Domestic Scenes: The Art of Ramiro Gomez by Lawrence Weschler Ramiro Gomez

Author:Lawrence Weschler,Ramiro Gomez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vearsa
Published: 2016-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

IN THE END, of course, he didn’t. (Who knows, of course, what ever became of so many of the disappeared in that so oft-cursed country, or for that matter of so many of the others who tried to escape: Los Olvidados.) But in almost every other way the trip to Mexico City still proved remarkably moving. I’d decided to tag along, as had David, and as, for that matter, had David’s father, who joined us from Philadelphia.

From the first moments in the taxi taking us into town to the hotel Charlie James had reconnoitered for us, Jay was busy snapping away on his cell phone, constantly noticing window cleaners and janitors and trash collectors, who for the rest of us otherwise simply seemed to blur into the passing scene, catching their momentary postures, banking the images, all in one clean gesture (up, click, down, glance, bank), and then gazing out and finding another. Occasionally though, in the days ahead, as we drove from one sight or venue to the next, Jay would grow quite overcome with emotion, tearing up, almost unable to continue, David reaching over to clutch his palm. In part, Jay confided at one point, he felt guilty at being the one getting such deluxe treatment when by all rights it should have been his incredibly hardworking parents who deserved it. But more often, it was the very nature of the treatment itself: “I can’t help constantly feeling like I am on the wrong side of this window of privilege, driving around in cabs like this. How am I any different from those folks out there, who have to trudge about everywhere and never ever get to ride in taxis?”

One morning we made our way over to the celebrated National Museum of Anthropology, where at every turn Jay seemed to be encountering profiles uncannily like his own, carved into stone, etched onto scrolls (this page). He was deeply moved, as he told me, by “the everyday artisanal grace and beauty on display everywhere,” but at the same time, especially in the Aztec pavilion, quite overwhelmed by the way that such momentary beneficences came steeped in a wider culture that celebrated the most harrowing warrior violence and human sacrifice—a veritable death cult set on a collision course with that other death cult represented by Cortés’s arrival and symbolized, at the very end of the processional display, by a simple stark wooden cross. Jay’s own existence of course tapped into both sources, such that the pavilion set off a virtual temper tantrum of emotional responses in him (“like that scene in Chinatown,” he said, “with Faye Dunaway reeling, ‘She’s my sister,’ slap, ‘She’s my daughter,’ slap, ‘my sister my daughter my sis—’”). Both the glory and the gore from both sides constituting his multiple inheritances.

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