We were startled into the gray pre-dawn by what I presumed, in my freshly-woken unreason, to be small carbombs that were being detonated across town. In actuality, it is fairly safe to presume that they were instead a "delightful" series of launched, M80-style fireworks. After all, it was festival time! Wake the feck up so that you can swill more Corona, por favor!
The high stench of the brimstone from the night before had sunken deeply into my hair and clothing, reminding me that I should - if at all possible - set out to find out where the Flying Jesus on Fire had returned to the fetters of the earth.
I rolled over and groaned like a Clydesdale getting a slick-glove-up-the-crack prostate once-over. Being woken by explosions and mariachis at godless hours was beginning to dull my rollicking "sense of adventure" into something more resembling "borderline hostility". As someone who functions only minimally if I can't have at least six hours of sleep, I prayed that this home was equipped with a coffeemaker so fervently that the room was, momentarily, filled with the smell of fresh-cut flowers, and made my way to the bathroom. I'd forgotten that my own unspeakable filth-water was still rankly holding court in a two-inch deep morass in the middle of the bathroom floor and, sloshing into it in the semidarkness barefoot, I spoke in tongues previously unknown to me. Well, if by "spoke" I mean "hissed unfettered obscentities that would have caused a nun's skin to slough off", then yeah.
It was to be the day of Abuelita's birthday party and I, presuming that it would be held at the home, was to become aware that a massive party-hall about a half-mile from the home was where the enchantment was to become ensconsed. This is because easily ONE HUNDRED FIFTY PEOPLE were coming and the courtyard, while quaintly coral-pink, was simply not large enough.
As I elbowed a child in the face at the party's potluck-style buffet table so that I could potentially eat something that hadn't processed urea, licked a particular animal's unmentionables or was mentioned in the Bible as a plague of Egypt, I took a gander at the amassed crowd. At that particular moment their main concern was to ensure that they'd be able to nourish themselves with room-temperature, unidentifiable-to-honkeys regional Mexican cuisine. One hundred fifty people. That's more people than I know, let alone who would come to a birthday party for me. And you'd better believe that Abuelita was keeping a lid on how many presents she'd gotten - my guess is in the low sixties. Her children - all (seven?) of them - apparently arranged this party AND the mariachis every year. Oh, and did I mention that, at about ten that morning, that a small dancing parade had appeared a the door of Abuelita's house, bidden forth by her children? How could I have forgotten?
I initially thought that the child in the tiara on the back of this "float" was a marzipan doll, but when she absently swatted at a pestilential insect that had alighted on her arm I was to learn the stark, if not entirely precious, truth. 
More amusing still was the parade of masked dancers, who gyrated and lurched about in the street as though live trout had been released into their undergarments. As a certifiable maskophile, I have to admit that I was nonetheless...concerned?...by the representation of the African gentleman in the background. More pressing, of course, was the presence of the evil clown that had, as clowns are wont to do, made its way startlingly close to my person. Whereupon I, uh, uttered a small shriek that was mercifully drowned out by the din.
Anyway, back to Abuelita's party. Mary and I cut out halfway through so that we'd once again be able to make use of our sense of hearing, which had been ruthlessly assaulted all evening by a "band" playing with the benefit of twelve-foot stadium speakers. We decided that we would repose in the most -restful?- place we could imagine:
A Mexican cemetery.
Part Two: Mexico City: Ohmigod.
Mexico City has a reputation, and it seems to always have had one. When the conquering Spaniards approached Tenochtitlan in 1521, their first thought must have been "Muh-fuh, they built this shet in a feckin' lake?" Over the next hundred years, the Spaniards rapidly built over the completely leveled city of (formerly) more than 250,000 persons, draining Lake Texcoco and founding the seminal core of what was to become Mexico City. In doing so, they doomed Mexico City to an eternity of sinking, to perpetual dustiness and, ironically, omnipresent water shortages. Add to this that Mexico City sits squarely in a bowl-valley surrounded by ACTIVE VOLCANOES and is subject to unusually severe earthquakes and one has the makings of a fresh bit of urban hell. Guidebooks on Mexico City usually gloss over mentions of the smog which, combined with the fact that Mexico City is one of the world's highest large cities, literally takes your breath away, or of widespread urban blight and rising violent crime.
I didn't care. I had to see it for myself. How often is it that one can say that they've gone to the largest city in the Americas - one that rivals Tokyo in size and sheer number of people? Smog schmog; my vestigial tail wagged unduly at the mere mention of going.
Driving into Mexico City at speeds usually reserved for medical personnel vehicles, one can't really get a grasp on just how fantastically enormous it really is. Imagine, if you will, Los Angeles. Los Angeles on post-Soviet horse steroids. Los Angeles on post-Soviet steriods with live burros darting into the road in front of your car. As Mexico City expands to engulf smaller settlements (which have, I have been told, managed to retain a high degree of local color), it has managed to form a strange sort of megalopolis, and I'd be lying if I wasn't completely overwhelmed with just how damn VAST it had become.
As one who follows stories of miraculous apparitions quite, ahem, religiously, I clearly needed to visit the hallowed site of Tepeyac and the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the apparition that converted all of Mexico and Latin America to Catholicism. Finding the face of Jesus in a yam is one thing, but one simply cannot make light of Juan Diego's cloak.
OK: For those of you who did not attend Catholic school (and are, therefore, normal now), the Virgin or Lady of Guadalupe phenomenon was attributed to (Saint) Juan Diego. While roving about a winter-scrub mountainside above what is now Mexico City, he heard a woman's voice call out to him and bid him come closer. At that point, the apparition asked Juan to speak with local clergy to have a shrine erected to commemorate her, as she was the Virgin Mary. Convinced that the local bishop would be, uh, incredulous, she instructed him to go forth and to leave the rest to her. After he'd spoken to the bishop (who, most likely, indicated that he believed that Juan had ingested some hallucinagenic cactus), Juan opened his cloak to reveal the image of the Virgin and dozens of blooming roses. Roses which, considering that it was the 1500s and the dead of winter, were fairly interesting to the bishop. By "interesting" I mean "he probably soiled himself", clearly.
The sky was sodden and threatening when we arrived at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of the largest churches on earth. On the nearby Tepeyac hill, we found a small commemoration of Juan Diego's miraculous cloak and the bishop.
And the basilica itself. Well, the original one. No, this picture isn't being taken at a weird angle; the original basilica is sinking into former lakebed. Good time.
Inside the second, modern basilica, was the very cloak itself. In case you are wondering, that's bulletproof glass and, at night, a mechanism moves it behind the reinforced wall for safekeeping. The only way to view it is while you are riding a horizontal "moving sidewalk" placed under the main altar of the Basilica. This is because, uh, there was a bombing that attempted to destroy the cloak, but at the last moment the bomb's blast was directed outward towards the hall itself. The cloak was utterly undamaged but the 600 lb. brass cross that had been on the altar was bent nearly in half.
The view from Tepeyac onto Mexico City.
Our recently deceased Pope. This statue is made of - are you ready?- thousands of donated, unneeded keys. As the Pope is the key to the church, this seemed appropriate. Behind, if you look closely, is parked his former Mexico City Popemobile.
Old and new basilicas, with rainy Mexico City brooding behind them.
It was only later that day - and, indeed, that night - that I began to feel a little unsettled. "Unsettled" is potentially too soft a descriptor; it felt as though I'd come to harbor a fever-ridden, rabid racoon deep within my inner workings. I knew what it meant and I was, frankly, surprised that it had come as late as it had.
There was nothing left to do but wait. So I waited to die. I waited to live. I waited for an absolution that might have come if, as was suggested, I had consumed seven or so shots of tequila.
By dawn it had become clear to my fever-ridden mind and my accompanying ashen body that I would, indeed, perish.
***
Next time: Can one tour the largest anthropology museum on earth with a parasitic load?
Until then, I remain,
Domonic (whatthehellhadIeaten?) Potorti
1 comment:
Everybody poops!
k
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