August 4, 2020
Her friends saw her waving, and called out to the combi driver to stop for her. She clambered onto the van that’s the standard form of bus here, no facemask in sight, smiled at everyone and went to hug and cheek-kiss the guys who’d done the calling. Who also had no masks, despite them supposedly being mandatory on public transport.
Soon, she was explaining the latest changes in her camino spiritual to the young men, while I fumed silently that one way of manifesting such a camino would be to give a hoot about other people’s wellbeing via a mask. But the hippie kids who move here from the cities almost all seem to come from comfortably off families, and carry that sense of divine exemption from the everyday rules that the wealthy can assume.
One of the problems with this quarantine is irritation. I used to be determinedly patient with everybody’s naive theories and wacko explanations for how things are; after all, I have my own set of beliefs that don’t coincide with 21st Century materialism. But I’ve finally reached a level of impatience such that I sat on the bus pondering what might happen if I hit the hippie girl over the head with the roll of paper towels I’d bought in town. For certain, most of the other passengers were glaring at her over their masks. In the end, I just grumbled silently to myself until she finally got off.
Combis in town, waiting for passengers. Each holds about sixteen people, or twenty-two, if people jam in and stand.
Quarantine here isn’t like that of a big city. Mexico City, I understand, is much more uptight, and some people there have not been farther than their street corner in months. This morning, though, as Ioften do I went for a two-mile walk along a mountainside trail, and (with mask on) bought some bananas at the Thursday open-air market in the village. Such amenities are partly why I chose to stay here instead of going back to Canada.
Most restaurants in town have reopened (with spaced tables), but sales of alcohol are banned, in case drunk people start to forget the distancing requirements. And we’re supposed to eat and leave within an hour – no lingering. At least one major restaurant doesn’t seem to be coming back, and a hotel in the centre of our village has also taken down its signage and locked its gates. Boredom is miserable, but losing the business you poured your heart and your savings into for years has to be far worse.
Luna Mextli (the names mean ‘Moon’ in both Spanish and Nahuatl) was one of the first places I ever ate at in town, well before I moved here from Toronto. It’s shown no signs of reopening.
But boredom is bad enough. I need new shoes, but I’d have to go on two buses to a nearby city to get a decent pair. I can’t any longer head into town and have a 90-minute conversation over a cappuccino with whoever’s around. I can’t make a day-trip to an archeological site and wander about, pondering what it was like in its heyday fifteen centuries ago. I’m having to remind myself that the pandemic is still expanding in Mexico, even according to the utterly unreliable official numbers.
And writing blog posts about being bored (beyond this one, obviously) isn’t much of an option. I wouldn’t read them myself, so why post them?
I’ve been trying to gauge how the pandemic is changing Mexican society. Normally, everyone assumes the President is corrupt and ineffectual. This one’s unhelpful remarks, however, have polarised the society, with many of those who voted for Lopez-Obrador still holding him out as a paragon of equality, and the rest of the country increasingly mistrusting him. He’s thus emulated his northern neighbour in sharply splitting public opinion, and in conceding nothing to his critics.
And while round here families have so far been able to hold up each other, I’m seeing some indicators of economic stress beyond restaurants that have not reopened. For example, my next door neighbour’s wife, who usually does a little caretaker work for absentee homeowners but is mostly a homemaker, has just opened a little store selling tortillas. The price is six cents Canadian, or four cents US, per tortilla. I tried guesstimating the math, but I can’t be certain of my results. Maybe she’s making six dollars a day, but possibly she’s operating at a loss. I hope that’s too pessimistic, but I’ve decided against opening my own competing operation on the other side of the village.
Either way, I doubt that boredom is her primary concern. Though I’d understand if, like me, she was getting irritated. Or worse.
Mexed Messages 