December 2021. Polanco, Mexico City
Stepping out into the sunny puddle of Polanco on a Monday morning means being met with a bite of cold no more or less comforting than one you’d get on a mid-December London morning. But unlike London, where the air gnaws away at you throughout a darkening day and crashes right into your bones you if you dare cross the Thames, the cold lessens a little with each minute in Mexico. There are dogs. As many dogs as humans: the country is overflowing with dogs and a small percentage of them congregate for business in Polanco daily. Most are medium sized and have long, well-groomed hair, all seem enthusiastic about something or everything. Some seem to recognise each other over a hedge are are keen to begin dialogues that may turn out to be violent or cheery; they are not left to their own devices by their tired owners to discover which but restrained by leads and restrained smiles to keep a healthy distance this early on in the long, dragging week. In the cafe, where owners exchange just about the same amount of restraint and smiles are are equally groomed, only more hairless and in more lycra, a series of names ring across pavements to try and reach the ear-podded ears of the new custodians of a row of expectant cups of coffee. Everyone and everything is waiting to start the day at the end of the year. Or wondering if this is it, already begun.
It is nearly Christmas, and the Christmas tree seller is washing the road before her selection of trees. They look a little iller and faded today than they did over the weekend. I can sympathise. The collection of suffering but optimistic pines also seems dwindled; I think the seller has been successful, then notice that a number of them have been moved back further into the park to form a small forest just beside the flat ponds of the park. Moving past the new woodland reveals a little city hidden within the middle of it. Cardboard, tarpaulin, sheets and boxes have been arranged over and between benches to form hideouts in this makeshift mountainous oasis. The remnants of a Sunday feast just beside them: pots, pans, packaging, bottles of orange soda and a pile of filth-ridden plates. I get the feeling this is an arrangement that will disappear before all us tourists emerge, fed and yawning, from the hotels. The tree seller shoots me a few guilty glances from a bowed head whilst she brushes streams of bubbles off the pavement. Later I notice a police car sweeping up to the curb-side. I think about these trees later being bought and undergoing their annual transformations. I wonder if they’ll remember their past lives as they leave, one by one, to be sheltered in minimalist flats and high-ceilinged sitting rooms. I wonder what they’ll make of their very different form of adoration from a very different audience, glittering lights reflected in in the skyscrapers all around before being softly turned off before bedtime. I imagine some will be placed by windows and look down on the park, to, in turn, be deliberately seen from below, by those who have lost their makeshift woodland.
Before the tree-houses a wiry and boney man with tanned wrinkles sits cross-legged with his eyes closed, face raised and back straight. He is worshipping the weak sun, and almost levitating from the bench as though his God is accepting his sacrifice and raising him towards it. Waling on and looking up in the same direction as him shows mist cutting through the treetops. High palms shoot up over the deciduous family that together form a hard-working lung for the congestion that juts and snakes around Parque Lincoln. Now, though, everything is just beginning and there is no traffic; the mist that falls in long tranches down past the leaves - reminiscent of what might have been here in place in this city long before - nothing - turns out to be caused by the gardeners hosing the ground. This yellow suited army of gardeners, forever busy and out and about, are planting Noche Buena. Bright red splats pasted onto scratchy earth. Some of the gardeners chat and eat sandwiches. Whenever I see this team, continuously planting and re-planting pots of dug-up flowers along the motorways or pavement borders, always changing according to season, always kitted out in bulky plastic hazmat outfits with little hands and shoes emerging from four ends, I think they seem like a biological army in rigorous and eternal defence of the health of this coughing city.
It’s a busy, comfortable place, Parque Lincoln, in the morning. Not frantic, never lazy. As I walk back home I see a dog wearing a bandana suddenly decide it cannot bear to go on with anything at all and sit itself determinedly on the pavement. Its owner, chatting with a friend, looks back, and the dog receives a glare and gets a tug on its neck. The dog and its little scarf is forced to move again and the three continue through the chilled air to carry on with their day. Monday mornings with nothing to propel you through the week are dreaded. But walking through this shadowy, draping park, nestled within muddle of streets all named after writers, helps.