Mexico Journal: Aug. 31, Elsa Cross, Mexico City

August 31, 1987

Comida at Elsa Cross's home. Elsa, Alberto Blanco, and Sandra Cohen are working on John's latest book. Discussion leads to the maldito artists, the bad ones who write good books. Neruda, Pound Dalí, Melville. I've just written a very wicked book and I feel clean as snow.

We leave for home in a few hours, loaded up with John's boxes of books, from the International Mexican Poetry Festival, which was fairly conservative.

Last night John knocked on the door and we talked most of the night as we did on the first night that we had arrived here. We were jockeying for position on both sides. He thought we had reconciled and I thought we were off. So finally, a slow reconciliation. And we fall into an uneasy sleep under the moon, perhaps reconciliation will come in the morning.

This is the last page of this notebook. I hate to end it on reconciliation. I hate to use all the pages of my notebooks, and this is probably the first time it's happened. I began this journal last day of December and at completed it on the last day of August. There are many lapses in between, a record of the rocky months between us, and yet we persevere.

Mexico Journal: Aug. 30, Elsa Cross, Mexico City

Elsa said she liked my work very much. Gloria, also. I'm pleased and surprised that they've even read my work. Jorge Luján will present his third espectaculo in November at the Book Faire in Mexico City, our work set to music. I wish I could be there to hear and see it.

When Lordes sang Horseflesh, my poem to John, I was moved beyond words. She sang so effortlessly. We attended her solo performance at the National Palace last night. She is not only really good, she is fantastic.

Elsa and I talked of the writing process and we discovered that men tend to write daily while women write in spurts. Whenever we can. Being a poet is more than just writing poems, it's the other living that we do that we must bring to our work. Because there is a long time between poems, I feel guilty. I'm not a poet…

Elsa said her first husband wrote two or three poems a day, and she felt she was not a poet. Elsa Cross! I feel all these lines churning in me, a month's worth of images, but what I want to say, I have no idea, it hasn't distilled yet.

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The other night, in my tirade against the Ladino culture, comparing it to the US, I noted how they've taken our bad habits and made them their own: the drunk in the street, the greasy Guatemalan or Mexican ogling, molesting women, the use of banned herbicide, the salesman on the plane selling 24D to the Guatemalan peasants so their corn will be pest free. But he doesn't tell them their children will have birth defects.

We are poisoning the earth in the name of progress. Why can't there be potable water here? Why do they accept so much filth? The bathrooms in even the upscale restaurants, can only be imagined. It isn't just the poverty, and there's plenty of it, it's an attitude towards the personal self, and the global environment, that sets my teeth on edge.

I accused John of being in love with this Ladino culture that is so shortsighted. He's defensive, taken aback, but I sent him to thinking, challenging him. His poem Poison, broaches the subject

All this street sweeping of ancient men with brooms made of branches, all this rain, it pours out of summer skies, flooding the streets, but it won't scrub the centuries of grime and oppression from this city. Every city is covered with the same carbon and diesel soot, the difference between Guatemala and Mexico is in name only.

The same peasants move to the outskirts, outwaiting the weather, hoping to seek a better life. Yet death comes anyway in corrugated tin and plastic shantytowns that grow like a malignant fungus on the outskirts of the city. But life is surely better than being dirt poor in the campo. Cambio, is change in both senses of the word.

I use the price of a cup of coffee to keep things in perspective.

The price of 4 cups of coffee buys the time of two maids for four hours. A movie cost less than a cup. The woman who owns the largest coffee finca in Antigua, runs a bookshop.

When we come to this place, open armed, bearing books, the natives treasure them, making a pleased fuss. John says our job as poets is to report back to the gringos our observations. As Carolyn Forché told us, bearing witness. Full circle.

In the taxi, there was a commercial for Laguna Verde, Mexico's first atomic plant, scheduled to go online in September. It spews out facts: the safety and the cleanliness of nuclear energy. I tell Gloria Novio of the huge sponges growing off the Farallone Islands mutated by radioactivity.

I imagine Mexico disposing of radioactive wastes in the local basurera, the garbage pit. I can't imagine them disposing of it properly. There is no proper way. They can't even clean up their own gas crisis, the smog in Mexico City is incredible. And it isn't even necessary.

The excuse is always a lack of money, or the money that never comes trickling down to where it's needed. The fat-cats claiming at all. That's why there are no toilet seats in the public bathrooms, nor toilet paper. Priorities: wipe your ass with newsprint, use yellow journalism journalism, put it to good use.

I was appalled by how the natives of Tikal lived. The outhouses are alive with flies, the single room partitions with thin wood and blankets divided into sleeping compartments, mosquito netting over the beds. At a low white table, an old man puts the finishing touches on his morning shave, and steps out of his hovel, looking for fresh and wholesome. Such contrasts.

My period is days late, it comes slowly, one months to the date. I'm afraid of being pregnant. If I have the kid I raise it alone. If I have the abortion I'll probably break up with John. Either way, I lose.

The women here just have babies, they don't have the agony of choice. I state that I don't want to raise a child alone. It's an unacceptable alternative. John tries to place as much distance as possible between his responsibilities, the idea of me having a baby is too threatening for him, and to his daughter. He claims first loyalty to his daughter, and is jealous of that role.

The women here just have babies. If the water were potable, if there was enough food, if they'd quit destroying the jungle, the birthrate would soar. Eliminate disease, the population explodes. But it's exploding anyway, why not to improve the quality of life?

Some of the Indians don't understand why we have spent all our money to visit all those remote villages. Others assume we are all rich and deserve to be ripped off. How can I explain the concept of rent? Jorge's three-bedroom apartment cost $65 a month. John's cottage, at $600 a month?

In the US, the cost of a cup of coffee is 15 times that of Mexico. I think of all those coffee bushes growing under the jungle canopy, some of the berries are turning red now. Cherry coffee ready to pick. What are a day's wages for a coffee picker in relation to the price of a cup of coffee in the US?

Coming from the jungles of Tikal to Mexico City in the same day, at 7000 feet, I get a head cold and can barely understand Spanish. My English is broken too.

People here sell sweets, and newspaper on the streets. We're all sitting targets at red lights. People here are not unemployed, just chronically underemployed. How many chicles does a little girl have to sell just to break even? When does she still have to sell enough to help feed her family? While she's working the stoplights, others more fortunate than her attends school. Later she will discover it's more lucrative to sell herself at the red lights.

There are 20 million chalangos living in this underbelly of the world. In less than a century, the lake has long since dried up and and now the only the remnants of the lake are in the city sewers. Downtown, at the Zocalo, one can see the same level of water throughout all the grates, and some of the sunken, flooded buildings.

Most of the sidewalks have healed themselves since the 1986 earthquake, but the buildings look as if a giant hand had pushed them off-center. It makes one giddy trying to decide which is level, the buildings or the sewers? The answer is the sewers. Under the streets of Mexico City, water seeks its own spirit level.