This infinite city repossesses my soul. Each street is a neighborhood, same-yet-different from any other: poor or bourgeois; green with trees or grey with concrete; festive in colors of political advertisements or gang graffitti. Last night Phil and I walked back to the 'casa' (the Casa de los Amigos, AC where I lived and worked for over a year in 1986-87) where we're staying as guests now, across the plaza that's in front of the Monumento de la Revolución, and at 8pm there were: 1) a marching band practicing (sound of cars crashing); 2) some boys playing football (americano! – not soccer – los chilangos love american football); 3) a permanent political protest encamped and playing traditional music through loudspeakers; 4) taxistas loitering; 5) men and women selling trinkets or candy or videos or music; 6) tourists strolling (that would have been us, I suppose). It all felt vibrant, and so typical. A city full of lives being lived.
This city. And Manhattan, where I was a month ago, too. These places always recall to me my untold tales of the truly infinite city. A city in a Borgesian mode, genuinely devoid of limits or boundaries. Some authors of science fiction have postulated cities that cover entire planets (Asimov or Walter Jon Williams), but I think there's a germ of something different, unique, evocative (and personally compelling?) in the notion of a city-universe.
Yesterday, Phil and I took the bus from Autobuses del Norte (terminal) out to the pyramids at Teotihuacán. We climbed the piramide del sol, saludabamos a los dioses moribundos y mirabamos a la muchedumbre de turistas que estaba ahí. Sacabamos unas fotos.
We returned to the city, amid the haze of the north side of the valley and the grey suburbios climbing the hillsides, which were punctuated with occasional brightly colored declarations of incipient middle-class wealth in the form of well-built two story houses amid the slums. Without map or guide I took us from Metro Indios Verdes to MA Quevedo at the south end of the city, and found unerringly but instinctually my favorite Mexican bookstore, la libería gandhi. Once a sort of counter-cultural institution, this business has in recent decades grown to a sort of Border's-of-Mexico, with multiple locations and a very nifty website from which I've even ordered books from the states, although the cost of shipping is a tad exhorbitant – oddly, it's cheaper to order books shipped from Spain than Mexico.
I bought a spectacular book of short stories, very recent (2004?) entitled El materialismo histérico, by Xavier Velasco. More on this gem, later?
This morning we went to the museo and casa de Leon Trotsky, who lived his final days here in exile before being murdered by a proto-KGB agent in 1940. We walked around Coyoacán, had some lunch, and returned. I met with Rosita, a woman who was one of the cleaning staff when I worked here 20 years ago, and now, despite her 70 years, is still spry and works occasionally to make ends meet. We chatted and walked over to try to find Guti, another person who was like a godmother to me during my time here, who has been ill. But she wasn't home or didn't hear us yelling up from the street ("mexican doorbell"). I know where she lives, though, and will try to come back to see her at some point again before we return to L.A.