It is no wonder that the myth of the Northerner should be so structured around technology, and that of Southern inhabitants around agriculture. The Northern Gods are metals, atoms, molecules, subatomic particles, fuel and energy. The Southern human being worships corn, the sun, moon, tides, soil, and rain. The Northerner with his weapons, and computers, becomes warlike. He uses technology to dominate, but ends up dissipating his warlike force. The male energy of technology-culture is expended, and absorbed by the earth. Weakened, it retreats, absorbed into the womb of more fertile zones. The earth itself divides energy, with its magnetic field, and distributing yin and yang like a behavioral charge, from pole to pole.
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Note on returning to Mexico City:
Amaranth – Spanish amarato is a grain used in soups, cereals, crepes, tostadas, tortillas. Pueblos in the U.S. used amaranth as a dye. Red pigments used in ritual ceremonies by the Zuni, and the Hopi, Rio Bravo indigenas. Relative biological value of the protein of different foodstuffs:
Maize/Corn 44
Trigo 60
Soya/Soybean 68
Cows Milk 72
Amaranth 75
Amaranth contains between 14.5 and 16.0 percent protein.
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Mexico City, Saturday February 27, 1993
An artist lives in Hell, but must have known Heaven, and is thus attempting to work his way back again. He seeks to re-achieve what he has lost, through artistry and inspiration. Heaven slams him down, again and again, each time he is furnished with a taste of love-lost, and so renewed goes back to work to regain it.
I met three young girls dressed in red uniforms yesterday in the zócalo. They were busy handing out leaflets promoting the sale of some leather goods, at one of the nearby hotels. One of the girls spoke English, so I offered to buy them all a coffee after work.
Four o’clock rolled around. I finished exploring the pyramid remains off the corner of the cathedral, then met the three girls as we had arranged. We walked to a lunchtime spot that turned tables to an end of the day trade, tea, coffee, and donuts.
Marisol, who spoke English, brought a friend, Jennifer, a vivacious girl with red hair, and a third woman, the beauty of the threesome, pale thin and quiet, and confused by all this foreign language. Her name was Erica.
Jennifer had to go to the market to exchange some shoes. We stood around in a street crowded with stalls, and people buying everything, dish wares, tacos, and clothes, while Jennifer fitted and tugged at different models for her pudgy little feet.
Erika, turned suddenly, and blurted out that her father had died. She’d gotten a phone-call from her grandmother. I looked on, not sure how to say the right thing in Spanish, so I said something in English. Jennifer gave Erica a big hug. Marisol looked sad and perplexed.
We agreed to go to Coyoacán, a ways south of the city center.
There we sat at a cafe table, and each of the girls politely ordered tacos and a soda and we exchanged banal Spanish and English with “how do you say” mixed in with a lot of giggles. Erika went to the ladies room and was gone a very long time. She returned pale and shaking, and began to cry quietly. The others told me she lived alone with her grandmother.
When we reached the metro, Jennifer and Marisol said good-night, and we made the usual silly exchange of telephone numbers. I stayed with Erika to walk around Coyoacán a little bit.
The friend that was supposed to take her home never showed up. We talked for about three hours, sitting on an embankment, overlooking the busy avenues. She helped me translate some of the tougher bits of an old Aztec poem that I had gathered at the museum, and she told me a bit of her life story:
Erika’s mother is American, her father Mexican. She took mother’s English name, but both parents deserted her when she was young, first her mother, then her father, but not after he molested her a great deal. She showed me scars, knife wounds, where he had cut her arms in different places. I was horrified, but was also caught in a suspicious state of disbelief, as if she were lying about something.
I noticed she was thin, and extremely fragile in build. I sensed her anger, her fear, her dependence and a very complicated love-hatred feeling about men. Her cute actress’s face froze into a grimace as she told me all this. It made her cold and she started to shake. She had lightweight sweater which she pulled out of her purse and put on.
Her abuela was everything. She said she wouldn’t leave Mexico, as long as that old woman lived. By the end of the evening, perhaps because Erika had shared so much, she became attached as if waiting for some moment of realization. She hung from my arm like a daughter, or a wife, or lover, but really we were just strangers. Perhaps she lingered because she felt some judgement was due from a father figure, something she worried I had held back.
We wandered all over the city.
We walked past Frida Kahlo’s house. The streets were dark, the purple-blue walls where Frida made so many great works of art, were just a black mass hung with vines. In another life, another time, Erika might have been a friend of Frida’s. Her Spanish was very hard for me to understand. But everything else was perfectly clear, as clear as one of Frida’s paintings.
I understood the heat from her arm. We were warm-blooded creatures, walking through a dark city at night.
We really didn’t look much at each other. Another time I might have tried to give her a kiss.
I wondered what her father’s death was doing to her. Did it make her feel guilty? More guilty? She’s now alone, dealing with what he did, responsible for it in some way. Maybe she cut herself, not him, because of things at home, though he may have driven her to it, and maybe now she lies about her scars to hide that. I felt guilty myself for thinking this way. There was pain and confusion, over everything like a low sky. Yet strength was there. I felt it, hanging, a warm precious parcel from my arm.
We scrambled over the hill and down the bank, leaving the cool of Coyoacán for the glare of highways and subway overpasses. A dull roar reverberated from vehicles we couldn’t see.
She made promises to call. Grasping my hand, she led me like a child to the proper train. I wondered what she would do after this. She seemed desperate to place me on the right line, headed for the city center.
There was this closing moment. Something electric happened. We embraced but it could have been done at a distance of a mile. All that was needed was some signal, some synchronous pulse to time it. I felt like it picked me up and set me down. Right after, she was twenty feet away and moving through the platform crowd and I was sitting in the train and the doors were closing.
I did call, and got her once. In faltering Spanish we arranged to meet at a museum. She never showed though I think she got the day wrong.
Some weeks later while exploring the mountains around Oaxaca, she deposited a note at my hotel in Mexico city, entreating me to get in touch, and apologized for not meeting me at the museum.
I called, spoke briefly with her grandmother, but with one day left in Mexico, was unable to phone again.
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I’m remembering all this while listening to a man who runs a small vegetarian restaurant at the edge of the zócalo. I’ve just eaten lunch. Vegetarian food isn’t common in Mexico. The place is quite empty. The owner is good-natured enough. He has a big mustache, like the waiters in the places that serve big steaks. I’m drinking a cup of coffee, writing down what he said. It sounds like a poem:
I worked for a family down by San Angel
Cared for their gardens I watered their trees
Every so often I chipped down some of the iron,
Made good work.
Put on red lead and then a coat of black paint
Pointed up some of the stones.
I kept the bougainvillea under control
Tightened the wires on the TV aerial.
Fixed whatever it was that broke.