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.