Here my boredom is different, because it grants me pleasures that are unthinkable in the city. It’s more frustration than anything else: I need to make my peace with this contradictory, seemingly empty place. The island, the sounding board, both gives energy and consumes it. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Time is heavy. A neighbourhood guy committed suicide this week; he cut his femoral artery. He bled to death within minutes. A housekeeper found him the next day, in bed, drenched in his own cold soup. Maybe we’ll hear more about him now, about his troubles – but what’s the point? He was a psychiatric patient at the hospital and that ward has been out of medications for quite a while. Even my tiny street seems to mourn him: only the builders are moving around, machines booming, however lazily.

The heat has become more humid in the past few days. People say it’s going to rain soon, but it’s already technically the rainy season and nothing serious has fallen from the sky. The temperature is suffocating. Last week there were two gun deaths and countless tourist muggings. I’ve been warned repeatedly to not walk alone on the ring road, but I don’t see how it can be much more dangerous than many neighbourhoods in Mexico City. Not all of my people understand. Both there and here, in San Andrés, the inequality is scandalous, humiliating.

After the years I spent in Bogotá, I found Mexico rough, racist, closed-minded. The thing is, though, I didn’t grasp this as a reality that transcends nationality altogether. We live in a world in which just a few people manage vast amounts of capital. No pickpocket will ever have more than a trifling quantity within reach. You can’t access the sums that really break the cycles of poverty through threatening looks or primitive intimidations. Some people have advantages, it’s true, and we have to learn, endlessly learn and unlearn if we’re going to compete, if we’re going to overcome the trend that means the whitest skins are the luckiest ones. Here, the means of production belong to a specific sector of the population, one my parents briefly joined. It’s an abundance that has moved from source to source: from land ownership, like in the medieval period, to controlling the means of production. Monopoly, trade, hotel ownership, rented properties.