The tiny patios, thick with honeysuckle and geraniums that hang from the railings, the clothes on the line, innocuous ghosts the wind sets flying between the green interjections of the parrot with a sulfurous eye, and suddenly, a slender stream of light; a canary singing;
the azure of the lunch-shops and the solferino of the cantinas, the smell of sawdust on the brick floor, the mirrored bar, ambiguous altar where genies with insidious powers sleep captive in the multicolored bottles;
…
the fair and its stalls of frying foods where, amidst the coals and aromatic smoke, the hierophants with cinnamon eyes celebrate the marriage of substances and the transformation of smells and flavors while they slice up meat, sprinkle salt and snowflakes of cheese over bright-green nopals, shred lettuce, bearer of tranquil sleep, grind the solar corn, and consecrate bunches of iridescent chilies;
the fruits and the sweets, gilded mountains of mandarins and sloes, the golden bananas, blood-colored prickly pears, ocher hills of walnuts and peanuts, volcanoes of sugar, towers of amaranth seed cakes, transparent pyramids of biznagas, nougats, the tiny orography of earthly sweetness, the fortress of sugarcane, the white jicamas huddled together in tunics the color of earth, the limes and the lemons: the sudden freshness of the laughter of women bathing in a green river…
— Excerpted from “1930: Scenic Views” by Octavio Paz, originally printed in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, translated by Eliot Weinberger.
Beautiful! This passage captures many of the sensory memories I keep of Mexico. For me, the smell of pino burning under a hot comal and the slap-slap of hands deftly making tortillas. That first whiff of canela before drinking a licuado. Hijole, I miss it!
Marisol: You made me want to share a few of my own sensory memories. The charred smell of tlacoyos cooking on the comal. The colors! The women selling ropes of orangey-red chorizo on the street, and the tiny black orbs of criollo avocado spread out on plastic tarps, arranged in pyramid shapes…
Hope you get to come back soon. 🙂
Thanks for sharing this, Lesley.
You’re welcome!
I love the smell of Copal and the feeling that people today are doing exactly what people were doing 500 years ago. Things change….but never too much. You really feel like history is still alive.
Verdad que sí? That’s what really resonated with me, too. Felt like it could’ve been written today. The sense of being captured in time is one of the things I adore most about the Centro. I’m not sure it’s going to stay that way for much longer.
Let’s hope that the only changes come as improvements. It would be a shame if the Zócalo and the Centro Histórico lost it’s magic.
What is “solferino”?
Saludos,
Don Cuevas