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

The First Victim of a War

They say that the first casualty of war is the truth. Well, I'd say that the first casualty of isolation is personal hygiene.

Friends report that when they went to COSTCO here in Mexico City, they found that in the clothing section the only things on sale were pijamas and sweat pants. I am not surprised because I soon found that if I didn't have a video conference programed for the present day I found no reason, much less motivation, to abandon my pijamas. In fact, I have started to routinely wear the same set of pijamas for a week and changing them on Saturday mornings. Three sets of pijamas are available for the routine but it is obvious that soon they will need substitutes because, like good soldiers, fatigue and combat wounds have started to take their toll.

Another victim of my isolation is the schedule of my meals, as formerly imposed by social and professional contact. I've always had my breakfast at eight o eight-thirty in the morning, because I've always started to work, either at the office or at home, at nine. Lunch was between one and one thirty in the afternoon, and dinner at eight or eight thirty at night once I got home. I'm afraid that said routine fell mortaly wounded just seven days after having been in self-imposed quarantine.

Now I find that I'm eating cereal and having my morning tea at eleven in the morning once I've seen the morning news while in bed. I take a lunch break at three or four in the afternoon, and dinner is delayed until nine or ten at night while watching the opera transmitted by the New York Met. Oh! The consequences of that schedule is heartburn that forces me to read until two or three in the morning. But as they say that always something good is a consequence  of something bad, this has allowed me to read several books from the pile that was gathering dust on my bedside table. Once I've cleared that pile, I will start on the many half-read books lollygagging on my Kindle.

And as in any other war, the number of victims and casualties continues to rise. Exercise fell like many other heroes have fallen: without making a sound. It used to perform its duty faithfully, if minimally, before in the afternoons when I went for a walk in the neighborhood (not without a stop at the great bakery on the corner of Juan de la Barrera and Pachuca streets). Now I have an excuse to stop my walks altogether, since I am not supposed to leave my apartment. I do have a patio, which is about six meters by five meters. But walking around and around in it depresses me more than it helps me because I feel like those prisoners in a James Cagney movie who were taken out to do an hour of walking around in the "exercise yard."

To do any meaningful exercise in my patio, I would have to be dragged out of my chair like Cagney was dragged into solitary confinement after the riot he caused in "White Heat" when he was told that his mother had died:

I fear for the other brave soldiers in this battle which I am forced to wage in confinement. I am talking about the daily bath and washing dirty dishes and clothing. These two activities, odious enough during the best of times, require all my will in order to carry them out in these the worst of times.

My children, when I visit their homes, do not allow me to wash any dishes. This is not of consideration for their poor, tired dad, no. Its because they consider me the worst dish washer in the world. My youngest says that if I ever needed to work as a dish washer, even if it were in a street corner taqueria or neighborhood restaurant, I would probably be fired after just one day on the job.

I tried an innovation: filling the sink with water and soap so that by soaking the dishes they would wash themselves. The result was a horrible soup of food, soap, water, and particles of something that seemed like life that came from another planet. The result of this experiment was a pile of greasy, dirty, smelly dishes, far from the clean shiny plates I had envisioned.

Oh, well. Even the toughest guys have to submit themselves to this unavoidable task.

Robert Mitchum, the "bad boy" of the 40s y 50s movies, washing dishes.

I had to admit that I would have to revert to the "tried but true method" of using soap and a sponge to scrub the things if I wanted them clean.

Washing clothes is easier because I have help from a mechanical friend: the washing machine. But, here I face another problem, a physical problem. Better said, I have to exert myself physically much more because said washing machine is on the rooftop terrace of our building. I live on the street level apartment; the washing machine is six flights of stairs up! Therefore, I have to take the dirty clothes up, put them in the washer, wait while it fills with water, go downstairs to wait for it to do its magic, go up to hang the clothes up to dry, go down to wait for the sun to do its magic, go upstairs to take down the dry clothing. Uff, by the time I'm done, I am plum wore out.

Nevertheless, the visit to the rooftop does offer a break from the confinement and while I wait for the machine to fill up with water, I can look down at our street, which is usually empty of people. I can also look at other rooftops, many of which have been converted to indispensable spaces for families and individuals, because I can see how they are being used for social and family gatherings. Mexico City has always been a "rooftop city." Because of overcrowding few people can afford space for a garden, as one can see when you land at the International airport. It feels like the plane is going to land on someone's rooftop.

Now the Corona Virus is forcing people to use their rooftop for another purpose: vegetable gardens. I am seriously thinking for starting a garden in my patio and/or the rooftop. I've had vegetable gardens before. In France, we used to rent garden space from a retired man. For 30 euros a month to cover water usage, he gave us a large piece of his backyard to plant in. All the things we planted gave us something to eat: tomatoes, squash, potatoes, radishes, onions, cucumbers, melons, and several kinds of herbs. In fact, we grew more then we could eat so we gave a lot to our neighbors and then preserved a lot for the winter.

But, boy is it a lot of work! And then there was the continuous fight against pests. Birds loved our cherry tomatoes, especially the red ones. Rabbits chewed our squash, potatoes, carrots, and the like. You would be surprised at how many rabbits there are in an urban environment. I felt like Elmer Fudd fighting off dozens of Bugs Bunnies. The worst were the rats. They seemed to just nibble at things to make them inedible to humans. I don't know how many pests exist in rooftops. We'll see. Well, that is, if I gather up enough strength to start a "victory garden."

Tomorrow: Fighting boredom.