There’s a church in this city, no, it’s not a church, it’s a huge basilica, where you can queue, along with many other people, to see an image. At the end of the wait, you step onto a short travelator that slowly carries the conveyor belt of viewers past the vision they have all come to see.
This is a clever idea for more than one reason. First, it keeps the flow of traffic moving: no one can dally in front of the figure. Second, it allows each person the same amount of time to look at the icon: it is an egalitarian device. Third, and perhaps most importantly, each person has only a few seconds in which to study the shroud in detail: blink and it’s gone.
There is no time for a thorough examination as you slide past, turning your head to the left for as long as possible, no time to scrutinise. You might ask “How?” You might ask “Why?” You might sigh and ask what is wrong with these people.
But, on further consideration, you might wonder what your mother would say to such questions. She doesn’t ask why. She doesn’t ask how. She simply chooses to believe.
“I seem to have been bitten,” says Luisa.
Her voice wakes him, and it takes Rob a moment to realise why she is there. They are looking at each other in the reflection of a mirror, a mirror that runs full length from ceiling to floor on the closet door. She pulls the neck of her t-shirt down to show him. There is a row of small red marks along her left shoulder.
“Are they itchy?” he asks.
“Yes, a little.”
The t-shirt is all she is wearing, and he thinks how good she looks.
“Don’t touch them then. It will only make it worse.”
“Easier said than done,” Luisa says, as she goes to scratch the outer ones but then resists just in time.
She slides back into the bed.
“I hope we don’t have bedbugs,” she says. “Do you have any bites?”
“Don’t think so and I’ve already been here three nights.”
“Typical,” she says.
He only mentioned it in passing but now here they are together in Mexico City. Rob had been invited to attend a translator’s conference, an idea he dismissed immediately. There were plenty of other events he might go to closer to Madrid. One in Barcelona would be ideal so he could spend more time with Luisa. If she wanted him to, that is. In the four years since they met, he has flitted to-and-fro between their two cities. He, wondering if this was to be his existence for the rest of his life. She, seemingly perfectly happy, wanting nothing more.
“I’d love to go there,” she’d said.
“Come with me then.” Said partly in jest. They have never been on holiday together and, whenever he had suggested it previously, she claimed her work at the university as an excuse.
She didn’t quite come with him, but that was fine. She timed her arrival to coincide with the end of the conference. They would travel back together.
She has a specific reason. She’s always wanted to see the Blue House.
It has a connection to how they met, she tells him. Rob was on a travel writing commission for the Observer newspaper. His colleague suggested a drink after work one evening. Cesc had arranged to meet some friends at a local bar, a few minutes from their office on Diagonal. In walked two couples and behind them Luisa.
Hair cropped. Peroxide blonde. Flawless skull. She looked striking. She still does. At forty-nine she could easily pass for ten years younger, maybe more. Rob was trying to find a new angle for his articles, something different, something unique. He was thinking about sites and fiction connected to the civil war, but knew next to nothing about it. Nothing beyond Orwell and Hemingway. When Cesc introduced Luisa as “our very own professor of Spanish literature” Rob thought his luck might be in.
“Remember our first date?” she says.
He did, of course, although he had not allowed himself to call it that at the time. He imagined Luisa to be well out of his league, thinking the age gap between them was far more than nine years.
“Marina Ginestà on the roof of the Hotel Colón,” he says.
He is referring to the photograph. The photograph. The one of Marina when she was seventeen, standing high above her surroundings with Barcelona’s cityscape behind her, rifle strap slung across her body, the barrel of the gun pointing upwards behind her head. The face of the revolution.
“And who was her lover at the time?”
Ah, yes, he remembers now. “It was Ramón Mercader. You sent me an internet article.” It was called The girl who dated Trotsky’s assassin. They had laughed at that title. About how it defined the woman through a man. Rob imagined Mercader preying on the young Marina, but Luisa had mocked at his idea. Women grew up quickly in the revolution, she told him. You just have to look at her eyes. But you can see she’s in love, she added, after a pause.
“The same Ramón Mercader who murdered Trotsky with an ice-pick.”
“Right here in Mexico City,” says Rob, as he parts the blinds to peek out at how the day looks.
“Yes, and who was Trotsky’s lover here?”
“Tell me.”
“None other than Frida Kahlo. Frida of the Blue House.”
“Is that why you want to go there?”
Luisa laughs. Rob always likes to see her laugh, throat extended, even when he knows she is laughing at him rather than with him.
“There’s a reason why Frida and Marina were lovers of famous men,” she says. “And it has nothing to do with the men.”
While at the Blue House, you can see a painting called El marxismo dará salud*,* “Marxism gives health”. It’s one of Frida’s self-portraits. One she painted for Trotsky. Her body is encased in an armour-like corset that shows the outline of her breasts. It is edged with red stitches that run up the centre of her torso. You might mistake them for small bites. In her left hand, she grips a book. The book is also red. As the crippled Frida casts away her crutches, her outstretched arms could be about to form the shape of a cross, while she is cradled by the hands of Marx. It’s a communist miracle.
While at the Blue House, you can look at the display of retablos*. Some of these altarpieces show a depiction of the Virgin of Guadalupe. An image that mysteriously appeared on a peasant’s cloak in the middle ages. An image that can still be seen at the basilica named after her in Mexico City. The impression incorporates representations of the sun and the moon, symbolism from the indigenous Aztec culture. It’s a Christian miracle.*
When you have left the Blue House, you might ask yourself why one tradition incorporates another. Why they feel the need to do this. Why they don’t have the courage of their own convictions.
The next morning, Luisa wakes with more bites: an identical row of marks on her other shoulder.
“At least they’re symmetrical,” says Rob.
She throws a pillow at him. “And you still don’t have any?”
“None,” he says. “You’re free to check.”
He eases himself out of the bed and heads for the shower room.
“Another time,” she says to his disappearing back.
When he comes out again, she has stripped the bed right down to the mattress.
“Find anything?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“Bedbugs hide during the day. Perhaps you brought them with you.”
“Bedbug tourists?”
“They like clothes and suitcases, so I’ve heard.”
“I need a shower as well,” she says and puts the book she’s been reading on the bed.
He notices the name of the author. “Another Guadalupe,” he says.
“You know she’s from Mexico City, right? Try the title story. It’s only short.”
El matrimonio de los peces rojos, “The Marriage of the Red Fish”, is about two Siamese fighting fish. Two tormented souls that can’t live with each other but can’t live without each other either. The actions of the fish reflect the lives of the people who keep them. Rob wonders if Luisa is making a point. Whether she sees their relationship in the same way. And there it is again, that nagging doubt, whether she is committed to him like he is to her.
When she reappears from the bathroom, she has a white towel wrapped around her body. The bites on each of her shoulders stand out more clearly against her skin after the heat of the shower. To Rob, they look like tattoos of small, red stars.
“What do you think?” she asks, indicating the book with a nod of her head.
“It’s not like us at all,” he says.
“Did I say it was?” She pushes him back onto the bed and kneels astride him.
“That’s good,” he says. “I’m not keen on the ending.”
She laughs.
“I’m glad about that.” She removes the towel. “So, if you’re not going to murder me, what shall we do today?”
“I think we should go to see the author’s namesake.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’m always up for a miracle.”
The gift shop at the basilica is crowded. Rob is amazed at the clamour for the artefacts on sale. Beads, medallions, necklaces, bracelets, postcards, books, pictures. You name it. All with a likeness of the image they have just seen. An Our Lady of Guadalupe multiverse.
“Are you going to buy something?” he asks Luisa, wondering why they are in there.
She picks up a small statue of the Virgin. The image from the shroud in three dimensions. In plastic. “This,” she says.
Rob doesn’t say what he thinks. That it’s a piece of tat. “I thought you were an atheist,” he says instead.
She shrugs her shoulders. “I presume Frida Kahlo was too.”
Rob’s sigh is audible.
Luisa gives him a dig in the ribs. “I like it, okay? It reminds me of my childhood.”
They follow the stream of people leaving the shop. They all seem to be heading in the same direction, with Luisa trailing. Rob sees a crowd has congregated around a low-level dais, and Luisa joins them. The people are holding their purchases aloft. From the platform, a priest is spraying water into the throng below.
Luisa holds up her statue. Somehow, the water hits only her. It’s like seeing rainfall at the edge of a cloud, wet to the right but not to the left.
“How did that happen?” he asks, as they move away.
Luisa shrugs again. “No bites, no water,” she says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I must be very blessed,” is all she says in reply.
Insects are significant in Mexican culture, ancient and modern. For indigenous peoples, their arrival and departure can mark a change in season, like the chicatana ants, whose exit announces the coming of the rains. Then there is the maguey worm, considered a symbol of fertility and also found in bottles of mezcal. In Kahlo’s self-portrait, Autorretrato con Bonito*, bugs can be seen amongst the leaves in the background. Insects are a part of life. They also sustain life. They are edible.*
If you go to one of the markets in Mexico City you are sure to find vendors selling street food. Chapulines – grasshoppers toasted and marinated – are plentiful, making them a cheap and popular crunchy snack. Other insects have gone up-market, seasonality giving them a rarity value, which increases price and puts them on the menus of high-end restaurants. One such bug is the jumil.
In the Mixtec region, November 1st is an important date. It marks when the jumil bugs are ready to be collected. A fiesta is held to celebrate the event. There is a fiesta in Mexico City at the start of November as well, one of the most important of the year – Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. In the Christian calendar, it spans All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days. That this coincides with the start of jumil season can only be a matter of chance. Surely. But then, some may consider an insect found only in epiphytic bromeliads – plants that grow on trees without damaging their hosts – an insect that can be eaten alive, an insect that has a spicy taste, like a mix of cinnamon and mint, to be something of a miracle. An insect miracle.
Over the next two nights, the bugs complete their artwork on Luisa’s body. On her third morning, she wakes with a line of bites running down the length of her breastbone and onwards to her belly button. It reminds Rob of the stitching on Frida’s corset in the painting they saw at the house. He notices Luisa now looks at her marks differently. As if they give her a sense of pride. Like she is a martyr to their itchiness, her very own hairshirt. On the final morning, fresh bites run up along the ridge of her nose and onto her forehead. Once again, Rob wakes to find her studying herself in the mirror.
“Look at what they have done,” she says, turning around. She is smiling broadly.
Now Rob understands why Luisa bought her new skirt at the market the previous day. It is olive-green, wide and flowing, reaching down to the floor. Her torso is bare, displaying the bites in all their glory. They seem brighter than ever. She holds her arms out to emphasise the cross that has been etched on her. In her left hand, she grips the Guadalupe statue.
“What sort of miracle is this?” asks Rob.
“An atheist one, clearly.”
“I didn’t realise the two went together.”
“I’m sure Frida thought they did. All those retablos in her house.”
“Perhaps they just reminded her of her childhood.”
Luisa laughs. “Touché, pussy cat,” she says. “Think of it as my ex-voto offering to Frida.”
Rob tries to remember what that means. He’s not sure he ever knew.
He thinks she looks like a work of art, a painting.
“A Kahlo painting,” she says.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” says Rob.
“I know.”
“How can you?”
“Just believe, Rob,” says Luisa. “Just believe.”
