Would you like me better if I was rich, if I was fit?

The area is what people call “not the best part of town”. Over there, there is a baby’s clothes store decorated on 1976, the window displays (proudly?) a few knitted items that make you want to run to Wal-Mart, we can smell the dust, the stagnation and the despair even as we drive by. Further down, there is a Coffee Time, the clientele is a select group of people whose health, luck, fortune and appearance compete furiously for the same adjectives, such a: ‘poor’, ‘terrible’, ‘seen better days’, and ‘despicable’.

The other stores look as helpless, dirty and anachronic as the first ones. People walking on the street were more likely to move you to compassion or fear than to admiration.

From the back seat, our lovely catalan friend says “I don’t like this area much, it makes me feel… I don’t know… down”. V & I smiled at her from our front seats. “Really? Well no wonder, how come you don’t like a dirty, ugly part of town?”

That part of the conversation falls behind, same as that part of town. Music by Sting on the stereo keep us company us as we move along empty streets, cold winter night. As we get closer to home we drive through Yorkville, properly illuminated streets, expensive stores, and prices a few orders of magnitude higher those other areas.

Our catalan friend, says again, with absolutely innocence: “And them for example, this area makes me feel much better. I like it much better”. V & I laughed this time. “Really… the trendiest, best decorated, more exclusive stores in town cheer you up? You prefer them? But why?”

For V&I the answer was screaming at us from so many different directions that it was pointless even to start enumerating the reasons. Why prefer a Cartier store over a bankrupt prone, dirty store, that makes you think of endless evenings hoping for any customer to come in and by anything? Why prefer to watch a young, healthy, fit couple, well dressed and having a good time; over watching an overweight, poorly dressed woman talking to herself and yelling at strangers?

Is only natural. Isn’t it?

But there again. Does that mean that is only natural to prefer to spend time with some friends over others just because ones are more attractive or more successful? Would you like me better if I was rich, if I was fit? If I had publish a few books, dictated conferences and have a six pack under my t-shirt?

Is it normal? Is it right? Is it right because is normal? Maybe our friend was right on not finding the answers as obvious as we did.

Makes me think of that song “That I would be good” by Alanis Morissette:

“that I would be good even if I did nothing
that I would be good even if I got the thumbs down
that I would be good if I got and stayed sick
that I would be good even if I gained ten pounds

that I would be fine even if I went bankrupt
that I would be good if I lost my hair and my youth
that I would be great if I was no longer queen
that I would be grand if I was not all knowing”

Musical Calculator

This is my second trip ever from Mexico City to the sacred city of Teotihuacan, but is pretty obvious that the bus we are riding has gone this path hundreds or perhaps thousands of times before.

Every time the driver switches gears the engine moans like a prehistoric, wounded animal; and there we go, moving forward like there is no tomorrow… And by the sounds of the machine, indeed for this bus perhaps there is no tomorrow.

The air is full of metal and fabric. Really: fabric and metal particles floating in the air. We can’t see them, but bow can we smell them! So many hands and bodies have rubbed against the seats and grabbed the steel handrails of this bus that the molecules on their surface are not just wearing out: they are giving up. Tired of being brushed time and time again, some particles defect their Solid state and jump off, choosing the careless life of being suspended in the air. Do they see their life past before their eyes before they jump off? How many thousands hands grabbing, holding, pressing, rubbing do they see?

In Mexico City, the shortest path between A and B may be a straight line, like in the rest of the world; but no matter how short is the distance between A and B, the path is always, always crowded with people trying to sell you something. Buses, subway, traffic lights, chinampas… it seems that there is a symbiotic relation between transportation and commerce. So the real philosophical question is: if a bus travels across a Mexican forest, and no one is selling anything… does the bus still moves?

There was no much surprise then, when a 40-something year old guy got in the bus and introduced to us the “Musical Calculator”. Are you curious? So were we:

He was, like I said, in his mid forties. Like so many underemployed people in Mexico, he dressed in the dignified way that gives poverty an uncanny resemblance to middle class, without an actual expectation to be the real thing. His hair was carefully combed into order with significant amount of gel; his shirt was white by birth, translucent by use; and he was wearing a tie despite the sun, despite the heat, despite the fucking poverty. Like so many street vendors, his language had a level of formality not heard since the times of royal courts, which makes me wonder if Garcilaso de La Vega has re-incarnated and is writing these speeches.

When he started talking, V & I looked at each other, incredulous. We tried to imagine the story leading to this performance: we pictured him lured to a promised high income by a newspaper add, or an overoptimistic compadre. Then he lands the job, gets a piece of paper with the sales pitch, and spends hours memorizing it: in a tiny living room with plastic table, perhaps in the small bathroom where hot water is an unlikely guest, perhaps at the local cantina. Here is a much abbreviated version of his performance, I can only pay a modest tribute to his art:

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Electronic and Entertainment Imports and yours truly are proud to bring to you The Musical Calculator.

The Musical Calculator is an invaluable piece of engineering accomplishment that should ever be missing at your office. At your desk. At home. At school… The Musical Calculator is operated by solar power, thus you will never have to worry about batteries. The Musical Calculator offers to you the most diverse variety of mathematical computations such as –dramatic pause in between each feature- The Addition… The Subtraction… The Multiplication… The Division... The Square Root… And –grand finale- The Decimal Point”

This went on and on for a while. V & I noticed that The Musical Calculator was musical only in name, as no sound was expected to come out of it, but that was not the point. The point is the way that, in the age of the iPhone, 20 years after the wrist-watch calculator, this guy managed to transmit genuine awe about his beloved product. This guy, apparently, could even make a living by selling it on the buses. He didn’t sell any on that particular one, but that didn’t seem to affect his mood. After walking up and down the isle displaying his product proudly, he left the bus, not before turning to his audience and saying:

“Thanks so much for your kind and generous time, have yourselves the best of evenings”

Teotihuacan, October 2007.