A Meeting with a Wizard: Books by the Kilo

 

When you live in France, you learn to live with the Past. By the Past I mean not only the grand buildings and monuments, the art, and the long and complicated History, but something in a more intimate scale and space where one comes in contact with everyday things such as furniture, cooking utensils, clothes, and other personal belongings.

In France, many things, from houses to silverware, are inherited; but also many things are recycled through antique shops, the wonderful flea markets, and through shops called "brocantes", where used things are bought and sold, and even through the Red Cross shops where one donates and buys used clothing and items.

In the Americas, where economies live or die by what happens in the consumer market, we are encouraged to throw things away. The "new and better" consumerism philosophy deems a thing as "useless," even while it is still in working order, simply because it is old (and in today's terms, "old" means as little as a few months or a couple of years).

In France, not only do antique shops, flea markets, and "brocantes" thrive on the sale of used goods but also organizations, such as the aforementioned Red Cross and charities such as Emmaüs, founded by the Capuchin friar Abbé Pierre, which resells all sorts of articles that people donate to it. I was very pleasantly surprised the first time I went to the Emmaüs subsidiary in Tarnos, a community a few kilometers from Biarritz. The warehouse-like building was filled with shoppers that, judging from the type of cars parked outside, came from every economic level, as it were. 

It is also common for people to place unwanted but still usable items on the sidewalk in front of their homes. These quickly find new owners as people here have no prejudices about taking an old, used item home.

But if one were to judge by sheer numbers, I would say that no other used item is dearer to the French, than the used books. The French are serious readers. I mean they really read. Rare is the French house that does not have bookshelves in every spare nook and cranny. As for shops, the "Maison de la presse," the ubiquitous newspaper, magazine, and book shop that not even the smallest towns can do without, does lively business, no matter where it is situated, not only in newspapers and magazines but in books. Regular bookstores are everywhere, and during Christmas they are as busy as any electronic gadget store. Municipal libraries are always full of people browsing and borrowing books and magazines. And many of them have a used book bin where one can leave books for others to take home to read. 

So, a society with such a huge appetite for reading material is bound to create a huge second-hand market—and it has.

Paris is a paradise for the used-book lover. One can browse the stalls of the "bouquinistes" that line the sidewalks by the Seine or find rare and valuable editions in the smart shops of the rare book dealers of the 7th Arrondissement. But nothing compares to the streets and avenues of the Latin Quarter in the 5th Arrondissement, the so-called Latin Quarter, where used book stores abound. I love these because they are the most specialized and eccentric.The Fifth Arrondissement is where a lot of schools are located hence where the book trade has a huge, readymade market.

On a certain occasion, I stayed in an apartment on the Rue l'Arbalète, near the famous Rue Mouffetard. I went walking around, getting to know the neighborhood, when a few steps from Rue Gay Lussac, I saw a man piling up books on two rickety tables outside a shop. A sign, obviously hand-painted, was propped up against one of the tables. It announced that the books were sold by the kilo. Amused by the odd sales pitch, I followed the man when he went into the shop.

Inside the place was the expected chaos for this kind of shop, with books piled on tables and on the floor, and a gallery of bookshelves bent under the weight of their loads.

Behind a large desk, on which books were also piled, sat the man. A bemused smile peeked from under his bushy, white mustache and beard. Midst the piles of books on his desk sat an old balance. The man, arms crossed, eyes twinkling as if he were Anubis waiting to weigh the souls of the books that were to be sold, looked at me but said nothing. I imagined he was waiting for me to greet him, as is customary when one arrives in a shop or in someone's house in France.

So I said the customary “Bonjour”,  and I asked in my very basic French if he had any dictionaries.

“Est-ce que vous est Anglais?” he asked thinking I might be English.

“No, je suis Mexicain,” I said uttering my standard answer.

“Ah,” he exclaimed as if I had just said I was a long lost relative, “vous parlez espagnol, alors.” He got up and motioned to me to follow him.

He led me through a maze of bookshelves and sundry piles of objects, among which, and I dared not ask why, he had amassed a dozen old, broken down children's bicycles and tricycles.

“Voila!” he said triumphantly while waving his hand toward bookshelf in a dark corner. In the dim light I noticed that these bookshelves were marked: “Espagnol – Español”, “Anglais – English”, “Italien – Italiano”, “Allemand – Deustch”.

The Spanish language section was a hodgepodge of Spanish and Latin American authors. There was the usual bevy of personal histories of the Spanish Civil War and novels by long-forgotten authors, as well as gems such as Cortazar’s “Rayuela” and an anthology of the works of Jorge Luis Borges. At the very end of the shelf, two thick books caught my eye: it was a two volume edition of the Collins French-Spanish dictionary. I took them from the shelf, as well as the Borges Anthology.

From the English section, I took a worn copy of Graham Green’s essays and a small pocket edition of an English-French dictionary.

The bookseller smiled at me and led me back to his desk. With an elegant gesture, he motioned for me to place my books on his balance. He then carefully moved the counter weight until the balance was perfectly level. He scrutinized it with a frown, noticing it was just under three kilos. Without saying a word, he rummaged around one of the desk's drawers and produced a paperback book which he ceremoniously placed on top of the books I had selected. Now the weight was three kilos even.

“Six euros, s’il vous plait," he said triumphantly.

I laughed and he laughed. I gave him the money and thanked him. He produced a used paper bag from under the desk and put my books in it. We said the customary “au revoir” to each other and I left the store.

When I had walked about half a block, I felt it safe to look at the little book he had used to round out the three kilos. It was a text on French grammar and verb conjugation, the kind of textbook that was probably used in French schools years ago. I smiled and thought, "I bet not much gets by an old dog like him.”

There were many bookstores in the long, and interesting streets of the Fifth Arrondissement, as well as in the avenues where the many schools and university buildings stand out among the old houses and ancient flats, as if they were overgrown boys standing midst a gaggle of old ladies.

In another bookstore, I saw that the owner was busily dusting and replacing books on shelves. I went in and after the customary greetings and explanation of my nationality, he told me, with obvious pride in his voice, that he had recently acquired the store. He nodded to an old man sitting in a very well-worn leather chair, which was lodged between piles of books that "Monsieur eez ze previous owner." The old man was in the process of lighting his pipe and emitting blue clouds of smoke as he grumbled something which I took to be a "bonjour".

"Are you looking for zomezin spezial?" asked the new owner.

"Not really," I replied, "but if you have a full set of Proust's "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu," the Gallimard edition, I would like to see it."

"No, I am afraid I do not 'ave zat," he said. At that moment, a man came into the store. He was very well dressed, wearing a beige raincoat with a light blue shirt and dark blue tie. He was carrying a blue, glossy shopping bag with the logo of a fancy clothing store printed in gold on the side. He went straight to the man sitting on the leather chair and muttered something. The old man between puffs of smoke muttered something in reply and pointed at the new owner with his pipe.

"Monsieur?" the new owner said to the man. The man came towards the new owner and muttered something in French while leaning forward a bit, as if trying to talk to the new owner in confidence. He then opened the shopping bag to reveal a large book, beautifully bound in red leather.

"Desolé, monsieur," said the new owner while shrugging his shoulders. He then said something in French which I understood to be that he did not buy or sell such fine books. The man nodded curtly, said good-by and walked out of the store.

"Was he trying to sell that book?" I asked.

"Yes, yes, he was," said the new owner with what seemed somewhat of an embarrassment. My curiosity was pricked so I asked him about the mysterious book seller. He sighed and said, "Ah, these are hard times, Monsieur. Some families that in other times were wealthy are not so now and they sell things that have been in their families for many years. It is a sad thing but this is how it is now, n'est-ce pas?"

I agreed and I thanked him and said good-bye; he gave me one of his newly printed business cards.

"When you are in Paris again," he said, "you can call and enquire if we have the Proust, no?"

"Yes, I will," I promised and left the store.

As I walked along the avenue toward the Boulevard Saint-Michel where I wanted to get on the Metro, I stopped now and then to browse through the books displayed on tables outside stores; a cardboard sign, a sheet of paper on a window, or simply a price scribbled on the side of the table advertised that these books were on sale for a euro or two each. Most of the offerings were old best-sellers, police and crime stories, how-to books, or political rants on bygone issues. The "bouquinistes" know their business, so they separate the best stuff to sell at slightly higher prices. For example, in a shop near the Saint-Michel metro entrance, I found a brand new copy of a book on drawings by French artists of the 17th and 18th Centuries—a marvelous find—at just five euros.

I also went into several regular bookstores that afternoon. They all seemed to have at least a few customers browsing books. Some of the larger stores looked like supermarkets on payday. One which specialized in travel books and coffee-table sized books was thronged with tourists. Another, on the Place Sorbonne, which specialized in philosophy books, had electronic sensors to discourage shoplifting. "One could do worse," I thought, "than to live in a country where kids want to steal philosophy books."

I was reminiscing about all of the above as I walked to my favorite used book store here in the Condesa neighborhood. It is called "El Hallazgo" (The Find). It has been on Mazatlán avenue for decades. Like the bookstores in France, the owner puts less interesting books, LP records, and magazines outside, piled up on the sidewalk and sells them for ten pesos each. But inside one finds a plethora of good used books, divided into section on everything from philosophy to great English language literature. Conveniently, next door to it, there is a nice café where one can sit to peruse a book just bought in El Hallazgo. The bookstore has never closed during the pandemic, although it warns that you will be asked to leave if you enter without a proper mask to cover your mouth and nose. But, the fact that it opens six days a week, without fail, gives me hope that we will soon be out of this mess and back to enjoying the simple things of life, like browsing the bookshelves of this wonderful bookstore, El Hallazgo. My other favorite bookstore in the neighborhood is the marvelous La Bella Época cultural center, also known as the "Librería Rosario Castellanos" and which is run by the Fondo de Cultura Económica. I miss going there on a Sunday afternoon to have a cappuccino in its cafeteria and then to sit in one of its comfortable easy chairs to peruse a book from the "novelties" section, or something from its huge inventory. The other day I stopped by and asked the policeman at the door when the cultural center would be open again and he said, "Not until further notice." Hmm, bad news.

---

Time to remember

Another benefit of the voluntary confinement to which the covid_19 forces me is that now I have enough time to remember what I had forgotten, perhaps not forgotten but relegated. When my life was full of work, meetings with friends, attention to my family and the daily routines of an executive, the past was relatively close because for me it was defined, in those days, by events that occurred two or three months before. Something that had happened a year earlier was not relevant to my present. Youth, adolescence, childhood, who had time to think about them?

But now, yes. I have plenty of time, because the hours of the day slide smoothly bye, perhaps filled with movies seen on television, books read, chats on WhatsApp and food prepared by me and eaten in front of the television, by myself.

The memories of some years ago consist of vacations with the family, partying spree with friends, unpleasant work meetings, trips, constant trips, taken for reasons of work, and the occasional flirtation or temporary love affair.

But today, in the solitude of my apartment, with the music of yesteryear playing loudly on the bluetooth speaker that my son gave me, memories begin to spring up that had been relegated to oblivion.

The first ones were evoked by a list of recordings on YouTube, all of them by famous guitar trios of the fifties and sixties, with some that were recorded as far back as the forties. The songs that my iPhone played evoked a program that was popular with the youth of the 1950s in Nuevo Laredo, my hometown. That program was broadcast on a Nuevo Laredo radio station late at night and was titled "Serenata en tu Ventana." (A serenade at your window) Young men called the radio station and dedicated a "serenade", which consisted of three songs chosen by the caller. The host of the program gave the name of the girl to whom the young man was dedicating the serenade. The program was very popular and the girls of the town listened to the program in the hope that some young man would dedicate a serenade to them.

I was only about eight or ten years old but I found out about this because my older sister, who at that time was about fourteen or fifteen years old, listened to the program every night. She would bring the radio close to her bed, modulate the sound as low as possible so that my mother wouldn't scold her and urge her to go to sleep. My sister whispered the details and the names of the lucky girls to whom a serenade had been dedicated, to a cousin who visited us every summer.

The nights, in those times, were so peaceful and with so little traffic noise that you could hear the bells of the clock in the square that was several blocks from our house. Therefore, I could easily hear the whispers of my sister and my cousin. The two girls were attentive to the program until twelve o'clock at night, when it ended and the radio station stopped broadcasting. Curiously, this station did not end its broadcast day with the national anthem, as many stations did at the time, but with a jaunty version of a Spanish song whose title I can no longer remember.

Listening to these serenades, I became familiar with those romantic songs, so much so that I can remember lots of them verbatim.

One of the songs that evokes specific memories of my childhood is "La Enramada" (the climbing vine) performed by Los Tres Ases. When I was six years old, I went to school at Colegio América, a religious school for girls but attended by boys while in kindergarten and first grade. By the second year of primary school we would be sent to Colegio México, also religious, with Marist Brothers as teachers.

Colegio América was a short distance from our home. Therefore, Elba, an assistant to my uncle the doctor, came for me and my sister every midday to take us home at lunchtime. On the way from school, we passed a house that had most of its facade covered by a climbing vine. Invariably, Elba began to sing "Ya la enramada se secó, el cielo el agua le negó..."(The vine has dried up, the sky has denied it water) ..." My sister and I smiled when we heard that large brown-skinned woman, with generous breasts, and white teeth that contrasted strongly with her almost black complexion, to be so moved by who knows what memories that the song conjured for her.

Once we were past the house with the vine, we crossed the Plaza México, which was torture for me because the walkways of the plaza were covered in red and purple berries, which were a temptation but that Elba prohibited me from picking up and eating because according to her they would infest my stomach with worms.

Once Plaza México had been cleared, there were only two blocks from Guerrero Avenue, the main street of the town, to walk in order to get home. These two blocks were full of businesses: a pharmacy, a jewelry store, a beauty salon, Aunt Pepa's haberdashery and other stores and businesses, among which was the Sanchez Funeral Home, the main funeral home of the town in those times.

Given that these businesses were almost our neighbors, and that we passed in front of them every day, we knew, and therefore we greeted, the owners and workers of the various businesses:

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Florinda (the owner of the pharmacy)

"Good afternoon, children," she would reply, "say hello to your mother for me."

"Good afternoon, María Victoria (we greeted the gay guy, owner of the beauty salon, who liked to dress like that renowned film star and singer.)

"Hello, children," answered María Victoria.

"Good afternoon, Aunt Pepa" (we greeted the owner of the haberdashery and the aunt of the Sanchez boys, our childhood playmates: Aunt Pepa did not stop knitting while answering our greeting.)

"Good afternoon kids.

"Good afternoon, Don Carlos" (we greeted the oldest of the Sanchez brothers, owners of the funeral home that bore their name.

"Good afternoon, children. Come tonight because I am going to show cartoons for you (Don Carlos had a 16-millimeter film projector. When funeral activities stopped at night, from time to time, Don Carlos would hang a white sheet on the wall of the garage of the business, and on this he'd project for us Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons.)

Once the door of memories opens, they begin to fall, one on top of the other, like objects stacked in a long-sealed closet. Then sunny summer afternoons come to the eye of the mind in which I, as a little boy, would be running from shadow to shadow (because the pavement of the sidewalks was so hot that it burned bare feet), when I was sent to buy the tortillas, freshly made, for lunchtime. Or the image of the restaurant where they would take us on warm nights to have a "refreshment" (fruit smoothies with ice that were once called trolleybuses). Then there would come to mind, the image of my mother and my grandmother sitting in rocking chairs, after dinner, on the sidewalk in front of the house, talking and commenting on the people passing by. I remembered that here was so little vehicular traffic at night that we children rode bicycles on Avenida Guerrero, the main street of the town, without fear of being run over.

Those were the days! When Nuevo Laredo was a peaceful, innocent town, in which all the "well to do" families knew each other and the municipal president was a doctor much loved by the townspeople. The days when there were empty lots on the main street of the town that we boys took over to play baseball on summer afternoons.

That town has disappeared. Time has moved it to another place, to another dimension where the boys can ride their bikes at night without fear and the ladies talk softly on their rocking chairs on the sidewalks of the town where I was born.

Wash day or an hour in our rooftop

As I have said before, I have to go to our rooftop to wash my clothes. That's where the washing machine room is. Even though I have to go up a flight of stairs, it is worth it because I get to spend an hour or more in the sunshine and I can watch the goings on in other rooftops, or the high-rise apartments near-by. I can look down to the street below, which is usually empty of traffic or people walking about. These simple things might not seem much to some but after months in isolation they now qualify as first rate entertainment for me.

Here's what I see as I wait for the washing machine to do its magic:

This is the view of our street looking southward. It's not a long street, it is barely 100 meters long. Most of the people in the houses that line the street have lived here most of their lives. The neighborhood is mostly residential but as you can see from the two office buildings in the background, that is slowly changing. Here is the other end, the northern end, of the street:

Again, one can see behind that large, hundred-years-old tree the encroaching office buildings and high-rise apartments that are beginning to invade what was once an all residential part of the city.

But, this neighborhood is so well connected with the "Circuito", a freeway that rings the city, nearby, and wide tree-lined avenues with dividers that are like small parks, and two of the largest parks of the city, Parque España and Parque México, just blocks away, it has become prime real estate much sought after by developers.

But, meanwhile, it is still a great place to live with quiet streets like ours just a five minute walk from Avenues like Tamaulipas and Mazatlán with their hundreds of bars, restaurants, and cafes, most of which, if not all, are now closed until further notice.

So, getting back to my petits amusers, my little amusements, let me continue with what I can see from my rooftop:

This is the rooftop of my neighbors right across the street it is typical. They, like a lot of other people in the street, and indeed in the city, have a small garden in the back These gardens have become precious space because people are beginning to use them to grow vegetables. Garden clubs are beginning to pop-up all over, and in fact we buy vegetables from one of them.

The six-story building that can be seen at the top of the picture is an interesting place. It was slightly damages by the earthquake of a couple of years ago. Most of the tenants moved out while repairs were done to it. Most did not come back when he repairs were done. But, one chap, the guy who lives on the sixth floor did. Before the pandemic, he used to throw a party every Saturday night. There would be a lot of people, live music, lots of lights and laughter. Now I see him exercising, doing push-ups, but comes Saturday night, no party is held.

As one can see, everyone hangs laundry to dry in the rooftop. But, what is most interesting about this picture are the buildings in the background. In Mexico City, you can't build horizontally: there is no space and if there is, it is very expensive. So, when people need another room or two, they build up, vertically. One can see how the houses in the street that runs parallel to ours have added rooms.

Here's another use of rooftop space. Lots of people keep their dogs in their rooftops. This is my daughter's dog. When she gets bored by being cooped-up in my daughter's apartment, or when my grandson gets too annoying, she comes up here for a bit of sunshine or just to have a bit of quiet time on her own.

As one can see, there are no people in the rooftops. The altitude of Mexico City is more than two thousand two-hundred meters. At this altitude, on a clear day the sun can be ferocious. Most people wait until the late afternoon to come up and enjoy the cool air as the sun sets. But, the rainy season is starting so it rains most afternoons. I'll see if anyone will come up this afternoon and I'll take pictures.

Although I greatly enjoy my time on the roof, while I wait for the washing machine to stop and I can hang my clothes to dry, there are some things that I see that disturb me.
 
As I lean over the wall and look down on our street, I do see some people walking about. They are mostly young people. They walk in pairs, couples holding hands, young men talking and laughing. What is disturbing is that few wear masks. A couple of days ago, I said to three boys that were walking by that they should be wearing masks. They said they didn't have any and that anyway they were just going to the supermarket to buy something for that night's dinner. I said that the masks were not so much for them but for other people. "If you don't wear a mask, and you are asymptomatic, with just by talking and laughing you could be spreading the virus all over people and things." They just shrugged their shoulders.

With the purported peak of infections coming up in the first two weeks of May, I wonder what attitudes like that will bring us.

As I consider my first outing after months of confinement

I walk a kilometer every day.  Not outside but inside, in my patio. I figure the perimeter of my patio to be 25 meters long so I do 40 turns or more as I listen to the radio stations from France, the US or Mexico. But walking in my patio, as nice and sunny as it is, is rather boring, visuals wise.

Before Corona, I used to walk everyday, in the afternoons. I loved just randomly picking my turns at corners or going up streets I'd never walked in before. There is so much to see in this city. It is so eclectic and full of different people, shops, places to eat, activities of its citizens that it seems to be forever evolving, changing, yet, in some ways, staying the same.It seems as if the word "eclectic" was invented for Mexico City.

The dictionary defines "eclectic" as "deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources." This could be the motto of the city.

I've always said that in cities such as Paris or New York, you can find a café, a restaurant, a fruit or flower shop, a bar and an apartment house all in the same block. But in Mexico City you can find a block such as that AND one where there is a beautiful mansion, a dry cleaners in an open to the street basement, a barbershop, a couple of restaurant-bars, a shop that sells vinyl records and expensive turntables, a bakery run by two kids that consists of an oven and a steel wire rack for the bread, and a house that looks like the local subsidiary of the city dump, all in one block. I'm not making this up because there is such a block close by.

This city is like that: clinging to its past and adopting the new with equal enthusiasm. The guy in the open basement has run his dry cleaners there for decades, the kids in the record shop or bakery have been there for a couple of months. 
That's what makes this city so interesting: you never know what you're going to find when you turn a corner. And THAT is what I miss about my afternoon walks. This city adapts and adopts with an intensity, a velocity that amazes. Yet, at the same time, it defends its old, staid ways with ferocity. So this mixture of the old and the new come together, and many times clash, sometimes in subtle, sometime incredible ways. 
As an example, I like to cite the area around one of the busiest subway stations in the world, Insurgentes (said to be only surpassed by Moscow Central). It is surrounded by the overpasses of some of the busiest avenues of the city. As one goes over one of its overpasses, one can't help but notice that the edge of the overpass comes within almost touching distance of a few houses and apartment buildings. It is obvious that people live in them because there's the occasional potted plant in a balcony or a string of festive lights at Christmas time. I can't even imagine what it must be like to live in such a place, with thousands of cars whizzing by, and smog that must be as thick as a London fog. Yet, there they are. Obviously the owners or inhabitants refused to move or give up those buildings, stubbornly defying the noise, dust, and smog. That sort of defines the character of the city.

A block away from where I live, there is a six story apartment building that was damaged by the earthquake of a couple of years ago. Most of the lodgers moved out when repairs to the building were started but a couple did not, the most prominent of whom is the guy that lives on the sixth floor. His apartment is built like a penthouse, with open spaces and wide corridors. Before the pandemic, he used to have parties every Saturday night. There would be lots of people dancing to live music and the place would be lit up with strings of colored lights. One could hear the music and laughter all the way to my place. No pandemic or earthquake or any natural or man-made disaster is going to make this guy move away. I can see him from our rooftop exercising and receiving deliveries of cases of beer. He's probably getting ready to have a party as soon as the lock down is lifted.

Elsewhere close to where I live, also, there is a beautiful mansion with manicured lawns and rose bushes. Right next to it is the uglies house in the neighborhood. It is unpainted, dirty with the ironwork of its fence rusty, its windows dirty. and a rusting 1972 Volkswagen in the garage. The rusty ironwork gate that protects the vintage car has a rusting sign that warns against parking and blocking the gate, even though the car looks like it hasn't moved in ages. Yet, there they are, coexisting as if caught in a time warp.

And its like that all over the city. The modern and the new next to the old and traditional. The comfortable and safe next to the unhealthiest place to live; a modern, beautiful restaurant and across the street a street side taqueria. I think that in a city with such a huge population (more than twenty million), if you want to create a personal space, you have to ignore what is around you. You can't physically create a haven so you ignore what's around you, pretend its not there, and live within your personally created space. And in a city beset by all kinds of challenges--earthquakes, over populating, lack of water, an international airport that is a disaster waiting to happen, smog, and crime, the people have to be resilient to not only survive but to thrive, as it has been doing for more than four hundred years.

This keeps the city in an ever-changing state. One of the things that I have always said about New York and Paris, to name the foreign cities that I like best, is that there is always some construction or remodeling going on. There is too here in Mexico City but unlike Paris or New York, there is also a lot of private, personal remodeling going on, which is visible, unlike those other cities. A lot of it has to do with the forces of Nature: in the last earthquake a lot of local buildings were damaged so some were torn down and had to be replaced but a lot of them are being remodeled and strengthened in the hope they'll survive the next big earthquake. 

And then there is the personal stuff. Since I've come to live here I have seen several houses of the neighborhood  transformed into apartments by the owners, two bookstores established in the garages of privately owned homes, a piano repair shop whose owner lives in a floor above bought out a car repair garage so he could expand, rooftops turned into social spaces because of the corona virus, yes, but also because of people needing more space for family and friends. People here are quick to adapt to new circumstances, no matter what they are. It seems that this eclectic coexistence is the secret to the success of the city in surviving the challenges life throws at it.

Getting back to my main point, I can't wait to be able to go out because if walking around was interesting before, I imagine that the rebirth of the neighborhood after the long lock down we have suffered, will have a lot of surprises in store for me.

The many lessons of Dobie Gillis or why I like sixties TV

If there is one thing that living in isolation provides abundantly its leisure time.

Oh, I try to be productive: Everyday I write at least 500 words of my novel, most days a bit more; I sweep and mop the apartment floors; I wash my own clothes and dishes; I wash and disinfect anything and everything that comes into the apartment.

But thee is still a lot of time left over for leisure activities, mainly watching television or listening to the radio, or reading books, and soon I plan to squeeze into my schedule playing my guitar and doing some drawing.

In the case of television, I now have time to watch things I would not have watched before, in those days when my afternoons were taken up by a walk to my favorite bakery to buy bread for my merienda, the late afternoon bread and coffee custom that we Mexicans love to observe. Or I would have walked to my beloved bookstore Rosairo Castellano to lounge around in one of its comfortable armchairs to peruse a book from the "Novelties" table.

But now, from six in the afternoon to eight, at which time I watch the opera transmission from the Met, I watch episodes of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," or "Route 66," or "Wagon Train," or "The Dick van Dyke Show," or even "Leave it to Beaver."

I admit that I started watching out of pure nostalgia. I wanted to remember those time when as I kid I would hurry to do my homework at five in the afternoon, so I could have dinner at six and then watch the "prime time" programs that started at six thirty.

Of course, all of these shows, and the king of great television writing, "The Twilight Zone," were then nothing but entertainment to me. I was too young to understand what was being said between the lines, as it were. The genius of writers such a Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone), Max Shulman (The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis), and Stirling Silliphant (Route 66) was way beyond my head. I didn't understand that they were pointing to what was "rotten in Denmark."

Most sitcoms of the sixties, "The Donna Read Show" and "Father Knows Best" to name just a couple of samples, portrayed a society that did not exist. In that fantasy world father arrived promptly at six, changed into a cardigan sweater, lit his pipe, and read the newspaper before being called to dinner at six thirty. The son of the family got fifty cents for mowing the lawn and the daughter of the family invited her friends over for milk and cookies so they could discuss what to wear at the school prom. Real life was not like that. The real marriage behind the fictional happy and funny couple of "I Love Lucy, for example, was a disaster of bitter fights due to Desi Arnaz' infidelity and alcoholism. They were not alone in their troubles.

The youth of America, and indeed in most of the world, was becoming aware of the social and sexual hypocrisy and and rampant materialism that hid behind the picture-perfect suburban houses and apparently placid lives of the families that dwelled in them. Television writers wrote about this in shows like The Twilight Zone in which each episode of apparent science fiction, there lay a moral question. "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" used over-wrought stereotypes (the very rich boy, the beatnik, the money-grubbing girl, the ultra conservative storekeeper) to make  point in each episode, too.

For example, there is an episode in which Dobie brings home his girlfriend to meet his parents. She is wearing shorts which causes Dobie's father to strongly disapprove of her. He wants Dobie to marry a woman like his grandmother who would only expose her legs "in case of an automobile accident or death." When Dobie's mother asked Dobie's father to explain the "facts of life" to Dobie, Dobie responds to his father's incoherent attempt to tell him about "the bids and the bees" by saying that he knows all about that because in school they are shown films about the mating habits of certain birds. This alarms Dobie's father. He says that he will protest in the next parent and teacher's meeting that the school is becoming a brothel by teaching such things.

What Max Shulman, the writer, was trying to do in that show was expose in a satirical and comical way the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of society at the time. Writers like Shulman, and Serling, and Silliphant couldn't openly criticize the morals and hypocrisy of their contemporaries; they had to thread a very fine line in writing criticism into their shows. In fact, there is the story of sponsors of Dobie Gillis protesting the way Dobie's father expressed his conservative views; they wanted and got the writers to tone down the father's conservative outrage. Why? Because the sponsors felt that their audience might feel that its conservative  way of thinking was being ridiculed. Which it was!

Even shows as staid as "Wagon Train" tried their hand at social comment. There is an episode in which the wagon master played by Ward Bond, a veteran of several John Ford films, objects to a woman traveling alone in his wagon train. She is a newspaper reporter who has been hired to write about the life of the people traveling west in these wagon trains. But the wagon master believed that a woman's place is by her husband taking care of children and cooking and keeping house in general. He and the woman reporter, of course, clash constantly during the trip. The episode climaxes when a vote is to be cast to see who should lead the wagon train. And the women win the right to vote on who should lead the wagons in spite of the wagon master's objection. This episode was aired just a women's lib was becoming an issue in America and other countries.

Even "Route 66," a show about two guys traveling around the USA in a Corvette sports car, tried its hand at social comment. In an episode filmed in the town where I grew up, Corpus Christi, Texas, a runaway boy hustles and steals money in order to have enough so he and his sister can runaway and find a man to substitute their dead father. A welfare worker is trying to catch the boy and return him to the good foster family that has adopted the boy and his sister. The episode gently discusses the right of children to have a say in their fate when faced with orphanhood. Children's rights was something unheard of in those times.

As far as "The Twilight Zone" is concerned, I could write a book about the many episodes that commented on the social and moral mores of the times. But some standout as particularly interesting. There is the episode of a young boy who has such mental powers that he can read everyone's mind, and if he catches anyone criticizing him or doing or saying something he disapproves of, he can destroy that person. It is a comment on dictatorship and the evils of absolute power. There are also many episodes that comment on being careful what you wish for because you might get it. We must remember that the McCarthy witch hunts were going on at the time. There is also the story of the man wishing he had all the time in the world to read books. He gets his wish when an atomic war wipes out civilization and he is saved by having been in a vault at the time. Now he has all the time in the world to read all the books he wants to read. BUT. he drops his glasses and they break. Now he has all the time in the world but it is impossible for him to read.

Many of the shows of the era were also ahead of their time in the production values and music they used for their themes. Dobie Gillis' jazzy harmonies and Henry Mancini's jazzy theme for "Peter Gunn" are great examples. As per production values, to quote Wikipedia, "[Peter]Gunn operates in a gloomy waterfront city, the name and location of which is never revealed in the series. He can usually be found at Mother's, a smoky wharfside jazz club that Gunn uses as his "office", usually meeting new clients there." These production values foretold a change in how society was discarding the worn-out clichés of the fifties. 

These and other shows of the late fifties and early sixties were heralding a change which came in the mid-sixties when a veritable revolution in social change gave birth to The Beatles, hippies, the anti-establishment movements, youth's rejection of the military-industrial complex, and so on. Those shows had issued a warning but the post-war generation, complacent in its boon-times materialism wasn't listening. 

In nineteen sixty-six I graduated from High School. I remember coming out of the Plaza movie theater after having seen "The Graduate." The scene where the man says to the graduate, "I'm going to say one word to you, just one word: plastics. There's a great future in plastics." was still playing in my head. All of my generation, like The Graduate, got the message, but not the way Mr. McGuire, the man talking to The Graduate, intended.

We're going to have to change our evil ways, baby!

Virus protection and Life goes on

I used to be blasé about taking a bath. One of life's little pleasures, the feeling of being clean, almost renewed, I took for granted. It is no revelation that our lives are shaped and formed and certainly coddled by the many small, and some not so small, things we take for granted.

Take my bath example (Uh, metaphorically not literally because taking a bath via proxy is not as nice.)

When taking a bath one takes so many little things for granted. First, that as soon as you turn the faucet water will flow, that the water will be hot because there will be gas to heat it, and that there will be enough water for you to even sing a few songs while you are bathing.

You also take it for granted that the drain will work and that you won't have to stand in 30 centimeters of soapy, dirty water. Of course you take for granted that the shampoo, and bar of soap, and conditioner will be there when you reach out for them because later in the day you took it for granted that the new online shopping service would work as advertised and they delivered all of these good and more to your doorstep.

Once you are done singing arias from "The Barber of Seville" and you have shut off the water, another chain of events that you also take for granted have furnished you with a clean, fresh, disinfected towels for you to dry your now paunchy body with. Never mind the long chain of events that allowed the washing machine to work, and the chain of events that produced the washing liquid that you used to wash the towel. And what about the lovely sunshine that dried the washed towel? Surely the sunshine is something that we take for granted, especially as the wonderfully clear sky over Mexico City is now. We had taken the smoggy air and sky as normal and forgotten what a beautiful, smog free air and sky are like. As I've said many times, no matter how hard we humans have tried to ruin the climate in Mexico City, it is still spring-like most of the year, and especially now.

So, once out of the bath and decently clothed, another set of things that I take for granted begin to make my interment more tolerable: I assume there will be electricity for me to heat water for my coffee, and so that I can sit and write this, and so that I can read some news, and so on.

There is one thing we have to remember midst all the doom and gloom news we get bombarded with every day: Life does not stop, it changes and evolves to fit the circumstances. Just ask the Corona Virus. We have not survived as a species because we are dull-witted and cannot adjust to new circumstances. We have survived because we are brilliant at discovering, inventing, creating, all the thousand things that work so well that we take them for granted.

So, we will get through this by discovering, inventing, creating things that will allows us to defeat the virus and which we will later on take for granted. But, perhaps we should stop to think a bit and reflect that this is Nature's way of saying to us "You have to change your evil ways, baby," like in that Santana song.

As children, we took it for granted that our parents would always be there until illness or age took them away. Now we take it for granted that our brothers and sisters, cousins, and friends are always there for us to talk to, give a hug or a kiss, ask for help or consolation, until the virus takes them away. Many of us always assumed that going to the office or factory to work was the natural thing to do, never mind the pollution and congestion, the stress and worry this caused. The virus took that away and LO AND BEHOLD! It turned out to be a good thing!

It's time we take stock of the things we take for granted, of the people we take for granted, of our ability to adjust to new circumstances which we take for granted.

Imagine just one thing: Imagine that all the office workers in Mexico City didn't have to go to the office everyday, just once a week. And that they could substitute even that day for a working lunch or dinner with a client or business colleague. How much pollution and traffic would that curtail?

We're going to have to change our evil ways, baby!

First precaution, then worry, then fear, then paranoia

I remember clearly when it started. I was mid-March and I was walking down an already empty street, heading for one of my favorite spots here in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City, the Rosario Castellano bookstore, which is part of the government owned bookstore chain and publisher, El Fondo de Cultura Económica (The Economic Culture Fund), when I got a phone call. It was from my daughter.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"I'm on my way to the bookstore," I replied. I didn't have to say which bookstore. She knew that I loved to go to the Rosario Castellano and sit in one of the bookstore's many comfortable armchairs to browse a book, or to sit in the bookstore's cafeteria and watch some of the older guys, like myself, play chess.

"You shouldn't be out in the street," she said, "you'd better come home."

I asked why she wanted me to come home, thinking it might have to do with her son, my grandchild being sick or something. Or him wanting to visit with me as he usually did in the afternoons. But she said that the Corona Virus epidemic was getting very serious and that the government was advising people over sixty and/or with serious or chronic health preconditions, to stay home, isolated if possible. Unfortunately, I fit both descriptions.

I am well over sixty years old, and a few months ago they detected a cyst on my thyroid. The reason they detected the cyst was that the doctors at the pneumology clinic of the IMSS (the Mexican Institute of Social Security) in Monterrey were trying to find the cause of unexplained bleeding in my windpipe. They had done a CAT scan and bronchoscopies (that's a procedure in which they put a camera and other devices down your throat) and they had found I had had a bout with another serious virus that had infected my lungs.

They treated my symptoms and allowed my immune system to take care of the virus, which it did, and after a couple of days in the clinic (thank goodness for those young specialist who are up on the latest medical techniques and knowledge), I was released but cautioned to be careful of any further infections of my lungs.

My daughter being aware of this was worried that I should be running around having contact with people in the street or in the bookstore. So, I went home to my apartment, and went into isolation. That was a month ago.

I, as did a lot of people, thought that the alert for this "epidemic" would last two or three weeks. I remembered the H1N1scare, which was a news story for a few months but it didn't interrupt our daily lives or influence the national economy. I thought this would be the same.

But then it wasn't just about the rapid spread in China, the terrible news from Italy, France, and Spain started to be the daily headlines in the news channels. So, my lackadaisical precautions turned to worry, and the self-imposed isolation became imperative.

I had an appointment on the 3rd of April with the head and neck surgeon specialist at the great 21st Century Medical Center in Mexico City but when I called, the medical assistant told me they were rescheduling all non urgent appointments to June. Only emergency matters were being attended to.

As the news from the US and Europe became more alarming, my worry turned into an unspoken fear. Everything became a suspicious source of possible contamination. When the man who sells me bottled water came and buzzed my doorbell, I did not open the glass front door for him. I told him to leave me a 20 liter bottle of water and to go away. I told him I would leave the empty and the money after I retrieved the bottle of water. The poor man looked at me as if I were demented. He usually came into my apartment and put the heavy bottle in the kitchen, for which I usually gave him a small tip. Well. I gave him the tip anyway but I did not ask him to come into my apartment. Nor did I exchange the usual pleasantries with him. He seemed perplexed when he saw me furiously wiping the plastic water bottle with a disinfectant wipe.

He, like millions of other Mexicans, belongs to the "if I don't work, I don't eat" class who cannot do "home office" or stay isolated. He has to go out with his tricycle loaded with 20 liter bottles of water to roam the streets, selling his water. I can hear him calling out from a very early time of the day.

As news that well known people died and it seemed that no age or class was spared by the virus, my fear became full-fledged paranoia. As food items were provided for me, I washed everything not once but twice. And when I went to open a can of soup or tuna, I began to suspect: did I wash this can or not? I don't remember washing it, so I had better wash it again. I did and I washed my hands as well.

I began to prefer food and drinks that are boiled or cooked for at least 10 minutes. Pasta I cooked for 20 minutes. I boiled water for tea or coffee in the morning. I began to fear going out of my apartment even to the apartment house's lobby which has a large glass door that is always locked, and glass panels so it should be quite safe.

Then one day I caught myself thinking that I might soak the pasta in water with 10 drops of Clorox like one does for vegetables, and I said, "That's it! That's enough! It is alright to take precautions but there is no need to turn into Howard Hughes."

And that's what we all have to do: take precautions but not turn into imitations of Howard Hughes."

I am slowly going to take steps to minimize my isolation. Say, go up on the roof to get fresh air and see what's going on in other rooftops. Then maybe stand outside the lobby and talk to the neighbors from across the street, and so on.

Let the end of paranoia begin!

My new friends, the birds

A lot of good and bad things in life happen because of accidents or unexpected events. This is the case with my new found friends, the birds.

Just as there are reports that birds are coming back to the beaches because these are empty of people (Mexico has lots and lots of beaches on both the Atlantic and the Pacific side of the country), so the birds seem to have come back to the trees and bushes of the city. Perhaps they were always there but were discreet because of the human presence.

All one has to do is take a walk during the early morning hours or late afternoon to hear the chirping and singing of birds of all kinds. This too was perhaps always there but was drowned out by the noise of car and truck traffic so prevalent in this city which had traffic almost twenty-four hours a day.

My patio is surrounded by the gardens of my neighbors. Bamboo bushes like these in the picture have become a haven for the finches and sparrows.

These little guys have taken over the place. I'm informed by a friend that they are House Finches.

I started paying attention to what they were doing because I noticed that they had been taking in their beaks little straw-like pieces that are shed by the bamboo and they would take these straws into the bamboo bushes. I suppose they were building nests. Then I noticed that they were doing me a great favor: the leaves of one of my bougainvillea that is in a large pot were being eaten by small caterpillars. Well, the finches and the blackbirds and other birds started to congregate there and soon there were no more caterpillars.

As a gesture of thanks, I put out a dish with water for them and crumbs of tostadas, which are dried tortillas made of maíz. Well, that created a flock of birds coming around every morning and afternoon. I can see them waiting around for me to spread the crumbs. But that is great because they stand on the dividers on the fence and sing and chirp, which makes for pleasant sounds that have come to substitute the noise of cars, motorcycles, buses, and trucks.

Now another type of bird has become prevalent in the flock: Bewick's Wren.

These guys seem to be more aggressive then the House Finches. They fly in and push everybody else out and they won't leave until they have eaten, drank some water and sometimes even had a bath. They are not as afraid of me as the House Finches who fly off if I come close to the open door that leads to the patio. In fact, one of them came to the door and pecked at the door mat perhaps thinking there might be worm in the green plastic that looks like grass.

Now I'm going to try to lure another bird into visiting me. It's one that's prevalent in Mexico City: the Humming Bird.

Before my isolation started, I had noticed that a Humming Bird would sit on the wire that stretched from a telephone pole to the house across the street. I supposed he had a nest somewhere in the vicinity because he is always there in the afternoons. Incredibly, Humming Birds are just about as common as the beautiful Jacaranda Tree that is the city's official flower.

Do you see the purple tree in the middle of the picture? Those are not leaves, those are flowers. These trees are covered with them in the spring and then they drop them all! One can find these trees all over the city. (By the way, notice how blue the sky is now that they traffic has been reduced by ninety percent.)

Along with the wren came the Inca Doves, those pesky little birds that are as used to humans as street cats and dogs are.

They refuse to fly when a human walks by. They'd rather walk to the side or under a car to let you go by. And they'll build a nest practically anywhere. Some time ago, a pair of them built a next on the knot that the Internet provider guys had made on the fiber cable that feeds me connectivity. A pair of them built a nest on the knot and the female laid two eggs. Both eggs hatched. Unfortunately, a storm knocked both chics out of the nest. Very sad to see but nature is like that: unforgiving before any mistake.

Anyway, I am hoping that someday a parrot will show up in my patio. Then I'll have somebody to talk to.

Tomorrow my other good friends, my plants which are beginning to bloom!

Me and my Alter Ego

Every writer who has ever written anything, in one way or another has created or chosen an alter ego. Proust's narrator and Nick Adams of Hemingway are excellent examples. The reason writers do this, I think, is to create a means of narrating personal experience without the narration being a direct autobiography. In addition, it allows the writer to add or subtract from the narrated experience those parts that do not add anything to the drama or emotion of the narration. And also, to protect the innocent, as they say. We all have things that we prefer to keep secret.

The problem with alter egos is that sometimes they take over the narrative, literally take it away from the writer and start dictating the course of the writing.

I was once asked how I could write dialogues that seem so natural. And I replied, without exaggeration, that I do not write the dialogue, that I transcribe it.

"What do you mean, you transcribe it?" asked my friend

"Yes. I only listen to what the characters say and that's what I write," I replied.

I should also have added that it is not me who "listens" to the characters, it is my alter ego.

I think most writers are like that. Some of us will admit it, others will not, but I think that in order for the characters in our stories or novels to appear so vivid, so alive, it is necessary that the things they do and say are like a film whose action and dialogs are eventually transcribed onto paper or screen of a computer, and who makes this transcription is the alter ego of the writer.

Well, this is the character that the writer observes with the most interest because the alter ego is always there, either as a character or as a narrator. One only has to read the first pages of the first volume of "In search of lost time" by Proust, to see an alter ego in action. This is the narrator, a young boy, who laments that the visitor to his parents' house has prevented his mother from coming upstairs to give him the customary good night kiss. That is something one does not need to invent. Those are feelings that only an alter ego can express because at that moment the alter ego and the author are one and the same.

But, memories like those reach the alter ego only after he or she takes over the narrative. They are too personal, too emotional to be an invention. Those are memories that come at night or when the alter ego, and therefore the author, are in a contemplative mood.

This is why writers need the peace and quiet of a studio or a place where they cannot be disturbed, so that they can listen to their characters and so that they can "follow" their alter ego and see what it is he or she is doing.

All of this is to say that this self-imposed isolation is just what is needed for the task of writing and observing an alter ego. As my favorite saying goes: something good comes out of something bad and vise versa.

In my case, my alter ego is a guy named Rafael Artebuz. Do not ask me about the name because it is a long story that I will tell at another time. The point is that for years Rafael has been writing stories, anecdotes, observations, emails, and notes about his own life and the lives of those around him. And he feels that it is time to put all this material in book form. He is not sure if this will result in a novel or what they now call an autobiofiction, which is a mixture of autobiography and fiction. He says he has excellent models to choose from in this post-modern era: Julian Barnes' "Falubert's Parrot" and most of Patrick Modiano's novels, especially the Rue des Boutiques Obscures (published in Spanish as La Calle de Tiendas Oscuras and in English as Missing Person).

I asked my alter ego if he would allow me to publish some excerpts from his writings. He has agreed to allow it. I will post them in future blog posts. It must be interesting what he writes because Rafael has been around the world and has had many adventures, or at least that's what he told me.

In any case, he is a good companion in this moment of strict and prolonged isolation. We'll see.

The Lack Of Human Contact

If isolation has become essential for survival, especially for people who are over sixty years old, we are failing to understand that the lack of human contact, both physical and social, as well as emotional, are as important if a person is to survive.

Psychologist refer to "skin hunger" as the result of being deprived of physical contact with others. They warn that prolonged isolation, without the physical, social, and emotional interchange with other people, can lead to depression, loneliness, stress, and poor overall health. It can also lead to immune deficiency and mood disorders.

We Mexicans are especially gregarious when it comes to physical contact. We are more like Europeans and less like Americans when it comes to physical contact with others. Men at bars will stand up and give an "abrazo" to any new arrival at the table, or even if the acquaintance is just stopping by our table to say "hello."

All of our grandchildren, nephews, cousins, and most family members in fact, would not think of greeting us without a peck on the cheek. Even people who are not directly related to us, friends of friends or friends of our children, for example,  greet us warmly with a firm handshake from men and boys, and a peck on the cheek from women and girls. 

So, one can imagine how hard it is for us Mexicans to forgo those important signs of correct social etiquette.  We are, in fact, a nation suffering from "skin hunger."

Our president was roundly criticized last month for ignoring the advice of health officials and kissing children, shaking hands, and hugging people during a visit to one of our southern states. 

So, is it our choice to die either from the virus or from "skin hunger", that is, lack of human contact.? Hm, some choice!

All of the higher primates are gregarious: chimpanzees, gorillas, and so on. It seems that is is part of our nature to be social and thus have a need for showing friendship and affection. But, not all greeting need involve contact. In Tibet, people stick their tongue out at each other.

While the Massai of Kenya, always a physical folk, greet each other with jumps in a dance.

So, next time my children and grandchildren greet me from the prescribed six feet away, I guess I'll just have to jump and stick my tongue out at them.

Then there is the air kiss. No Mexican man would even consider that type of greeting but my grandchildren do send me kisses that way either when at a proper distance or while video chatting with me. They are growing up in the non-gender specific time where words such as effeminate or manly have no place in their vocabulary, and pink and blue are not colors specific to girls and boys respectively.

But, to get back to my topic, what to do about the lack of human contact? I suppose that we will have to wait until vaccines and medicines bring the virus under control so that we will look upon it as we do the common cold today. But until then, we'll have to make do with phone calls, video chats, and messages on social media sites.

But then, there's technology. For years, if not decades, we have been experimenting with the possibility of titillating the senses by virtual means. Well, if there was ever a time when there was a market for it, it is now!


Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth complained that her husband “is too full of the milk of human kindness” to kill his rivals. Tomorrow we'll talk about how that kindness has been stretched here to the limit by the virus and how one can extend it even via virtual means.

Boredom and other friends

After the deterioration of personal hygiene, the consequence of isolation that can be considered the most harmful is boredom. La Condesa, the neighborhood where I live, was far from a dull and boring place, until the virus arrived.

But now, dozens of restaurants, bars, and cafes are closed. My favorite café, the one that allowed me to read the French newspaper "Le Canard Enchaîné" (The Chained Duck), was one of the first to close.

Little pleasures such as sitting on a bench of the divider of Mazatlán Avenue, having tea and watching people go by who would walk their dogs in the afternoon, is no longer possible. The free movie club at the Hotel Condesa is suspended. In short, everything that gave life and liveliness to the neighborhood has disappeared.

And what are we left with? Well, to follow orders and stay locked up at home.

Well, regretting doesn't fix anything. What should I do to get me through the day which might not be fun but at least will keep me busy until evening falls because that's when the things that I DO consider fun begin?

For starters, I have assigned myself the task of writing a "post" for this blog every day. This is not only a healthy occupation but also an exercise that allows me to overcome the writer's number one enemy: laziness and distractions. If you, reader, think that writing is a relaxed and easy task because I practice it sitting down (few writers write standing up like Hemingway did), you are wrong. Writing a thousand words a day (which is what I assign myself between this blog and a novel I am writing), is like trying to squeeze about 100 milliliters of water out of a rock. (Let the metaphor be understood as the brain is the rock and the words the water).

When I click "Save" in MS Word after I have written the 1000th word, I feel like I have finished a round of boxing with a heavyweight. Now I understand why Hemingway boasted of having beaten opponents like Turgenev, Maupassant and Stendhal in an imaginary ring.

The other danger to completing any writing task is distractions: WhatsApp messages, phone calls from friends and family, the temptation to see one more chapter of my favorite series on Netflix, to see what the folks are saying on Facebook or Twitter.

But when laziness, tiredness or distractions threaten to diminish my production, I remember that this activity, these words that unfold on the screen to describe my thoughts, are and should be, allies and a great help against boredom, the true enemy.

When the "fun" part of the day begins, another great ally against boredom is YouTube. I am addicted to old movies, especially those that were filmed between 1935 and 1955. How I envy people who lived through that post-war era because (according to Hollywood) they traveled by train and when they were not having a cocktail in the Club Car of the train, they were having it in a fancy bar. Witness the scene from "Leave Her To Heaven" in which Cornel Wilde is in the Club Car of the train, sitting in a comfortable chair and in front is Gene Tierney. Wow, talk about confort.

And I never get tired of seeing "His Girl Friday" with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, for my money the best comedy that has ever been filmed. You have to have a very fine ear to capture the funny dialog of the characters that shoot out of each scene as if it were from a machine gun. You have to be very attentive to catch them all.

For example, Rosalind Russell (as Hildy the reporter) is accusing Louie a pickpocket of having set his girlfriend to charge Hildy's boyfriend of proposing improper things to her:

Hildy: "It's your fault Louie, you sent that blond albino to get my boyfriend in trouble."

Louie: "She ain't no albino. She was born here in this country."

Two other characters that "from time to time" accompany my boredom are anger and nostalgia. The anger that says "I am pissed that this unfortunate virus has robbed me of so many things that I like to do and live, especially at this stage of life when every day feels like I'm countdown of my life. After the anger comes nostalgia for those things, those days that we enjoyed so much.

But there's a solution:

The other day, when nostalgia got hold of me, that kind of nostalgia that the Portuguese call "saudade", which is a feeling of longing, melancholy and nostalgia. I remembered the many summers we spent in Paris. When I lived in France, every year we rented the house for the entire month of August to a Parisian family. And we would go to Paris. Paris can be very unpleasant in August due to the number of tourists that invade the city, but if you know what areas the tourists never go to, it can be very pleasant even in the middle of summer. So, we would drive up to Paris via Route 21, the national route that crosses the geographical center of the country and passes through many pleasant and beautiful towns, which the super highways do not do. We would take two days to do so, spending the nights in whatever towns that we liked, such as Perigueux, for example.

Once in Paris, we would stay in Suresnes, a suburb on the other side of the Seine, far from the madding crowd of central Paris.

This is the Hotel de Ville de Suresnes, the equivalent of a municipal palace in Mexico. But, what makes me nostalgic is remembering the walks we used to take in those parts of Paris that are not frequented by tourists, such as the 5th Arrondissement, the so-called Latin Quarter, which in summer is very quiet given that the students are on vacation. There are many things to see and experience there: the old-book sellers (like the one who sells books by the kilo), and the movie house on Rue des Ècoles, which shows remastered old films.

But, since I can't go to Paris to walk through those streets and avenues that I enjoyed so much, I do what we can all do now: I make virtual visits. There are web cams everywhere and there are 30 or 40 minute walks that one can enjoy on YouTube. Searching for "city walks paris france" one finds walks through various parts of the city. It is a palliative.

Finally, I will say that to combat boredom, there are many offers and many of them free, between visits to museums and my favorite: the extraordinary productions of opera by the New York Met. Look for the site metoperas.org