The warm night’s layers become unstuck and start combining in unusual configurations as we start our journey and the city is eerie, more silent than ever before, abandoned except for the dispersed flow of people moving hesitantly up and down Calle Madeiro as if unconvinced about direction, murmuring under the low orange lights that carve the deeply bent facades.
We squeeze somehow between these layers, observing, chatting passionately as we walk towards the Angel. Where are they? Maybe everyone is already there? A whole segment of Madeiro is erased by darkness adding to the eschatological feel and we cannot help joking about the Mayan calendar phantasmagoria. There is a thin trail of people pointing in the same direction, compressed by the strange silence of the city, mesmerized survivors in a post-apocalyptic plataresque Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet.. We get closer, it’s a part of the Diletantes boulevard we feel we have never seen before, Las Vegas style we imagine, the by now dignified-looking symbols of the colonial bourgeoisie dwarfed by the brash ugliness of the neo-colonial megaliths and it’s funny because our chat has been about the transformative potential of indigenous resistance and bourgeois State terrorism and the way North American multiculturalism plasters over fundamental conflicts and makes this terrorism seem like benevolent education and the irony is completed (as Vince Noir astutely comments in “Journey to the Centre of Punk”) as we stumble upon Plazuela Colon, the man that gave his name to genocide standing erect in the centre of the casino-looking buildings, pointing firmly towards progress, unapologetic about his legacy and his kinky tights.
And we realize it’s a ‘fuck you’ by the upper bourgeoisie to the rest of the nation, “Fuck you and your discussion of indigenous rights and self-determination, fuck you and your talk about other symbolic orders within the nation, fuck you and your de-colonial or anti-colonial movements. We are here to stay, this is our nation, ruled by our rationality, our army and our flows of cash and desire. This is the nation of the sons of Columbus, of the conquerors, of those bearing proudly the signs of European modernity, of progress, of Louis Vuitton. The man in tights is our hero, the genocide he stands for is our model of governing and the primitives that do not self-reform will feel the edge of our enormous swords!” We laugh again, but a bit intimidated and we start hearing the music: there is obviously a gig at Angel, it sounds like that brand of Euro-new wave that didn’t came out of punk and never quite morphed into post-punk and now looks like a teenager growing old while preserving its childish features, a slightly horrific sight. As we walk more and more people join, a lot of American and European youth among them; they have brought in their over-sized luggage their woolly beanies, carefully distressed skinnies and standard-issue‘quirkiness’, eager Mexican trendies in their entourage confirming their nauseatingly insecure smugness and we imagine how they will later brag about their adventures in the colonies. It’s Plazuela Colon in juvenile pop culture form and we feel repelled, we start walking back fast, towards the Zocalo were people will be eating lurid blue cotton candy and selling and buying grapes and pop corn and sparklers in untrendy coats and ludicrously unnecessary polar hats and mittens. As we move away from the discharge of trendies we are feeling better and better, like poor K. as he is carried out of the spinalizing labyrinth of bureaucracy.
At midnight four or five people start jerking up and down in the alcoves of the bell towers, barely visible in the sprouting mass of the cathedral, pouring an intricate but surprisingly bouncy cauldron of sounds over our heads for what seems like a long time; and then the compression of silence again and an Anglo behind us shouts: “DON”T STOP NOW!!” as if someone left his hand job unfinished and then the people start moving around a bit aimlessly again, like huge toddlers and we walk ourselves towards the hotel, a deeply satisfying anti-climax making us grin as we go to bed at 00.47 am.
