A Forced Vacation

Last weekend in Mexico City persons unknown stole my computer. Sunday in the early afternoon I took the Metrobus on Insurgentes Sur all the way to the end of the line, just to see where it goes. (It goes to a turnabout on the side of a hill a couple of miles south of the UNAM campus.) On the way back I stopped at the Parque de la Bombilla. Across the street perched on an outcrop between two massive avenues is the Ex Convento del Carmen.

The former Carmelite monastery, like many museums in Mexico City, is a ramshambles and a gem. The museum is most famous for its mummies. They lie hidden in the crypt, beyond the ossuary, in splintered wooden coffins with glass lids. They are not the bodies of the priests. Instead they are the bodies of local residents who used the property as a burial ground in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, after it had been expropriated by the state.The mummies are an accident of the climate. Most interesting and haunting, their clothes are remarkably well preserved. One figure wears a black cloak that drapes heavily over his skull. A woman wears a yellowed pinafore over a blue wool dress. The lace edges of the pinafore float delicately in the space around her hips. A man stands still in his brown leather shoes. The laces are missing and the tongues flop gently forward, and the soles are buckled. But otherwise they look fit enough to walk in.

When I got back to my apartment in Condesa a few hours later, several police cars were parked out front. Ten or more officers were milling about in the corridor. A robbery. Forced entry into the apartment, my neighbor's also.  Items missing: the flat screen TV in the bedroom; a small safe hidden in the closet; my laptop. Not the end of the world, and the sort of thing that happens every day in every corner of the world, but the end of my vacation. As a result I am without means for editing photos and videos. And also in minor mourning for the year past in images, all gone. A new computer is already in the works and I should be up and running again in a week or less. In the meantime a forced vacation for I Ate What I Am.