Thursday, December 30, 2010

Sleepwalk


Photo by Graciela Iturbide

I've always wanted to know what is behind the doorway of the house molding with age, crumbling as though there are actual vines twisting in and out of the porous, stucco flesh. But this, after all, is a different kind of jungle. Walking around Mexico City, I feel the existence of two machines operating side by side-one hidden and one revealed. I have been told not to deviate from this street, but still I am prone to think about the family in the room, up the stairwell, behind the door of the damp house on the other side of the street; how divine to be invited inside a strange home.

I have been in Mexico City for two days, crashing on the floor of a modern flat in Condesa with the lovely Germans. Everybody is chain smoking and drinking beer all day, and I am starting to become privy to the secret, communal life of men. A seemingly endless stream of them [men] wander in and out of the flat all day long, endlessly shifting the order around the table and, subsequently, the great ashtray, sometimes ducking out to the deck to watch the rain, which appears to come every day.

Yesterday, I went to the Centro Historico on my own and ate lunch in a touristy restaurant. There was a man with an accordion, who stopped at my table and asked what sort of song I would like to hear. I told him, "a sad one," and he played just that. The feeling stayed with me for a long time... stayed with me all afternoon in the museum as I stared at paintings of humans objectified; I was forced to think about myself as an object, capable of decay.

If only as a pale ghost, the feeling is always with me in Mexico City. Colonial interiors and haunted faces are claiming my attention, making me think of a European tree fort, struggling to overcome the jungle elements. Whatever the feeling is, I am drawn to it and I return to it over and over again-walking the streets of the neighborhood on my own, drunk in a taxi in Roma, stuck on the snake highway staring into the building jumble below. Sometimes I don't know if the weightlessness is coming from within, or if the whole physical world is lifting, slowly, off the ground, only to be whisked away.