My belly is full, in a sort of leaden way, because I just stuffed the last handful of cheap imitation M & Ms into my mouth, waited for the little candy shells to soften and dissolve, and then swallowed them down. Before that I ate a chocolate bar. Before that I ate four small mangoes, first slicing all four into wedges, then chewing the remaining flesh from the pit, getting the stringy mango fibre in my teeth, and then finally eating the slices. And before that I ate a packet of potato chips.
It's my junk food day: a necessary, indeed vital, component of the Slow-Carb Diet. Specifically, one junk food day is necessary a week- for me, a Sunday- for the sake of sanity and apparently to keep my metabolism from downshifting or something, through some mechanism which I don't currently recall. More in a second.
I’ve been in Mexico for two months. First landing in Guadalajara near the centre of the country, I slid along a necklace of towns such as Guanajuato, a densely clustered colonial pueblo cupped between the dry hills of central Mexico, with houses spreading across the surrounding slopes like stranded detritus on the side of a cereal bowl. I passed through the sprawling, smoggy Mexico City, home to some twenty million souls, down to Puebla and into Oaxaca, the indigenous south. I spent two weeks in the area of Puerto Escondido and Mazunte, a stretch of coastline that collects vagabonds like driftwood on the tide line. Driftwood draped in shell necklaces, feather earrings and baggy linen.
I can’t be sure, but it may have been in Puerto Escondido where I experienced for the first time a feeling of actually being old.
It's not that I feel old exactly, but I’ve started to have for the first time the experience of talking to other people in hostels, ostensibly feeling of the same generation, and discovering that in fact we have two distinct sets of cultural references.
You couldn't be a young person of a certain inclination a few years ago and not know who Fleet Foxes were, or Bon Iver. Many people I meet now haven't heard of them. People who otherwise consume music by the gallon. That is incomprehensible to me. This gradual loss of touch is, I suspect, how aging creeps up on you. Incrementally, like bread going stale in a fridge.
Anyway, back to the diet.
For the first time in my life I want to get muscular. Ripped. Stacked. In fact, it’s symbolic of this entire quest I’m currently on. I’ll explain.
As thirty has arrived I have felt my internal gears shift and click into new configurations as the relative allure of different options rises and declines. The flame of single life, of independence, and of the on-the-road lifestyle is beginning to flicker ever so slightly. Of course I don't expect it to ever extinguish completely, but an adjacent candle, one that burns for stability, connection and community, seems to be burning steadily brighter. This second candle has not yet obscured the first, but the trend does seem to be in one direction. I'm getting older, in other words. And so I want to get in shape, because I will probably never be in better shape than this.
But it’s more than just a six pack. I will not always have the option to spend six months learning Spanish in Mexico, or to live for a year completely free of commitments in Brazil. Nor will I have the capability to be lean and strapping and look like at any moment I could pursue a thief or scale a wall or suddenly emerge from the brush on horseback, shirtless. That’s the goal, really. So far I’ve mostly just been skinny.
There will come a day in the future, and in a future which perhaps is not as distant as I would like, when losing the weight gets harder, injuries grow longer and, of course, I have more than just myself to consider. One day, when I have a dad’s potbelly, untameable grey chest hair and a butt-crack that wrests itself free every fortnight when it’s time to mow the lawns, I want to know that there was once a time when I at least tried to get in shape.
So here I am in Mexico, stuffing handfuls of imitation confectionary into my mouth, questing for a six pack.
Chiapa de Corzo is a small town in the nook of a long, languid bend in the Rio Grijalva before it enters the Canyon de Sumidero. Chiapa lies across the river from Tuxtla Gutierrez, the biggest city in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state and in which about a third of the people speak an indigenous language. Chiapa (no s) is the embarkation point for the tours and there are lines of boats moored in the river, moving wide and slow and brown, waiting to take tourists up into the canyon.
When I arrived here three weeks ago the plaza was packed with carnival equipment: bumper cars, a Ferris wheel, stalls where you shoot miniature basketballs and bottles with pellet guns, places selling candy floss and a live auction of cheap imported blankets that goes late into the night, every night.
It was Fiesta de Enero, the annual two weeks of raucous partying in honour of Anthony the Great and Saint Sebastian, the patron saints of the town. Traditionally, different days are designated for different things, like the parachicos in colourful costumes with lacquered masks and hats that look like the upturned bristles of the sort of brush used to find fingerprints at crime scenes. And of course there are the chuntas, men dressed as women, with their hair in pigtails and wearing delicate make-up, shaking their traditional rattles.
There are bands that sit on every other street corner, playing marimba (a sort of big wooden xylophone) or banda. They tour from pueblo to pueblo throughout Mexico for each local fiesta.
Then there are the parades that every other night march up and down the grid of streets radiating out from the plaza. In the middle somewhere are four of five men or boys with drums and horns, belting out music, competing with another set of musicians fifty yards further back. Drunk revelers clutch beer cans or liquor bottles, pouring them into each other’s mouths.
The days are punctuated by the crack of fireworks, set off at random in the street, the square is full of children and revelers until the early morning and the rattles drone on through the warm darkness.
Now the fiesta is over and I’ve moved into my home for the next five months. From the plaza you walk two blocks south past the taco and hamburger stands and the places selling pozol and alongside the church of Saint Domingo de Guzman, constructed four and a half centuries ago by the Spanish but closed for two years since the earthquake. You continue under the shade of the big old tree leaning over the road, then take a left on the road that runs along the river. It's the house with the dark blue wall.
My host parents are Gerardo and Marina. Gerardo is a gregarious man who smiles with his whole face. He was wearing a white singlet when I met him and has the sort of smile that would suit a shiny gold tooth, perhaps slightly off centre. Marina is slow moving and almost as friendly, and glides quietly around the house, smiling knowingly to herself.
They live with their son, also called Gerardo. He has an enormous pot belly and a goatee of wispy whiskers that decorate his chin like a cluster of lonely shrubs in a disused field next to a factory. He also has a habit of singing loudly and poorly to reggaeton music. The other day I caught him watching me sleeping through the crack in the ajar door. I don’t talk to him so much anymore.
With the windows open in the late afternoon you can hear the sounds of the neighborhood that carry through the still air. Pick-ups with trays full of gas bottles or cars with trunks full of oranges and pineapples trundle past at any hour, all playing music and blaring announcements from loud speakers mounted on the roof of the cab. It hasn’t rained since November, but there are already plenty of insects.
Ants scurry over the kitchen floor. Ants in warm places seem to scurry faster than at home. They scurry in tight little circles over the tiles. As I make dinner I feel them cross my feet. They head skywards until, shortly after, they reach the Forest of Leg Hair.
The ants battle bravely through, from leg hair to leg hair, while I absently rub one leg against the other as I transfer vegetables and beans from container to plate.
This evening a few made it through the Forest to the Open Plains of the Inner Thigh. I promise you, ants, there is nothing for you here. At this point the feeling of tiny insectoid appendages scuttling over my skin sharpens the attention. I put down the plate to swipe them away mercilessly. On the other side of the Plains there is nothing but the rugged Foothills of the Testicles. Now, THERE be dragons.
