This week-end I decided to explore Cuernavaca beyond my home drag, Avenida Morelos. Yesterday I took a cab and asked to be taken to Librería Gandhi, a bookstore that had been recommended by one of the professors at the Tec. The taxi driver knew where I wanted to go and took me there by a fairly circuitous route (but Cuernavaca is so cleaved by gulches that there is no route that is not circuitous) and he explained to me that there was a “manifestación” or demonstration downtown at the Zócalo and that one had to avoid it. I later saw he was right as the bus that took me back to the Zócalo got stuck in traffic on a street full of shops with signs claiming “se compra oro”, ‘gold bought here.’ The taxi driver was a chatty type, or I encouraged his chattiness from the back seat, and told me that he had been a philosophy student at the university, that he had valiantly taken on “Neetch” (i.e., Nietzsche), and that he had written a “tesina” or graduating paper on truth, or Truth, that is, on finding out how to catch such slippery eel. He said that the Mexican essayist Carlos Monsiváis had been great inspiration, and that Monsiváis convinced him that truth was really very malleable –a postmodern position, I take it. The driver also asked me where I was from, and immediately he went on to inquire who were more pretty, Mexican women or Spanish women. I missed my chance (I should have unhesitatingly answered: But of course the mexicanas!) to point out to him that the truthful answer to his question was slippery, subjective, and surely phantasmagoric. I told him instead that at my age more and more women appear beautiful and thus I had a sort of data overload to be able to decide. And neither will I tell you, my patient readers, which ones I think the more beautiful. Come and see for yourselves.
It turns out that Librería Gandhi is now Ganco Colorines, and I am going to take a break now and give them a call to see if one book I was after has arrived.
