Daniel Hernandez
It won't stop raining.
It's rained pretty much all day today. In the morning, during the lunch hour, during rush hour, all night. It's just past midnight and it's raining right now. In fact it's been raining all week. As of Tuesday night various boroughs of the city are on flood alerts. El Universal is reporting that a regulating reservoir on the edge of Iztapalapa is about to overflow.
You can't escape the rain even in the metro. Water drips in through the layer of streets, buildings, and pipework overhead. Illegal vendors are making bank selling cheap umbrellas. Because many of the metro lines go above-ground when they radiate away from the center, trains return to the core dusted in raindrops. The seats nearest open windows are drenched.
Weirdest part is, it's cold out. Today I wore a sweater, a navy coat, and a scarf. And I still feel a chill from running around all day. Apparently there's a sizable storm passing through the center of the country, but I'm not fully convinced there are not other forces at play.
Yes, it's summer — rainy season. It's supposed to rain a lot. But my suspicion is that the rain god Tlaloc is restless.
Am I projecting? The other day I heard a curious urban legend, that ever since the Museo Nacional de Antropologia acquired a massive statue of Tlaloc and placed it at the museum's entrance, it's rained more in the D.F. Who's to know? All I know is that rain has its own personality. Sometimes it is hard and mean, making people slip and fall in the puddles. Sometimes it is gentle and sad, pattering away in the interior light shafts of apartment buildings.
Call it a blind, gloomy pessimism, but this summer I'm expecting it to rain and rain and rain and rain, until, somehow, we can find an equilibrium with the elements.
* Image above, from Wikipedia. Related: “An incomplete picture of weather without borders.”
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