I come from New York City where seasons change. My body knows the rhythm of the seasons. It feels best, of course, in the spring and fall when the weather is temperate, but it needs the balance of the freezing winter and the torpid summer.
Here in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, it is always hot. When it rains in summer months, it is hot. When the rains stop in October and the natives say, "Now we will have fresh weather for a couple of months," to an extranjero like me, it is still hot. And in the spring, when there is no rain and no breeze, it is unbearably hot.
I think this is the hardest thing for me to accept as part of my decision to move here to teach English. My body resists the change to unchanging climate.
I spend many hours in front of a computer screen and I know it is because here at the window to hyperspace I can view and perhaps vicariously feel the infinite variety of an open atmosphere. It can be winter, cold, cold winter anytime I want it to be. I can read about spring in Paris and London. I can view pictures of storm threatened lighthouses on lonely seacoasts and almost feel the spray of the ocean. I can look at a lava pit bubbling in torment and know there is someplace hotter than where I am sitting. There is relief from sameness available, but...
It is a double-edged sword. I am usually here in front of a computer screen because I need to work on documents for school. There are reports to fill out, tests to prepare, articles to excerpt for students' reading and the pictures and armchair vacation moments are a distraction from necessary duties. Let's say I have to prepare a quiz for Thursday's class. If I had my priorities in order, I would do this on Monday evening, which would give me time to go over the work, correct for errors, give it focus and have time to print it and copy it for ten o'clock Thursday morning. That would be the ideal, but Monday evening, I am too worn out from walking in the sun all day - to the bus, down the road to the school, around the campus - not to mention the exhaustion of trying to keep teenagers in line for a couple of hours; teenagers who are well adapted to their climate and seem to reinvigorate themselves over the short hot weekends and are ready on a Monday to torment their tired teacher into becoming some kind of quasi-circus ringmaster. So Monday evenings I take refuge in my cyber world and tell myself I can get the work done Tuesday and still have time to prep it. Then Tuesday evening comes, after another similar day, I go to see a movie with friends in an air-conditioned movie theater. That's my other "escape". I eat a great hotdog smothered in picante stuff, too much popcorn, and drink a large cool beverage. After the film, of course, we have to discuss what we've seen and whether or not it measured up to last week's film and time slips away. By the time I get back to the house, it's too late to get involved in writing up a quiz, and I don't have the head for it anyway. That leaves Wednesday. One night to do it all.
I turn on the machine. Go get a Coke. Smoke a cigarette. Turn on both fans. Open my schoolbag and spread papers all over the table. Start reading something I was handed a week earlier and had forgotten I was expected to respond promptly to it. I start to prepare a response. Smoke another cigarette. Give up on the response and send an e-mail. Check my other e-mail because I notice Hotmail says my inbox is full and they are going to start deleting things. Much of it is junkmail, but I'm always afraid I will miss something from a friend (a necessary contact for people like me who have relocated somewhere so far from home). I refill my glass and eat a cookie or three. Check out the photo someone has sent me and then when filing it, open a folder with previously taken photos and daydream for a while remembering how it was the day in April, when Álvaro and I had a couple of beers at the outdoor café behind the World Trade Center and how that is all gone now. And how because it was April, the anniversary of having lost someone very dear to me, I had other things on my mind. I catch myself spiralling downward in memory and give myself a mental kick, trying to fixate on the task at hand. I have one more cigarette and start typing.
Two hours later it is eleven o'clock and I'm thinking about going to bed, but I have a beautiful little twenty question quiz that actually pertains to this week's unit of study. Not too difficult, I think, but not so easy that it will be pointless to administer.
Then I have to go upstairs and bring down the printer. I keep it hidden in a closet, as well as carrying my laptop every day since the house was robbed last year, and I print out a copy of the quiz. I have to print it here at home because whenever I bring a document to school on a diskette to print it on one of the networked computers, they are always occupied. After that long walk in the sun, I always arrive with not enough time to print and make all the necessary copies. The photocopier is usually occupied as well and I have to wait there a few minutes, which will make me late for class. Students wait ten minutes, no more, and then evaporate. It is best to do as much as possible beforehand. So I unpack the printer, attach it, print out two copies, detach it, repack it and return it to the closet. Come back to the table and admire my handiwork. I have to admit, this is the best quiz I've put together. Play with Paintbrush for a half hour, doctoring a photo, then close the program without saving my masterpiece because it really wasn't one, and besides, while playing, my eye caught a typo on the pages lying beside the computer. I debate myself on whether it is worth the effort to go get the printer and redo it, decide it's not, and manually correct it.
Finally, past midnight, I shut off the power and move the "vacation" into the mental zone. Perhaps I will have a great travel dream, though more likely I will experience a horrible nightmare where everything goes wrong and I find myself drowning in paperwork.
Thursday morning Álvaro drives me to the school where he works and I walk the six blocks to my busstop. I'm soaking in cologne scented sweat by the time the bus to Berriozabal arrives, but it's going to be all right. The bus is almost empty and there are plenty of seats. As the bus speeds down the boulevard, a cool breeze flows through an open window and dries me off. Maná is playing on the radio and all is right with the world. I close my eyes and I'm on the beach at Punta Arenas. With a lager in one hand and a delicious deep-fried jumbo shrimp in the other and the prospect of a swim in the temperate Pacific in front of me. Ah, life is beautiful! When I get off the bus and start the trek down that long dusty road to Tec, as hot as the sun is it can't drive the picture from my head.
I think about the classroom I'm about to enter. I think about the papers in my bag and how a few of the kids are going to say, "Oh, teacher, no. Not another quiz. We just had one last week," but then they will settle down and quietly apply themselves to their work. And before too long, they will start asking questions, raising hands at first, then just blurting out. Speaking will become banter. They can't contain themselves for more than fifteen minutes. They are teenagers and so full of energy. It probably comes from the sun. I'm sweating again by the time I walk up the steps to the entrance. I'm hoping none of the other teachers is using the photocopier. There are only about seven minutes until the start of class. Everything runs apace.
Mexico is a land of heat and dust and omnipresent sunlight. It is full of aportioned energy and life, vibrant in its uniquely slow way in the eternal pursuit of "the paper". Call it bureaucracy or red tape or whatever; even when things appear to be standing in torpid stillness, they are always moving, and people are usually smiling.
People don't smile enough in New York.
