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copper, or milky mauve and dirty yellow. Everybody looks either quite exquisite or too monstrous to be true, without any transitional age between flowering ephebe and oozing hippopotamus. The male ephebes are dressed in extreme, skin-tight versions of California sports clothes, shiny, gabardiny, belted slack-suits in ice-cream colours, pistachio and rich chocolate; their elders are compressed in the darkest, dingiest kind of ready-made business outfits, and ladies of all proportions draped in lengths of sleezy material in the more decorative solid colours, blood orange, emerald, chrome yellow, azure. There is a wait of twenty-five minutes, then a succession of courses is deposited before us in a breathless rush. We dip our spoons into the soup, a delicious cream of vegetable that would have done honour to a private house in the French Provinces before the war of 1870, when two small platefuls of rice symmetrically embellished with peas and pimento appear at our elbows.
    ‘Y aquí la sopa seca.’
The dry soup.
    We are still trying to enjoy the wet one, when the eggs are there: two flat, round, brown omelets.
    Nothing is whisked away before it is finished, only more and more courses are put in front of us in two waxing semi-circles of cooling dishes. Two spiny fishes covered in tomato sauce. Two platefuls of beef stew with spices. Two bowlfuls of vegetable marrow swimming in fresh cream. Two thin beef-steaks like the soles of children’s shoes. Two platters of lettuce and radishes in an artistic pattern. Two platefuls of bird bones, lean drumstick and pointed wing smeared with some brown substance. Two platefuls of mashed black beans; two saucers with fruit stewed in treacle. A basket of rolls, all slightly sweet; and a stack of
tortillas
, limp, cold, pallid pancakes made of maize and mortar. We eat heartily of everything. Everything tastes good, nearly everything is good. Only the chicken has given its best to a long and strenuous life and the stock pot, and the stewed fruit is too sticky for anyone above the age of six. The eggs, the stew, the vegetables, the salad, rice and beans are very good indeed. Nothing remotely equals the quality of the soup. We are drinking a bottled beer,called Carta Blanca, and find it excellent. At an early stage of the meal we had been asked whether we desired chocolate or coffee at the end of it, and accordingly a large cupful was placed at once at the end of the line with another basket of frankly sugared rolls. This
pan dulce
and the coffee are included in the lunch. The bill for the two of us, beer and all, comes to nine pesos, that is something under ten shillings.
    It is four o’clock and the sun has not budged from its central position in the sky. We do not fool with hats and shade, but return to the hotel by cab. I close the shutters, lie down, and when I wake I do not know where I am nor where I was just now. I hardly know who I am. These pieces of escaped knowledge seem immediately paramount; hardly awake I struggle to fill the blanks as though it were for air. When identity is cleared, I cannot put a finger on my time, this is When? At last the place, too, clicks into place. It must have taken half a minute, a minute, to catch up with my supposed reality. It seemed much longer. One sleeps like this perhaps two or three times in a life and one never forgets these moments of coming to. That intense pang of regret. For what? The boundless promise of that unfilled space before memory rushed in? Or for the so hermetically forgotten region before waking, for the where-we-were in that sleep which we cannot know but which left such a taste of happiness? This time reaction is reversed, opportunity lies before not behind, adjustment is a joy. I am at the edge of Mexico – I rush to the window. It must have been raining. It has. This is the rainy season, and it does every afternoon from May till October. The square looks washed, water glistens on leaves and the sky is still wildly dramatic