Part 4. Mi Casa, New Casa
Being homeless is not as fun as they make it out in country music. Though Annemarie and I are hardly sleeping in box-cars, we have essentially hoboed across country with banjos slung over our shoulders.
After more than two months in Mexico, we finally exchanged on a flat. Though with our worldly possessions floating about somewhere on the Atlantic, we were faced with the proposition of staying in the temporary accommodation a little longer. Living out of suitcases and cooking in a kitchen which was a to scale model of a Salvador Dalí napkin doodle for a few more weeks.
It’s funny, the things you miss. I never knew what an important part of my life teaspoons played. Who would have foreseen you still need oven gloves, even when you don’t have an oven? The scalding truth you discover when you’re lacking a sieve or colander. Buying a whole new wardrobe is great until it quickly transpires what you actually have is a lot of expensive aprons. There are family members I would murder for a tea-towel.
I went to a friend’s house to make sausages. A truly fun experience, especially when scored by white hot mambo music and a river of cold beer. It was an odd feeling, eating sausage, mash and onion gravy in the middle of Mexico City but not as odd as being in the man’s kitchen. I was transported back to being a poor child visiting a rich friend’s bedroom. It’s not the expensive toys, like the meat grinder or sausage stuffer that make my eyes green with hunger. It was the basic stuff. A garlic press! Tongs! A freezer! This kid doesn’t know how good he’s got it.
Of all things in the temporary accommodation that gets under the skin, it’s the décor that itches deepest. I understand that interior design is a deeply personal thing. And God knows our tastes wouldn’t be for everyone. In our house we have two enormous prints of laughing clown faces. Nineteen-forties funfair rifle targets I picked up for Annemarie after a trip to Margate’s ‘Dreamland’. We have a taxidermy mouse, dressed and posed as a magician performing sleight of hand. Again, a gift from me to Annemarie. When we were courting, I’d learn a new card trick ahead of every date. The taxidermy course where I learned to stuff the beast was a valentine’s day present from her to me. We have framed packets of crisps and chocolate bars. A framed locust we got as a wedding present. A framed donut bag, upon which I’d written a contract for Annemarie to sign, stating she wouldn’t ever leave me even if I ever got fat. A plaster cast of a Victorian Frenchman’s teeth. A nineteen-thirties, papier-mâché ventriloquist’s dummy, with real human hair. We understand that art is a unique and personal singularity but the stuff in that flat is just mania inducing.
There is a print up of ‘Hakuna Matata’ lyrics, as if in a dictionary. It’s ‘Hakuna Matata’ as the word being defined, complete with phonetic pronunciation [ha-ku-na ma-ta-ta], ‘phrase’ label and meaning. Except the meaning prescribed on the print is not, “no worries for the rest of your days”, both the lyrics to the song and, you would assume, the inspiration for the dictionary definition design. Rather it quotes, “It a wonderful phrase; not a passing craze;”. I understand these are still lyrics from the song, though citation is not correct, but why wouldn’t you put “it means no worries for the rest of your days” when the lyrics of the song are “it means no worries for the rest of your days” and you’ve designed it look like a dictionary entry that gives meaning to the phrase? It’s so counterintuitive, it’s actually gaslighting me. Every time I look at it, hanging in the Dada kitchen, it cooks my brain. Appropriate, I suppose.
Elsewhere in the apartment, there is a there is a living or salon area. It has a tasteful sofa and chairs, a coffee table and lamp, all neatly arranged facing a really nice TV cabinet but no TV. Where you would expect one to be mounted, there is a framed print in the style of those colour-blindness tests you’d take at primary school. A large circle filled with a psychedelic swirl of coloured dots, coming together to spell the phrase, “Dream Currency”. The cash of nightmares, perhaps. It is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen and I’ve worked in a tannery for the last ten years. But that’s beside the point. It’s the location. Why wouldn’t you hang “Dream Currency” in the bedroom? Why? Because that’s where they’ve hung the TV, obviously. Did Lewis Carroll design this place? Was the whole building based on an Edward Lear poem? It’s all so mind bending it’s almost endearing. Though that may just be some kind of artistic Stockholm Syndrome.
Before our things from the UK are delivered to our new apartment, there was five days limbo. We could stay through the looking glass. But we booked a hotel.
Annemarie started her new job and was immediately thrown in at the deep end. A baptism of fire. By the end of the first week, she’d been baptized in the deep end of a lake of fire. It’s a terrific job and she thrives on it but there was no spare time for work on the new apartment. I’d have to do it myself.
Having never been able to furnish a place to my own tastes, I was relishing the idea. Intimidated at first, I contacted a woman who interior designs for a living. Luckily for me, she never returned my call and I was forced to pull my socks up, stiffened my lip and go out into the wild, hunting for woods. Just me, a tape measure and some squared paper. Walnuts, willows and encinos were all to be mounted on the walls and floors but first I thought I’d start small. Ceramics, glassware and objet d'art. They were fun but really like shooting fish in a barrel compared to the big game. If you want to bag yourself a rare coffee table or a prime sofa, you got to go deep. Deep into the dark heart of the hip and monied regions of the city. It can be dangerous out there. Many a good credit card has failed to survive.
Fortunately, I had my eye in. I found a nest. A boutique operated by a couple who already looked better than anything I owned. They had a pack of dogs in there, every bit as attractive as the furniture, running wild around the store. They spoke no English, why would they, so I had to use my app-based language skill.
“My wife and I live in Mexico for seven weekends, alone. We have a new castle. But we have never sofa. We have never something for records and I have much discos. We need many, many!”
I ran away with a sofa, chairs, shelving and almost an office chair too. The last one only got away from me when they explained that in my excitement, I’d wandered into their actual office and started pointing at things. “This something, what cost?”
At the end of it all, I understood why they had the dogs in there. Emotional Support Animals for when they hand you the bill.
Fortunately, it’s also quite easy to pick up early to mid-century furniture on the cheap in Mexico City. La Lagunilla is a zone located in the northwest of the City, under the shadow of the Cuauhtémoc Mayor's Office. At its heart is an enormous market built at the end of the fifties. You can buy anything here but the furniture and antiques section stands out. It is a cornucopia of mid-century living. Everything from toys to telephones, magazines, newspapers, 16millimeter films and projectors. Piles of family photos, musical instruments, glassware, artwork, cutlery, cooking pots, everything you could put in a home is on these stalls. There is a generational sub-section of middle-class families here who, when the grandparents die, have their houses cleared and sold in bulk to these market traders. Nothing is saved. Everything is removed in one foul swoop. It doesn’t take long before you start to suspect why. There are a lot of genuine Nazi artifacts. Swastika pins, military badges, helmets, flags, banners, uniforms. It’s all just sat there among the tin toys and faded coffee table books. An eerie reminder of how close we still are to all those crimes. You don’t see these kinds of everyday reminders in Europe. You don’t get the SS badges next to the Micky Mouse pins in our markets and rightly so. In a time when, inexplicably, this stuff is on the rise again in Britain, America and across Europe, these relics offer a stark reminder of where that road leads.
We picked up a really nice desk. We can only hope it’s previous owner wasn’t an escaped war criminal.
