Woke to the sound of someone's radio doing the news in a voice that thought the news mattered. The roof already smelled like wet stone even though it had not rained. I put on the charcoal fleece and went looking for a different café because Origen's counter is the wrong height and I am tired of my back filing complaints.
Found one on Independencia called Café Brújula. They had a flat white and a counter. I stood. The counter was three inches lower than Origen's, which is to say six inches worse. A woman next to me was explaining something to someone on her phone in a Spanish that was all consonants and urgency. I lasted eight minutes. My spine staged a walkout. Still looking.
Walked to the market because that is where the morning goes when I do not give it instructions. Bought a *tamal* wrapped in a banana leaf from a woman with a steel pot the size of a small car. Oaxaqueño — black mole, chicken, mass that tasted like it had been made by someone's grandmother at four in the morning. I ate it on a bench near the flower stalls while a man tuned a guitar that did not want to be tuned.
The chapulines man was in his usual spot. We nodded. That is most of what neighborhood feels like — the same face, the same corner, no performance required.
I walked back through the zócalo, which was full of Sunday's advance guard — balloon sellers setting up, a man with a cart of *elotes*, women laying out woven bags on blankets in a grid that suggested they had done this before and would do it again next week. I kept walking.
Lunch was three tacos de barbacoa at a stand on Mina. Lamb, onion, cilantro, a consommé on the side that I drank like soup because that is what it was. The woman handed me the cup without asking. Thirty pesos. I ate standing because the two plastic chairs were occupied by men in work shirts who were not in a hurry.
The afternoon had no shape. I walked east toward Xochimilco, past the low houses with the painted doors and the dogs asleep in the shade like they had won an argument with the heat. A corner store sold me a bottle of water and a *gansito* because I was hungry in a way that did not require dignity. I ate the gansito in four bites and immediately regretted all four.
By the time I got back to Héctor's it was nearly three and the day felt like it had already spent itself. I went upstairs to fill the bottle from the tap. Héctor was on the landing with a book in his hand — a paperback, spine creased to breaking, cover gone.
"You read?" he said.
I nodded.
He handed it over. "Take it. I am finished."
I looked at the cover. *Pedro Páramo*. I had heard the title before but could not remember where.
"It is short," Héctor said. "Good for the roof."
I said thank you. He waved it off and went back down the stairs before I could ask him what it was about, which might be the only honest way to lend a book.
I sat on the roof with it. The plastic chair, the mountains going purple, the radio downstairs doing a ballad that had more verses than it needed. I read the first twenty pages. The Spanish was harder than I wanted it to be but not hard enough to stop. A man looking for his father in a town that might be dead or might be a memory. I could not tell yet. That felt right.
The light started to go around six. I kept reading until I could not see the words anymore, then came back downstairs and walked to the *tlayuda* stand on Trujano. Same order as last time. Folded, not flat. Ate it on the bench near the cathedral while the evening arranged itself into families and street sellers and the shoe-shine men packing up their kits.
A kid with a box of *chicles* worked the benches. I shook my head. He moved on without breaking stride. Professional.
I walked back through the zócalo, which was louder now — a man on a megaphone selling something I could not parse, a couple arguing near the bandstand in voices that suggested this was not their first lap, a dog nosing through a spilled bag of *chicharrones* like it had all night. I did not have all night. I came back to Héctor's, filled the bottle again, and climbed back up to the roof.
I am writing this from the plastic chair. The city is doing its evening work — engines, voices, someone's television bleeding through a window. Tomorrow is Sunday. Tlacolula is on Sundays. I might go, or I might sit here and keep reading the book Héctor gave me without asking what I like. Both of those feel true.
— Finn