Repetition Nineteen. Mónica de la Torre
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Using the acronym for its past status as a federal district made me sound like I was stuck in the past century, a friend corrected me over a text message.
Suspended now many feet away from the city’s confines, a woman in her seventies across the aisle in the row behind mine keeps calling my name. By the second time she does this I am well aware of the fact that she isn’t talking to me, but regardless, each time I hear my name, my reflex is to turn around ever so slightly. The older woman’s calls are invariably met with silence. My namesake must have a low voice that can’t rise above the rumble of the plane’s engine, I figure. She’s directly behind me, so I can’t tell if she’s just nodding her head or lifting her gaze. Then I hear my namesake flare up. One of her kids has taken a sip of his brother’s juice and they’ve gotten into a fight. I spot a coffee stain on my jeans; I’d forgotten to clean them before getting on the plane. “¡Ya párenle! Stop it!” I go to the lavatory and get a glimpse of her, even though I’ve barely tasted the pastry the flight attendants just delivered. She’d sounded harsh, so I thought there’d be something bitter about her features. I had expected her to look somewhat like me but I am relieved to find out that we have nothing in common other than our age (past forty but otherwise indeterminate). She seems content but a bit hardened, and has the worn look of those who resent that minding other people’s business is precisely their business. Before me is the image of a family with a purpose as a unit; the older woman is probably my namesake’s mother or mother-in-law. They speak to each other with a distance amplified by the gap between their seats. Back in my place I notice that as audible as the older woman is, her mouth is but a tiny hole. Her two grandchildren, whom she barely speaks to, are identical twins. I know nothing of her and her family, and yet I can imagine a banker son or son-in-law waiting for them in their Tribeca or Dumbo apartment.
We are in an in-between state. When aboard a plane, there is hardly a trace of the roads we have traveled in order to get on the vessel taking us to our one shared destination, no matter how brief our stay in it may be before each of us takes our own path. And yet a counterargument can be made, as demonstrated by the exercise I’ve been engaging in, not deliberately. Traces of our past are etched onto our skins like tattoos, on the words we speak, like accents that resist elimination. They are there for that rare type of person with a pair of eyes and ears curious enough to be drawn away from mediating devices. Most passengers seem to be napping now. What visions parade through their minds’ eyes? And how many of these visions are mirrors of sights actually seen? Are the two identical or reversed?
I imagine myself in my own bed later that night, when my experience of CDMX falls into another dimension, with its own dictates and laws—the dimension of the remembered and consequently distorted. I cannot predict how much I’ll forget given what I’ve already forgotten. Forgetting will have to be forgiven. For getting/for giving: two sides of the same coin affording one the possibility to move on. Lights out and one self dislocates, only to appear again in the next place conjuring it.
And yet this flight joins the two of us. One resides temporarily in New York, the other left Mexico City decades ago. One has children; the other does not. One is going on, or has gone on, a family trip; the other one is alone, returning from visiting family. To be sure, more than three contrasting equations could be made, over three comparisons positing us as antipodes. The could have been—is it a thing if it exists in the mind? Is it like peace, which you can sense but cannot test? And/or. A pledge to myself to leave home, back when I might not have understood the implications of doing so, had resulted in the me in this row instead of the me in the row behind. That makes me neither an accomplice nor an enemy to her, whom I overhear on three other instances during the flight. First telling her kids what to do, then singing along to the clapping game they play to pass the time.
Now the older woman, sensing my attentiveness to her, starts addressing me from across the aisle with a jarring familiarity. She can’t open the switch to release her tray table. I can’t tell what she wants to put on it; I don’t think she has books or printed matter on her. I’m on this plane ride and I could be making art if I were Nina Katchadourian. Just hand me an in-flight magazine and three grains of rice or a packet of salt. I don’t bring up Nina randomly. This is how I remind myself that I am supposed to be working on an interview I did with her about four weeks ago. My to-dos project me further into distant times. I might have said a name pertaining to her photographs taken aboard airplanes wrong: “Seating Arrangements” instead of “Seat Assignment.” And if I did, she said nothing about the mistake, sparing me the embarrassment.
I doubt my namesake’s noticed me. The third time I overhear her, she’s telling her sons a story. They might be around four: “This is the story of a pair of twins, the same as you two! If they were apart, they felt like they were missing one of their hands’ five fingers. And yet they were on their own at certain times. You might ask yourself: ‘When? What happened when they were alone?’ What I am saying is that as much as they liked each other’s company, when it came to doing stuff together, they didn’t always see eye to eye.” “What’s that?” one of them says, “You mean eye to eye like from here to there?” He must have poked his brother in the eye, because he let out a whimper. She ignores it and continues with the story: “They didn’t always agree. One of them liked to burn things. Small stuff, not, like, your bed or furniture or anything, but paper cups and plates, magazines, wrappers, that sort of thing.” “And his parents let him do it?” asks the other twin. “No, they didn’t let him burn things, but he’d go ahead and do it anyway. And when he did, the other one would split, because he was terribly afraid of fire. But then he’d feel heartsick from being away from his brother, and would keep coming back.”
We land in New York. We each go our own way. A conversation between us might have been a letdown. I am back in the place that’s been my home for as long as I lived south of the border. My other city recedes into a past whose contours keep going the way of DF.
A smoke alarm goes off. Untimely, like another alarm that a few months later, on September 19, 2017, would be set off by seismic activity near CDMX. The epicenter was so close to the city that the experiencing of the earthquake coincided with its warning. Unbelievably, there’d been a drill earlier that day, so people thought it was all a simulacrum until they realized the ground was rattling beneath their feet. Only in fiction could a deadly earthquake happen a few hours after a drill, in the same place, and on the same day, as a deadlier one thirty-two years earlier.
Conversions
One. One silence, one flame.
A sip of coffee before it tasted bitter.
A prick inside a hollow.
Two roads yet one path
and eyes closed during a nap.
How many mirrors are two.
Evening falls and two moons appear,
Two offshoots that are already three.
Three is peace and the promise
of a friend and a foe,
three open books, three grains of salt.
Four times I said your name, to no avail.
Four is equal to two.
And if five times you ask yourself,
What am I doing here? set your bed on fire,
let it burn, and leave.
Equivalences
One silence, a flash.
A sip of coffee before I knew bitter.
A hole in a hole.
Two paths to a path
and his eyes closed napping.
Many mirrors are twofold.
Late