Post-Santa Tristesse

It's the day after Christmas. I'm all alone in the apartment here on Calle de Rosales. The sun is shining outside, the morn balmy, the faithful in the streets making their way to one or other of the neighboring churches. Even Cec decided to attend the Unitarian service this morning, hoping to meet some Americans and get a better sense of the place. She left me sunning myself on the roof, carefully padlocked the grate across the front entry, and walked briskly off with the only housekey. Aqui soy.

The streets in San Miguel are intimate lanes - narrow, cobbled alleys with housefronts abutting the pavement, making narrow canyons of stone and concrete. Along one such narrow way on this dark Christmas eve, a passing group of young criminals ignited a cherry bomb immediately behind my cousin and me as we strolled, deep in amiable conversation, and the concussion ricocheting along the bricks and stones nearly made our clothing uninhabitable. Next door to my bespoken abode of tears is a modest single-story building indistinguishable from its neighbors with a large paved courtyard within the front gate. The courtyard is roofed in well-seasoned sheets of corrugated steel. This quiet Sunday morning, without warning, the sound of jubilant congregational singing accompanied by guitars, drums and keyboard obtrudes itself into the soft matinal air. The galvanized roof panels rattle with Christian fervor like a soundbox. The very houses and stony streets echo back the joyful noise. To my mild consternation, I find I have settled next to an impromptu church, una iglesias evangelicas, and no housekey within reach. The hours pass, cantatory, hortatory, oracular, the irony nearly insupportable.

Otherwise, the general Christmas spirit on exhibit in the streets is subtle. The jubilation of the season has been muted, which (lacking the gene for triumphalism) better suits my DNA. The local shops have not seemed crammed, either with more shoppers or more "gift items" than ordinary (when gifts became "gift items" and "gifting" became a verb was another among lexicography's frequent dark days). The hottest holiday item on the streets, in fact, is fireworks of all sorts, but especially the pernicious and nerve-frazzling cherry bomb, as I think I mentioned. On Christmas day many of the local merchants were open for business, seated in the shadows of their little back street tiendas, dimly lit by the reflected glitter of mylar packaging. The restaurants around the main plaza were packed, the streets were awash in people, the bands in the bars played to full houses until five a.m. The Nativity here seems to elicit a certain frolicsomeness, as do the Day of the Dead and the feast days of any number of the saints. Mexico is not, I remind myself, a Protesant nation with the odd moral repressions one often finds to the north. Its populace is prone to a degree of friskiness at unexpected seasons.

Revolution is apparently no longer one of those occasions. The Bicentenario of the Mexican Revolution, now winding down with the old year, has been a measured and grave affair, occasion for exhibitions of art, panel discussions, political seminars, short haircuts and highway dedications. The Mexican tricolor does not fly from every unhypothecated flagstaff - in fact, though patriotism is by no means dead here, an empy flagstaff seems neither a reproach on its owner nor an invitation to run up another "Old Gloria." It is no more seen as a declaration of antinationalism (or a "war on the flag") than not shopping, or saying "happy holiday," is considered another salvo in a "war on Christmas." Underneath the high-profile poltical and social difficulties the country currently faces, everyone tries to get along. There is no taste for trumped-up disputes where the larger national difficulties are genuine. In Mexico, "Fox" is not news, he's just an ex-president.