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.