As Beasts We Travel
by Kathryn Chiariello
For NLH, Mexico City
Traveling with you is being hungry, always. We prowl the sites like jackals, waiting for our chance to jump. Hot, sugary churros chased down by beer after beer at the ancient bar behind the new colonialist temple, and the ruins of the older Aztec one where we ducked in to escape the rain and warm our July-cooled bones, and stayed until we were as dry and comfortable as the dogs we are, our conversation the only fire, and the music, and the only other people in the place another couple, she with heavy, tightly constrained hips and red, plum-red, hair. Him, a mustache, gray at the temples, the only wedding band between them.
Traveling with you is never being late, always in the nick of time, knowing the moment a bus will arrive, or a museum door slide closed, us always making it, scuttling like two mousy-brown mice, for all the world timid to look at, breathing too fast, hands/feet fluttering to make a nest of our things, but at heart, brave and unstoppable, the unaccounted citizens of a thousand years of cities, darting through impossible openings, knowing the moments after dusk and before dawn as commuters know each stop of their train and the faces of strangers they ride with each morning. Or maybe it’s only me a mouse and you, my pet, a lion.
If we are ever late, or early, we change our plan. We’d rather walk around this plaza than spend such a sunny afternoon in that museum, anyway. The shaded benches are taken by young lovers and old widows, by students who listen to a friend play guitar, looking like stoners the world over. They laugh in Spanish. We stroll across the plaza to buy water from a woman under an umbrella, red and white, a second protection from sun, since she too is beneath the towering trees of this place, so far from the city center. She sits with two big plastic coolers, the universal blue of coolers, the one with drinks is filled with gray and leaf-riddled water and thin chips of remaining ice. The other cooler is filled with a new pup, barely old enough to be weaned from his mother, too fresh to easily stand up in its smooth, white walls. We are thirsty. We buy two waters. The woman takes our bills with a leathery hand missing its thumb and reaches into the pocket of her checked apron for change, cooing all the time to the pup, his tail a black blur.
Traveling with you is one hundred nights asleep together somewhere, or one thousand, or one, all the same, all home. We wind our way through alleys to a market so jammed with people that there is a standstill in the widest part of the street, and only a few of us can squeeze through along the edges, like mud sliding through the close fingers of a closed fist, until we find our way at last to the awning that covers our entrance and announces our home.
For this night, we sleep with the window closed against the noise below, the fan above us a constant threat, rocking and shaking as it does in its mounting. For this night, this bed is our bed, these sheets our sheets, these four walls, this worn, chartreus carpet, this dripping faucet, and this solitude together, is our home.
Below us sleep the bones of a thousand generations, a lake buried, the empty tracks and tunnels of trains that every day roll on, undaunted by the tremors that could shake this wide city again at any moment, silent now, empty now, a holy citadel for rats and roaches no doubt, and below that somewhere, there must be rock for this place to still stand, and below that, ever deeper, one hundred thousand-thousand generations below, here as everywhere, is a molten core, a secret, seething reminder that this is all an illusion, that the great affinity we share which opens an infinity to us tonight as always, sleeping naked, curved together like two banks of the same river, is in truth a limited matter, limited by matter, by time, by space, by accidents of history, by the chance order of the universe. It is a reminder that we will die, and soon. Let it be prayer that I die travelling with you.
About the Author
Kathryn Chiariello is an emerging writer from DC. Her work has been published in The Audacity, The Watershed Review, Gargoyle, and Cutleaf Journal. Like all DC residents, she lacks voting representation in Congress. She hopes to live in the 51st state.
