guadalajara

The crumbling concrete walls of tiny houses crowd around the railway tracks. Small brown children run, scream, giggle, clamber, legs stretched, arms out, untumbling over the rails.

A boy holds a plastic ball, both arms reaching in a hug around its circumference, and he stumbles over the gravel because he cannot see his feet. An androgynous doll dangles upside down; American-pink-made-in-China plastic legs, gripped tight in a small brown hand. When the girl climbs over the track the doll`s head smacks against the metal, twice, both rails, like something forgotten. Each time though, the blue unblinking eyes still stare, expression unchanged, at the swaying upside down world, peeling red lips pouting at it.

From here the small concrete blocks dangle right angles into the sky, and the sizzling crackle of dough on burning oil snaps. Smoke coils down into the blue yellow air, like silk slowly sliding down the banister of a spiral staircase. Thick white toying with the sky, and melting into it. The scene sways uncertainly; stones, metal, concrete, hanging above the sun.

An older girl calls the children to eat, and they turn, straight away, and run. The ball bobbles over the stones, Barbie`s head smashes against the metal for the fourth time, and they run towards the hungry, sizzling fat.



I lift my bike across the railway, on the fringes of Mexico´s second largest city, thinking about planning permission; about the bribes to keep away bulldozers, tiny perhaps, but too expensive, immobilizing. I wonder what it must be like to have a functioning train track instead of a back yard or a field, and I smile, because from the sound of the laughing and the giggling, the joyful screaming and the smell of frying food I think it must be wonderful.

Back onto the main road. New German cars. Tired, rusty, old buses; coughing black, and choking. At the traffic lights adolescent boys in dirty t-shirts too big for them, and faces too old for them, squirt soapy water onto windscreens, and wipe glass that was already clean. Women in long skirts walk between the cars selling sweets, crisps, cigarettes, chewing gum; unhurried and slow, knowing the exact amount of time they have before the lights turn green.

In front of the four lanes of traffic a young man in a dusty top hat and a black magician´s cloak stands, holding a black box. He holds it upside down, displays the empty interior, and the next moment pulls out a small dirty-white rabbit. The rabbit is sleeping; bored by the trick, repeated all day and every day, at every red light, in the choking fumes, and as the magician walks down the lines of cars, in the hope of a couple of pesos, the sleeping rabbit lends a decidedly anticlimactic ending to the display.


In the centre of Guadalajara, kids in skinny jeans, Hoxton-haircuts and Converse shoes walk in the thick dark shadows cast by four hundred year old buildings, and through the blinding yellow shafts of sunlight, conscious of their silhouettes. A street fills with hundreds of bicyclists and in front a stereo blasts tunes in keeping with the kids; the haircuts, jeans and the silhouettes.

Later I sit here, half-talking, half-gesturing in a will to be understood, with Carlos. He kindly, tells me that everything he says is unimportant when I say I don´t understand it. He is one of those people who bring life and joy to a conversation, even if only 20% of it is, on the face of it, comprehensible.

"¡Me gusta la vida!" he says, over and over. Smiling at every passer-by, saying hello to everyone in the centre of a 4 million person city. "Buenas noches, buenas noches." He turns to me. "Qué ते gusta?" What do I like?

"Me gusta... me gusta viajar."

"Por qué?"

And somehow with broken words and hands, even a slightly broken chin, threatening to burst every time I smile, I tell him that I love to travel because when you see something you´ve never seen before you feel like a child. Suddenly life is new, everything becomes full of wonder, as though you have just been born. And, miraculously, I think he understands.