You are the oldest señora in our building. I first noticed you during the earthquake that took place three months after I arrived in Mexico City, the time the alarm went blaring minutes after midnight. Hurtling down the stairs, señora Tania urgently murmuring corre, corre at my heels, we were rounding the railing on the first floor when I spotted you emerging from your door as if in slow motion, dazed.
You had lived through the great earthquakes of 1957 and 1985 and 2017, and now you took your time reaching the ground while our street shifted and staggered beneath our feet. You were 101 years old, you told me later, and I marvelled at the physical shape you were in: thin but not frail, slightly hunched but not stooped. You had your long silvery hair gathered in a braid. Elaborate cardigans hung on your shoulders, dabbed rouge on your withered lips. And I thought there was even a smudge of foundation on your high cheekbones.
You must have been beautiful in your day; you still were. Another time, you told me you were 89.
We began running into each other often, and I came to know your routines: midday stroll to the newsstand on the corner where you could sit inside with the vendor and enjoy a cigarette, afternoons spent reclining on the bench outside the dentist’s next door, and at sundown, hauling a suitcase full of old clothes to sell outside the sports grounds opposite.
I became familiar with your suite of caretakers too, a tall elderly gentleman constantly paging you on the intercom—who I later learned was your son—and a series of younger women who helped you shop and clean. But most of the time you were on your own, ambling, slowly out of our building and down the block and back again. Despite your active schedule, your body was failing you: you needed our old elevator to reach the first floor. When I broke my knee and had to use a walker, you said you had one too, and as the days grew shorter and the cold got to your bones, both of us would make our way up and down the short marbled steps of the building lobby on our walkers, side by side.
Living alongside you and the other señoras in our building, I wondered if this was what it meant to live in a community, up until then nothing more than a wholesome idea that had eluded my city-dwelling experience. I thought about what it meant when señora Alba invited me to her grandchild’s gender reveal party, when señora Julieta would leave notes on my door letting me know she had my mail, and when I would pause on my errands to watch the moon with señora Rosa and her puppies named after Japanese tennis players. News of my broken knee was met with an outpouring of offers to help: to bring my clothes to the lavandería, to get my medications from the pharmacy.
All of you have lived in our building for decades, your families bonding and feuding and bonding again through the years, and had been close with my apartment’s previous occupant, my landlady’s grandmother, before she died. When I arrived from the other side of the globe to take her place, you folded me into your web of relationships like a shawl I didn’t know I needed. I had grown up in one of the impersonal high-rises ubiquitous in Hong Kong, and as I moved around the world from Bangalore to Beijing my neighbours had been indifferent at best, downright hostile at worst; here too in Mexico City stories abounded of apathy and aggressions exchanged between cohabiting strangers, as may be expected of any metropolis in this era. Yet somehow within months, I had had more neighbourly interactions than my entire preceding life combined, and learned more about your private lives than some people I call family. By divine luck, I had stumbled into a cocoon whose warmth awaited me at the end of every day and which came to define my experience of the city. I wondered if it was as good a reason as any to stay, instead of vaulting off elsewhere again before long.
But you were not like the others: you never smiled. You never asked for my name nor offered yours, never acknowledged my provenance as an extranjera. Instead, you greeted me as mija, and in our snatches of conversation between the lobby door and short elevator trip, you would confide in me your preoccupations that sometimes turned a touch sinister. My son wants to kill me, you whispered in my ear one evening; a couple of days later, I want to kill my son. The week after: they want to kill me, they want to kill my son. I was stunned into silence: Was I misunderstanding you? Was it my lack of fluency, still inept at comprehending idiosyncratic flourishes of speech? Was it simply a ghost of your imagination — or were you in serious danger? I was new to Mexico — still am and always will be — and easing myself only reluctantly into the guiding mythologies that seem to go hand-in-hand with the country’s legacy of violence, the uncanny air that pervades its literature and music. Your proclamations introduced an ominous spirit into my immediate orbit that I was not quite ready for. Perhaps there was a reason the other señoras never stopped to chat with you for long.
So pardon me if I started tuning out your words during our run-ins, focusing instead on helping you hoist open the heavy elevator gate. Time after time you would hold me close for a moment and tell me to visit you at your apartment, you had something for me. I would smile and nod and say of course but I never did come by, afraid of what lay behind your door.
Then you vanished. For weeks I stopped encountering you by the building entrance, and no matter how often I searched our block from my balcony you were nowhere to be seen. Your son, a consistent presence on our street, also disappeared.
I worried about your whereabouts, if you were well. I worried if your dark assertions had been more than the idle musings of an old woman lost in her own mind. I worried about the worst possible outcome, if you had passed in your sleep from one day to another like señora Tania’s mother had just a few months ago. I wondered what it meant to worry about someone whose name I did not even know. But isn’t that also one of the greatest gifts of living in a city: fleeting intimacies shared with strangers that are no less meaningful?
The day after returning from a month-long trip, I stepped out for a grocery run — and there you were at the juice stall across the street, pushing some dead leaves around with a broom. Your hair had been dyed a luxurious chestnut brown, and three necklaces sparkled in front of your loose shirt. You pressed my face to yours and gave me a kiss. Mijita, you said.
As I write this I am getting ready to leave our building, in search of a different space. I wonder if I will come visit you on the first floor and tell you about my departure, or if it is even necessary. I will be moving just a few doors down, where I can still run into you and the rest of the señoras any day of the week, where I can continue watching you wander around the neighbourhood from my window, a walking mystery I am happy never to solve. I wonder if you will even realise that I had shifted down the street.
