My premonition of 9/11 and a small dose of paranoid misanthropy.

We arrived in Mexico City in the year 2000 and left it in the year 2002. I've written about it. But I want to write about it again because I want to refine an experience that puzzles me. That really puzzles me.

I know it is real because I phoned my mother and discussed it with her. My mother could not come to see us because she was undergoing an operation for a minor cancer.

The house is a 1930s house or was. It was due for demolition from what I saw on street view. A hotel to be built in its place. It was a beautiful house in its way, but quite dark. On the ground floor the windows opened out onto our privada. The walkway we shared with six other houses, decorated with tiles.

The houses were large with wooden flooring and high. There were three floors but then there was also a long spiral staircase which took you to the roof and a servants' quarters on the roof. 

The stairway was dramatic. It swept down to the lounge, and in the lounge there were white pillars. The stairwell was big too, and looking up, at the top there was a skylight. It had a landing big enough to put a sofa, for several closets and a TV.

Going up the stairs on the left was a large bedroom where Tere and I slept. 

One afternoon I went to sleep and dreamed. Then went downstairs and while the dream was fresh in my mind my mother called me on the phone. She always called me when I was really upset. We were connected. She could feel what I felt. I could feel what she felt. I accepted this. I accepted this connection naturally, as you do. Because it is your mother. You should have a connection.

But she could feel what I felt and once she said to me. 'Phil, you are skating on the dark side.' And I knew what she meant. It started after I read Rimbaud when I was 16. My disordering of the senses. She was at least as intelligent as I am, more. She could understand, but then easily dismissed things that she considered unhelpful or irrelevant.

It's hard for me to put into words what I thought about my mother or what our bond was because I never reflected on it and I still haven't. At one time we got on each others nerves an lot. When I was a teenager. I have never interrogated myself about my relationship with my mother. I don't have to.

I lay on the cool, quilted covers of the king sized bed. Tere had Elvira come over and give her massages that were supposed to help her lose weight. Elvira massaged Tere with a rubber stick. The stick had blue suction pads on it. I used to look at her poor body afterwards. Elvira put her elbow into her work and Tere was always left with bruises on her waist and thighs.

Elvira did it once to me, but once was enough.

I could find out when exactly it was. If it was June 2000 or June 2001. Because of the operation my mother and father did not come and instead the rest of the family came and we hosted them. They were very loud when they did come and in the Palacio de Hierro one of the waitors was irritated enough to sprinkle crushed glass into my brother's Margaritta.

I faced him down. I said to him:

'Listen you mother fucker. If you are going to kill one of us then take out a fucking gun and do it that way. Don't sprinkle crushed glass into someone's drink you fuck.'

I was annoyed. But I could see something was up. Mexican people are more well behaved. Something was going to snap. Loud happy children are not universally welcome. The entitlement of children to cause a rumpus in public places is something that annoys me too. 

But I'm just being grumpy. And those acres and acres of video, God I can't stand them. The self regard, the preciousness. Stop. Stop it.

OK.

I lay down on the bed. I thought of where I was. Near us the golden Angel of Independence on its pillar. 600 years ago we would probably still have been on dry land or perhaps in the water between Tenochtitlan and Chapultepec. Walking through Chapultepec with my children we found two kittens. One on each plinth near the run up to the monument to the heroic children who wrapped themselves in the Mexican flag and threw themselves down from the castle rather than give up to the American soldiers. We took the kittens home.

My daughters were delighted, but my wife was not. We had to get rid of the kittens. They have never had a pet throughout their childhood. I had many pets. Dogs and cats. But what happened to them when we moved. They were put down. Given away. Uncertain fates. To have had an animal then would have been cruel, I suppose. In the end we let them loose in the English hospital on the Advice of Aunt Li. She said they had a kind woman there who picked up the cats and looked after them.

Aunt li was the centre of our social life and a key source of nutrition outside our home in Mexico City; and yet I used to fear her influence on Teresa. When Tere came back from aunt Li she was deeply intolerant. There was something about being with Li that put her against me. I don't know what it was. But a pattern emerged. Which was odd because I like Li - everybody does - and I think she likes me. 

Hard to explain. But I am a bit of a masochist anyway. Perhaps I wanted Tere to be hard on me. Perhaps I wanted to feel unworthy. I love spurning opportunity. So long as we can live I have constantly ignored betterment. That must get very frustratng for a woman. Very frustrating.

You give your ideas freely to everyone. She says. You can't keep your mouth shut. Yeah Dad, my children would repeat. Why do you give everyone your ideas. They just copy you and make money out of them and get the credit. Really?

Tere is not easily impressed by anyone or anything. She was by Marcus when he was against the PRI with his blue eyes, or were they green, and his implacable opposition to the elected dictatorship. But then it became clear he was an idiot. She looks up to her younger brother who became very important in Mexico. Jets and helicopters at his disposal. Black Marias. I am not at liberty to say.

Tere stopped telling me about her family because she said I would blurt it out to the Halls and here I am blurtng. But I am not saying anything really, am I?

So let me get back to the moment I want to recast and reflect on. I am lying on the bed. The same bed which I lay on with Dengue fever for a whole week while my family were in Uruapan. It's called the bone breaker. I knew I would get it. There was a student. I don't think she liked me. She had been away for a week with dengue but came in and insisted on having a tutorial. I was worried.

What if a mosquito bit her, then bit me? Would I get dengue too. A mosquito bit her and then bit me and then I got dengue too. We underestimate how maliscious people really are. How intelligent they are in their small and great unpleasantnesses. How well they conceal their inadvertant acts of spite. I believe she meant it to happen.

I remeber her skin, a bit sallow and her eyes looking at me from across a desk. She really had nothing to ask me and I had nothing to say. She sat opposite me, our knees nearly touching, and I was too polite to bat away the mosquitoes.

I am on the bed. I can hear a faint ruch of traffic and the room is light and in an hour or so I will have to pick my children up from school. Far away in the south of the city. I drive fast. Very fast. Irresponsibaly fast and remember the first time I was in Mexico City as a teacher and a strange girl plucked me out of the staff room and said: Come home with me. She was very thin. She was extraordinary. Armida was her name.

She took me all the way down to Coyoacan. I don't know why and I met her father, a former politician, and her cousin. Her cousin was young and slimy. He had set his mind on joining the government and was repeating the slogans of the PRI. You could see he had made a conscious decision. He made my skin crawl. I had met people like him in the young communist league in the Ukraine. Stop at nothing psychopaths.

But I am being harsh.

It turned out that this strange young woman had had a romantic attachment to an American which he or she had broken off and that he was a Morman and couldn't marry her. Still storming with emotion left from their farewell she chose me. It became clear that who I was was completely irrelevant. She took me back. But she drove very fast and very badly. Weaving from side to side. Travelling at only a meter's length from the car in front. laughing.

On the bed, my only anxiety was the need to pick my children up in a few hours time and then my wife in Polanco later on. I worked at the same place she did. But as a consultant, so I didn't have an office there. One of my old enemies was working there and she had blocked my appointment to a higher post. her name was Rosalia Valero. She chose her friends and was fircely loyal to them. She chose her enemies and would never make up with them.

Later on I heard that her house burned down with everything in it and it wasn't insured. I didn't know how I felt about that. I asked myself. How do you feel about this. I got no reply from myself. Not sad. Peturbed, perhaps. Another person I disliked, Dr John Wells at UCL suffered something worse. He is gay and lived with his lover on Monserrat and the volcano exploded and drove him off the island.

I remember him humiliating the elderly father of our tutor Bas Arts. Mr F Aarts. At the end of the lecture F Aarts gave, he humiliated him. He did the same to lots of people. In the interests of academic excellence of course.

So I lay on this bed and it was midday and the room was very light and the house didn't smell very familiar. It smelled of its former occupants. A woman like a governess and an old man with white hair. A troublesome busy body. But they were kind enough. In the room at the top on the roof there were boxes and boxes of surgical spirit. Old rubber gloves, suitcases and lampshades. They were his. Or hers.

I went to sleep. I dreamed and when I woke up I went downstairs and had a conversation with my mother.

.....

I'll describe it later.