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."