A long drive to the dusty edge of the city, out to the embarcadero. Xochimilco is a strange village, farm fields that appear to float on the water. Really they are built-up islands, farmed since the time of the Azteca, when this city still stood in a lake. The canals and square farm-islands are the last evidence of what lies beneath all this history and claptrap called Mexico City. Sra. Frida lectured with great flair during the drive, sometimes letting go of the steering wheel to wave her hands, telling how the ancients supplemented their diet of frogs by making these islands for growing vegetables. How the layers of water lily leaves and fertile mud are built up inside a fence of interlaced reeds, until the island gets above water level and the farmer can plant his crop.
Now it is a mad maze of colors and cool water. Squash and cornfields, floral explosions, with waterways running on a perfect grid between the island fields. Angel’s trumpets dangle their pink bellflowers over the water, and white herons stand one-legged among the reeds. Giant old poplars tower along the borders of each field, shading the watery lanes. You can see how it’s all constructed; they begin by planting these poplar saplings in a rectangle under the water, for anchoring the interlaced reeds and poles that will become the island’s perimeter. Now the saplings planted long ago are ancient, leafy giants, with coral beans crowding in thickets between them. Some islands have the farmers’ reed-thatched huts built right upon them, with children running and swimming from one to the next, naked as fish. Women cast lines into the water or hawk jugs of pulque to the boaters passing by. Every side channel offers another thrilling glimpse, a long ribbon of shining green water overarched with a tunnel of trees.
The passenger boats made for the canals are broad, flat-bottomed trajineras. Gaudy ducklike things, every one is painted up in red, blue, and yellow, with an arch across the front of each one spelling out a woman’s name in flowers. Made to order with each hire. Frida and Lev had a dispute when they hired the boat: she wanted to call it Revolución. Not the best (Van pointed out) for the security of our comrade guest. Lev prevailed, and the boatman spelled out Carmen, Sra. Frida’s first name. She snuggled up happily with the “old man” on the bench on their side, with Van and HS on the other bench, two pairs facing one another across the plank-table. All the boats have one, a long, narrow table for picnicking bolted right in, running from prow to stern. Ours was painted the brightest yellow, which seemed to suit Frida’s mood. She would know a name for this color. The canals were jammed with these boats, all painted with similarly violent imagination, bobbing with couples and families escaping the city’s heat, pushed along by boatmen with poles. The farmers in canoes full of vegetables had some trouble poling between the traffic jams, making their way out to the marketplaces of the city.
A canoe swept by carrying marimba players, two men in white shirts standing side by side at their long instrument of wooden blocks, rolling their hands over the rippling wooden notes. Frida tossed the marimba men a few pesos to play “The Internationale.” Other boatloads of musicians bobbed past also; the place was filled with them, even a whole mariachi band standing up in their canoe, entirely precarious, balancing the enthusiasm of song with their will to keep dry.
It was a wild, floating marketplace. Men selling flowers, women with giant aluminum pots balanced in tiny boats, pulling up alongside to sell you a lunch: roasted corn, pollo mole, carne asada and tortillas, handed up into your boat on crockery that would be washed afterward in the canal. Lev bought a bunch of red roses and tucked them one by one into Frida’s crown of braids. He poured glasses of red wine for all of us, and then refilled them. He paid a band to play “Cielito Lindo” and then twelve or fourteen other songs, all about the heart and not one concerned with the Revolution. When he leaned out over the water to pay the musicians, he forgot to let go her hand, which he was holding under the table. The lovers were quite on display, cuddling all the afternoon, her little elbow folded neatly against his.
Van looked away, listing various sights as we passed by them in a childish way that was very unlike him, thanks to his discomfort. It would have been just as well to stare at these two; they make a better physical match than the little dove and the toad-frog. A more pleasing alignment: the Indian girl and her compact Russian peasant. Across from them, the Nordic god and native typist were shoved so close together on the bench, every turn of the boat pressed some part of a leg or shoulder against another. The air was breathlessly still, a cottony hot roar that swallowed everything: heat and music, a pounding pulse. Van close enough to touch his cheek, or clasp his knee. It took everything not to do it.
Then suddenly, loud screaming split the quiet. Our sleepy boatman raised his pole in alarm, but it was only a boatload of schoolgirls. They came alongside, waving wildly, with another boat following behind in right pursuit. That one, of course, filled with schoolboys, splashing and hurling flowers at their victims.
“It’s a war of flowers!” the girls shrieked, launching back long-stemmed arrows across the water. They fell short every time, like the Azteca warriors uselessly slinging arrows at Cortés, just before their hearts were blown apart with cannon fire.
“En garde!” cried Frida, arming herself from the bower encircling her head, tossing roses in every direction. Lev also threw some flowers: a probable first in his long career as a militant. Frida reached into the water to catch a long-stemmed carnation and pointed it like a sword, swiping Lev’s cheek and then his chest.
“I am hit!” he cried, clasping his chest in mock drama, falling back against the bench. “Struck in the breast by a posey. What do you call this one?”
“Encarnado,” she said.
“Descargado por encarnado,” he said. Carnal wounds. Injury may be mortal.
She kissed his cheek. Van looked carefully at the trees. The two boatloads of warriors moved away down a side canal, leaving the water behind them clotted with their colorful ammunition. Another canoe approached, and a man selling toys climbed aboard our boat, his pockets filled with trinkets of woven palm leaves. “Any children here?”
“No,” Frida said, and Lev said “Yes” at the same time. Van explained, “I’m afraid the children have all gotten away.”
“Well, this one is indispensable for people of any age.” The man pulled from his pocket a long, woven tube. “A trapanovio. You had better try it, señorita.” He held it toward Frida, who obligingly put her finger in the end of the tube and then made a show of not being able to escape. Everyone knows this trick. The weave of the tube holds tighter, the harder one pulls away.