Francis Alÿs’ “A Story Of Deception,” in which he pushes a block of ice around Mexico City until it melts in the Zócalo calls to mind a story of my own from the time I lived in the city. I was there to help build and manage the “Nomadic Museum,” the monumental bamboo structure that held the photography exhibition Ashes and Snow, for which I was a combination of things including “head of marketing” “press liason” “VIP guide” and “personal assistant to Gregory Colbert, the creator.” Basically, I was everyone’s little bitch, but I met a lot of famous, very wealthy people, such as Carlos Slim, and all fifty of his bodyguards.
My boss had rented a number of apartments on the Madero, in a gorgeous, art deco, tiered balcony building. There’s a much more beautiful way to write all of this, but I’m sick.
The apartments were cavernous and freezing. During the day, they drowned in the screams of protests, who swarmed the streets on their way to storm the Zócalo, only a few blocks away. At night, they were eerily quiet, marked only by the echoes of voices entering and leaving the lobby. The exterior walls of each unit were glass; anyone could have broken into them. There is no doubt that it was a dangerous, but very romantic, place to be living.
The apartments came with very little. For instance, there were no kitchen appliances. My immediate boss, who is uncannily similar to me—which means that we both love and hate each other intensely—decided that she and I would remedy that by going to WalMart, and buying a refrigerator. We walked roughly two miles down Bolivar, starting at the Madero. Me in my wedge sandals; her in more sensible shoes.
At the WalMart, I bargained for a tiny refrigerator in elementary Italian, which the clerk got the gist of. We bought it, and then we carried it back, the two of us, down Bolivar during rush hour, past locals who gaped at us like we were mentally ill homeless people.
There’s a beautiful essay to be written about it; all that I’ll say now is that seeing stills of Alÿs push his block of ice down the street reminds me of that experience.
