I woke to the sound of Héctor's radio downstairs doing something earnest with a ranchera. The roof still had the smell of last night's rain — wet stone and whatever blooms in the cracks when it gets wet. I put on the olive shirt and walked.
The café hunt took me east this time, off Alcalá toward Porfirio Díaz. There's a place called Principal that has a counter and flat whites on the board. I stood. A man next to me was reading a newspaper folded so small it looked like origami. The cup was good — properly steamed, the right weight. But the counter faced a wall, not the street, and I drank it watching my own reflection in a chrome machine. Still looking.
I walked back through Benito Juárez because I had a question I didn't know how to ask. Someone — I think it was a reader, weeks ago — had written to ask about memelas, how they actually make them. I'd eaten three by then and could not have told you. The stall was near the west entrance, a woman with a comal the size of a bin lid and hands that moved like she had done this before I was born. I watched. She pinched the masa, slapped it flat between her palms, then pressed it onto the hot iron with her fingertips — just long enough that I winced on her behalf. Turned it. Pinched the edge up into a low wall while it was still soft. Asiento, beans, salsa verde. She did not look up once.
I ate two, standing, because sitting felt like I would be committing to something. A man at the next stall was selling chapulines in bags the size of your fist. I have not tried them yet. That is not virtue, just cowardice with a polite face.
By noon the sun had turned the zócalo into a skillet. I sat under the arcade with a bottle of water I had filled twice and watched the balloon sellers work the families. A small girl in a yellow dress had a negotiation with her father that lasted three laps of the square. She got the balloon. He got to look tired in a way I recognized from other people's childhoods, not mine.
I walked up Constitución because I had not yet, past the small hotels with their barred windows and the shops selling *barro negro* that I will not buy because I have nowhere to put it. A taco stand near Arteaga had a queue. Tasajo, three tortillas, onion and cilantro, lime. The salsa was the kind that makes you wonder if you've been rude to it in a past life. I ate standing against a low wall, next to a man in paint-spattered boots who was eating with the focus of someone who had earned it.
The sky went grey around three. I made it back to Héctor's before the rain, but only just. The roof is wet again. The plastic chair faces the mountains like it knows something I don't. Tomorrow I might walk toward Xochimilco, or I might sit in the market until I am brave enough to try the grasshoppers. Sunday is still three days out. Tlacolula can wait.
— Finn