49. City Thoughts in Ayacucho

49.

I eat breakfast for the third day in a row at the same good café. I notice that my presence has upset the usual “sociogram” of the place. Regular customers had their special tables staked out until I intruded, throwing a monkey wrench into their routine. Can they handle it? They will have to think a little--and before their first cup of morning coffee too. I feel a little bit cruel.

So, to take my mind off their seating problems, I think some more about cities.

Cities seem to sprout, flourish and die like plants. For the best living it may be best to pick a city on the way up––not one that has already arrived—but these conditions change fast. A city with a good reputation can already be a bad place to live by the time you hear about it and move there. It seems to take a long time for a good reputation to die—if you’re a city, that is.

People living in big cities seem to be dedicated to the exploitation of one another. The city is the Big Marketplace, where the young, talented and beautiful come with what they’ve got to trade for what they can get. In a city, costume is important. Youth and inexperience fall for the trappings, but behind the costume is the flesh and bone and behind that meat, the human awareness of the entity.

You come to town dressed up so fine--
But I wonder what’s going on in your mind?

(If anything.)

And, of course, youth does not last. The city dweller plugs along, living sometimes well and sometimes badly until the youthful energy is gone. If lucky, the citizen may retire back to the country to the good life and if unlucky, the citizen remains in the city to be exploited and abused by a new youthful generation until he dies. So it is.

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