That April off Tehuantepec

"Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf."

The above line is by Wallace Stevens, as are the lines in my previous post. He's a poet unparalleled in subtle beauty, in my opinion. Is there a better line in the English language than "Paradisal green/gave suavity to the perplexed machine"? And he's talking about the ocean. Who else would call the ocean a machine? And then the adjective 'perplexed,' conjuring the swirling, competing tides that do create conflict in the massive water.

Que lindo, as I kept saying in Mexico. It's one of my few Spanish phrases and it applies to almost everything in Mexico, since it means, "how pretty!" My other phrase was "que limpia!" which means, "how clean!" This was a bit less useful, but I used it a lot anyway and it worked surprisingly often, since we were often gazing at landscapes that normal superlatives could not do justice to.

I love Mexico. I love speaking Spanish, and the people are so friendly. They help you out as you grope through incomplete phrases, they say "buenos tardes" (good afternoon) to you with great regularity -- say you pass a group of three -- each one will say "buenos tardes."

On the other hand, they seem new to the game of waiting on people at a restaurant. Time and again my family and I had a pleasant but puzzled waiter writing orders down and then revealing that they hadn't understood anything we'd said, after all. The mere situation of two people wanting the same dish seemed to stop them in their tracks. "Uno pollo de marajon" they'd repeat and we'd nod decisively. "Y ... un otro pollo ... de?" "Marajon!" we'd say. "Dos pollo de marajon!" The waiter/tress would frown in puzzlement at the coincidence, checking with us once again before even going near their order pads.

It wasn't our faulty Spanish, either, since my sister, her husband and her two children are all fluent. On my last night, I found New York impatience taking over in a Japanese restaurant. As our waiter checked over and over with my sister and brother-in-law about our, to me, boringly obvious requests, I found myself rolling my eyes. Oh no! The Ugly American comes out when you're fiercely hungry. "What's so hard about taking an order and bringing us food?" I muttered. "Have these people never heard of their own menu?" Being grumpy and impatient is very much an American behavior, my sister told me, and I felt embarrassed but was still too irritated to hide it.

Tehuantepec is actually a little town far from the lovely city of Oaxaca that we visited. We didn't go there, but I saw the name on a map and felt a shock of recognition. Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company in Hartford. He traveled mostly in his imagination -- I'm fairly sure he never went to Tehuantepec. But he heard the poetic quality in the name, and imagined the sea in that exact spot, and gave us that impossibly elusive, beautiful poem, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds."