Kandis Elliot: Evolution in Guadalajara

By the time Ziggy was wrapping up with a pitch for a biosphere reserve on that local, still-undeveloped mountaintop, most, if not all of the ladies in the audience, and a good number of men and older children, held infants. The room was filled to overflowing. It had grown brighter in the last few moments from new plate-glass windows boring their way through the century-old adobe walls. The back of the auditorium and the east entryway had been knocked down, and the historic building was half-remodeled. Through the rifts I saw various plastic signs, advertising fast-food places and clothing outlets, waiting in tombstone-like rows out in the old monastery garden, which was being paved. The church was becoming a mini-mall.

After the lecture I tried to get an explanation of the painting (it had just been smitten by a wrecking ball). Someone said it was Jose Clemente Orozoco’s Four Aspects; but everyone was going up to Ziggy and either regaling him with praise for his courage in broaching the subject of overpopulation, or trying to spit in his face because of his blasphemy. “We are not rats,” they protested. One young reporter wanted to know how Albricht cleaned up the rat poop. —It was quite an ordeal, as I understood. The dean finally had Albricht’s rats gassed and hired a professional firm with moon-suits to shovel out the basement. On humid days when the pipes sweat you can still smell rat shit down there.

The trip back to our villa made us all wish we’d taken a taxi. Just outside the Alamo-cum-MexMall a starving child sat watching his naked mother sell blowjobs to three workers in the night shadows of a construction crane. The child was filthy; Inez walked by him without looking down, but Ziggy cast an angry eye his way and murmured—the first murmur of his life— that he should throw the little snotball in the plaza fountains. The copper-sulfate blue waters no longer existed, however, the plaza stone having been tarmacked and colonized by businesses while we were in the lecture hall. The smell of roast corn had become the reek of sweat-shop effluent and seeping dumpsters. The plaza’s palm trees were now anti-vandal lights, and the Indian traders who this afternoon sat on blankets and sold semi-precious stones and fired pottery were replaced by pizza and Chinese take-out hole-in-the-walls, bars, strip joints, drug sellers and users, whores. Foul language dribbled ceaselessly from the mouths of apparently homeless urchins. Fights broke out six times in five blocks; the sound of gunfire and shrieking tires filled the noisy distance. A gang of scary ne’er-do-wells gave us a look-over and a follow. An even scarier look from Ziggy made them change their plans. Steam blows from grates in the gutters floated like wraiths of disease and mixed with the exhaust of noisy bumper-to-bumper traffic.

At one point Ziggy halted so abruptly I crashed into his back, nearly dislodging The Royal We. He faced the low yellow billows of smog above that obscured the higher buildings, and filled his chest with the thick air. “Julian Simon says the Earth can support unlimited population growth for seven! billion!years,” he roared at the top of his lungs. Inez and I each grabbed one of his arms and yanked him down the streets.

We almost missed the villa; it had become buried in a cavern between a Hyatt and a Banco de Mexico high-rise.

I stayed up well past midnight, depressed by the latest GNP, by outrageous media misreportings of Ziggy’s speech—all of which cast him as a tree-hugging Hitler and advised self-castration if he wanted population control—and by the consequent gutting of environmental programs, what there’d been, in Mexico.

I had a glass of kahlua and milk with Inez in the kitchen just before she headed for her room, then fed The Royal We leftover chicken tostadas. I splashed enough salsa verde on them to ream a horse, just to see if she’d eat them. She did, without hesitation and with great literal relish. I then checked on Ziggy. The gloomy return from the lecture had gotten to him. He was passed out on the floor of the bathroom in a barf puddle, mainly the contents of a liter of El Presidente.

“ ’S regressive evolution,” he babbled. “People w’ sensitivity—first to drop out ’a gene pool. It’s ’ose sel’-promoters inna air-conditioned bedroom communities who’re goin’t’ survive us. All ’ey need izza steak dinner ’n cable. Rat chow, water, ’n a new car. Education’s t’ National Enquirer. Truth’s an NRA flyer…”

I lifted his head up by his hair and shoved a towel under his face so at least part of him would have a dry, if not comfortable, night; then I took a leak, found another brandy bottle, and retired to my room where I spent two hours on the Net not finding out what was secretly on tap for Monte de Manantlán, the last living mountaintop in Central Mexico.

I was just starting to think about all the strange motes I’d been noticing lately out of the corner of my eye when I saw a big one. A little flurry in the air, more like a flicker of reflected car headlights, snapped my attention from the LCD and into the yellow lamplight on the desktop. I was so amazed, I found myself staring at nothing for a full minute, seeing an afterimage clear as a bell. An animal had stood there, its staring face I mistook at first for my own in a mirror reflection, only there wasn’t any mirror on the desk; tiny thick-fingered hands, not paws, rested on an ashtray; a long, horny tail armored with tiny whiskered scales curled around the telephone. It was no animal I recognized, and in my business I recognize them all. I tried not to make startling movements as I looked under the table and around the room for it—wild animals can move faster than the blink of an eye—found only The We curled up on my pillow and sound asleep. I gave my bottle of El Presidente a suspicious glance, but Ziggy had inspired my thirst only as far as two shots, hardly enough for the DTs.

“Would Her Royal Magnificence,” I suggested to The We, “kindly rouse her precious personage and keep the vermin out of the bedchambers for at least one night?”

She replied with a salsa-verde cat fart that sent me out of the room. I fled to the pool area, skirting little dark heaps on the wet tile. Overhead a few bright stars pierced the light-polluted sky, but my eye kept being drawn to thick billows of streetlit fog that rose and swirled like the mists of time beyond the broken glass of the security wall.

We drove west. Guadalajara’s morning light knifed through smog like congealed pudding. “Step on it, Nezzy,” Ziggy ordered, pounding his laptop. He showed no after-effects from his night of driving the porcelain bus, whereas I nursed not only a headache and queasy stomach—harsh retribution for only two shots of brandy, I thought, until I remembered the water glass of kahlua and milk—but also a stiff neck from falling asleep on a pool lounger. Inez twisted and jerked the Volkswagen around thickening traffic and down the maze of Old-City streets. In places the sidewalks were still cobbled and cracked; in others, whole sections of corrugated tin sheet-metal slums, like a shuffling deck of cards, were being bulldozed and replaced with newer slums made from plasterboard ticky-tacky: putting the shine on squalor. In the residential aprons of town, swarthy black-haired people poured from doorless doorways, pushing carts, sweeping little weedy lawns, setting up one-family stands to sell damn near anything: bottled water filled at the nearest polluted tap, fried cabbage and dogmeat tostadas, mounds of tomatillos, fresh-squeezed fruit juices from backyard trees bearing more weight in fruit-fly maggots than fruit. The ubiquitous roast-corn aroma mixed with the odors of gasoline and industrial effluent pumping El Cappa from endless rows of smokestacks. It did nothing for my sense of ill-being.