2, picked Buenos Aires as their new home. I can see, too, that N’s feelings are at least slightly hurt because I wasn’t dramatic enough in my appreciation for the baby pic (his own) that he just brought out to show Hans and me. But everybody’s already on edge today.
Me. I’m typing this. I was reading short personal essays in some book titled, The Best Travel Writing, Vol. 10, and wondering, sincerely and not snottily, how so many people can be so good at publishing and just okay at writing. The book gets better later. By the fourth essay, I think. Some chick just before that wrote a mega-personal essay on Italian ex-boyfriends, and I read it while thinking about the 10,000 volunteers digging survivors out of edificios derrumbados in this city right now, and … yeah, I don’t want to grow up to write like her.
That said, Hans and Nico and I aren’t playing hero, it’s true. But we are doing what we are supposed to be doing and staying off the streets so the heroes can save lives. I woke up today wondering if I should go get syrup for pancakes. Nico woke up wondering if his hi-tech audio recorder could be used to hear people still trapped in the rubble as they call for help. I felt bad about this. I mean about me, thinking about syrup. But I woke up three times last night convinced we were in another quake. Which meant I felt like I deserved a morning of pancakes and coffee and normalcy by the time 8am rolled around. But then it turned out the Super Naturista around the corner was closed today anyhow. No syrup.
Lots of things are closed―we’re in an official “duelo nacional.” Except for the businesses with owners who are absentee and/or emotionally uninvested in their laborers, it seems. Soriana, for example, is making a killing today. Soriana is Spanish for Walmart. Basically. And they sell everything on the federal list of supplies to donate right now, including bottled water, which is mostly owned by Coca-Cola. It’s hard to be a marxist when tragedy hits.
Yesterday afternoon old cars drove up and down the streets slowly, their megaphoned messages not about metal collection but instead telling everybody to go home and stay inside so our emergency workers could do their emergency work. The thing was, likewise yesterday, management told us to stay out of the building until Protección Civil could check the foundations, let us know if we should go back to hanging out on the fourth floor of our way-vintage building or find a new apartment. Which is why we went to the biggest park in urban Latin America and hoped nobody would yell at us for being out.
Solace is what we found. With our books, and the squirrels that ganged up as soon as they heard the rustle of my caramel corn packaging. Solace in thoughts of death by tree instead of toppled concrete condos.
