About the Author: John Armor practiced before the Supreme Court for 33 years. John_Armor@aya,yale.edu His latest book, to appear in September, is on Thomas Paine. www.TheseAreTheTimes.us

¿Qué hay en verdad de fondo tras la promulgación de la ley SB1070?

Un inmigrante se columpiaba

sobre la tela de una araña

como veía qué resistía

fue a llamar a otro inmigrante…

Más que una clave archivonómica se trata de un distintivo. La ley aprobada y por entrar en vigor dentro de unas semanas en el estado de Arizona, Estados Unidos, ¿qué es? Como lo veo yo, es una llamada de atención tanto para el gobierno y la sociedad estadounidenses como para los mexicanos; y aún más, para el resto del mundo.

Estados Unidos y cada uno de sus estados son libres y soberanos para hacer dentro de sus fronteras cualquier cosa que les plazca, y que sirva para la mejor convivencia. El respeto a la ley es prioritario en Arizona como en China, pero cuando las leyes son usadas como ariete, cuando se emplean como un pretexto para otros fines, es cuando resultan sospechosas, por decir lo menos.

En México, la reacción a esta tan cacareada y polémica ley ha causado gran disgusto, incomodidad y revuelo. Ya no se diga en Estados Unidos, donde las multitudinarias y variadas manifestaciones no se han hecho esperar. Se hacen a diestra y siniestra acusaciones a la gobernadora Brewer, empleando un sinnúmero de calificativos hacia su persona y su gobierno. El despropósito está instalándose en la opinión pública. ¿En verdad se trata de una imposición “racista”? ¿Cuál es el trasfondo de una decisión de esta envergadura? ¿Se trata de la versión real de aquella película “La segunda guerra civil” protagonizada por Beau Bridges? También podría pensarse que se trata de una artimaña concertada para forzar al congreso estadounidense a tomar medidas definitivas y, de una vez por todas, votar una reforma migratoria más que suficiente, más bien moderna y ajustada a las necesidades reales tanto del país como de la gigantesca población migrante que año con año determina el dinamismo de la todavía principal economía del mundo.

Pero también puede pensarse que es una forma de acicate al gobierno y la sociedad de México, toda vez que, entrapado el país en una guerra sin cuartel contra el narcotráfico y otras linduras como la crisis económica, la influenza, etcétera, está arrinconado en la definición de soluciones concretas, viables y factibles que resuelvan el problema de la migración dentro y hacia fuera del propio México.

MIGRACIÓN ES MOVIMIENTO

De México se va la gente no por falta de oportunidades, ofertas de trabajo hay y muchas, pero pocas satisfacen las necesidades y expectativas de la población. El campo ha sido abandonado a su suerte y la población rural ha optado por ceder a las “bondades” de la vida urbana. Sueldos bajísimos combinados con costos altísimos de diversa índole obligan a las clases bajas y media (lo que queda de ella) a hacer malabares, recurriendo a desempeñarse en más de una actividad para llevar el sustento a casa y cumplir medianamente con sus obligaciones más elementales. La concentración de poder político y económico en unas cuantas familias y empresas (sin hacer hincapié en las trasnacionales, muchas de ellas estadounidenses) ha hecho de México un laberinto cuyo centro no puede ser hallado si no como reliquia del pasado, y la salida, la mejor que puede ofrecerse, generalmente es la fácil y a contra pelo de las normas y los ordenamientos: piratería, comercio informal, narcomenudeo, entre otras.

De México y hacia el sur el problema es similar, claro que con matices según el país y la región. Hoy, México junto con el resto de Latinoamérica, ha decidido “dar la espalda” a Estados Unidos y formar un bloque común, con fundamento en lo que les es común, la cultura, el idioma. Latinoamérica en su conjunto es mayoría en población comparada con Estados Unidos y Canadá; pero, en otros factores por supuesto que son el contrapeso justo del continente estos otros dos. Por eso también México y el resto de Latinoamérica caminan de la mano de Estados Unidos. Pura conveniencia mutua. La división norte-sur, por maniquea, es parte de lo que está generando la mecánica del continente. Estados Unidos y Canadá, por su nivel de vida, son objetivo aspiracional para muchos latinoamericanos. Estos, al llegar a la “tierra prometida” ven, en la mayoría de los casos, que sus “sueños” se convierten en pesadillas, máxime cuando terminan siendo explotados, ninguneados, desprovistos de los derechos más elementales.

Está mal México, sí, porque no hace lo que debería para retener a su población. Pero también está mal Estados Unidos, porque está haciendo todo lo posible porque no entre en su territorio la materia prima humana que históricamente ha definido al país como lo que es, uno formado desde la raíz por inmigrantes (y, recordemos, no siempre de la mejor estofa, como muchos de los primeros colonizadores).

AL DEMONIO LAS FRONTERAS

En una época cuando las fronteras cada vez están más desdibujadas, la migración, sea por causas de turismo o por búsqueda de la supervivencia, acentúa y complica los conceptos añejos que teníamos de soberanía y nacionalismo, por mencionar dos. Al amparo de la “seguridad nacional” y el miedo irracional al “terrorismo” (también a los rebeldes que defienden sus causas nobles se les llama ahora de ese modo), países como Estados Unidos hacen lo que China hace dos siglos: cerrarse. Mientras, China hace lo contrario y ¡miren cómo está y a dónde va!

Entender los tiempos no es algo que a los gobiernos estadounidenses se les haya dado con cierta facilidad históricamente. En México, en cambio, seguimos viviendo de los rencores no asimilados.

Un genetista estadounidense ya demostró con sus investigaciones que el concepto de “raza” es no sólo una estupidez, sino el más imbécil pretexto para la discriminación. Todos tenemos de todos en nuestros genes. Pero no es más grave la discriminación por esta causa. La verdaderamente grave es la que obedece a prejuicios infundados, al odio irracional.

En una de mis primeras colaboraciones a SWI afirmé, y lo sostengo, que yo sí discrimino. Es natural la discriminación, es parte del proceso adaptativo de todas las especies. Discrimino cuando tengo que elegir entre comerme una manzana o una naranja, para ello aquilato sus propiedades, mi gusto, mi necesidad del momento. Pero entre este concepto en su acepción lógica, incluso ecológica y antropológica, y el uso que se le da cotidianamente al tratar con el otro sólo distan la grosería, la obsecación, la egolatría.

Los seres humanos nos debemos mucho a cada cual, y sería muy sano empezar a imaginar un mundo sin más fronteras. Ya estamos tan revueltos, que las líneas divisorias están de más. Estados Unidos (pero no únicamente) se ha dedicado a imponer su voluntad a otras naciones mediante recursos transfronterizos y pretextando mil y una razones, muchas de ellas bastante ridículas cuando no enojosas. Entonces, quieren o no quieren fronteras. Quieren mandar en el mundo, pero que el mundo no rebase el límite de… ¿de qué? Quieren ser el policía del mundo, pero en vez de admiración, como el policía de la película muda ganan animadversión y recelo de parte de los demás.

HABLANDO DE NACIONES Y TRAICIONES

Cuando un estadounidense muere fuera de su territorio, el mundo es el territorio estadounidense y hay que mover cielo, mar y tierra para dar con la justicia. Es un país que de suyo ha promovido la acción mercenaria. En México, nuestra Constitución pena al ciudadano que pelea en las filas de un ejército extranjero por causas ajenas a México, son traidores a la patria. Eso son muchos mexicanos enrolados para pelear como carne de cañón en Irak, Afganistán… Son traidores a México. Pero con en México somos muy románticos, además de ignorantes de nuestras propias leyes, cuando muere un mexicano “heróicamente” en esas tierras tan lejanas, en vez de señalarlo ensalzamos su memoria como la de “alguien que luchó por la libertad y la democracia”. ¡Pamplinas! Nos merecen respeto los familiares perdidos en algún enclave de la Sierra Madre, es humanitario allegarles el cuerpo para darle cristiana sepultura y consuelo. Es comprensible la actitud, pero entonces ¿a qué estamos jugando? ¿Somos o no somos?

¿Es para enorgullecerse pelear guerras ajenas para países que, aun cuando sus ideales son nobles, su fundamento es contrario a los intereses más básicos? El soldado mexicano en el ejército estadounidense, ese que come tacos y hamburguesas, ese que llegó de mojado y ya como recluta porta su green card, mastica a medias su lengua materna y escupe la adoptada, no es más que un mercenario. Un inmigrante y mercenario; mientras tenga papeles es tolerado, de lo contrario…

Contradicciones tenemos todos. Preocupante es que las contradicciones nos lleven a definiciones y decisiones contrarias a nuestra naturaleza. ¿Cuál es la naturaleza y el espíritu de la ley SB1070?

It was a day like no other in memory. It was a day of miracles, and there were to be two of them before midnight. The sun saw the first one when it peeked over the mountains and looked down into the great Valley of Mexico, astonished to find that during the night the valley had been swept clean of the smog that usually covered it in layers of filthy smoke and grit. Only the oldest people, like old Pablo Gutierrez, nearly one hundred, remembered when the air was clean and smelled so sweet. Pleasantly surprised, the sun rose over the mountains and bathed everything in light. From village to village it went, waking birds and animals and people, moving rapidly toward the vast city that lay like a gigantic animal across the ancient dry lake bed of Lake Texcoco. High in the western mountains the Aztec rain god Tlaloc looked down on the valley and smiled, pleased with his night’s labor. Moving this way and that with his great broom of wind and rain, he had pushed the mass of filthy air over the eastern mountains where it descended to the sea and was dispersed by winds that swept north from Central America to Texas and back out to sea again. Tlaloc was pleased with the results of his work, but he was somewhat grumpy too. In both city and village, people would think the smog’s disappearance was a miracle of the God the Spaniards had brought with them only a few hundred years earlier, who walked on the earth as the man Jesus, had an earthly mother named Mary, a father named Joseph, several brothers, and was trained as a carpenter. Tlaloc growled, rattling the trees. Then he folded his arms and stared, disillusioned. Such is the way of life. Hadn’t he and Huitzilopochtli the old Aztec war god said it to each other often enough during these past few hundred years? Was there really some small chance that somewhere the idea might pop into someone’s head that it was he, Tlaloc, who performed the miracle of a smogless day without help from anyone? Or was he just wasting his time thinking about it? Whatever the case, he couldn’t bring himself to give up the idea. Maybe somewhere in the city that stretched out below him, or in a village in the great valley or on the slopes of snowcapped Popocatepetl or Ixtaccihuatl, some small and insignificant person would get the idea that it was Tlaloc who performed the miracle. He and no other. He sighed. Allegiances shift. It is the way with the world, even for gods. Huitzilopochtli had said it often enough. If there was any satisfaction, it was the knowledge that the God the Spaniards had brought with them suffered the same fate as both Huitzilopochtli and himself: mostly ignored except on special occasions and times of trouble when people think they can’t handle things by themselves.

Turning away from the valley, Tlaloc began trudging slowly through the pine forest toward Popocatepetl, a slow cold wind moving toward the mountain causing superstitious people to cross themselves and promise to carry an extra candle ord two that night during the procession of Las Posadas.

Eric became aware of the first miracle when, deep in the city near Chapultepec Park, in his apartment on Ejercicio Nacional in Colonia Anzures, the sun crept over the windowsill of his bedroom, slid silently across the floor and bathed his sleeping face in golden light. He opened his eyes and thought, why is the sun so bright this morning? It’s as if there is no smog. In the months he’d lived in Mexico City he couldn’t remember having seen such a bright, sunny morning. Getting up, he went over to the window, opened it, and poked his head out. The layers of smog that always filtered the sunlight were gone. The sky was clear, a bright ice blue, and the air smelled fresh and clean.

Smiling, he showered, dressed and went into his kitchen to make himself a pot of coffee. Then, cup in hand, he went to the window that looked out onto the street, opened it, and put his head outside. From up the street on the corner of Ejercicio Nacional and Coqui, the delicious smell of pastries wafted from the Panadoria Fidelia. From a few doors down in the opposite direction where Ejercicio Nacional, Gutenberg and Concepción intersected, the orange juice vendor Gustavo Heinz stood polishing glasses at his stand. Calling out to him, Eric said he’d stop by for a glass of juice after he first went up to Panadoria Fidelia to pick up some pastries. Gustavo Heinz waved back at him, nodded, and went on polishing glasses. Across the street, señorita Luisa Moreno threw open her widow and called across.

“Buenos dias, señor Eric, isn’t this the most glorious day you have ever seen in Mexico City?” She smiled. “I don’t remember the last time the sun has shone so brightly and there has been no smog. A miracle, wouldn’t you say?”

“It is, señorita, it definitely is.” Excusing himself, he ducked back inside and a few moments later popped out his door and went to the bakery for pastries, which he shared with the orange juice vendor and drank a tall glass of fresh juice. Looking at his watch, he excused himself and went back to his apartment. Thirty minutes later, shaved and with a folder under his arm, he walked down Gutenberg to Melchior Ocampo, waited for a lull in the traffic, then darted across to Tiber and went down the hill. His ESL class started in twenty minutes, so he rushed across the Paseo and down Florencia to Hamburgo, where he turned left, running to get to the Language and Cultural Institute on time.

His three students, Braulio Cárdenas, Edgardo O’Gorman and Lázaro Benavidez met him just inside his classroom, bursting with news. “For a Christmas present, señor Eric, we’re taking you out for dinner tonight at the del Prado, and then out for an unforgettable evening of fun! So don’t plan anything else, and if you have, cancel it right away!”

“Well, the del Prado sounds like fun, but what else do you three have in mind?” He knew their reputation for surprises well enough to ask. “Where are we going after the del Prado?”

“To the most fabulous of places, señor Eric! You won’t forget it!”

“Where is it again?” He continued to press for specifics; the three young men played coy.

“Right downtown,” Braulio said. “Don’t worry about a thing!”

“Fabulous plans!” Edgardo said, trying to dodge around specifics.

“Unforgettable!” Lázaro said. “You will absolutely have the time of your life! We’re taking you to Plaza Garibaldi, the place of never ending festivals, to show you what Las Posadas is really like!

“We couldn’t do that at the del Prado, guys? I’ve heard of Garibaldi, and it doesn’t sound too safe.”

His three stooges cocked their heads and looked at him. “When you’re with us,” they chorused in unison, “you’re in safe hands! Don’t worry about a single thing! You have our joint word, isn’t that true, amigos?”

“¡Si!” they shouted, again in unison.

“The time of your life señor Eric!” Braulio said.

“Fantastic!” Edgardo said.

“Absolutely top drawer!” Lázaro said.

“We can’t wait!” the three said in unison. “We’ll meet you at the Hotel del Prado at six! We’ll have dinner there — on us — then we’ll go and enjoy ourselves. Nothing in Mexico City like it, señor Eric! It is absolutely the best place to be during the Christmas season, without any question about it!”

There was no turning them down. The whole idea of spending the evening at Plaza Garibaldi gave him a sinking feeling that lasted the rest of the day.

**

The Hotel del Prado stands at the corner of Juárez and Revillagigedo, directly across from Alameda Park. Eric liked the park with its statue of Benito Juárez. There was always something going on in and around the park. Shooing away the crowds of shoeshine boys that crowded around him as he neared the hotel, he went inside, where his students met him in front of Diego Rivera’s famous mural, and reminded him of the evening’s agenda.

As they took the elevator up to the restaurant, it was Braulio that hogged the conversation, going on about the food. “I’m so hungry I could eat my shoes!”

“That would be interesting to watch,” Lázaro said, but it would spoil my appetite. Let’s go get something to eat before we find out he’s not joking.”

“Stuff ourselves like pigs!” Braulio continued, pushing past the others as the elevator doors opened. “And flirt with the girls!”

“You do that all the time, Braulio. Why not try something new?”

“Because there’s nothing as interesting, Edgardo.”

“Sometimes, Braulio, I think if we opened your head and looked inside, all we’d find would be a big plate of food, a fast car, and a couple of cute girls.”

“Would that be so bad?” Braulio replied, looking shocked.

**

At exactly eight forty-five, Eric and this three students left the Hotel del Prado, turned right on Juárez, and left at Bellas Artes onto Alarcón. That is the simple part. From there back in 1973, the journey was fairly complicated if you didn’t know the area well because the naming of the streets was so inconsistent. Plaza Garibaldi, where they were headed with some enthusiasm is only five or six blocks from Bellas Artes, and was easy to find if you knew that Alarcón became Serdán in a block or two. If you failed to pay attention to that, as Eric tended to do, you might think you’d got onto the wrong street, turn around or take one of the side streets and end up at the Zócalo staring at the Metropolitan Cathedral and scratching your head. But if you kept going steadily down Serdán, you’d be at Garibaldi in only a few short blocks. But by then Serdán became Leyva which, if you again let your attention drift, could start another cycle of confusion. To correct this confusing nightmare, the city fathers got to thinking that it would make everything a whole lot simpler if they renamed the street Avenida Lázaro Cárdenas. End of confusion. If you kept going toward the noise and the light, you would be just fine. Plaza Garibaldi has always had more than its share of light and noise. But on that night the city fathers hadn’t arrived at a decision (they couldn’t agree on a name), and so confusion still reigned. Fortunately for Eric Lindahl, his three students knew exactly where along this confusing street Plaza Garibaldi was.

You encounter the street vendors about a block before you get to the Plaza. These are mostly poor women with small charcoal braziers cooking food they sell to passersby. It’s pretty good and causes intestinal problems only some of the time. Mexicans call the intestinal problems “los animales”, amoebas that usually only bother tourists. Just imagine a horde of little animals running around in your intestines and you get the idea. You don’t want anything to do with them; they give you a really sore gut and a very bad case of the runs. I’d give you a more graphic picture of what the word “runs” means in this context, but I won’t, as it’ll spoil your appetite. Anyway, I’m sure you’re capable of picturing it yourself without my help.

Getting closer to Plaza Garibaldi you hear the street musicians, and you see a crowd of poor people scrounging for money, hundreds of party-goers and pickpockets, always pickpockets, because they consider Plaza Garibaldi a bonanza of free cash, credit cards, and an occasional passport or two. Feeling suddenly nervous, Eric felt for his wallet, still zipped safely inside the inside breast pocket of his jacket. He was definitely not taking any chances, at least not where his wallet was concerned. Though his three students, Lázaro, Edgardo and Braulio were relaxed and anticipating an evening of fun, he was feeling a little more than slightly out of his element. “Why,” he asked himself, “did I let myself get talked into this?” Receiving no answers, he followed his students into the jam-packed plaza.

As expected, Plaza Garibaldi was packed to its edges with pickpockets, street people, tourists, locals, musicians and students. But no sign of any of the troublemakers that frequented the Plaza, and especially no sign of the one person they were watching out for, el Águila Primero, Numero Uno, rumored to be a sometimes independent agent of the government and bane of students and tourists, a tough guy named Emilio Benitez, who loved Plaza Garibaldi as much as anyone did, slipping in and out of the crowds like a knife-wielding ghost leaving not a few bleeding students and tourists in his wake.

“How do you know he isn’t around?” Eric asked his students.

“Because he makes himself obvious,” Edgardo responded, “and we don’t see him anywhere. If you see a tall guy wearing black pants and a black leather jacket, that’ll be him. We’ll keep our eyes peeled, señor Lindahl, you can rest assured of that”

“Oh.” Somehow, he didn’t feel assured. He had read about the gangs that liked to prowl the plazas at night, especially the gang called “Los Águiles”, leftovers from the government’s crackdown on student activists during the student protests in 1968. Emilio Benitez was the top gun of that group.

But on this night, at least, he was not there; at least not yet.

“Keep your eyes open, señor Eric,” Lázaro said.

“How would I recognize him again?”

“Black pants, black leather jacket, aviator sunglasses. He’s almost as tall as you, so you won’t miss him if he shows up. You’ll either see him, or you’ll see the crowd making room for him. He always makes himself obvious. If one of us sees him, we’ll let you know, and then we’ll head for one of the cantinas, because they have guards at the door, and they’re big, tough, and armed. They’re the one place that el Primero can’t get in.”

“Oh, good, I really feel better knowing that.”

“Hey!” said Braulio, startling him. “Let’s get something to eat, I’m starving!”

“That’s the third thing we’d find in his head if we opened it up, amigos!” Edgardo remarked; “A beautiful girl, a fast car, and food.”

Braulio gave his friend a shocked look. “There’s more?”

“Braulio’s holy trinity!” Lázaro said with a laugh as they walked through the door of one of the cantinas that ringed the Plaza. While Braulio ate a full meal, his friends, who weren’t hungry after their meal at the del Prado’s famous dining room, drank coffee and ate a few snacks.

When they emerged into the Plaza again, there were more people, more musicians, more food vendors, and more pickpockets. But no Eagles, no el Primero. Braulio began scanning for pretty young women to flirt or dance with, while the others amused themselves listening to a musician that was attracting a growing crowd of admirers. The musician was a young man with Down Syndrome who was singing at the top of his lungs while he drummed out the rhythm of the song with wooden shoes. A second young man, his manger (or handler, as Lázaro cynically remarked), whipped up the crowd and collected the money that the musician’s cheering admirers began throwing at him. Eric and his students, Braulio with a pretty young woman in tow, pushed to the front of the whistling, dancing, cheering crowd to get a closer look. The more money people threw, the more they whistled and cheered, the more excited his manager was, and the more wildly the young man sang and pounded his feet, his face beet red and bathed in perspiration.

It was then that Edgardo spotted him, a tall young man in black pants, black leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, moving slowly through the crowd from Camilito Street in their direction. Emilio Benitez, el águila primero, walked slowly toward them, his gaze fixed on Eric and his three companions. Emilio’s approach was precise and simple: appear, harass people, cut someone or, more often than not, scare them out of their wits, then vanish, ¡Pouf! into thin air. The police were unable—or unwilling; it was never clear which—to touch him. Just seeing him nearby caused crowds to fall silent and begin moving out of his way, just as they were doing now as he strode steadily and silently through the crowded plaza toward Eric and his three students. Even the ecstatic young musician, seeing him, fell suddenly silent.

“We’d better get out of here, señor Manning, fast!” Edgardo said, touching Eric’s elbow. “You see that guy coming toward us? It’s him; we’d better get into a cantina, and do it fast!”

But before they could take a step, Eric heard an icy voice say next to his right ear:

“Hey, gringo!”

He turned toward the voice; there was no one.

From behind him came: “Enjoying yourself?”

He wheeled around. Nothing. He looked from Edgardo to Braulio to Lázaro, who, seeing nothing, shrugged.

Then, so close to his left ear that he could feel the warmth of the man’s breath, he heard: “Scared, señor?” But when he looked, there was only empty space.

“I am going to have some fun,” Emilio Benitez said, looming suddenly in front of him with a large and very shiny knife in one hand. “I don’t like tourists, or their friends. And I like gringo tourists worse than anything. Except,” smiling, “for fun. That I enjoy. ¿Comprende?” And he laughed. The laugh made Eric Lindahl’s skin crawl.

He thought he was going to die, skewered on a shiny knife wielded by a total stranger. He stared at the young man who slowly and deliberately ran a thumb along the cutting edge of his knife, and he couldn’t manage a single intelligible thought except to wonder if Braulio’s head, usually filled with as cars, pretty young women and food, was as empty of content as his. The eagle began circling the four of them, caressing his knife, his face a blank mask. Circling, circling, circling, waiting for just the right moment to thrust, to slash, to tear these four men to shreds, el águila primero inspected his victims…and waited.

And Eric, feeling very much like a mouse about to be caught in an eagle’s talons froze, and stopped breathing. Deprived of oxygen, his brain sent an emergency message to his lungs: “Breathe!!” it shouted. Responding, his lungs drew air through his constricted throat in a high-pitched “HEEEEEE!” Then it came out in a loud “HAWWW!” causing Emilio Benitez’ mouth to drop open. “HEEEE!” he went again as his lungs gasped for air; “HEEEEEE!” and “HAWWWW!” Then, eyes popping half out of his head, he threw back his head, opened his mouth and began braying like a mule.

“HEE-HAW!” he went. “HEE-HEE-HEE-HAW!” stopping the shocked eagle dead in his tracks and bringing a stunned silence to the Plaza. “HEE-HAWWW! HEE HEE-HEE-HAWWW!” The sound of his braying spilled out of the Plaza and rolled up and down neighboring streets scaring dogs and cats and sending flights of pigeons circling into the night sky. “HEE-HAWWWW! HEE-HEE-HEE-HEE-HAWWWW!”

Emilio Benitez, el águila primero, stood rooted to the spot and stared. The donkey stared pop-eyed back at him, his teeth showing, and kept madly braying.

“HEE-HEE-HEE-HAWWWWWW!” He brayed on and on, filling the air with wild donkey sounds that rose up into Tlaloc’s smog-swept air, filled the nearby neighborhoods, stalled traffic circling around the Zócalo, and brought everything for a square mile to a screeching, silent, deadening stop. People opened their windows, stuck their heads out, and listened. “HEE-HAWWW! HEE-HEE-HEE-HEE-HAWWWW!” For a square mile around, all that could be heard was the donkey’s wild braying and the loud flapping of pigeon wings. Even Tlaloc, dozing on Popocatepetl’s crater rim, snapped suddenly awake, looked down toward the city, and cocked an ear at the racket.

Then, just as quickly as it had started, the mad braying stopped, and the teacher was himself again, standing there with his mouth shut and a serene look on his face. A smile broke slowly across his face at realizing that his nemesis was nowhere to be seen. The eagle had flown. El águila primero, the terror of Mexico City at night, had sprinted out of the Plaza like a m an possessed. Assaulted by the donkey’s awful braying, he had taken flight, run away from Garibaldi and the noise toward Allende Street, run as fast as he could from this donkey-man who was suddenly, and perhaps supernaturally, more powerful than he. Scared into bewildered, mindless flight, Emilio Benitez, for the first time in his thirty years, entered the Metropolitan Cathedral to pray, the sound of the donkey’s raucous braying still loud in his ears.

“Holy Mother of God!” he said as he struggled with shaking hands to place a small lighted white candle in a side altar in the old cathedral’s sanctuary. “Blessed Virgin, please save me!” He looked around for signs of the demon donkey, but saw nothing but a nearly empty sanctuary. He remained there, huddled near the altar, until the sun crept over the eastern mountains and bathed the valley of Mexico in the light of a new day.

At Plaza Garibaldi, the crowd was cheering and whistling for the donkey. People crossed themselves. They thanked Jesus and His mother. They congratulated Eric for scaring that no-good, that thug, that notorious bad guy into such a fit of alarm that he dropped his knife and fled as fast as his legs would take him. A group of young men lifted Eric to their shoulders and paraded around the plaza with him, cheering at the top of their lungs.

“El águila primero es finito!” they shouted. “He is a coward! Long live The Donkey! ¡Viva el borrico!” They carried him into Cantina Rosario, followed by Braulio, Edgardo and Lázaro and a cheering crowd of admirers.

He was at a loss to explain what had suddenly come over him and made him begin braying like a mule. One moment he had been standing there scared out of his wits, and the next moment he was braying like a maniac unable to stop himself. Then all of a sudden it was over and he was himself. Edgardo declared that he had never heard such a deafening sound. Lázaro looked at his teacher as if he expected him to start barking like a dog. And Braulio, he was too busy flirting with a pretty young cigarette girl to think about anything else. But everyone else was focused on Eric, el borrico, who in the flash of an instant, was transformed as if by a miracle into a donkey and scared the nemesis of the night into abject cowardly, cowering flight. “Hooray for el borrico!” they shouted.

And so began the story of el borrico, a story that grew with the telling, “La historia d’el águila y el borrico”, made popular by storytellers and plain street-corner gossip-mongers who love this kind of tale. There hadn’t been such an amazing event in anyone’s recent memory, a day on which Garibaldi Plaza was cleansed of terror. Again and again people hoisted their glasses into the air and shouted “Viva el borrico!” while a mariachi band played and sang a new composition in honor of this magical event.

All the while, the donkey sat there surrounded by warmth and a full belly, still not quite back down to earth. Gradually the image of the black-clad Benitez and his knife faded from his mind, and he began to relax and enjoy himself. He sang along with the musicians who stopped by his table. He danced with Braulio’s most recent girl, who whispered in his ear that she’d never heard a man make sounds like that, ever, querido mio, which made him blush and miss a step.

At around two in the morning, just as Andrés the red-haired waiter was polishing glasses, a man wearing a black leather jacket, black pants and aviator sun glasses came into the cantina for a nightcap before catching a taxi to his home in Colonia San Angel. The donkey caught a glimpse of him in the mirror behind the bar. At first he did nothing but stare. He tried to say something, but nothing came out of his mouth. Finally prying his mouth open in what Edgardo thought was a yawn,he said “HEEEE!” filling his lungs with as much air as he could and then pausing, eyes popping from their sockets.

“What’s wrong?” Edgardo exclaimed, startled.

The donkey pointed at the leather-clad young man. “HAWWWWW!” he shouted at the top of his voice, scaring everyone.

Braulio stopped flirting with a pretty young cigarette seller and looked. “Nothing to worry about,” he said, “it’s not him.”

The black-clad young man, stopped in his tracks by the donkey’s deafening braying, turned tail and dashed out of the cantina and across the plaza and all the way to Juárez where he jumped into the first taxi he saw. “San Angel!” he shouted at the driver, scaring him so badly that he jammed his foot on the accelerator and peeled rubber for half a block, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

“He was wearing the same outfit,” el borrico said, calming down. “I thought…”

“It wasn’t him,” Lázaro replied. “Let’s call it a night.”

So the four friends, accompanied by a swarm of volunteer bodyguards from the cantina, traipsed up the street to Juárez w here they flagged down a pesero taxi. By three, Eric was safe in his bed in a deep, dreamless sleep that lasted until ten in the morning when he awoke to the kiss of the sun.

In the neighborhood surrounding Plaza Garibaldi, people still tell each other how God protected good people on that night so long ago. They talk endlessly about the gringo who was miraculously changed into a donkey so that evil was scared away on that special night at the beginning of Las Posadas in 1973.

**

And so ends the story of the donkey and the eagle, the gringo and the tough guy. Instead of ending in a tragedy, as so many similar incidents before and since, it ended in happiness for almost everyone. Perhaps even for Emilio Benitez, who was never seen again. Rumor has it that there is an aging priest in a tiny village in the mountains of Michoacán, who has a donkey named “Gringo” and once lived in Mexico City and has a shady past. But no one has asked the old priest about it. With a story, “truth” is in the telling of it. And around Plaza Garibaldi in the dead of night, it is said that the donkey’s mad braying can still be heard. And that is enough for those who believe it.

(This story will appear as a chapter in my novel “The City Has Many Faces”.

Rio Usumacinta Street is an old street, lined with houses that go back to the time when Spain ruled the country, back before Madero, Hidalgo and the others tore Mexico from Spain’s grasp. Señora Gálvez’s ancient stone castle stands behind a high wrought iron fence on the corner where Usumacinta bends toward Panuco or, if you enter Usumacinta from Panuco, where it bends toward Sena. Though very tiny, Usumacinta was at one time an important street. Señora Gálvez’s house, being the residence of an important ambassador, was its most important residence. Its two stories are covered in baroque ornamentation, with nightmarish grapes and gargoyles that have scared generations of neighborhood children and delighted architectural connoisseurs. The entrance of the old house is behind a wrought iron gate in an ancient and much-tangled garden that is inhabited by generations of feral cats. A balcony off the living room overlooks the bend in the street and provides a grand view of the neighborhood during the day. During the night it provides a sometimes amusing view of what goes on in that old house: a mysterious waxing and waning of light. The first floor is occupied by two things: on the corner by a small market that looks as if it is about as old as the house, and the apartments of José and Corazón Ibargüengoitia, servants who have worked for señora Gálvez since before the turn of the century. Old José takes care of the house, while his wife takes care of señora Gálvez.

Wanda Blackstone insists that the old woman is as old as Popocatepetl, and that the house is haunted. “I tell you, Mel,” she insists, “this place is haunted, haunted!”

“No, no, Wanda, it’s just la señora, it’s Mrs. Gálvez. She makes it seem haunted.” He looked at Joe Manning and his friend Ramon Garces. “That old woman is enough to make anything seem haunted, guys, because she’s likely to show up and stand behind you in the kitchen without your ever hearing a sound. Scares us half out of our minds sometimes, right, Wanda? Remember the time when you were feeding those feral cats at the window and she came in? Remember what she did?”

“Oh, yes, I do,” she said, laughing. “She scared me half out of my mind. She saw the cats and shrieked ‘Aiiiieeee! Gatos! Los gatos! Demonios! Aiiiieeee!’ and rushed out of the room talking in archaic Spanish about gringos and cats and devils. But,” giving her husband a look that said no amount of reasoning was going to convince her otherwise, “this house is haunted. And the old woman, she gives me the creeps. Come over some evening and see for yourself, Joe,” she said. “It sure seems haunted to me.”

Her husband rolled his eyes and shrugged.

The apartment she and Mel rented is occupies the second floor of the old house. They sublet their spare bedroom to a French Canadian philosophy student named Paul Gerard. Señora Gálvez lives in a back bedroom, looked after by the long-suffering Corazón. The arrangement works fairly well, but is not without its frustrations and frights, because the old woman, who is close to one hundred years old, deaf and said to be demented, makes a nuisance of herself by harassing the renters, who soon move out. Then the drama begins all over again. Her eldest son, Justo, rents it again, Señora Gálvez thinks the renters are interlopers and makes life so difficult for them that they leave, whereupon the whole process begins all over again, to the amusement of everyone but la señora, old José and his wife, and the renters. But Wanda insists that the real problem is ghosts. Which is a bigger problem for la señora’s son Justo, whose main frustration is trying to keep the apartment rented and does not want to hear anything about ghosts. He has enough of a problem with his mother.

The Blackstones are from Iron Mountain, Michigan. They came to Mexico City so Mel could study the classical guitar, and rented the apartment because it is large, elegant, inexpensive and convenient. It didn’t take them long to regret it. The old woman had a habit of appearing unannounced during meals, standing there dressed in a long light blue robe, and staring at them.

“And themselves old horror steals the light bulbs,” Wanda said. “She sneaks around like a ghost and scares people half to death. So,” looking at her husband, “it seems like she’s what haunts the apartment, but she isn’t, it’s something else. People see things.”

“You have to admit, though,” Mel replied, describing the huge old stone fireplace with the steps, the woodwork, and the huge formal dining room with the beautiful formal dining room table that easily seated twelve, “that it’s a classic.”

“A classic house of horrors!” Wanda replied, shuddering. “Joe, I swear to everyone at this table that it’s haunted.”

At night, you can stand outside on the corner across from the balcony and watch as the lights are turned on, then watch as they begin to dim, starting in the living room and moving back toward the old woman’s room, as if she sucked up all the light in that place and took it with her. In truth, she removes the light bulbs, puts them in the pockets of her light blue robe, and takes them into her room, where she hides them. Then long-suffering Corazón finds them, takes them out to the darkened apartment and screws them in one by one, so that the neighbors have the impression that light is always waxing and waning in the old house. Joe Manning watched it happen during several visits there over the next few months.

It was early in the evening of November third, 1972 that he pushed through the big iron gate into the dark, tangled garden and knocked loudly on the door, hoping to find his friends at home. The sound of his knuckles on the wood echoed hollowly throughout the big old house. He shivered. In the bushes he heard something creeping around; probably one of the cats, as the cats had long since taken care of all the rats in the neighborhood. Wanda had half-tamed some of them by putting food outside the kitchen window on a platform that she had rigged up. Finally, after several loud poundings on the door, it creaked open and he found himself staring into old Josés deeply lined face.

“Good evening, señor Manning,” the old man said, smiling, “do you wish to see the Blackstones?”

“Sí, José, I do. Are they here?”

The old man wagged his head negatively. “They are out, but you may come in and wait if you wish.” He stood back and let him in, then closed the big old door and led the way up the darkened stairway and into the living room, which was lighted only by a single small bulb.

“La señora, I’m afraid. My poor wife hasn’t yet discovered that she’s removed all the lights again. Anyway, she would no sooner replace them than la señora would remove them again.” He gave an elaborate shrug and sighed. It was an old and very, very frustrating story. The young couple often complained about it to the old woman’s son, to no avail. Old José rolled his eyes. “The poor man has so much trouble keeping renters, señor Manning. I am sure it is obvious why.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes, José, I surely wouldn’t.”

“May I offer you a glass of wine while you wait?” the old man asked, indicating with a sweep of an arm an armchair that hadn’t been there before. “It is the finest Bordeaux. I have only now opened it,” doing so with a twist of a corkscrew and a glint in his eye. “La señora would be very upset if she knew. But,” he went on, smiling, “she doesn’t know. It is very, very old.” He held out the bottle for him to see. The label said it had been vinted in 1903.

“Well,” he said, sniffing the cork; “I hope they don’t return too soon. That way I won’t have to share this fine old vintage. I can tell them about it when they get back.” He smiled. “They won’t believe it. I’ll have to show them the bottle.”

The old man was droning on. “…….there is quite a bit left from the old days when the Ambassador was still alive… Not even la señora’s son is allowed to touch it, so you see,” spreading his hands and his mouth in a wide smile, “I sneak a bottle of it now and then, and nobody knows, because I am the only one who knows how much there was to begin with.”

Picking up a cut crystal wine glass from the antique Chinese table next to the armchair, he filled it and gave it to his guest. Then he turned on his heel and disappeared toward the kitchen, lighting his way with a big flashlight, leaving Joseph Manning alone with the wine glass, the wine, and his thoughts.

Thoughts about his friends soon gave way to thoughts about the big dark, elegant apartment that Wanda insisted was haunted by more than the old woman’s nocturnal wanderings. The first time he had seen la señora she h ad scared him badly one evening as he and his friends were seated at the long dining room table, drinking coffee. He had sensed someone standing behind him, and when he turned to look, let out a yell. There, barely two feet away, stood the old woman in her long light blue robe, silent and as a mummy, holding a light bulb in one hand and staring at them with accusing eyes.

He held the glass up to the single small light bulb; the wine glowed a beautiful dark ruby red. He glanced at his watch. It was five P.M. He took another sip of the wine, rolled it around in his mouth, then swallowed. The wine had a fine musty taste, unlike an wine he had drunk before. Of course, he had never drank seventy year old wine, so it wasn’t surprising. He wondered idly what would happen should the old woman emerge from her hallway and catch him there, sipping the sacred fruits of her family’s history. “She will probably,” he told himself, “bite my head off and spit out the seeds.” He recalled Mel telling him one night late as they sat in the kitchen drinking beer, how he had awakened late one night to find the old mummy leaning across him screwing out the light from his reading lamp, and how he’d sat up and yelled loud enough to waken the dead. The old woman stared at him from the deep sockets of her eyes, put the light bulb in the right hand pocket of her light blue robe, and disappeared, shutting the bedroom door softly behind her.

Stretching, he held up the crystal wine glass and enjoyed the different facets of rich ruby reflected in the dim light. He took another sip of the wine. It’s texture was velvet, its aroma smoky. The wine slid down his throat. He leaned back in the armchair and closed his eyes. It is too bad, he told himself, that José didn’t leave the whole bottle. He set the glass down on the table beside him, took three deep, pleasurable breaths, and fell asleep.

2

Waking up abruptly, he found himself looking into the smiling face of a stunningly beautiful young woman . She was regarding him with an amused smile.

“Is the party so boring, señor Manning, that you fall asleep in the middle of it?” He stared. The young woman’s dark hair was caught with a stunning diamond tiara, under which her dark brows were arched in wry amusement over swimming brown eyes. She repeated her question.

He took in a deep breath, held it, then let it out in a great whooshing sigh. It must, he said to himself, have been something in the wine. Or else it’s the effect this crazy haunted old house has on everyone in it. He closed his eyes, rubbed them, and opened them again. The young woman was still there, more amused than ever.

“Really, señor Manning,” she said, “you are being most impolite!” She hid her face behind an elaborate Chinese fan and laughed.

“I am so sorry!” he replied, sitting up suddenly and nearly knocking over his glass, which still had a finger of wine in it. “It must have been this wine. It is very old.”

“Nonsense!” the young woman replied, taking the goblet from him and holding it up to her elegant powdered nose. “It can’t be more than four years old, if that. José should be ashamed of himself for serving such green wine. The Ambassador will be very displeased with him if he finds out.”

He closed his eyes again. “The Ambassador.” So that was where he had seen her before, in the portrait hanging in the dining room. Ambassador Gálvez’s wife. It was the wine! That damned José must have put something in it. “But if that is so,” he thought, looking around at the now brightly-lighted rooms, “where have all these people come from?” The rooms were full of people, all formally dressed for a turn-of-the-century banquet or ball. Off in a corner near the fireplace he recognized the old dictator Porfirio Diaz talking to a man who looked a great deal like Justo Sierra, Diaz’s Education Minister. In the living room he saw José Yves Limantour, another Cabinet member. “Oh, please, please wake me up from this nightmare or hallucination!” he prayed, hoping to wake up in the darkened old apartment with Mel and Wanda asking how long he’d waited for them. “Too long!” he said to himself; “Way, way too long!”

“Well, señor Manning!” It was the young woman again. She was not amused. “Are you going to sit there with your eyes closed all evening?”

“If I have to,” he said to himself, opening them briefly and closing them again, then opening them and looking at her. “I am so sorry, señora Gálvez; it has got to be the wine. It has simply taken my head away.” He got to his feet and accepted her hand, lifting it to his lips. And Juána Antonia Gálvez smiled, curtsyed, turned and walked away. He half-expected her to begin turning out the gaslights one by one. The reigning horror of the house on Usumacinta Street was no more than twenty-five years old. Feeling suddenly weak, he sat back down again. And a chill, beginning somewhere near the center of his soul, radiated outward until his teeth, had he not clamped them shut, would have begun rattling. He recalled Wanda’s warning about the old house. “The place is haunted, Joe! Mel won’t believe me, but it’s haunted!” He had pooh-poohed the idea. He would never pooh-pooh it again.

He looked down at himself; another radical change, When he first sat down he’d been wearing a casual shirt, khaki chinos and walking shoes. Seated in these elegantly-appointed rooms, he was dressed to the nines. Reaching into the inside pocket of his formal coat, he removed a leather cigar case, and opened it. Inside were six long Cuban Churchill cigars, each one bearing a bright paper ring bearing a coat of arms and the name Larrañaga. Shaking his head, he stood up as Justo Sierra and the dictator Diaz were joined by Eusebio Gálvez, Mexico’s Ambassador to China.

The rooms were furnished with what had for years been stored away in the one room of the house not open to anyone since the Ambassador’s son began renting it out. The one time he had peeked into it around old José’s neck, he saw that what had been the Ambassador’s library was stacked floor-to-ceiling with antique Chinese furniture, the very items that now graced the elegant rooms of what was to become (or was) Mel and Wanda’s apartment. He rubbed his eyes. His clothes? He looked down at them again. Never in his life had he even contemplated owning or wearing such things: a formal coat with tails, striped formal trousers, a high-collared white shirt set off with a broad black and white striped silk tie pinned with what had to be a one carat diamond tie pin, diamond cuff links, and black patent leather shoes with spats. Spats! Picking up his wine glass, he sniffed the dregs at the bottom, and downed them. Old José must have slipped something into his wine. A good trick to play on the gringo. A jolly good joke! He gave his head a vigorous shake. Unbelievable! Beyond all reason, Wanda Blackstone must be right; the apartment is haunted.

Reaching into his coat pocket, he removed a cigar from its case and held it up to his nose. A much younger José suddenly appeared, clipped it with a silver cigar cutter, and lit it for him.

“Very nice gathering, wouldn’t you say, señor Manning?”

“Oh, very nice,” he replied, taking a long drag on the cigar. Then he excused himself and headed toward the open balcony door. “I think I need a breath of fresh air.”

“Yes,” José replied, smiling and bowing slightly; “it probably will help to clear your head.”

He walked through the crowded room and out onto the balcony into a night that was both cool and clear and without a trace of smog.

3

Overhead the sky presented a dazzling display of stars unlike anything that anyone in Mexico City had seen for at least twenty years. The only sounds he heard were the soft neighing of horses, the rumble of iron rims on cobblestones, and the hushed conversations of carriage drivers and soldiers gathered below and across the street. What year was it? It had to be prior to the Revolution of 1910, because everything was peaceful. But when? José was barely out of his teens, señora Gálvez, reported to be near one hundred in 1973, looked to be in her mid-twenties, her husband the Ambassador a good deal older. Since the Ambassador was shot by a soldier in 1911 while returning to his home and was fifty-two at the time, the year he found himself in must be several years earlier. Trying to make sense of it all gave him a headache. He blew a cloud of smoke and looked at the cigar. Seldom had he smoked such an excellent one. “I hope,” he said out loud to no one, “I can bring them all back with me. If I ever get back to where I belong.”

Just then a quartet began playing something by Mendelssohn, and he went back inside, his cigar clenched firmly between his teeth and a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

4

“Oh, there you are Doctor Manning!” Halfway across the room, señora Gálvez met him. Smiling broadly, she took him by the arm and said: “There is someone I’d like you to meet, señor Manning. She is very anxious to meet you.” And she began leading him down that hallway downs which, years later, all light would vanish.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” he thought; “If only I’d gone back home when José told me Mel and Wanda weren’t home, I wouldn’t be in this mess not knowing if I’ll ever get back from it. What kind of horror am I being led into how?”

“My grandmother,” señora Gálvez went on, “has been wanting to meet some of the guests, but she is bedridden, poor dear, as she is over one hundred years old, and she seldom gets out of her room anymore. Not that she would if she were able, as she doesn’t approve of the present age with all of its extravagances, and she thinks that poor Porfirio is a boor. But then,” smiling, “she’ll tell you all about that, I am sure!” And, having knocked at the door of her grandmother’s room,she opened it and the two of them went in.

5

Propped up in an immense bed, lying on piles of feather pillows and covered with a light blue comforter, was the exact duplicate of what señora Galvez would become in some seventy years.

The old woman gave them a toothless smile and cackled.

“So you are surprised to see such an old woman still living and having her senses about her!” she stated, looking him straight in the eye; “Haven’t you seen such an old woman before, young man?”

Stammering, trying hard not to swallow his tongue or turn and flee from the room, he blurted out: “I’m sorry, señora, but you look exactly like someone I’ve seen somewhere before.” The old woman gave him a wide toothless smile. Her granddaughter laid a hand on his arm and introduced him.

“This is Doctor Joseph Manning, grandmother. He is from the United States,” she said; “He studies the human mind.”

“I don’t care who he is or where he is from or what he does!” the old woman snapped; “One gringo is just like another one to me,” squeezing as much venom out of the words as she could. “So you study the human mind; what do you make of it in these trying times, young man? Eh? Are you in Mexico studying the modern Mexican mind? Eh? Speak up!”

“Grandmother!”

“Don’t you ‘grandmother’ me, young lady!” the old woman snapped, wagging a finger. “Well?”

“I’m afraid I’m just a tourist, ma’am,” he replied trying to mollify her.

“Tourist!” she spat out, pronouncing the word as if she were saying bedbug, cockroach or louse.

“Then you’re not going to be here long, is that so?”

“Grandmother!” his hostess repeated. “You promised not to be naughty if I introduced you to our guests!”

“So!” the old woman said, “an old woman is ‘naughty’ when she speaks her mind, is that what you think, Antonia? What this world has come to, the young ordering their elders around as if they were children! Your grandfather would roll over in his grave and give you a thrashing if he could hear you talking like that to your grandmother! Such lack of respect! All this modernism!” Her face took on the venomous aspect of an adder. “You would think,” scornfully, “that you were of low birth, like that Eusebio of yours, and not a Sierra!” She turned to look at the despised gringo, who was wishing fervently wishing he could vanish. “So what do make of the Mexican mind listening to this conversation, señor Manning?”

“Grandmother, please!” blushing with shame.

“‘Please’, nothing!” the crone snorted, having sunk her teeth (so to speak) in her granddaughter’s jugular; “You know better than I do where your husband comes from, and if it hadn’t been for that peasant Porfirio dragging him up out of the gutter, he would still be a nobody! He may be a fine man and impressive to look at, Antonia, and he may be very successful as things go, but he married you for your looks and your money, which is true, even if you don’t care to look at it!” She glared, ignoring the fact that one of her granddaughter’s guests was standing there taking it all in with big ears. “I don’t suppose,” turning and staring him full in the face, “that you are interested in a continuing family feud of long standing that goes back even before your own parents were born and is a preoccupation of an old woman like me.

“But I was born at a time when one’s parentage,” looking at him as if his parents had run on four legs instead of two, “meant something, and when we Mexicans had some dignity left, and there were still,” eyeing her granddaughter, “a few aristocrats around. But that was way before either of you were born, so you know nothing about any of it except what you read in the history books, which are packed full of lies! But,” going on, “whoever asks an old woman anything? My father, Justo Barranda, was from a very old and honorable Spanish family, and he owned a silver mine near Taxco. Our family’s history began going downhill from the time of that awful man Morelos and that other bandit, that dishonored priest Hidalgo, who are so much praised nowadays.” She made a face, as if merely pronouncing the names of the two heroes was distasteful to her.

“So I believe that those days, before all the blood began to be shed, were better than the days which we now inhabit. And don’t you forget, Antonia, that I have seen everything and know much more about living than you do! The only good days since my childhood were when we had a genuine Emperor and Empress. Maximiliano and Carlota, pobrecitos, murdered by that Indio Juárez! Bah!” Her granddaughter looked at the floor.

“Well, at any rate, Antonia,” the old woman said, smiling broadly at her granddaughter’s discomfort, “you look every bit a queen tonight. You remind me of myself when I was a girl,” causing a chill to run up and down the spine of her granddaughter’s guest. The old woman signed. “I am quite tired now, Antonia. Thank you for bringing señor Manning to see me.” She extended a hand for him to kiss. Then she gave a long sigh and sank back on her pillows and closed her eyes, mummy face framed in the white lace froth of her bonnet.

“I hope,” his hostess said as she led him back down the hall toward the living room, “that grandmother didn’t bore you with her diatribe. She’s always doing that to guests.” She gave him a pained smile. “By the way señor Manning, who did my grandmother remind you of?”

“Oh, someone I met some time ago,” he replied, chills chasing each other up and down his spine.

6

Back in the crowded living room near the fireplace, he found the chair he had been sitting in, excused himself from his hostess, and sat down. Reaching into the breast pocket of his coat, he removed another Larrañaga cigar. “Santiago de Cuba” the cigar band read. From what he knew about cigars, Larrañagas hadn’t been made since the Castro revolution. He returned the cigar to the pocket, sighed, and closed his eyes. Maybe the nightmare will go away. Maybe. Perhaps if he rested his eyes and tried to clear his mind of everything, the hallucination would simply go away. Which, opening his eyes a few moments later, it apparently had done. Except for the antique Chinese table next to his chair, the chair itself and the cigar in the crystal ashtray, everything else was as it had been when old José poured him that first glass of wine. On the table were three unsmoked Larrañaga cigars and a leather cigar case with five more inside. Slipping the case and the three extra cigars into a shirt pocket, he got to his feet. Except for the single light bulb, the old house was absolutely silent and dark, old José and his wife having apparently retired to their quarters on the floor below. As he started toward the stairwell to leave, the door below and Mel and Wanda Blackstone started up the stairs.

“Joe!” Wanda exclaimed; “How long have you been here?”

He looked at his watch. “About two hours, give or take about seventy years. José let me in. I must’ve fallen asleep. I think he’s gone to his apartment.”

“Where’d the table and chair come from?” Mel said, scrutinizing them closely. “They’re from the old lady’s Chinese room, right? Did José bring them out for you?”

“They were here when I arrived.”

“Why would José bring them out when he knows the old lady won’t like it? It doesn’t make sense.” Mel looked toward the hallway leading to the old woman’s room. “We’d better have him put them back before she comes out and finds them, or our goose is cooked.”

They went into the kitchen, where the bottle of wine was sitting on the table with its cork firmly in place. “And where is this from?” Wanda said, picking it up and looking at the date. “My God, Mel, it must be from the Chinese room.” Mel removed the cork and sniffed the contents.

“Smells good, Joe; want some?”

“No; one glass of that stuff was enough.” And he told them about what had happened in the strange interval between the time of his arrival and shortly before their return, showing them the cigars to reinforce the truth of his story.

“I told you the place is haunted!” Wanda shivered and looking around. “The old woman is a ghost.” Turning to her husband: “Mel, I’m not spending another night here! I’m scared to close my eyes after what Joe just told us. Let’s move out now.”

They spent that night and the next two in a nearby hotel before finding an apartment on the fifth floor of a building across from Parque Sullivan, then sneaked back into the old haunted house to clear out their belongings. The French Canadian student, Paul Gerard, moved out at the same time, tossed out on his ear by the old woman, who stood at the top of the stairs in her light blue robe that glowed with a soft blue light in the darkened house and told him to never, ever, set foot in the house on Usumacinta Street again under the pain of death.

“But my things, señora,” he said; “I have to get my things!”

“They have already been removed!” she said. And they had been. She had thrown them over the balcony onto the street, as if ridding her house of demons. Pointing an imperious finger down the stairs she commanded him to leave, which he did immediately, the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. Retrieving what was left of his belongings from in front of the old market, he walked rapidly away towards Reforma as fast as his legs could take him, not once looking back.

From the balcony on the corner, the old woman’s ghost watched him, smiling.

Author’s note: This story is from my novel-in-progress “The City Has Many Faces” set in Mexico City in the early 1970s when I lived there for a time.

Eric told me this version of what happened when we got together for coffee at Sanborn’s on the Paseo, which was badly damaged, but was cleaned up pretty well by the time Lisa and I returned from Cuernevaca. What follows is just as Eric told it because I recorded it…with his permission, of course.

~~~

It happened the day I got fired from my job teaching English at the Instituto Idioma y Cultura de Durango, the day Iglesia Rosario, aka “Pope” Rosario, walked into my class and caught me reading from The Herald instead of following her sacred approved system, which she views as scripture. She stood there in the doorway, arms folded sternly over her breasts, and asked me what I thought I was doing. “Teaching English,” I replied as innocently as I could manage, knowing that I had been caught with my pants down, metaphorically speaking. “Come to my office!” she ordered, which I meekly did. She fired me on the spot, aiming a long finger at the door and handing me my day’s pay in its little brown envelope, the same one she gives the guy from the Department of Education his “mordida” in. She didn’t utter a word; just glared at me like I was a cockroach, followed me to the front door to make sure I left and didn’t try to sneak back in to say goodbye to my students, then shut the door behind me and made sure it was tightly closed and stood there until I was out of sight. I decided to walk over to Chapultepec Park and spend the day at the Museum of Anthropology and History, a welcome relief from señora Rosario’s prison. I got some small comfort from knowing that I was the fourth teacher in the past two months to be fired, “excommunicated” is the way one of them put it, a fifth had to be hauled away to a psychiatric ward, driven mad by those three students of mine, whom I’d won over through bribes, reading English language publications like The Herald and tossing Pope Rosario’s sacred text into the ashcan where it belonged. A long walk through history, I told myself as I headed for Reforma, is just what I need. I can reconnoiter and come up with another plan later; jobs teaching English can’t be that hard to find. The one thing I’ll miss are those three goof-ball students of mine, sent by their employer, Kimberly-Clark S.A., to bedevil Sra. Rosario’s fabulous institution. Gonzalo Rivera, Manuel Juárez and Eustacio Moctezuma. what a trio! The Three Musketeers! Always thinking of something, hatching some devious plot against the sanctity of Pope Rosario’s Holy Fortress of Learning. What a crew!

When I got to the park, I stopped for a moment near the giant ancient ahuehuete tree, the one that I call “the-tree-that-looks-like-a-mountain” because it reminds me of a mountain in an old Chinese painting. It is ancient and gnarled, has a gigantic trunk that dwarfs people sitting around it, and huge lumbering main branches and hundreds of small and middle-sized branches that go up vertically like trees. It goes back before Moctezuma’s time, maybe a thousand years. I gave its trunk a friendly tap as I walked by, then crossed the street and walked slowly up the hill toward Maximilian’s castle, having decided to take a small detour through its history before visiting the Museum of Anthropology and History. The hill gave off an odor of dry grass and smog. The park was filling up with people arriving for their midday siesta and picnics on the grass. On the small lake, lovers were already launching out in rowboats, rowing slowly. The big gray pelican, a fixture in the park, was busy pestering people for handouts as he waddled from one to another, clattering his beak. As I went up the hill past the Museum of History, a place full of horrific scenes of killing from Mexico’s violent past, a place that sends chills chasing all over my body whenever I walk past it, a car bearing Guatemalan plates passed me going up, and a jeep load of soldiers passed me going down, rifles at their sides, swirls of dust curling up from the wheels. Getting to the top, I went over to the brow of the hill, leaned against the balustrade, and looked out across the smog-blanketed city, trying to pick out Sra. Rosario’s citadel down on Durango, but I couldn’t pick it out, the air was just too thick with smog. Looking across the valley toward the mountains I noticed, totally out of character for this time of the year, a swelling, boiling mass of angry black clouds beginning to gather and swell. Then I was aware of the total absence of bird sounds and a general stilling of the air, as if the world was holding its breath, had sucked it up and held it in, expectantly, like an animal will do when it senses danger. Then from way off, the bank of clouds began moving rapidly toward the city, casting a black shadow beneath it as it sped across the valley, spitting lightning and rattling and rumbling as it flew, a swelling, malignant mass that gained momentum, a runaway train, a devil of a thing, charging right at us.

One of the young museum guards stepped out of the nearby guard box, stared off into the distance and motioned to his companions to come have a look. The four of them shook their heads and muttered, telling each other that things like this do not happen at this time of the year in the Valle de México, but, amigo, then how do you explain those clouds that are marching madly toward us, rattling and billowing like all Hell,? The five of us decided there were better places to be than standing on the crown of Grasshopper Hill waiting for the storm to swoop down on us. They headed for the castle door, while I, for reasons which I still don’t understand, hightailed it down the road to the body of the park, hoping, I guess, to take shelter in the Museum of Anthropology and History before the storm hit, cursing myself for not having followed the example of those guys and run into the castle and slammed the door behind me.

From the other side of the hill came the loud rumbling of thunder, and then the first black thunderheads spilled over the hill and the castle, and a monstrous black avalanche of clouds that belched fire and torrents of rain and pushed a cyclone of wind ahead of and beneath it, swooshed down the hill and sent leaves and branches flying. It sounded like the end of the world! I turned on my heel and ran for the nearest substantial cover I could think of, whipped by gusts of wind and sheets of water and pelted by debris, pell-mell toward the Paseo. I gott only as far as the colossus of Tlaloc when the storm hit full-force, threw me over the edge of the reflecting pool at the deity’s feet, face down in the wet and the mire. I dragged myself to my feet and took shelter between the god’s massive legs, thinking that it was as safe a place as any.

The rain was so dense that it blurred everything, like a river descending from the sky. Trees bent double until they broke, snapping with loud cracks! Branches and hats and people flew about like birds, flotsam carried by the wind; cars skidded into one another, floated down the Paseo like boats, three VW Beetle minicabs went by with their windows tight shut and steamed over. And overhead, well, overhead Tlaloc himself — that god of the storms, fury, and impatience — looked down, growled, and hurled another thunderbolt. I clung to one of the colossus’s massive legs and prayed. Never, never in my life, I swear it, have I prayed so long or so fervently: “Lord, get me out of here, and I’ll do whatever You want!” It’s amazing what a man will say at times like that. And Tlaloc, hearing, swung a long arm of wind around, spun it around the Museum of Anthropology, the dirty sneak, so he could hurl it at the rear of his likeness and hit me square in the back with a curtain of wind and water that sent me sprawling on my face again in the pool. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the storm disappeared over the Museum and vanished, trailing black tatters and rumbling murderously in the distance.

When I picked myself up out of the pool and looked around, the sun was shining in a clear blue sky. Water ran in rivulets down the colossus’ massive legs, ran in rivulets down me, poured over the edge of the pool onto the grass, and ran in a broad river down the Paseo. I lifted one foot out of the water, looked at it and shook my head: another pair of shoes for the trashcan! Steam began to rise from the ground, and out of the steam people dragged themselves, groping about, bewildered, looking for friends, relatives and pets, finding some lying dead under some snapped-in-two tree, others lying dazed but alive in puddles of water which were everywhere, like minor lakes; others wandered about like people raised from the dead, lost and in a daze. It was like every blade of grass and every particle in the roadway had become a steam vent, the steam quavering, drifting, hanging about, surreal, like a hallucination. I sat down on the edge of the pool and dangled my feet over the edge and just stared. Wreckage was everywhere. In the distance, I could hear the rising and falling wail of sirens as they converged on the park. I stood up, looked up into the colossus’ great stone face, which seemed to be smiling maliciously over everything. I began walking home, amidst swirling clouds of steam.

Evidence of the storm’s passing was everywhere between the park and my apartment on Ejercito Nacional: there were broken trees, shattered windows, smashed cars, cars washed up onto sidewalks, wrenched and ripped awnings, junk. And everywhere, that shimmering, moving bed of steam. Oddly enough, monuments like the statue of Diana and of el Angel stood unscathed, except that Tlaloc, in his passing, had taken an awning from somewhere and draped it over Diana’s nakedness, giving her a garish kind of modesty in green and white striped canvas. Turning up Tiber, I began to wonder what kind of horrors might have happened in the apartment I shared with a roommate who is a stickler for cleanliness and neatness and has some very nice things. I wondered if our maid’s shack had washed off the roof. María Antonia is Justo’s long-suffering maid, who lived with her son Eusebio, her teenage daughter Anita, and their dog Perro. I never knew why they didn’t give him a more dignified name, but never asked. Maybe it was because he wasn’t a very dignified sort of dog, but only a small, tan-colored nondescript little mutt who barked at everything and seemed scared of his own shadow. María Antonia was a jewel. It was a wonder to me how she managed to keep everything and everyone in balance.

Getting to Ejercito Nacional and seeing the flotsam and jetsam scattered about, the crowds of people dragging their soaked belongings into the sun to dry, sweeping this way and that with long brooms, some simply sitting on the curb staring disconsolately at their feet, I knew I’d better shake a leg and find out what had happened back home. Passing the bakery, I saw the baker wandering around inside among mounds of soggy bread and pastry; further down the street was the lonely figure of Gustavo Heinz, our orange juice vendor, emptying glass after glass of water into the gutter, doing it very carefully, as if he didn’t want to get any of it on the sidewalk. Like everything else, he was giving off clouds of steam.

“At least you didn’t get washed away,” I told him, trying to put the best face on things.

“As far as that goes, I might as well have,” he replied, pouring another glass of water carefully into the street. “The damned storm washed all my oranges and all my money down the sewer! The old woman will never believe me!” He gave a shudder, catching a glimpse of his wife, the estimable señora Heinz, the shrew, shaking her broom at him and shrieking: “How dare you come back home without any money, you worm! I know what you did with it, bum, cockroach! You spent it on booze in that cantina where you like to hang out, don’t tell me about any storm, liar!” He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of such a thing happening at this time of the year señor Eric, never! And this is twice this winter we’ve had a storm like this. Only this one was worse, it didn’t just flush some bad cop down the sewer, it tore the Hell out of everything!” His face wrinkled up as if he were going to cry.

“Maybe it’ll be the last one, Gustavo,” I said, trying my best to cheer him up.

“Por diós, I hope so! Another day like this one, and I’m finished!” The man went on to describe what had happened, he, going on about his daily duties, standing there squeezing juice for a customer when all of a sudden, WHAM! the storm hit like Hell had come, shrieking down the street and leaping over buildings roaring like a harpy from hades. The wind took every window of the supermarket out and left the inside of the store a wreckage of smashed and sodden debris. “I hid in the doorway,” he said, “and watched the wind take my oranges and dump them in the street and wash them away! I’m damned, señor, but it was just like someone was standing there dumping those things in the street, like a living being, if I believed in such things. And then the money, which like an idiot, I left in a box under the counter, the wind went in and took it all, opened the box and spilled all my cash right down the sewer after the oranges! Holy shit, señor Eric, it might as well have dumped me down there after it, the old woman will never believe a word of it, so help me God!” And he burst into tears, bawling like a baby.

I couldn’t think of a single helpful thing to say, so I said nothing, kept my mouth shut, and listened. When he finished, I patted him on the shoulder and crossed the street to the apartment. As I was letting myself in, Gustavo called out:

“And the damned thing didn’t break a single glass! Not one of them! How do you figure that out, señor, I ask you? I mean, whoever heard of such a thing? Who? That’s why my wife will never believe me!” And he went on crying and pouring glass after glass of water into the street.

~~~

The apartment was a disaster. The storm had dumped gallons of water on the flat roof, and it all cascaded down the stairs and flooded everything, ruining the new oriental rug that Justo had bought just the week before, the one he paid so much for because it’s Persian, soaking it with sodden ashes from the fireplace. María Antonia was pushing water around with a broom and shaking her head. When she looked up and saw me, she wiped her forehead with the back of a hand and said: “Por diós, señor Eric, but the sky has fallen! Señor Justo will be beside himself! The rug is ruined! Everything is ruined! I don’t know what to do!”

“I’ll help you,” I told her. I looked down at the carpet, which did look like a total loss. “You’re right about the carpet; there’s probably nothing that can be done for it. But we can at least hang it on the line. By the way, is your room still up there?”

“Sí, señor, it is; but poor Perro shit everywhere from fright, and everything, like here, is a terrible mess!” She leaned on her broom and shook her head. “I don’t know where to begin.”

It was true. Looking around, it was hard to decide what to do first, but I said “we might as well begin with the carpet.” So that’s what we did. The oddest thing was that my room had been totally spared, as if Tlaloc, in a fit of compassion or a sense of irony had decided that one thorough dousing was enough. I mean, it was completely dry! I closed the door right away so María Antonia wouldn’t see it, and we rolled Justo’s Persian carpet up and carried it, corpse-like, up the stairs to the roof, where we slung it over the clothes line to dry. As for Anita and Eusebio, she didn’t know where they were, which started her crying.

Perro, having strewn shit everywhere, was huddled next to María Antonia’s shack, whimpering and quaking with fright. I went over and patted his poor head, and then we went back downstairs and began bailing water out of the rooms, pushing it down the stairs into the patio and tossing buckets full out the windows. It took us over two hours. Then we went back upstairs and began cleaning up the roof and María Antonia’s two-room shack, which was a sopping, shit-covered mess with gaping holes in the roof where that howling wind had torn pieces off and sent them sailing throughout the neighborhood. We went to work with scrub brushes, soap, hammer and nails. I managed to find a few pieces of her roof in the street below, where Gustavo Heinz was still gazing disconsolately at the sewer opening, and I nailed them back into place. We could still hear the sound of sirens wailing as rescue trucks, fire engines and police cars cris-crossed the city. From up there on top of her shack, the wreckage on the tops of nearby buildings was clear to see: blown-down TV antennae, chunks of roofing, and other dogs like Perro, pooping in pools of water. And everywhere, people wandered about like lost souls. From down below, María Antonia leaned out of Justo’s bedroom widow and waved to a neighbor woman across the street who was holding onto a long broom and staring off into space as if she half expected Tlaloc to come raging back again, appearing first as a small black speck in the sky, then swelling and billowing and filling the sky with howling wind, shattering bolts of lightning, and oceans of water.

“Soledad!” María Antonia shrieked; “Hey! Amiga! Comadre! Are you alright? Hey!”

“God has punished us for our sins!” Soledad replied, looking around and shrugging. “You should have been over here. My God, what a mess!”

“Ay, por diós! What could we have done to deserve such terrible punishment, comadre? You should see the mess over here!”

“Ay, diós mío, María Antonia; everything is covered with water. The señor will be furious!”

“Ay, Soledad, and so will señor Justo! You should see his carpet!” pointing with a finger and shouting in a dead-raising voice. “It is probably ruined, and he paid a fortune for it!”

“And señor Inocencio’s library was washed down the stairs!” Soledad replied, leaning on her broom and shaking her head. “It came too fast, whoosh! down the stairs like a river into his library and through it. Everything is destroyed! One minute peace; the next,” snapping her fingers, “disaster!”

“Maybe it was Satan!” María Antonia shouted back.

“Yes, it’s probably true, what with all the sin going on in this place,” Soledad replied; “But why would God punish us?” clearly meaning herself and her good comadre from across the street.

“For our sins, ninny,” María Antonia retorted at the top of her voice; “It could have been either one of them.” Since her meaning was ambiguous, the conclusion was left hanging in the air.

“The results are all the same, comadre, whichever it was,” Soledad responded, resolving the theological problem.

“It won’t make any difference to my wife,” Gustavo Heinz shouted up from the street.

“Ay, pobrecito!” Soledad called down; “What are we going to do?”

“Clean everything up, comadre; it’s all we can do.”

“And pray to God it doesn’t happen again.”

“Yes, and pray to God it doesn’t happen again!”

And far off in the mountains, lurking in a deep valley amidst a drenched pine forest, Tlaloc muttered to himself: “It wasn’t either God or the Devil, you dummies; it was me!”

When I finished nailing María Antonia’s roof back in place, and she finished cleaning up the mess inside her shack, we left Perro whining and shaking and peering anxiously up at the sky and went back downstairs. As she walked by the line where Justo’s Persian carpet hung, its colors probably indelibly embedded with fireplace ash and dogshit, María Antonia crossed herself and shook her head. Justo’s anger would be boundless. All that money, down the drain! She couldn’t help giggling, and by the time we were downstairs, the apartment smelling of mildew, she was laughing outright, wheezing and dancing this way and that in a fit of hysterics that left her rocking back and forth and holding her sides. When we went into the kitchen and found a salamander in the sink, she laughed so hard she had to sit down. Tlaloc, the old trickster, had left his final calling card. I scooped up the salamander and tossed it out the window into the patio.

~~~

The storm entered the city between Colonia Presidentes de México and Colonia Lomas San Lorenzo and swept north, leaving a corridor of destruction before vanishing into the mountains. The rest of the city was left unscathed. At least a dozen people drowned, three were blown off rooftops, two were squashed by falling trees, and one was washed down a storm drain. Scores of shops were flooded, causing no end of consternation (a baker was seen chasing a pan of pastries down Ayuntamiento, galloping like a horse and giving out hoarse shouts); hundreds of trees were toppled, some of them very old; a small fleet of yellow VW Beetle taxicabs sailed away down the Paseo like boats putting out to sea; and one food vendor in Chapultepec Park ended up in the central courtyard of the Museum of Anthropology and History, stall and all, and was found wandering around in a catatonic trance, muttering in Nahuatl about Hiutzilopochtli. And downtown, in the Zócalo, from whose ashes Mexico City had risen like a phoenix from the ashes of Tenochtitlán, the storm took the speaker’s stand and all the bleachers, set up for an Independence Day speech by the President, and left them in a pile of twisted steel and splintered wood, over which the body of a soldier was draped. The pictures in the papers the next day, not to mention the rumors that flew about, were unbelievable. The damages climbed into the tens of millions of dollars, plus uncounted costs in personal tragedy and loss. Whole colonias laid low, whole families, innocents, dogs and cats, merchants destroyed, washed away just because (to hear our neighbor Gilberta Madrazo talk) someone ticked the gods off, not knowing just how accurate she was, or which god had done the dirty deed.

María Antonia and I had opened all the windows in the apartment to air it out, and were sitting in a couple of dining room chairs resting and having a cup of coffee, when we heard the front door open and footsteps climb the stairs. I looked at my watch: it was six o’clock in the evening. We had been hard at work for six hours. In a moment, Justo’s head appeared at the top of the stairs and looked around.

That evening, after Justo had looked around and surveyed all the damage, including his Persian carpet, which, having dried in the sun, looked more salvageable than it had when María Antonia and I dragged it up to the roof and hung it over the clothesline, I went out for cakes from a bakery down the street that had somehow escaped unscathed. María Antonia fixed a pot of coffee, and the three of us sat around the kitchen table by candlelight and talked about the events of the day. Justo’s office was in an area of the city the storm had missed, so seeing the reality in his neighborhood was quite a shock. The next day, he sent the carpet out to be cleaned.

I finally took my flashlight and went to bed at around eleven and dreamed about poor trembling Perro, salamanders and angry Aztec gods. It had been an eventful day, filled with shocks and surprises.

The first thing the next morning, I got dressed and went out before anyone else was up and went down Tiber toward the Paseo, where I ran into my three students from Pope Rosario’s language institute at Sanborn’s on the Paseo. They were surprised to see me looking so good, and asked me what had happened to me the day before when the storm hit. It was pretty unbelievable to them, as they live in a part of the city that escaped the storm. They told me they quit Pope Rosario’s school and found a new school on Masaryk; I think it’s called “Madeleine O’Hara’s Instituto Masaryk”, but I’m not sure. They said she had an opening for a teacher, and they recommended me, but I told them I wasn’t interested because I’ve decided to go back to Des Moines. Seeing them was a good start to a doubtful day. Things around the neighborhood began to look normal with the supermarket repaired and roofs getting patched up, and even Gustavo Heinz was back making orange juice looking none the worse for wear. That big ahuehuete tree in Chapultepec Park? Lost a few branches, that’s all. Tough old tree. Perro? Oh, he’s still scared shitless, which is literally true. Clear your throat and he drops a load wherever he happens to be. We hope he’ll get over it eventually, but knowing Perro, I’m not making any bets. And Anita and her brother? They showed up a few hours later. Seems they missed the storm altogether, and most of the work cleaning things up.

Me? Oh, I’ve decided to go back home, Joe. I’m leaving for Des Moines in a couple days or so. I’ve contacted the Psychology Department at Iowa State University, in Ames, about finishing my Ph.D. in counseling psychology. I have a few things I still have to do and people to see here. I’ll give you a call as soon as I have my tickets in hand. Then we can say our goodbyes.

~~~

That was the last I saw of him until he dropped by my apartment the day he left for Des Moines.From what I’ve heard from mutual friends, he’s completing work on his degree and plans to start a private practice in Cedar Rapids.

“The Storm” was published in Issue 13 (August 2009) of The View From Here magazine (UK), and in the July online issue of the same publication. It is reprinted here with their permission. The story is a chapter from a novel I am working on, “The City Has Many Faces”.

Para quienes han llegado hasta aquí, he de pevenirlos que los temas abordados en ese artículo fueron la relación entre la orina y el vinagre, la distinción entre Política y politícas, el “declive” del idioma inglés y un reto a los colaboradores de SWI.

Ignoro cuántos de los lectores de SWI, entre los que obviamente nos contamos los colaboradores, comprenderá cabalmente este comentario. De hecho, puedo asegurar que será el “negrito en el arroz”, no sólamente por ser hasta ahora el único escrito en español, con todo propósito, sino porque soy el único colaborador hispanohablante. Y aclaro, para quienes vayan a hacer la traducción de este comentario, que la anterior: “el negrito del arroz” no es una frase despectiva, racista ni nada que se le parezca, simplemente es una expresión popular muy común en la cultura latina que alude a las piedritas que luego ensucian el arroz crudo. Así, en el afán de romper uno que otro diente, debo decir que:

1. En efecto, es una verdad de Perogrullo que Política no es lo mismo que políticas y sin embargo en la raíz lo es.
2. El vinagre es al orín lo que el óxido al hierro. Ambos primeros descomponen a los segundos.
3. El idioma inglés sí está en crisis, pero esa es tan permanente como la que experimenta cualquier otra lengua. No es necesario forzar las cosas mediante supuestos actos creativos y ocurrencias del momento para que sucedan los cambios ya progresivos o regresivos de un idioma. No por escribir como se habla, o jugar con la gramática se va a a producir como experimento planificado una revolución idiomática. El lenguaje cambia porque se usa, y cada día, cada generación espontáneamente da giros a los usos lingüísticos.
   

   Gabriel García Márquez y su libro "Cien años de soledad"

   En el Primer Congreso de Lengua Española, el escritor y premio Nobel de Literatura Gabriel García Márquez, siempre cuidadoso del idioma, propuso en un discurso humorístico, entre broma y en serio, eliminar a mansalva algunos caractéres de la ortografía y del alfabeto. No faltó el idiota que lo tomó en serio; sobre todo los idiotas que jamás dieron una en las materias de lenguaje en la escuela y siempre salían reprobados. (Y luego esos mismos presumen y petenden que el bilingüísmo sea una política de estado, ¡JAJAJA!)

4. En cuanto al reto al que empuja Tim Roux, con el debido respeto me parece una ocurrencia, una gracejada, la búsqueda del Santo Grial. Seamos sinceros, serios y honestos. No hay nada nuevo bajo el sol. Eso no quita que podamos pararnos de cabeza para ver el mundo y las cosas desde otra perspectiva, claro; experimentar. O de plano no me quedó suficientemente clara la propuesta. ¿De qué se trata? ¿De inventar el hilo negro o el agua tibia?

Derivado de los anteriores puntos ahora acoto lo siguente. Como parte del “Boom” de la literatura latinoamericana, varios escritores optaron por explorar el habla popular y reflejarla en sus textos al cobijo de la premisa de que todo escritor debe reflejar la realidad que lo circunda. Así, la “literatura de la onda” rescató el habla de los jóvenes de los años sesenta y setenta, aligerando de ese modo y acercando la literatura a un público cada día más reacio a la lectura por culpa de las políticas educativas gubernamentales.

En la actualidad, la literatura latinoamericana se ha diversificado en los modos de retratar la realidad y, si bien todavía algunos siguen optando por extaer las maneras del habla cotidiana haciendo una especie de etnografía del discurso, otros han preferido hacer un  viaje en el tiempo e ir hacia épocas anteriores a las revoluciones, para tratar de comprender los antecedentes de las mismas y las situaciones actuales de los países de la región. Y esto, no tan al margen de que en estos años, entre 2008 y 2012 varios países celebrarán centenarios de sus luchas intestinas y libertarias; mi México uno de ellos. Hay que mencionar también que con el advenimiento de los nuevos medios y tecnologías, el discurso literario se ha visto enriquecido al contrario de lo que podría alegarse, y esto no es exclusivo, como podría desprenderse de los textos de Tim Roux, de la literatura anglosajona.

Este comentario no ha buscado ni mostrar acuerdo ni desacuerdo tanto con el autor del artículo como con los distinguidos comentaristas previos. Simplemente es sólo una opinión, y una hecha en el segundo idioma más hablado de la Tierra y que, al menos en SWI, pare ser el menos socorrido. Si eso no es para sentirme orgulloso, entonces ¿qué?

Y ahí les va otro reto, anglohablantes, ¿cuándo y cuántas veces y por qué no han hecho el esfuerzo novedoso de escribir en otro idioma, de dirigirse a otras culturas en su propio idioma? Si hay unas culturas bastante soberbias en su andar, esas son precisamente las anglosajonas y germanicas, entre las que ha de incluirse la francesa, pero por otros motivos.

El Lenguaje y los símbolos son el Caballo de Troya del colonialismo y el imperialismo

Con la actitud colonialista e imperial que circula en sus venas lingüísticas se han mostrado incapaces de entablar un adecuado diálogo con otras culturas y formas de ser y expresar. Se han mantenido aislados en su islote. En cambio las lenguas romances, de las que aquí excluí al francés y no por razones etimológicas, sometidas en su mayoría por el colonialismo y el imperialismo se han enriquecido con la  imposición construyendo y reconstruyendo el sentido del discurso de manera constante, absorbiendo y retribuyendo; fortaleciéndose.

Por supuesto que no olvido que el español también gozó por muchos años de genes colonialistas e imperiales, pero la historia es clara y eso pasó a segundo término para dar paso a formas más sutiles de enculturación por ósmosis. Dicho esto no faltará el lector que, llegado aquí reclame por qué no soy condescendiente y, habiendo una mayoría de lectores y colaboradores anglosajones, no escribo en inglés. Yes, I could, but I don’t want; because my proposal was  exactly this: write in spanish for foreign readers. It’s greater challenge to me, to readers and, of course, the editor, who accept this madness.

Y podría, como tal vez le gustaría a Tim Roux, escribir cantinfleando; para que tú o aquél, ora sí que, vaya, como dice el dicho “ahí está el detalle”. ¿O no? Porque como digo una cosa digo la otra y entre tanto decir resulta que, ay, ¡mira cómo serás!, que si la tecnología, que si esto y l’otro. Bueno, dejando en claro que el sentido de lo dicho dicho queda y si tienes alguna duda, lector amigo, pues vuelve a empezar.

Dejémonos de baladronadas. En muchos países latinoamericanos, todavía hace 20 años en las universidades muchas fuentes bibliográficas y hemerográficas debíamos leerlas en inglés. Ahora, entre la pereza de los estudiantes y el disgusto generalizado por leer en otro idioma que no sea el propio (cuando se lee), el panorama ha cambiado. Y eso comienza a notarse en la Internet, donde la “lucha” cultural está tomando visos encarnizados en algunas áreas.

Una de mis hermanas es profesora de inglés, la otra es traductora y están conscientes y fascinadas con el hecho de cómo la esponja que es este idioma empieza a verse permeada del español incluso en la construcción gramatical. Y esto no significa que el inglés vaya a desaparecer, es simple evolución. Pero está visto que también en el campo de la lingüística se suceden las discusiones creacionistas.

Tampoco se tome el párrafo inmediato anterior como una reminiscencia del darwinismo social, no se trata de “la sobrevivencia del más fuerte”, aunque en la perspectiva de las lenguas autóctonas desde hace siglos esto así está sucediendo.

Ya sea que narremos historias, que contemos jocosidades, que voltéemos al revés las palabras y sus significados, el primer cambio se da en la relación de cada quien con respecto a su forma de hablar y de escribir, primero dentro de su circunstancia y luego dentro de su ámbito cultural, incluídos los intercambios; en la medida de su preocupación por el decir y el pensar, y sus consecuentes y muy distintas lógicas comunicativas.

Is this the SWI geriatrics home?

“¿Es esta la casa geriátrica SWI?” Pregunta Tim Roux en el título del artículo provocador de éste que ahora escribo. Y no dejo de concordar con la crítica constructiva, sobre todo cuando se la ubica en el contexto de las observaciones previas del mismo autor, por ejemplo cuando en su artículo “Tú, ¿deberíamos escribir Jinglish?” menciona cómo ha cambiado el uso del lenguaje desde hace veinte años:

Although 20 year olds may write in a limited vocabulary, they actually speak, in my experience, like the rest of us (except British 20 year olds who may not speak at all). The same is true of lawyers. They speak like the rest of us too, with a few ticks and watch-watchings thrown in. It’s when they write that you realise that they are communicating in jingles beamed across from another dimension. If 20 year olds speak traditionally enough, then hopefully their thoughts are even more congruent with the rest of ours [...]

Over the last twenty years, things have got wilder. English has become the global standard language, which means that everyone now owns it. Germans write German-English to the French who write French-English, which is all commented upon by the Spanish who speak Spanish-English and the Italians who give up entirely and talk among themselves.

En conclusión, si puede haber una, si escribir con corrección conlleva el tufo de la naftalina como para ubicar SWI a modo de casa de reposo de una literatura anquilosada, bueno, entonces sea SWI la clínica donde uno que otro juega a vejetar. Pero si el interés por mantener tirante y controlada la evolución en el decir puede equivaler a colocar cuidadosamente capullos en la alberca cultural y generacional, como elemento rejuvenecedor y redundante de las formas de comunicación y expresión, bien venida sea la novedad con todos sus límites.

El reto, Tim, no está en la palabra, sino en el acto mismo de definir.

For me, all stories develop from characters, never from story lines. I meet one, like the monkey Yukitaro in “The Old Man and The Monkey” and grandfather in “Grandfather Stories”, and the story (or stories) develop from there. I usually have no idea where things are going until I’m well into the process of writing. In “Grandfather Stories” I began with grandfather and the wolves, then a raven flew over my head one sunny day and I wrote about grandfather and the raven without knowing that that big bird would take the whole thing over and become the focus of what has become sixteen stories. Ravens are pushy birds, so I guess that shouldn’t be surprising.

“Verhoeven” developed from a news item about a shooting in Seattle; it would have gone nowhere had Magnus Willem Verhoeven not shown up just at the right time to take it from there. I am grateful for him. Where did he come from? I suspect that he was modeled on the Minnesota novelist Frederick Manfred, whom I once knew. Except that I added a couple of inches to Fred’s height when I drew Verhoeven. Fred Manfred was once the tallest novelist in America, and Verhoeven, so far as I know, at 6′ 11” is the tallest fictional detective on record. I must have had Fred in mind, as he and Verhoeven were from the same region (southwest Minnesota, and in Fred’s case, northwest Iowa), both descendants of Netherlands immigrants. Manfred’s ancestors came from Friesland and Verhoeven’s were Dutch. In Southwest Minnesota that was an important distinction. Make the mistake of calling a Frieslander a Dutchman and you might get a sock in the nose, the same being true if you got it wrong the other way round. I really should write more about Verhoeven, but haven’t so far. But I do like him well enough to have kept him on my list.

As for character development, that pretty much happens as the story progresses and is edited. Sometimes it is a slow and rather painful process, and at other times it isn’t. I never know which it’s going to be until I begin. Like with most relationships, we have fun, tussle with each other, have misunderstandings, disagreements and quarrels, laugh, follow along and get to know each other. And in the process a story is told that is sometimes short and sometimes a whole lot longer. Plus everything in between.

That’s the way life is.

Note: My novel about Mexico City, set in the early 1970s, “The City Has Many Faces”, is a work-in-process. I hope to have it finished sometime next year. (But, being a novel, it may prove to take longer.)

El sistema de partidos en México a punto del zapatazo

Teóricamente, una noticia tiene generalmente como promedio de vida en el ámbito de la opinión pública de alrededor de una semana. En ese tiempo, la resonancia de la información depende de muchos factores contra lo que puedan suponer los adoradores del rating, el ranking y otras mediciones estadísticas. El primero y más determinante de ellos es curiosamente el más difícil de medir: la relevancia.
Es común que los investigadores midan la relevancia desde la perspectiva del uso o respuesta de los consumidores respecto de un mensaje en particular. Así, si 10 personas leen la nota “A” mientras 25 atienden a la nota “B” se determinan conclusiones que se antojan estadísticamente obvias, pero si hay algo con lo que los estadísticos tienen que lidiar y hasta ahora muy pocos han podido resolver es con el valor subjetivo y cultural que subyace en las respuestas de los consumidores.
Al investigar mediante el buscador de Google cuántas referencias se suscitaron a lo largo de la semana en que estuvo en la palestra el asonado tema de los zapatazos lanzados al presidente estadounidense George W. Bush, estas fueron de un millón 380 mil referencias conteniendo la combinación de palabras “zapato” y “bush”, para las fechas entre el 15 y el 22 de diciembre de 2008. Referencias todas estas en varios idiomas, algunas repetidas o redundantes o con alguna forma de desviación en cuanto al contenido contextual. Ahora, a la fecha de redactar esta entrega, el número de referencias “actualizadas” es de 163 mil. Es decir que disminuyeron en poco más del 90%.
¿Qué significan esos números? ¿El grado de interés sobre el tema? ¿Su importancia? ¿La actualidad? Sí y no exactamente. En la superficie sólo son la cantidad de búsquedas actuales relacionadas y no necesariamente la cantidad de referencias específicas, entre las que podrían contarse los documentos y artículos más añejos, las variaciones sobre el tema o las tendencias e inclinaciones en tal o cual sentido de la información. Podría pensarse que servirían de fundamento para establecer una tasa de referencialidad o una tasa de actualidad, pero no serían suficientes para retratar tales conceptos cabalmente.
En aquellas fechas, cuando la búsqueda se combinaba además con la palabra “periodista”, el número disminuía notablemente a un millón 10 mil referencias. ¿Era menos interesante o relevante el tema por incluir al periodista actor del hecho? Hoy se muestran 143 mil referencias. Tanto en uno como en otro caso, todavía habría que hacer la tarea de excluir aquellas referencias sesgadas por incluir alguna o varias de las palabras pero en contextos diferentes al de la famosa escena del periodista iraquí que lanzó un zapato al ex presidente George W. Bush. No pueden hacerse simplonas sumas y restas, como pretenden algunos.
En estos días muy próximos a las elecciones intermedias en México, los temas de discusión central han sido el voto nulo y el voto blanco. Al buscar en Google la combinación exacta “voto nulo” obtenemos 495 mil referencias. Con la combinación “voto blanco”, 363 mil referencias.
Desde mediados de junio, luego de la proposición del empresario Alejandro Martí mediante su organización Mexico S.O.S. para promover el “voto comprometido” bajo el lema “mi voto por tu compromiso”, y con el cual conminó a los políticos mexicanos a signar ante notario público una lista de compromisos a cumplir a cambio del voto ciudadano, la primera combinación a la fecha de este artículo arroja 1,550 referencias, mientras la segunda arroja 151 mil referencias, haciendo notar un mayor uso de esa combinación en los materiales publicados en la Internet tanto en blogs, sitios, revistas, diarios, podcasts, etcétera, trátense de textos verbales o textos icónicos (imágenes e ilustraciones).
Estas cifras, que nada tienen que ver con otras medidas como  vistas, visitas, clicks, contrastan con las de otra combinación: “voto diferenciado”, que arroja 4,160 referencias. Estos datos duros, fríos, no reflejan el grado de confusión que el tema ha suscitado en la población mexicana que no está distinguiendo los conceptos “voto blanco” y “voto nulo”, considerándolos equivalentes cuando en estricto y técnico sentido no lo son; ni clarifica el nivel de aprobación o rechazo del mismo. Sólo son indicios del interés que unas parejas de palabras tienen en la opinión pública durante un tiempo más o menos determinado.
A los anunciantes y publicistas esta información resulta útil al momento de contratar espacios publicitarios. Y a los editores de contenidos en la Internet y otros medios les sirve de guía para generar interés y tránsito hacia sus sitios mediante la fijación de etiquetas y categorías para la búsqueda. Pero para efectos comunicacionales y sociológicos, esta información no basta para profundizar en el trasfondo que encierra el interés por dichas palabras “voto”, “nulo”, “blanco”, “diferenciado” y “comprometido”. Son necesarios y obligados otros estudios más concienzudos que separen y observen por separado la incidencia de otros factores conceptuales y filtros de búsqueda. Las búsquedas que hemos hecho para este artículo no han utilizado ninguna clase de filtro, fuera del que implica el orden de las palabras, el uso de signos lógicos y el idioma.
También es importante considerar el origen y ubicación de la referencia, pues no es lo mismo que una palabra aparezca en el cuerpo de un artículo, que este artículo sea reciente o antiguo, a que lo haga en el título del mismo.
Google, sin duda el mejor buscador, aún con sus filtros, no discrimina. Es labor del investigador documental, del lector, del usuario de la Internet efectuar la discriminación y para eso son necesarios criterios que van más allá de la simple medición estadística. Hay que decir igualmente que semejantes datos no distinguen entre referencias comerciales (anuncios), referencias interactivas (vínculos y tracking), menciones efímeras (twitter, facebook y otros), y otras formas de referencialidad capaces de introducir sesgo involuntario.
Quien se entera mediante la carretera de la información ha de tener en cuenta estas minucias para no caer en las trampas que encierra la formación de la opinión pública. Existen muchos periodistas adoradores de las estadísticas que harían bien en volverse más metódicos  y críticos al momento de emplear estos datos para su labor informativa, de lo contrario seguirán abonando a la confusión y amplificando la espiral de ruido.

INFLUENZA NUEVO VIRUS

Recientemente recibí el correo de un familiar acerca de la epidemia de INFLUENZA en México. Enseguida lo anoto y luego añado algunas precisiones que bien cabe aclarar. Sirva este texto a modo de aportación.

LA CARTA

Hola a todos.

Seguramente ya tdos están informados de la epidemia nacional de influenza que estamos viviendo. Tengo una tía trabajando en el Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitacion que acaba de llamarnos por teléfono para ponernos al tanto de que NO es una epidemia de influenza, es un virus que se encuentra suspendio en el medio ambiente SUMAMENTE PELIGROSO. Siguen desconociendo el orígen, pero los síntomas son un malestar general en el cuerpo, cuerpo cortado, dolores de cabeza fuertes, irritación en los ojos y mucho ardor, estos síntomas se presentan uno o dos días y después se acompañan de un fuerte dolor en uno o en ambos pulmones. En el Instituto además de innumerables muertes de pacientes, han muerto ya 10 médicos, y están hospitalizados 2 médicos de 25 años. El hospital Juárez (uno de los más grandes de la ciudad de México) está cerrado por cuarentena. Es un virus tan fuerte que los síntomas se presentan uno o dos días y si no es atendido de emergencia es mortal en TODOS LOS CASOS. Los médicos suponen que es una mutación de la gripe aviar por sus características. Desde luego, el gobierno no quiere dar a conocer tal información para no crear pánico, pero es una realidad. Las clases ya se suspendieron, el presidente acaba de cancelar su gira. Esto no ocurre a menos que haya una causa de fuerza mayor para que se lleve a cabo.

MEDIDAS DE PREVENCIÓN

 

• No salir a lugares públicos a menos que sea una emergencia
• En caso de tener que salir a la calle, utilizar cubrebocas TODO  EL TIEMPO
• No saludar a nadie ni de mano, mucho menos de beso.
• Cargar una botellita de alcohol y constantemente desinfectar con el las manos y boca, como si fuera crema, no secarlo.
• Evitar comer en lugares en los que preparen la comida, pues se tiene contacto físico con ella (restaurantes, fast food, etc.) Preparar todo en casa y si no es posible consumir solamente alimentos en lata.
• Hervir 20 minutos el agua (incluso el agua embotellada)
• Al presentar cualquiera de los síntomas CORRER a un hospital, no a un particular ni consultorio, a un HOSPITAL.
• En verdad nada de esto es imposible, hagámoslo todos y circulen esta información con todos sus contactos. Si alguien tiene más información haganla circular, porque evidentemente este tipo de información tan confidencial también se filtra.
• A los que tengan hijos creen conciencia en ellos, pues las clases se suspendieron para evitar que los niños esten reunidos y hacer más grande el problema, si no hay clases NO LES PERMITAN SALIR A LUGARES PÚBLICOS. Y circulen esta información con otros padres de familia.

Espero tomemos conciencia y llevemos a cabo estas sencillas medidas preventivas.

Saludos!

 

LA CONTESTACIÓN

No me gusta llevar la contraria, pero estimo necesario hacer algunas aclaraciones respecto a lo anotado en el correo, sobre todo porque su contenido, más que informar alarma, y eso hoy es lo que menos necesita la población, que se la desinforme y se la alarme.

De acuerdo con las autoridades del Centro de Operaciones de Infectología (no recuerdo exactamente su denominación) de la Secretaría de Salubridad del gobierno de México, así como con las contrapartes de la Organización Mundial de la Salud y epidemiólogos de Canadá y E.E.U.U. que han venido a México para el caso, es forzoso desvelar algunos mitos y temores que se han creado alrededor del asunto.

1. SÍ se trata en efecto de un nuevo virus. Es una cepa nueva del virus de INFLUENZA PORCINA. Este virus ya había ocasionado casos aislados de enfermedad y muerte en Asia y E.E.U.U. hacia los años ochenta.
2. NO es el virus de INFLUENZA AVIAR que ocasionó muchas muertes y enfermos en Asia a comienzos del siglo.
3. En tanto nueva cepa del virus de INFLUENZA PORCINA, esta se caracteriza por estar recombinada genéticamente con el virus de INFLUENZA ESTACIONAL de los humanos. Para esta segunda existe una vacuna que cada dos o tres años debe ser repantentada porque el virus muta muy rápidamente volviéndose más complejo y resistente. Para el primero no existe vacuna, pero sí existen dos antivirales a los que es susceptible y que lo pueden curar. Esta vacuna no es de ayuda, al menos hasta donde se sabe, para el caso que nos ocupa.
4. ES UNA ENFERMEDAD CURABLE, siempre y cuando sea debidamente diagnosticada y tratada dentro de las primeras 72 del contagio. Es muy posible que haya casos de autoinmunidad y que no requieran tratamiento específico. Los casos extremos que conllevan la muerte son los que importan más a los científicos porque, desafortunadamente para los deudos, esos son los casos de los que se aprende más acerca de la etiología (comportamiento) de la enfermedad.
5. El virus tarda de 3 a 5 días en incubarse y manifestar los primeros SÍNTOMAS ya muy mentados: dolor de cabeza intenso, temperaturas superiores a 39 grados centígrados o equivalente en Fahrenheit.
6. En sí mismo no es mortal, son las condiciones del paciente las que pueden derivar en complicaciones respiratorias, por lo mismo quienes corren más riesgos son las personas fumadoras, los que por algún tratamiento o enfermedad severa tienen disminuídas sus defensas, las personas asmáticas o con problemas respiratorios, las mujeres en estado de gravidez, los niños y los ancianos.
7. El virus no puede ser transporatado por el aire y no se sabe a ciencia cierta si es transmisible por picadura de mosquito como ocurre con otros virus similares. La más eficiente forma de contagio es el contacto directo con superficies contaminadas con el virus y enseguida, el tacto sobre mucosas corporales vía ojos, nariz o boca. De ahí que la clave para el control sanitario sea la HIGIENE y el ASEO GENERAL. Lavarse manos y cara con regular frecuencia. Sobre todo las manos. Restringir el contacto físico es importante, pero no determinante. NO ESCUPIR EN LA CALLE, aunque dura poco tiempo en el ambiente, el virus puede esparcirse así con regular facilidad. Además esta es una FEA COSTUMBRE.
8. De todos los casos reportados, más de mil, sólo un reducido porcentaje de alrededor de 15% ha resultado mortal y se ha confirmado como causa la presencia del virus mencionado de INFLUENZA PORCINA en su nueva cepa. El resto ha presentado INFLUENZA ESTACIONAL, NEUMONÍA (probable complicación) o INSUFICIENCIA RESPIRATORIA (problable complicación). Por lo que están muchos casos investigándose, incluso a los familiares que pudieren ser portadores.
9. Para el mejor control de la epidemia, LOS VIAJES HAN DE SER RESTRINGIDOS a menos que sean de fundamental importancia. LAS FRONTERAS NO HAN DE CERRARSE, ES INNECESARIO. Esto obedece a que entre menos se movilice la población, más control habrá sobre los mecanismos de transmisión y contagio. Pero no tiene por qué paralizarse la vida del país, salvo en aquellas actividades que supongan un alto riesgo o foco de contagio, como son las escuelas, los centros de multitudes. De aquí que el PRESIDENTE Felipe Calderón o Perico De Los Palotes cancele sus viajes y giras si no son de vital importancia.
10. Automedicarse no sirve de nada. Tampoco los complementos nutricionales son de ayuda para la prevención, sólo la HIGIENE Y EL ASEO, repito. El uso de tapabocas es una ayuda de menor eficiencia porque apunta a una forma de transmisión poco eficiente como lo es la aérea, pero ayuda a prevenir el contagio. Si no se quiere usar el tapabocas, basta guardar una distancia un poco mayor a 50 cm con las otras personas. El virus no puede viajar, no camina (no tiene patas), no vuela, y no puede ser transportado por el aíre más lejos de esa distancia pues no sobrevive ni se enquista.
11. Es verdad que se sabe muy poco sobre el nuevo virus y por lo mismo cualquier medida de prevención por exagerada que parezca no está de más, pero eso no es motivo para ALARMAR a la población. Y esto va también para mantenerse alerta sobre el tono con que los medios de comunicación de tendencia amarillista dan las noticias.

Entonces, a reserva de estar atentos a las informaciones y las novedades, no ganamos nada con entrar en pánico. Los avances de la ciencia y la civilización están de nuestro lado. La clave está en dos puntales: HIGIENE Y COMUNICACIÓN EFICIENTES.

Para mantener a nuestros lectores informados habremos de dar un giro a estas colaboraciones y, sin perder el estilo planteado, ponerlos al día con regular frecuencia acerca de lo que acontece alrededor de este importante tema de interés público mundial.