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maiz y crema
October 07, 2004
I'm hard at work on my new website, which, unfortunately, first requires that I relearn Dreamweaver. One thing the finished product will do in addition to housing my blog will be to serve as a repository for all the bits of scribbling that have come before. But this blog stuff at the moment is easy enough that I can throw some of those bits out there. So, here's one.
maiz y crema
“Do you wanna go in?”
I looked through the windows, saw the people lining the inner walls of the cathedral, supplementing hundreds more in the pews. I had no disrespect for the Virgen de Guadalupe, and I actually sort of believed the story of the young boy, of the roses, and of the image that burned into his cloak like some divine Polaroid. I believed it was there inside, perhaps the only bona fide miracle I’d ever be able to stand in line to see. But I was tired. Mexico City had worn me thin, and damn it, I was tired.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the city. At home in Austin, Texas, I was jaded by the oldest buildings I had ever encountered, with their cornerstones dating back to an almost-prehistoric 1800 and something or the other, and their easily imaginable histories. Here in Mexico City, though, buildings of a scope and heritage completely foreign to me had reigned for centuries. Even more mind-boggling, beneath those ancient buildings, they had found pyramids, statues, remnants of even greater kingdoms long gone.
But it’s one big-ass city. We had walked through most of it, my girlfriend Margo and I, her sister and three other girlfriends. We had crisscrossed the city on the surprisingly clean and modern Metro system for the rest of the time, struggling to stake out enough room to breathe, our chest cavities compressed by throngs of surprisingly but unfailingly polite locals, our arms quivering with exertion as we held our bags over our heads to make more room. And just the day before, we had done epic battle with a gang of pickpockets that took advantage of dimwitted tourists with shallow pockets that stood on crowded subways with their hands up in the air on the verge of asphyxiation.
Here, faced with the prospect of viewing the evidence of the miracle that had changed the course of Catholicism in the Americas, I was underwhelmed. I declined, and everyone but Margo and I, including, interestingly, her Hindu friend Swarna, moved inside.
Margo and I waited out in the courtyard. The courtyard was filled with these… really impressive buildings that were old, and the night sky stretched out, muted by light pollution from a city that stretched across the earth forever, so you didn’t know which ended first, the sky or the city, and the stones all cool through the soles of our feet, blah blah blah.
I’m sorry. I suffer from a peculiar laziness now, that doesn’t serve a writer well at all. Once, the previous paragraph would have been in itself a miracle of prose, the image of the courtyard and the Mexico City night burned onto the page, and into the reader’s mind, just like the portrait of the Virgin Mary in that kid’s cloak. But these days, I erupt straight to what seems to be the point, the moments; the points and steps of the proof are more often lost to me, too tedious to drag myself through. I only want the answers, the counterbalance to the weight I feel, the ending to the unsatisfying story that is living me.
So anyway, we fell quiet, steeping in the moment, and I think we felt that maybe we were missing something, like we were emotionally stunted and unable to feel the meaning of where we stood. Still, maybe I sent a hope or a wish to the ancient buildings, to the boy’s cloak inside the cathedral. I knew better than to expect answers or a timely service call. God just refuses to work that way, and that’s OK, because at a minimum, being your own boss seems like a god’s prerogative.
Margo and I would alternately talk, then fall silent for a while, soaking in the afore-inadequately-described night and history that surrounded us. As we stood there alone, in one of those moments of silence, we heard a snuffling sound, and we turned towards the gate behind us, where a scraggly, limping little dog stepped through the gate. His tail wagged, and for a second, I recalled the zen koan that questioned whether the wind blew the flag, or the flag the wind. The mutt walked up and sat there before us, patiently and quietly, tail wagging happily but calmly, asking for nothing, in his friendly eyes, the warm cool depth of the night sky above, unmarred by the light.
We stood alone, the three of us, surrounded by hundreds of years of man’s monuments and institutionalization of the sacred, his attempts to reach God with stones and steeples. Inside, 30 yards away, insulated by the modern cathedral, hundreds, maybe thousands, waited to catch a glimpse of the image of the mother of God on a bit of cloth.
Margo and I looked at each other and laughed a little. We never talked about it, really, but at the time, we felt the same inexplicable, unexpected, unlikely flash of recognition. The city seemed to grow completely quiet, the thin and polluted air crisp and alive.
Where impatience held me from description earlier, now something else does, something bigger and undeniable, something I can still feel now, years later, but can come no closer to putting into words without trivializing it.
I still held the cup of crema and maiz, bought from a street vendor out of hungry desperation. I pulled the spoon out of the cup, tore the top half of it off, and set it in front of the dog.
And there, in a city of countless millions, amidst the devout and the hopeless, ourselves a bit of each, on worn stones that joined history to new religion, the wind blew gently, Margo held my hand, and God ate from a Styrofoam cup, my offering of crema y maiz gracefully and gratefully consumed. And we didn’t even have to stand in line.
Posted by Rob at October 7, 2004 11:25 PM