a tribute to a country other than my own and the man with the red blanket who brought that country to life for me:
EVEN THOUGH I AM AN OUTSIDER, I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT...
MEXICO IS A PART OF ME, AND THAT WITHOUT THE EXPERIENCE of Mexico, I wouldn't be the same man. The Mexico community has taught me much about honor, work, and pride, about courage, about the need to keep going on long after common sense had told me to give up. My attitude to the world Mexican fatalism has been grafted into the German and Belgium fatalism inherited from my Mother and Father; and down through the years, I have been further enriched by the writings of Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and Juan Rulfo. I have had the privilege of being in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Mexican folk art is everywhere, and once owned a book of photographs by Agustin Casasola, the great photographer of the Mexican Revolution, who brought me the fine strong faces of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, two men who seemed to be saying to me: "It doesn't matter what is happening now, life will go on and it will one day be good."
It was one morning in the winter of 1977, when I opened the drapes in the hotel room my girlfriend and I were staying in, and there was before us in the brilliant summer sunshine lay the Zocalo. A cathedral lay to the left called the Sagrario. On the far side of the vast was the low, scalloped outline of the National Palace, a building begun by Hernan Cortes in the 1520s beside the ruins of Montezuma's palace. To the right: the city hall, from which the largest city in the Western Hemisphere is governed.
Directly below us was a panorama from the continuing history of Mexican surrealism. More than a thousand high school students were standing on a stage that was climbing 4 stories above the ground filled by hundreds of performers celebrating the Day of Revolution. Over on the side, workmen were hammering together the numbered sections of plywood platforms. Eight stories below on the rain-lashed street, staring up at my silhouette in the small rectangle of our room, was a Man with a Red Blanket. I had seen him the day before, selling wares on the street, begging those who passed by to buy what he had to sell in order to provide him food and housing. Most passed without a word. And he would bless each and every one of them.
Why does he look so sad? my girlfriend asked, gazing down at his lonely presence.
Because he is, I replied.
I immediately went down the elevator and came up to where he was standng. I handed him a $20 dollar bill. He crossed himself, then kissed me on the cheek. He never said anything. He held up his Red Blanket, his eyes full on insatiable hope. I watched him walk down the rain-soaked street and disappear through the door of a small grocery store. And as I lay down to rest when I had returned to my room, I thought of this great, noisy, dangerous, and polluted megalopolis, I knew that I had met a man who was a finer man than I was. In spite of what seemed to me to be the bleak emptiness of daily life, most Mexicans I met could recite personal examples in a tone infused with optimism, of why life was worth living. "Life goes on," and old Mexican man told me one day. "You can do nothing about some things. But you can always hold hope in your heart, and enjoy the mysteries of what may or may not lay ahead."
At the end of our stay in Mexico City, as fathers took the hands of their children, and traffic began to appear again on the blocked streets, and cops smoked cigarettes in doorways, I happened to glance across the Reforma and my eye stopped on the sign of a McDonald's restaurant. Suddenly he whirled: the Man with the Blanket. I took my girlfriend's hand and we started walking toward him. He stopped and looked at me. He then smiled and said, "Gracias, senor. God will forever bless you...
...And these words were spoken by him just as the cathedral bells began to toll...
It was one morning in the winter of 1977, when I opened the drapes in the hotel room my girlfriend and I were staying in, and there was before us in the brilliant summer sunshine lay the Zocalo. A cathedral lay to the left called the Sagrario. On the far side of the vast was the low, scalloped outline of the National Palace, a building begun by Hernan Cortes in the 1520s beside the ruins of Montezuma's palace. To the right: the city hall, from which the largest city in the Western Hemisphere is governed.
Directly below us was a panorama from the continuing history of Mexican surrealism. More than a thousand high school students were standing on a stage that was climbing 4 stories above the ground filled by hundreds of performers celebrating the Day of Revolution. Over on the side, workmen were hammering together the numbered sections of plywood platforms. Eight stories below on the rain-lashed street, staring up at my silhouette in the small rectangle of our room, was a Man with a Red Blanket. I had seen him the day before, selling wares on the street, begging those who passed by to buy what he had to sell in order to provide him food and housing. Most passed without a word. And he would bless each and every one of them.
Why does he look so sad? my girlfriend asked, gazing down at his lonely presence.
Because he is, I replied.
I immediately went down the elevator and came up to where he was standng. I handed him a $20 dollar bill. He crossed himself, then kissed me on the cheek. He never said anything. He held up his Red Blanket, his eyes full on insatiable hope. I watched him walk down the rain-soaked street and disappear through the door of a small grocery store. And as I lay down to rest when I had returned to my room, I thought of this great, noisy, dangerous, and polluted megalopolis, I knew that I had met a man who was a finer man than I was. In spite of what seemed to me to be the bleak emptiness of daily life, most Mexicans I met could recite personal examples in a tone infused with optimism, of why life was worth living. "Life goes on," and old Mexican man told me one day. "You can do nothing about some things. But you can always hold hope in your heart, and enjoy the mysteries of what may or may not lay ahead."
At the end of our stay in Mexico City, as fathers took the hands of their children, and traffic began to appear again on the blocked streets, and cops smoked cigarettes in doorways, I happened to glance across the Reforma and my eye stopped on the sign of a McDonald's restaurant. Suddenly he whirled: the Man with the Blanket. I took my girlfriend's hand and we started walking toward him. He stopped and looked at me. He then smiled and said, "Gracias, senor. God will forever bless you...
...And these words were spoken by him just as the cathedral bells began to toll...
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