Miguel

I walk towards the city center on a wide sidewalk that separates the shops from the street. It is paved with worn concrete slabs, trodden by thousands of pedestrians every day. Dirt and chewing gum stick to the concrete like a kind of lichen, impossible to remove. If someone were to clean it, the slabs would be sticky again the next day. I keep my head down, my eyes fixed on the slabs, on the dents and cracks, on the joints where trash collects, food scraps, discarded straws, paper tissues. The narrator describes a day in Mexico City, where he visits several places that have become important to him over the time he has spent in this city at irregular intervals. In restrained, then increasingly urgent language, he recounts what he does, sees, hears, and thinks. He gets lost in the underground of the anthropological.