Hit Parade

Bus Rides #2

For my work here I must take one or even two rides (to the school and back) on a bus every day, and so my vision of Cuernavaca is essentially framed from a bus, full of jerks and stops, of fumes and noise. The buses are called “rutas” and numbered; the word “Ruta” and a number is painted on every white bus from the city transport, and the painted sign must have given the name to the busses themselves. Mine is number 18 and it costs me each way either 5 pesos (about 50 cents of a dollar) or 4.50 depending on the whim of the driver or some regulation I have been unable to fathom.

The buses race through to the end of their lines, sometimes passing each other more than once in a short stretch and in defiance of oncoming traffic. When the driver is young you are assured of a five-peso thrill, made more exciting by the abundance of speed bumps. Cuernavaca’s motto is ‘the city of eternal spring’; ‘the city of a thousand speed bumps’ might be more appropriate, if less likely to attract tourism. I cannot decide whether the bumps where placed on the pavement in order to slow down the traffic or to offer bus drivers an added challenge. I am daily in the hands of two or more Evel Knievel wannabes.

Robin Hood

First Impressions

There is, about Mexico, something Italian, by which I mean something impenetrable. Like in Italy, there are three levels of architectural and artistic splendor, and like in Italy people make things look pretty, sometimes with the poorest of materials: a cracked flower pot here, a façade painted the color of pumpkin there, colorful dresses, patio gardens, the hundreds of handicrafts. There is the Catholic religiosity, and all those altars hanging from corners with Virgins waiting for flowers and saints defying what pigeons do best in cities. Then there is something Italianate about the Mexicans themselves; the way they walk, almost solemn; the way the men gaze at women, taking an old world-order for granted; the diversity of the pululating population: old mammas, peasant types (here in their straw Western hats with a little tail hanging from the back of the rim), the go-geters who have embraced twenty-first century capitalism and strut about with their cell phones and their gummed hair. But all these similarities only stress the differences. While Italian impenetrability seems to be a form of aloofness, the Mexican seems to be a form of refusal. Italian aloofness has to be a modernized form of their Renaissance sprezzatura or the classical ataraxia, that is, a conviction that one can float above the tempest-tossed daily malaises. Mexican impenetrability is more of a mystery, surely a surliness, a kind of diving under, as one does while swimming on a beach when the waves are too high.