By 9:45 the unrelenting confusion and noise
catalyze a curious emotional state in me; I start feeling detached, like a shimmering,
sovereign eyeball gliding unseen through a surreal landscape. Suddenly it strikes me that
the mercado is music and all the things in it are tones, and that the tones cluster in
every key and every mode, and not much in harmony with one another. Yet, the mercado's
overall rhythm, its pulse, is the same everywhere, lusty, full of life, somehow cheerful
and hopeful, and I'm part of it. The mercado's colors begin exploding inside my head like
effervescing bubbles. Now I wander aimlessly, and here's what I see:
- stacked soda bottles, luminescently red or orange inside
- deep green blades of spring onions heaped on a red sheet of plastic
- rusty red chicken bodies roasting on a grill
- clear-plastic bottles of yellow safflower oil
- yellow bananas with black bruise-spots
- Volkswagen-beetle taxis painted green and white, with square, purple information boxes on white doors
- yellow and orange plastic tarpaulins over sidewalks
- orange carrots in gray-brown wooden crates
- green and orange papayas on a table below a red tarpaulin
- orange squash blossoms bound with green grass blades
- green and yellow watermelons, one cut open shockingly red and wet inside, glistening in the sunlight
- burgundy hued mangos
- yellow and white blocks of cheese stacked on shelves
- rusty red links of sausage draped on a black wire
- half a pig, flesh red with white fat, on hooks
- pale orange tostadas in clear plastic bags
- inside the Merced, hundreds of piñatas of every color suspended from timbers above the stalls
- a dayglow-orange sign with black hand-lettering reading Macizo de Res 18 kg
- skin tones of naked women on magazine covers at street-corner kiosks, the eye irresistibly drawn to black pubic hair
- red blanket beneath dozens of rainbow-colored trinkets from Oaxaca
- three-foot-tall clear-plastic bags of yellow-orange cheese curls stacked seven feet high
- inside a semi-truck's cargo area, its back doors open, shiny red, white, and blue aluminum cans of Pepsi Cola stacked to the ceiling
- dozens of crates of blood-red tomatoes along sidewalk
10:00 AM
At 10:00 I shift to nose-walking; I go to the middle of the
cavernous, new, modern-looking, mostly empty Plaza Comercial, standing next to the main
Merced building. Here the odor of bare concrete and steel mingles with echoic
house-sparrow chirps from high in the metal rafters. Now I walk sniffing toward the main
Merced building, and this is what comes to me:
- the slightly stinging odor of sudsy detergent where a woman mops the concrete floor in front of her comedor, or eating stall
- wool, at a stall specializing in hand-woven sweaters
- coffee, from a white styrofoam cup on a counter
- the fresh-ironed odor around a stall selling T-shirts that on their fronts boldly proclaim "Innovation Sportswear Fasteners"
- truck exhaust fumes, odor of oil, someone's cigarette
- dried peppers in four-foot-high open bags, the dust burning my eyes
- toasted corn
- more dusty, dried peppers, this time as I pass, the odor gradually fusing with the moist, green smell of a four-foot-high stack of head lettuce
- over-ripe bananas
- basil, as a woman walks by carrying an armload of herbs
- leather, around a stall selling sandals
- greasy odor of twenty plucked chickens on two rotating spits inside the shining aluminum hood of a comedor's big rotisserie, the chicken bodies wet-looking and dripping
- mellow, simmering stews richly spiced with cilantro, or coriander, from comedores preparing for the lunch rush
- the general odor of vegetables, like V-8 Juice, especially celery
- garlic in two-foot-high wicker canisters; I smell the garlic and the wicker wood itself
- the dusty odor of white, bound-together corn shucks stacked in silolike mounds twenty feet high
- crushed-herbage odor of stripped and folded banana leaves
- ripe mangos
- granola, mostly the odor of honey and shredded coconut
- charcoal smoke from comedores on the Merced's south side
- roasting pig and frying onions
- urine around the metro entrance
- the odor of plastic where red, yellow, and white plastic buckets are stacked along the sidewalk
- the odor of boiled potatoes, but here no one boils potatoes... ; oh, it's glistening chicken bodies again, rotating wet and glistening inside a big rotisserie; maybe my nose is getting tired; time to end...