Better and better and better.

Hello. Are you familar with the film ¨The Passenger¨, starring Jack Nicholson as James Locke, a journalist of the American variety struggling to locate a rebel group in an unnamed Saharan country? It was made around 1973 by Michelangelo Antonioni and not released until recently.

The plot hinges on a moment of discovery in a fellow traveller´s hotel room: a dead Englishman in the adjacent room of an overheated hotel in the middle of nowhere. Locke looks at him, finds his passport, and has a realization: an identity is available for the taking, and he proceeds to switch passport photos, datebooks, and lives as he is entirely sick of his own. That´s all of the plot I am interested in retelling. The relevant bit in my mind is the mood Nicholson conveys, the irritated,
exhausted, spoiled white man moving through a foriegn landscape that neither interests nor inspires him. He roars off into the Sahara in his Landrover and gets stuck in a sand dune immediately, after abandoning his foot-guide (in search of his obscure rebel group) in disgust. One damned thing after another. He smashes helplessly at the ´rover with a shovel.

I have no such adventure before me, only the heat, the cockroaches, the lost passport. Yes, that's right, I managed to lose my passport w.in 48 hours of arrival, which included my visa for a mere 30 days in a country where I am under contract work for 90. Of course I missed my flight here anyway, was forced to wait it out in Mexico City for 24 extra hours and then take a 12 hour bus ride (which turned out to be an air-conditioned breeze, and not the 15 hour milk run I was promised. Now I work six days a week teaching English to sleep-deprived teenagers who drop their books on the floor every five minutes. I have indeed fallen into another life, one where the weather seems to get hotter each day, where the cockroaches have the size of some the larger beetles, where I drag my mattress out on the roof each night, where its cooler and quieter and where I have no Maria Schnieder as of yet.

Its the heaviness of solitude, of having no friend but a heap of problems each day, where procuring a postage stamp is a two hour exercise in sweat-soaked toil. This is the feeling that makes me think of Nicholson in the first twenty minutes of The Passenger (which is a pretty good movie, if only because it holds in high relief the emptiness of the Western material identity, the nihilism of a successful, priviliged man faking his own death out of irritation and boredom with his jetsetting, professional life).

A jackhammer is slicing its noise into my brain as I write this, distracting me from telling you about the exciting sites and sounds to be found here in Chiapas, i.e., the constant sight of old VW Bugs, the ripped apart sidewalks, the posol (a drink made of from the coconut).

I attempted to generate a discussion about overpopulation with my students this morning. They had no idea what the population of Mexico City was, and why should they as don´t live there. I insisted it was 30 million. No one argued. I announced that it was the same size as Canada´s population. No one contested that either. I went into an extended comparison of the relative sizes of the two landmasses in order to show that overpopulation was a kind of myth. No one argued, no one said much of anything. The Mexican teenager doesn´t want to argue it seems, especially not at 7:30 on a Friday morning, but not most other times either. And who can blame them? Isn´t it hot enough already? Why add a lot of thinking into the problem, and in English yet? Its the lassitude of the Tropics coming through again.

Why is Chiapas the poorest state in M.? I asked another group the other day. The corrupt politicians who are totally useless and sell off all our raw materials one girl offered. They´re all going to vote in the elections in July. But what to do about all this corruption? An unanswerable question. This is Mexico, they seemed to say. All people in charge are morons. So why worry?

Regards,