"Me, Love's servant? I wasn't at all! And suddenly my heart felt ugly, I was sick of myself. I thought that my aim of being simple was just a fraud, that I wasn't a bit goodhearted or affectionate, and I began to wish that Mexico from beyond the walls would come in and kill me and that I would be thrown in the bone dust and twisted, spiky crosses of the cemetery, for the insects and the lizards."

-- The Adventures of Augie March

I am reading this book slowly, partly because I am reading other things and partly just because its language is sometimes difficult for me: and also I was very impressed and got clobbered by the fact that as soon as Augie finds love he goes to Mexico following obviously eagles and snakes. It took me by surprise and had me sliding down memory lane (again).

"And so"

And so we were laying in bed inside the room by the open roof. Our naked bodies etcetera, one against the other dark against the white sheets etcetera. Above our heads the mosquito net which bothered us during sex when one of us stood up on top. Outside, incessantly, the sea-- but I wrote these things already.

We had an argument because Eli had invited us to go with her to the disco in the village nearby, and then Martina said she wanted to go alone. This wasn't the argument because it was me the one who nicely took it out of her that she wanted to go alone -- advantages of being more experienced -- and then, OK, I said, but tomorrow it's our last day here, isn't it kind of stupid? It wasn't. I also took it out of her that she wanted to be alone the following day as well.
She was funny to look at, her profile sulking in the pillow, senses scanning the roof and the noises, at moments making a long face, casually asking, does it bother you?
Now I am forgetting spanish all the way... I don't know if she said '¿te molesta?' or something else.
She was playing the part, let's be real cold and forget all about it, this was but a small amount of the ominous fury she was going to be capable of, stomping on the things she feared she wasn't able to keep from happening, the pain mixed with grace-- but spontaneously I knew better, again the lousy advantages of experience -- and said: of course it bothers me, I want to be with you -- I said it in a gentle way -- and I knew she didn't expect the straight self-exposing dope, a degree of sincerity yet to be known by her-- that's when the argument started, pure obstinacy on her side to make things slump -- I need to be alone, I came alone, I have to go away alone, she said. It's all right, I said, it's a pity, but all right. Just don't be upset now.
But she dressed up in a hurry, in the remaining seconds during which we didn't look at each other. I felt kind of hurt because of the impersonality and the swiftness of this small tragedy -- her behind disappeared in the short jeans skirt, her small lovely breast in the top, her dear mouth disappeared behind a door closed in a rush. I said 'stupid' as the door closed and regretted the sedate casualty of the remark. Then the sea only made noises.
I stayed in bed for a while more. I didn't know of what she was capable of at that time and didn't really worry.

Then I got out, climbed down the stairs, looked down from the terrace to the sea, the empty uneven beach and the foamy round waves under the big clouds -- I went further down, to the beach and to eat. On the way to the restaurants I found abandoned on the sand a bracelet with little colored stones stringed to a leather ribbon and took it.
Later it was still bright, it was bright until late. I got to the internet place, started reading or writing emails, emails that probably contained omissions or lies, and from the monitor I raised my head and there she was, out in the street, licking a white ice cream with her red red tongue and looking at me through the window hole with the same dark serious eyes in abeyance. I smiled, got out. She came close to me and said "I am impulsive". I opened my arms to make her come close and stop her from explaining things, and we hugged and didn't let it go. The girl of the internet place was sitting under the porch with her baby just out of the crib and looking at us. The baby had learned to walk. The dusty road was empty and quiet. I felt Martina's grip and her smell. It was so simple -- and mysterious at the same time. What were her thoughts in that moment? What her feeling? In what area exactly our feelings were meeting? What name or address it had? But we were happy and relieved and no words were needed. Has my heart ever beat that fast? (Yes it has. It doesn't matter.) Eli went alone to the disco that night and Martina told me that when she came back it was four in the morning. We were finally asleep.

"I hate these memories"

I hate these memories. They come to me across the things I read and the music I hear. Funny how I listened to all those songs so keenly the first weeks and now the sheer idea that something like "our" song might exist and might be heard paralyzes me. I thought those things were supposed to go away or not to hurt so much. At the same time I feel like I am pushing the memories to the surface where they should evaporate and dissolve. Because they will. The thing I like most about astrology, whatever kind of astrology including the mayan that Martina liked so much, is the knowledge that the wheel keeps turning, always, although in a complex uneven way. So nothing lasts identical for too long. I feel that I am turning, my hair and posture are already half-way-- I soon am going to look at something else: this is so terrible and unjust-- and these idea of sending her a picture one day of myself from the garden where I will be doing--- whatever, should it be possible, I won't care to send her anything anymore. That's how it goes. Etcetera.

So I fantasize that I receive the emails I am waiting for, open them, give a look at them, very fast, jumping from one line to the other (certain words appearing as in bold, or as slightly larger than the other words). Then I put the emails away -- without actually reading them from start to end, instead going to bed, finally sleeping knowing that waking up the next day won't be a disappointment or a torment. I think we have these dreams (with the classic open eyes) because we dream to do good to ourselves-- And I remember all the times I did that, even as a kid: with letters my mother wrote, or my father, my brother. Letters girlfriends wrote, that went in the drawer without being read until later. But inexactly now it feels like I never waited for those.

-- In picture, above: magic episodes of traveling, from the museum of anthropology, Ciudad de Mexico.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

-- Max Frisch

The Hotel LaCroix in Palenque, Chiapas, is a run-down one storey building whose once beautiful garden is now scattered with trash, and whose once welcoming cozy lobby is now covered by layers of dust, debris fallen from the failing roof. Not that I ever saw it before this day, but just looking through the gates and the garden fence is enough to understand that part of the story. The outside and inside walls of the structure are still marked by martian-red painted-over quotations from books, and in the inside, mysterious colorful paintings of figures from the mayan tradition. The plants in the garden grown wildly, the grass green only in patches. All the rest is lost.

I go around the barrio looking for people who can help me to understand. It is difficult to get enough attention from them today, Sunday, during the futbal match, and many just mumble words keeping their eyes fixed on the TV screens.

As I learn it, the dueño of the hotel LaCroix (el señor LaCroix, possibly) died few years ago (some say four, some say ten) and right after his departure his sons fought over the property, as so often happens. The property is now split between them, and thus unusable, unsellable, abandoned.

The town of Palenque, once a village in the middle of the rain forest, is a horrible place, no doubts about it: grown rapidly in the last forty years out of a handful of cabañas and turned into a collection of modern or semi-modern, cheaply built hotels, restaurants and shops for gringos and for those who live out of tourism, makes the same impression of certain italian cities, especially in the south, whose growth consists of self-built unfinished cement houses that cannot last more than two generations without turning into dust. They have no spirit, no solidity, no character... People inhabit them, occupy them, and crowd them with big cars and loud music and colorful commercial banners without understanding that it is the city itself, its careless presence, the cause of their unhappiness.

The so called colonial cities of Chiapas I visited after Guatemala, before arriving here, in this ugly hot, damp, dusty place, were of rare beauty: San Cristobal de Las Casas, of course, despite all the silly t-shirts and puppets of the subcomandante, where the "alternatives" go to the pub "revolucion" apparently convinced that being in Chiapas itself is some dangerous revolutionary act; even more beautiful, Comitan (where, all right, they stole my cell phone on the road to the Lagos of Montebello): an almost gringos-free town of rich and poor, of sexy women and steep narrow roads going up and downhill, ran by the inevitable wolksvagen beetles.
These cities, rich islands in the middle of the poverty and inequality of the rich state of Chiapas, are proof that if anything, the spanish colonialists, incapable of recognizing the beauty of the pre-hispanic architectures and culture they only wanted to destroy, obviously had an idea of beauty themselves: an idea which was powerful and which was meant to resist across the centuries and resist almost forever-- although nothing does, just like it didn't the idea of beauty and religion they were seeking to destroy.

In Palenque there is nothing of the beauty and character and promise left over by the loathed colonial times: it is instead a perfect example of the confusion and wasteland of modern times, times were humans are no more capable of designing, inventing, or imitating a beautiful town: they cannot vindicate their past in any way, but still they call themselves in way of development, mainly because they can impose their loud cheap pop music to anyone's ears, thanks to their new stereos (and mind you, half of it is cheap pop italian music sung in spanish by hypocrite italian pop stars).

At the core of the town of Palenque, the only decent thing would have been the Hotel La Croix, and probably only for me, here, today: only because I am the only one to know that the Hotel La Croix was so beautifully described by Max Frisch in his masterpiece Homo Faber, and because it was a unpredictable, unique place.

But the hotel is closed. For one night I sleep into another one, a horrible box of cement down the road. In the following morning I go to the ruins, sit on the top of one of the overwhelming temple-pyramids and sleep surrounded by the monkey-bird-chicharras sounds of the awaken forest all around, and later, by the voices of the vendors and the tourists and the guides explaining it all. I long to be back to San Cristobal in the evening, the small old colorful houses and the relative calm of its zocalo. And from there, possibly to get to the beaches somewhere on the pacific coast, for a couple of my last weeks here on this so big continent called America.