“papa”

A recent, furious storm marked the likely end of a particularly relentless rain season. Two stories from the (d)rain.

The first one has all the marks of an urban legend but my father claims it was a very notorious case, appearing in all the major newspapers of the time. Some ten or so years ago, two daughters of a famous doctor returned from a party late at night. A storm having raged not long ago, traffic was a deadlock and the streets were quite literally rivers. To save their friends from a long, slow detour, they got off at the sidewalk opposite their home, not minding overmuch the drench.

They never crossed. They never came home. Their bodies were found in the sewer. An open, overflowed manhole having sucked them that night.

The second story is neither as gruesome nor, really, a story, it’s just a droll scrap from the past. It comes down from my mother who, back in Guzman, her hometown, attended a relatively posh, nun-ran school where the good girls were raised. On rainy days a man used to wait at the school’s exit with the simplest of carts—a wheeled platform with handrails front and back. Booted, he would push the cart himself, across the main avenue and back, charging his passengers some cents of a peso in exchange of a dry crossing. Prim catholic schoolgirls crowded.

The other day dad told me he considered Mexico’s relative economic self-sufficiency—that if we had to, we could, more or less, feed ourselves and scrape some living with only our national resources—one of our greatest strengths. I didn’t buy it. At all. Self-sufficiency seems to me a much overrated, much idealized kind of economic independence.

I’m not self-sufficient, neither is my father, and I’m willing to bet that if you’re reading this, neither are you. Neither is anyone that lives in a city. The only truly self-sufficient people left in Mexico (and in the world)—indians who mostly grow and tend their own food, weave their clothing, and build their huts—live in what we call extreme poverty. Not all poor people are self-sufficient but all self-sufficient people are poor. The more self-sufficient the poorer. The more self-sufficient the more bounded to their own meager abilities, to their own fragile circumstances, to the weather (now when’s the last time you worried about it?).

We, the codependent, have made a different bargain with the world. We betted on specialization and cooperation, and I stand by that decision. It has given us far more wealth and independence than our forebears dreamt of. I don’t think you wake up at night scared of how much the butcher has over you because the only thing you know how to do is sing. Modern cooperation is breathtaking, isn’t it? This MacBook from which I write you, this computer in which you’re reading me—they required the work and talent of thousands of people around the globe.

All this begs the question: Why? What ties these invisible threads of people around the world into building the things you need? Why don’t you fear your butcher will extort you? Why are we all so reckless as to depend on each other for our very sustenance? The answer is trade and competition. Trade is simply the name we’ve given to peaceful cooperation and is the fiber that binds the world. On the other hand, competition, as much as it’s been demonized, is simply the prerequisite of cooperation—rather than being cooperation’s opposite, it is its complement. You don’t fear your butcher because you can always go to another one (or become one!)—it’s as simple as that. Cooperation without competition is indeed the fragile, vulnerable dependence most people rightly fear. Cooperation and competition—free trade, that is—is the resilient, magic codependence to which we owe our wealth and our freedom. (Think about it the next time you hear of a trade barrier of any kind, realize how it ultimately makes you more dependent, more subject to the whims of the special interests pandered.)

So no, I don’t think our relative national self-sufficiency is anything to be particularly proud of. It’s a blessing that we live in such a fertile, bountiful land. If we turn it into an excuse for isolation it’ll be our curse.

After an afternoon of sumptuous, unrestrained culinary indulgence, bursting at the seams, a friend of Ureña, one of dad’s best friends, liked to say, in fantastically black humor: ”Ojala hubiera muerto de niño—para no sufrir tanto.” (“I wish I’d died a child—to save myself from so much suffering.”)

”Trabajo que no da para levantarse a las 11[AM], no es trabajo.” (“A job that doesn’t pay enough for sleeping after noon is no job.”) Used to say another, rather too fond of the good life, friend of Dad’s.

People usually said goodbye to my grandgrandmother Aurora—who is now just over a hundred—with a formulaic, yet earnest, “Take care!” To which she promptly responded, ”You take care! I’m over ninety years old, what I want to do now is die!”

”Que puedes esperar Parra,” (“What can you expect Parra”) used to say Ureña jokingly to my father, ”yo me crie con tortillas de sal y chile. Yo no comi pescado, ni leche, ni jamon.” (“I was raised on tortillas with salt and chile. I didn’t get to eat fish, nor milk, nor ham.”)

Last Saturday, Gwyn invited me to the First Flickr Phototour of Guadalajara^WP. I didn’t know what to expect or what the hell a phototour was (I brought my camera rather as an afterthought), but I wanted to meet that mysterious Gwyn and get some air. (My parents wouldn’t let me go at first, having read in the day’s newspaper about some local murderers that met their victims through the web. When they finally read the article more carefully and found the victims were local gays hooking up dates online, they exhaled, relieved, and let me go without further ado. Which was homophobic and then some but I can’t change the world all at once—I was too late already.)

Well, it was unbelievable fun. I read somewhere that as we grow old we stop seeing things and only name them instead. You look around your room and instead of seeing the bed—its shadows, texture, pattern, perspective—you call it “bed”—and move on. Precipice locals, from John Brunner’s ^WP Shockwave Rider^WP novel, had a very peculiar way to fight this tendency:

With my formist^ELZR obsession and my “My kingdom is not from this world.” joke, I am of course guilty of such distracted overnaming. (It has been, in fact, a point of pride.) And so it was a revelation for me to be forced by the shutter to shut up and simply look around.

There was a point, while we visited the Hospicio Cabanhas, when my euphoria was reaching religious-experience proportions. Everything was suddenly so sensual, so fresh and poignant^EEM, so physical, so there. I looked and looked at stones and tree bark and white walls, and they seemed suddenly infinite in their detail.

I have to go back there soon. Sit in the middle of that huge, geometric patio, and read, design, or program the morning away. Which reminds me, I had this weird impossible idea before breakfast^ELZR (I skipped it) that with its many patios, its huge rooms, and its beautiful cloisters, the Hospicio Cabanhas would be the perfect media hotel!^ELZR We’ll see when we can afford it.

So, yeah, I had a great, crazy time. Check out my photoset, Gwyn’s, and Pedro’s.

Here some of my favorite shots:

...es facil.”

Suele decir mi papa a cada rato y tiene razon. Olvidamos demasiado pronto todo lo que nos costo aprender algo.

...solia decirnos mi papa cada vez que nos enojabamos por que mi mama nos mandaba a hacer algo.

Ha mucho de eso, pero todavia lo recuerdo cada vez que me mandan a hacer algo que me molesta. It never fails to cheer me up.

El ingeniero Hereford¹ era un contratista de pisos, concretos y banquetas al que Rogelio ofrecio un dia un proyecto importante bajo ciertos precios.

“No,” dijo el Hereford, “no puedo aceptarte estos precios Rogelio, que nos lleva el diablo a los dos: a ti por cabron y a mi por pendejo.”

¹ Si, le dicen asi por su parecido a los toros Hereford.

I don’t know what made me cry when I read this brief account by Heberto Castillo some years ago. Perhaps I saw in him—a young, talented, penniless, just-married, idealistic civil engineer—my father, perhaps I saw myself in his unabashed naiveté.

Here’s my hand-typed transcription of the story, which appeared in his 1988 book Si Te Agarran Te Van a Matar: