Monterrey Entries

Dust 2/14/09

Place 3/1/09

Place

“[People] are linked to that environment through three key psychological processes: attachment, familiarity, and identity. Place attachment…is a mutual caretaking bond between a person and a beloved place. Familiarity refers to the processes by which people develop detailed cognitive knowledge of their environs. Place identity is concerned with the extraction of a sense of self based on the places in which one passes one's life.” – Mindy Fullilove

After the episodes of traveling and the supposedly scientific paper writing about the topic, only now am I becoming cognoscente of how I come to know a place. I walked through el Parque Fundidora and afterwards along the canal Paseo de Santa Lucia to the downtown plaza one afternoon. The park is a large, flat stretch of land dotted with random structures of industry – rusty iron flumes penetrating the sky, bright yellow painted half-cars of trains, skeleton towers that once supported God-knows what at one time. At one edge of the park lies the sleeping giant – the Fundidora, or iron plant – dark and ominous with spikes jutting out of its unkempt mane. It breathes when I’m not looking. Its insides have been converted into a modern museum of the science and history of iron-making, a tribute to the industry that suckled and made fat the city. For the time being, it allows the human parasite to linger in its belly until the day it decides to awaken and do unto the petty squatters what it pleases. The poems and incantations of the long passed workers and servants give worship to the turbulence and majesty of its being: the heat of its insides, the fumes of its anger, the turbulence of its temper. It provided for them and toyed with their fragile corpses and hearts as all gods do.

It was the first time I was alone with the park and I decided that I needed to find a place within it that I would call my favorite to make it my own. I came upon a small clearing in which the cement pavement was replaced by a patchwork of square metal platforms. The patchwork was missing several pieces, the gaps revealing the vertical twigs of water spewing from rusty iron pipes running below: a chessboard made by a drunkard. On one edge of the patchwork sat an old metal piece of machinery whose function I realized was no longer worth understanding. It was now to be honored for its shape, its scars, its age, like an old woman in a black and white photograph. It matters not what it has gone through and suffices to say that it was ‘a lot.’ I chose this to be my favorite spot. It was to be mine and mine only to sit by and love as others walked by, once in a while stopping to marvel at its curious constitution. I suppose this is love: we decide that one is to be our favorite and stay by him, as the rest of the world strolls by in occasional admiration.

There were several more things I made my own that night – the chocolate and caramel filled churros from the small shop by the canal that consistently delivers the same crispy, gooey, sweet surprise; the bridge shaped like a rotary highway that allows you to descend to the side you seek only once you’ve followed its circumference; the sugar-sprinkled mini empanadas wrapped in clear plastic that inhabit the small bakery in the alleyway behind the flashy duplex mall; the mariachi band singing on a boat forever anchored to the bank of the canal being paid by whom to do so, I will never know; the aging man from Argentina guarding his telescope with a sign saying “Venus - free” showing passers-by his pet planet to whom we all feel obligated to give a few coins; and the lovers embracing and kissing proudly under the many milky pools of lamp light. I walked and sat until I was satisfied that I had collected enough belongings in this place. Yes, I can say I know Monterrey – or my little bite of it – for now and for eternity. Yes, these things now belong to me and in exchange, my sentiments, my tears, and a small serving of my heart now belong to it.

But I was wrong about knowing Monterrey. I didn’t then – not the Monterrey that I would come to remember.

In these foreign places where I resort to the sound of P. Diddy to remind me of who I am, I find myself even more sensitive to the stages of friendship: its growth and its expiration – stages that change rapidly and unpredictably with each passing day. I spend my hours here awaiting her silence that tears apart our fragile conversation, the drowning of my mind by an exclamation of undecipherable sounds containing the secrets he has finally decided to share with me that I will never know, the eventual loss of her gaze first intermittently and then forever as I spew out all the thoughts I know how to say, hoping that one of them would capture her interest, and finally his smile insufficient to cover the annoyance once he realizes that it just isn’t worth trying anymore. But today it occurred to me that this disappointment is all too familiar to be only due to my being here. This feeling of throwing darts at the hearts around me, hoping that one would stick, hoping that one would stay and accompany mine – it’s been my companion all along.

And the moment I had decided that I actually needed my inevitable solitude to grow complete and wise, one stuck – after just one throw, just one word, or perhaps even before then. And I recognized in that moment that this too was a familiar feeling. I have made a friend – in the way that I had always made a friend. It did not matter that I spoke in wrong tenses, needed him to explain his jokes, or was raised where there were never palm trees. It never mattered. And it will always be a mystery why we were chosen to have found each other.

It would remain a mystery why I was assigned to Maricela: 44 yo, with a twin sister, and >4 sets of twins on her own, making a total of 10? 14? 16 children? No one knew exactly at first because she could only stutter “ba ba” when she first arrived. The right side of her face remains drooping like a Dali painting, but she is now able to toss out words one by one like ping-pong balls: a speech resembling that of a mentally disabled child, but coincidentally the kind that I can understand best. Each day, she tells me the same simple things again and again, also just like a child and also so perfectly adjusted to my needs like a good teacher would have chosen to do. She tells me her face fell and her tongue became tied when she was making tortillas the way she does every day for her children, she tells me her babies are crying at home because they think she is going to die, she tells me her strength is improving but her face continues to droop, she tells me her husband is attempting to work enough days to earn the money for the last study she needs (an MRI arteriograph), she tells me she worries that her household is becoming unkempt and that she misses cleaning it, she tells me to take care and be well in my future.

My final night here I spent with my freshly made friends and their long-time friends in a Ranch in the mountains where many people owned rustic homes. I expected the ranches in the movies, but there were no wide-open fields, horses, or cowboys. There was a medium sized empty house and a mildly unkempt backyard that terminated with shrubbery overflowing a wire mesh fence. Under a large tree, surrounded by sparse bags of chips, coolers overwhelmed with ice and canned beer, packs of tortillas and bags of cheese, and of course the now all too familiar sound of Mexican music, there sat the relievingly familiar faces and shapes in the bendable breakable plastic chairs. This was to be the place where we would sit and drink and dance and laugh until the sun set and the night revealed the stars. In the air there were mosquitoes, chatter, and the strong regular beats of reggaeton. Inside, my heart gushed with the sparse memories of the few days in a life of many we have shared. I heard on replay the conversations we have had and the ones we will never have. I took in the feeling of being by each one of them: sometimes the feeling that there is nothing left to exchange but our giggles and head-bobs to the music, sometimes the feeling of satisfaction and camaraderie, and rarely, the feeling of severe insufficiency to ever exchange all that could be.

I like the music!
It was great meeting you!
I think you’re really nice!
Thank you for everything!
You should come to the US!

We parted like we always have with a touch/kiss on the cheek and transient hug – far too silent for the gushing of my heart.

This was to be the Monterrey that I will remember. Just like the China I remember, the Indonesia I remember, the Korea I remember, the Maine…the Troy…the Boston…the New York…

I soothe myself to sleep with the promise that I will slowly exchange all that needs to be exchanged through the pieces of text in cyberspace over time, all the while knowing that it will only be the need that will dwindle rather than the exchanges be fulfilled. But this is what I have signed up for, knowing that this happens every time, knowing that I have always been so greedy for closeness, knowing that I will always have to let go of those words never spoken and the potential I work so hard to build, knowing that I will always leave again. It’s a masochistic habit, this traveling. Maybe one day I will stop tormenting my own heart, trying to teach myself the lesson of forgetting that I know I will never learn. Maybe one day – but not yet.

Dust

For days I’ve been trying to identify the substance that I inhale here from the gusts of wind, that upon contact dries up the back of my palate. It is tasteless, colorless, and ever-pervasive in these parts. It makes me want to escape it by crawling into my windowless, vent-less dorm room with fluorescent buzzing lights. As we rode out of the city and into the arid lands today, I opened the window of the taxi cab that smelled of exhaust, only to find myself suffocated with more of the stuff from the wind. I realized then, that of course – it is dust.

Like most places, there are two kinds of people in the hospital here: the doctors and the patients. But I have yet seen a place where the two differed so much. I have yet to see as good looking a group of young people as the medical students and doctors here: the young girls with their hair pulled back, makeup neatly lining their lips, clothes formal but tight-fitting and flattering; the young men with their hair slicked, dark eyes and intense eyebrows.

The patients, on the other hand, blend in with each other as though they are of a slightly different skin-tone altogether. They are browned by the dust. They come with their various colored blankets and small bags of belongings that somehow all appear brown in the distance. They come with young and old attached to them and it’s often difficult to tell who is the sick one. Their skin is grooved like dried mud, and they pile together along the walls, against the pillars, and overflow to the outside sidewalks and curbs like the inevitable and relentless brown that stains a corner, unable to be reached by the dull tools and the strained cleaning schedule available to the hospital’s caretakers. The area of the stain waxes and wanes but it is always present. People are always waiting. It’s as though the caretakers have given up and decided to continue sweeping only the areas that is most convenient, leaving the grooves to continue browning.

The patients remain just as different, just as brown once moved onto the hospital floor. Some still have hands and feet caked with dirt, only rubbed off along with gel used for the echocardiogram that marked a spot finally deserving to be hastily wiped with toilet paper. There is Martin, the 68 or so old man who has curly gray hair and particularly dark skin, lying patiently with a distorted right arm now in the shape of a banana after some accident long gone in the past. He is aphasic now, after a stroke, but smiles when I tell the other medical student in broken Spanish about how I warn my younger sister not to choose medicine if she can be happy doing anything else. There is Miguel who is only 23, and near possibly the end of his life with AIDS and presumed toxoplasmosis encroaching on his brainstem, making him appear cross-eyed and forcing his hand to dance its way to his nose when he is asked to touch it. A woman sits by him most of the time, presumably his mother. She feeds him and a matter-of-factly instructs him to follow God’s Words as she points to the cross on his chest. Finally, there is Juan, someone’s name I don’t hear called often. He is 60 but appears the size of an 8 year old child since most of his flesh is wasted away and his right leg has been shortened by an amputation. He is strapped to the bed with various make-shift restraints created from sheets and torn cloth. His eyes wander freely about the room as he is in a state of coma, and his voice is only heard as the spasms of wheezes and coughs that produce bursts of projectile sputum from his tracheostomy, landing as far as the bed across the room.

Perhaps the only items that penetrate the brownness are their eyes – framed by wrinkles, even in the young. They remain bright and flickering, grateful and content. They are eyes that have learned not to be surprised by disappointment, eyes that have seen what things can happen in life, eyes that now patiently accept the random and meager rationing of God’s gifts. They do not disapprove of the professor’s daily request to tap their fingers together to demonstrate their perhaps permanently disabled coordination, nor of being fully exposed amidst the crowd of doctors for the changing of the fluid-stained and odorous sheets beneath them. It’s as though their spirits have already become detached from their bodies and their physical frames are but the beaten vessels that shield them from the harsh sun and dust. They have transcended to a place I’ve only known through the writing of philosophers. I am envious of their freedom.

There are also two kinds of prices here – probably for the two kinds of people. There’s the two-hour bus ride to the outskirts of the mountains for 8 pesos (50 cents), and there’s the bottle of Herbal Essence for 100 pesos (8 dollars). It makes me imagine the two worlds that these two kinds of people might traverse in, the two universes of goods and culture, perhaps never needing to interface each other except at the hospital – but even there, we are divided by spaces we occupy – between beds or on them, gliding through the center of the hallway or clinging to the walls.

Today there was a man who was in a coma from Guillam Barre syndrome. Alongside him was a medical student, squeezing the balloon “ambu” bag every few seconds into a tube that fed into his lungs, supposedly keeping him alive. Another student came by and took over, but not until the next changing of the guards did I realize that there was no machine on its way – this was the way things were supposed to be. I offered to help for half an hour, both appalled by the use of manual labor in such a hasty, risky way, and empathetic towards the dire conditions it must mean we are all in. So I gloved and took over the bag, warmed by the hands of the medical students before me. I was a personal ventilator. If I stopped or malfunctioned, he would slowly drift away.

I tried to talk to Martin who was in the bed across the room. His dense mutism has melted a bit into a grumbling and I felt proud of him. I asked if he could read the sign on the wall and he walked up and read part of the first word – the name of the patient who I was keeping alive for the moment. I told him he was improving and he nodded. I asked him what had happened to his arm, and he grumbled back gesturing some object falling from the sky. For a moment, he looked longingly at his banana arm but then quickly resumed his usual content nature, shaking his head and smiling as if to say “tis is life.” I chuckled at the situation, realizing for a moment I was trying to understand a man whose language I barely spoke who is aphasic and just learning how to grumble again. But then the others in the room were catatonic and comatose and strangely we were the two that had the most to say. Several times, I looked down at the patient I was ventilating and wondered whether he was still alive. Once I even checked his pulse just to be sure, but quickly resumed bagging, fearing that he would expire without the next puff. This may have been the biggest role I played in a patient’s life for a while.

Most of my friends are other exchange students here from other countries. It makes it difficult to say that I know what it means to be Mexican. It’s much harder to write this time around. I believe it’s because I’m not so lonely. I find that the more I know about people, the less I have to write about them – they become too real for words. Maybe my writing is only limited to simple things – things I can paint with my dullish fingers. Perhaps I’m just scared that I won’t get it quite right as there are so many more mistakes to be made.

My only conclusion had been that Mexicans are very kind. I told a taxi driver this and he responded ever so wisely, ‘there are good people and bad people everywhere.’ I have been told this in many places of the world and it is a lesson I should have known by now: that culture and place runs only so deep, and underneath, people are really all the same everywhere. There are ones who give and ones who cheat, ones who worship the truth and ones who lie when it’s more convenient. It’s funny that I think I am writing to capture the flavor of different parts of the world, when in the end, below different colors of candy coating, it is all just the taste of humanity.

So far I don’t know what else to make of this place. I have shared the few thoughts I have. But I feel comfortable with this. I have learned from a friend recently that not everything makes sense at every moment, although it all may in time.