I watch a cheeky blue-green jay's clever antics as he helps himself to breakfasts at Bigotes de Villa, Pancho's Mustache. He sports a black bib, blue and green feathers, and a chartreuse belly, rounded off with a glossy blue-green tail. People yell and swat him with their hats.
In Coyacán, all the houses are painted blue. Especially Frida Khalo's casa. It is blue as the sky, it's painted azul to ward off evil. In Coyacán you can get your shoes dyed blue for pennies. To ward off evil with each step you take. In Coyacán, azul is a verb.
Beneath a green awning, a parrot climbing the bars of his cage, bites the finger of the woman feeding him. She swears and scolds him. He doesn't listen. He doesn't like his cage, or the woman who feeds him, for that matter. Freedom is the color of the sky.
I have trouble distinguishing between the words ant and oven in Spanish, which makes for some surreal breakfast conversation. The sunlight has the texture of tissue. It's whispering a smoky resonance of wood and ash.
The blue-green jay perks up, and bounces off the sides of the parrot's cage, after I feed him some bread. The parrot is not amused. And says so in no uncertain terms. The knelling of church bells, mass is over. All is forgiven. Or not.
I give an Indian woman a few pennies. John scribes madly in his journal, the fierce pen nearly pierces the page. After arguing most of the night, the chasm between us is a little less precipitous.
We have not fallen into the crevasse yet. In Coyacán.
2 August 1987
added, rev. 10/17
(I'm still processing Steve Kowit's homework ideas).
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