It took me about 13 minutes after leaving Benito Juarez International Airport on my first trip to Mexico City to realize that the city's official song was something that essentially was conceived as a strange, everyday homage to the angel Gabriel, the horn-tooting biblical messenger who foretold the birth of both John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. In the arena of global prophecy, this is akin to the sportscaster who predicts that the next four Super Bowls will be won by four different teams who don't yet even exist. It is a veritable forecasting 'coup d'état', and one that, I suspect, isn't likely to be repeated anytime soon, unless the Louisville Mint Juleps, Arkansas Lewinskies, Baton Rouge Evacuators and Alabama Oil-Spills draft very well next April, make a deep splash in the free agent pool, and just about every other team in the league is paralyzed by tapeworms.
But that isn't likely to happen, and we're not here to deal in outright fantasy. We were dealing with music, or in this case, the unfortunate official sound of my new home at 7300 ft., which is the ubiquitous car-horn.
There is no way of properly conveying the over-use of this simplest vehicular device except to say that from the hours of 7am to 8pm, Monday to Friday, and occasionally into the weekend, one's morning maintenance, daily tasks, market visits, dining, nightcaps, romance and rest are likely to play themselves out to a cacophonous racket that permeates closed windows, earplugs, television noise, music systems and conversation, to provide a soundtrack that is only barely tolerable if you happen to be hearing it while someone is trying to extract perfectly good teeth out of your mouth without any courtesy of anesthetic.
That's right. Every single day, I rise, wash, eat, work, shop, dine, drink, fuck and sleep to the sound of hundreds of motorists who are either expressing irritation, grief, intention, menace, glee or greeting by ramming the palm of their hands forcefully against their steering wheels like the fucking things are bleeding to death, and the flow of blood must be stemmed.
We are not talking about a casual 'honk, honk' to let someone know that you're behind them, or to alert a friend or colleague that you've noticed them picking out cheap drapes from a secondhand store in a bad part of town. These are all-out, twenty to thirty second, ear-grating symphonies of piercing noises that invade the ears and don't dissipate for much longer periods. "HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!"
"Oh. Hello Jose. How are the kids?"
To Mexico City residents, however, this kind of behaviour is merely a warmup for the morning commute, when the bastards may as well drive with one palm in the centre of the wheel at all times, while the other applies makeup, holds a taco, surfs Facebook or gestures wildly at the person on the other end of the telephone, which, incidentally, is held to the ear by the shoulder. Because the morning commute, dear friends, is when the orchestra comes out in full force, impaling the minds of anyone unfortunate enough to be within 400 metres of Paseo de la Reforma, or Constituyentes, or Virreyes, or Viaducto, or Circuito, or even my small, one-way side-street Pachuca with long, piercing, angry howls of assembly-line generated rage. It is like being locked in a room with 30 different speakers, each pumping 1000 watts, and then having 13 different bands play their own hit song at maximum volume. At the same time. Badly.
But then, as with many things, there's a bright side to the whole practice, which, in this case, is that I learned of someone, a long-time resident, who hates the sound of a car-horn more than I do. We were following the poor fool home last week, when I turned to Juan Carlos, a colleague who ferries me about, and instructed him to 'lay on the goddamn horn'. Our mark's eyes immediately shot to his rearview mirror, where he was greeted by two delirious laughing faces. He knew it was pointless. We weren't going to let up. So he hunched his shoulders, shook his head ceaselessly and kept driving.
We followed him for three kilometers, alternating between long blasting notes that seemed to actually crescendo and short, staccato bursts that seemed to be hitting him in the base of the spine.
"My God", I wondered. "What kind of effect must this be having on those sharing the road with us?"
I drew my eyes away from our victim in front of us, who had yet to evade us, and started to look around at the crowded road, into the cars and at those driving them.
Nothing. Not a measure of surprise. No disgust. No irritation. No eye-rolling by the pretty lady yammering on her cell phone directly beside us. Nothing.
This is, after all, completely normal behaviour.
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