Entre las Aguas

My second memory of Mexico is of water. Clear, cool blue-green water in a bathtub. We were visiting the Rafael’s, re-kindled friends of father’s who lived in a modern apartment somewhere off Insurgentes Avenue, which had a big window that overlooked the city, or so it seemed. It was warm, I was bored and I needed to go to the bathroom.

The bathroom was cool and fresh. Shiny chrome poles held up a white porcelain basin and the smell of green “pal-moh-liveh” soap added a savory of sorts to the moisture of cement tile. The softened light of the harsh sun outside filtered through the crinkly, translucent windows, reflecting sharply off the bright white of the sink and dissolving into the greenish refractions of the water in the tub. I would as soon have stayed there.

I reopened the door. Did the adults know that the tub was full of water? There was an abrupt halt in their conversation and a palpable momentary panic. I hadn’t done anything, they asked, had I? No... it was just that the bathtub was full of water -- crystal clear, bluish-green water. It was explained to me that one needed to store water because the water always ran out, daily. Ah.... As a child I accepted this strangeness with little criticism.

More interesting to me was the smell and texture of this water. Water in New York never felt this way. There was no contrast. It was just a substance. Here, the water was always playing off something and just as invariably always reflecting something. I stood staring into the tub, transfixed by its watery shadows. I wanted to run my hand through it feeling its yielding thickness.

Water may have run out every afternoon, but in the altiplano water was everywhere. In the afternoons, it evaporated in the dry heat or lingered in shallow pools on cool moist stone or collected in the crevices of lava rock.

In the early evening, as pipes creaked and clanked, the water sputtered back on and made hollow rushing sounds as it filled cement tanks, or simply overflowed from spigots or hoses that had been left open.

In the mornings, soft slapping sounds resounded throughout the city as buckets splattered their contents and water washed over cement sidewalks and stones adding its fresh liquidity to the piercing chill. Whisking sounds of wicker brooms scraped sheens of water into gutters with scratchy rythyms as red geraniums in metal cans or terracotta pots slowly came to life lifting the dew off their leaves in the still feeble, tentative morning sunlight. Somewhere, on someone’s roof top, a cock would rasp out its chortling crow.

Amoxcalco.... in yectli cocoxqui
ye con ya totoma, aitec

En la casa de las pinturas...
el hermoso faisán,
su canto despliega
en el interior de las aguas

In the House of Spring ....
the resplendent pheasant sings

His song unfurls

from within the waters.

--In The House of Spring,
Netzahualcoyotl (1402-1472)