Wondering About the Simpler Life
Sometimes, when the day has been long and the air is as sticky as a Saturday night sidewalk, I wonder whether we are better off than we were in London, and, if it is so, what constitutes the proof of this.
I am 44 years old and university educated. I work as store clerk selling pots and pans to poor folk who are as ruthlessly rude as I can imagine. They spit on the floor, demand discounts of 50% or more, traipse in with extended families in tow, ignore me then waddle out. They are often unwitting and easy targets for the unscrupulous, yet they do not recognize it.
The market is a noisome, scabby place, full of impoverished desires and misbegotten hopes - fallout of the irrational side of the Ibero-Catholic culture. Betwixt the opening of one day and the next, a fine coat of gritty dust coats every horizontal surface, making the daily task of cleaning into a Herculean Labour.
So we flick feather dusters and wipe with swatches of red cloth in the snatched moments between customers. And what customers! Poor old women, flapping and slapping along in their broken shoes and plastic sandals, mumbling and chumbling, parting with their pesos upon the pain of greatest reluctance, all the while peering suspiciously at the world, convinced of petty frauds and cheats.
These scabrous surroundings are the source of our incomes. Other sales outlets could be developed, but, for now, things are allowed to languish and atrophy.
Our home is a three bed apartment, built, atop the house of my in-laws, at a cost of some US$65,000. It is a little smaller than I would like (and lacks storage space), but the ceilings are tall and I have a workshop-cum-office of my own. There is no garden - although we have a large, unshaded patio upstairs - and the common, tiled yard downstairs contains two small, yapping poodles, who are allowed to micturate freely everywhere until the maid hoses the place down. In summer, the stench of stale dog piss is almost overwhelming.
The in-law's house dates from the 1920's. I assume that downtown Tampico was altogether more pleasant and wholesome in those days. Certainly, there would not have been the aural pollution of the buses, taxis, colectivos nor the pullulation of private cars.
Now, unfortunately, there is much twenty-first century degradation. People urinate in our doorway and dump their trash outside. The air is rent by the discordance of vehicle klaxons - loud and sonorous from the buses and trucks, shrill and piercing from the taxis and colectivos. Ours us the remaining private house in this block.
Whores ply their trade just two block away, close by the dereliction at the top of the hill. Graffiti has made its cancerous way onto nearby buildings, occasionally ours included. The block plays host, after dark, to taco stands which always have a noisy swarm of colectivo drivers at feed.
Our immediate surroundings are impoverished and debilitating in their own way.
Yet despite this degraded immediacy, we are materially comfortable. We partake of the American Cornucopia in McAllen three or four times a year and we usually have an extended vacation as well. This year, we are off to Disneyworld in Florida and the other year it was an east carribbean cruise. We live in air-conditioned comfort and eat out at least every other week. Our daughter attends a private pre-school. We have a late model minivan (our second new vehicle in less than 5 years).
We could afford to live in a more pleasant locale in Tampico – but a stronger matriarchy prevails in this family.
Labels: Culture
