The Somnambulist's Diary #5

In the dream, my sister and I are traveling through a dream version of Italy. It is a very specific place with stable, dream contours and familiar monuments: a cobblestone square next to a small canal. We quickly leave this familiar part of the world for a series of country roads, like the outskirts of Parma. While the streets are unpaved, there are modern-looking houses lining them and small fields full of wheat or grapes can be glimpsed between them. As it begins to get late, my sister and I stop at a hostel, though it looks like a large mansion.

Inside, it is very strange. It seems to be populated by one family: grandparents, parents, in-laws, cousins though no one under the age of twenty or so. They have a distinctive look, big teeth, small, close-set eyes. They are friendly but there is something off. My sister and I watch TV with them. All the rooms are over-sized and this one is more of a home theater. Old, dilapidated couches sit at odd angles, and my sister and I settle into them, pressed up against the many family members. I am seated next to a very old man with rheumy eyes. He keeps slapping me on the back and pointing at the giant projector screen. There is soccer on it, teams in North Africa.

The bedroom looks like a hostel at least: lots of rows of bunkbeds in an un-adorned white box. In the middle of the night I need to get up and use the restroom but the one I passed by earlier is filthy. I wander out onto the front porch, which, covered by a tarp, extends some twenty feet in front of the house. There is a door that leads into a wing of the house I did not notice before. I open it and find a very modern, well appointed bathroom. The design is Art decco, the furniture is comfortable. And there is a door from the restroom deeper into the new wing.

I open the door and find stairs leading down into a basement rec-room--very well kept and pristine. Compared to the somewhat ramshackle nature of the rest of the house this is also a shock but it makes me uneasy. That's when I see them, glowing eyes in the relative darkness of the rec-room. They come closer, attached to children, horribly deformed, their flesh streaked and scarred and, suppurating keloid flesh hanging in tumorous clumps. They are dressed in nice velvet dresses and tuxedos, crawling on their hands and knees towards me. I scream and run.

The next day, my sister and I are driving around the outskirts still, looking for a place to stay, or our parents, or just trying to avoid going back to the hostel. We are driving by a school and there are a lot of children crossing, It is utter chaos and I am switching gears constantly, cutting a slow path through the crowd. That is when I back up into something. There is a crunch of metal. I get out of the car and see that I have hit a man's bicycle. It is twisted up under my back bunker. The hostel is down the street and I am eager to get away from it, so I approach apologetically. The owner is 7ft tall and sinewy, rail-thin. His face is gaunt and he has gray, stringy hair down to his waist. He is dressed in a clean, red tracksuit. and there is something so threatening in his eyes, so menacing in the clench of his teeth that I start to back away. He raises a wrench in one hand and starts striding towards me. I put my hands over my face and sink to the ground. He walks past me and smashes my rear-windshield with his wrench. Then he bolts, letting out an unearthly howl.

My dad appears at the end of the street and beckons my sister and I to follow him up onto the highway. As we do so, I wake up.

Shadows in the Noonday Glare

Given its mythic importance in my mind (as the birthplace of my grandmother and the cultural center of the part of my heritage with which I most strongly identify) I never had a very clear image in my head of Mexico City. 

The closest I ever got were conflicting descriptions of a city high atop a mountain, a city built over a drained lake, a city densely populated and overpolluted. None of these came with a clear mental image. Even now that I've been, with my less than thorough investigation of its various districts and barrios, I have only a perfunctory impression of the place. It was not what I expected. 

The center of town feels like it could be Manhattan or Milan, with wide crowded streets and austere edifices, many stories tall. But as one spirals out from the Zócalo, a different portrait begins to emerge. The city is green, greener than any American city I have been to, with palms and cactus and stunted, twisted pines growing up, over a d around the buildings. There is a very clear feeling of shadow beneath all those trees, a palpable darkness in the canopy that feels like the mysteries of dense jungle, or, more accurately of bayou, with crepe myrtle and willow obscuring the views of gated courtyards. Though I did not see any, it reminded me most if the eucalyptus forest I remember from my childhood spent in both Woodland Hills and at the LA zoo. The shadows in the trees are equal parts comforting and dangerous.

The buildings arou d which this foliage grows are pleasantly dilapidated with unfinished, unpainted facades and dark tendrils of water stains reaching down their sides.  Everything gives off the sense of decay, of once-grandeur, affably sliding into disrepair, passively allowing itself to be reclaimed by the trees. 

And then there is the pollution. I am used to LA smog--an oily smear at the edge of the horizon which turns to magic and fire as the sun sets. Here, it takes the form of a luminescent haze. I did not see the sun once in my stay, though the skies were often cloudless. The light is too intense to look upon as it drifts down through the occultation of the trees. 

This was most true in the neighborhood of Coyoacan, where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in their Casa Azúl. My sister described it as New Orleans square at Disneyland, but it is more somber than that, despite the crowds, street vendors and blaring calliope music. The city has a peevish dignity, a feeling of suffering you to be there. 

As you leave it, you understand the description of a city in the clouds. You wind down out of large sloping peaks, scores of homes and apartments clinging like lichen to their stones. At the base is unmitigated urban sprawl, an endless field of white drywall, black tangles of wire and gray billboards cryptically displaying only a telephone number. Looking back, the peaks of the mountains, where the city sits, are wreathed in mist and haze, the sky darkening yet still, somehow, glowing like a computer monitor, displaying nothing but quite clearly on. 

I was there as a tourist, with all the arrogance of travel--wondering at the lives of people I thought I knew through a moment of eye contact on the street. Looking back, this description is full of that arrogance: wanting to see a thriving ruin instead of a major metropolis whose decrepitude I assume only from the tangle of its foliage and cracks in its paint. In the end, despite my being of Mexican descent, I know nothing about the city or its people and no three day trip could make it so. That was, however, the city I saw, the city whose imagined pristine history, unclear in my mind, was dashed apart by seeing it, alive and real and overgrown by itself.