Living on the edge

During my first visit to Mexico, my now-roommate, then-Hospitality Club host, counselled me not to be afraid.

The truth is, I wasn't. Intimidated, perhaps, by the fact that I didn't speak Spanish and was more or less on my own to find my way to the pyramids, to Taxco, but not scared.

I was scared in Brazil, where I had spent two weeks four months earlier. There was one moment in Rio de Janeiro when, coming back to my hostel from Copacabana beach by metro as the sun set over the mountains, I realized that I didn't know in which direction to go upon exiting the station. Only a few blocks from my unmarked, steel-doored, camera buzzer-ed hostel but unable to ask for help and with darkness firmly settling in around me, the fear was choking.

(This is in stark contrast, incidentally, to a not particularly wise but thankfully unpunished decision to walk back to the hostel with my new friends a few evenings later, drunk on caiparinhas, cameras swinging from wrists, singing loudly in English, at 4am...)

I've not had the same fear in Mexico for a number of reasons:

First, while my five days in Rio involved a fair amount of late nights (I apologized to my friends one evening for going home "early" at 5am) and alcohol, my first visit to Mexico involved daytrips to interesting sites followed by quiet evenings "at home" with someone whose friendship had knocked me off my feet from the day I first met him. Now that I live here, drinking nights are limited to "optional" work events, in which I choke down a glass or two of wine in order to placate the General Manager and then head home for 9pm. I am not a party girl, which dramatically decreases my personal risk (see drunk/cameras/singing/4am story...).

Second, the violence against tourists in Rio is famous, to the extent that, when I was getting my visa, the Brazilian Embassy counselled me to always have the equivalent of US$20 in my pocket for muggers. Not having money because you were concerned about being mugged, see, is not an option. Poverty is so extreme and so evenly woven into all neighbourhoods that you can be mugged at gunpoint at 2pm in the afternoon, walking down a tourist-y beach with 20 of your closest friends.

That the Brazilian friend I was visiting, who wasn't with me in Rio due to work, spent every day with me hissing warnings probably didn't help my perception of Brazil as being just-around-the-corner perilous, actually.

Mexico City, in comparison, always seemed logical: don't go into the bad neighbourhoods, don't flash money, don't wear expensive jewelry, don't wander around at 3am, don't look lost and vulnerable, and you'll likely be fine. No one is pretending it's not a dangerous city, but all large cities are dangerous and this one didn't feel much worse than New York or London or even Toronto. When my friends came to visit, most of them looked at me with long faces and expressed some degree of concern about personal safety. "Ah," I would sagely tell them, "forget kidnappings. The biggest risk you have here is trying to cross the street."

In fact, in two and a half years, the only relatively violent thing that has happened to me is the theft of everything of value from my backpack while traveling by bus from Merida to Palenque in December 2006, and I personally bear a huge share of the blame for being so Canadian as to believe that luggage racks are for luggage. I never saw the men who rifled through my bag as I slept, but their thoroughness (I had money hidden in four places, including in a secret pocket and buried amid my dirty underwear, and they found every peso) and the deep slash that cut through roommate's bag, two shirts and several pairs of his underwear suggest that they were professionals with a fairly substantial knife.

This blissful period of fear ended watching the man lie in a pool of his own blood in the middle of Avenida Reforma last month. At first I was just twitchy about traffic, thinking of him every time a car zoomed past me as though I wasn't trying to cross a busy street, aided by police, with a walk signal. Morbid me, I watched the cars pass at the spot he was hit and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be hit, what my odds of survival would be. I visualized how far he must have flew. I grew paranoid that my end was near, flattened by a car, left to bleed on the street.

(Dramatic? Me?)

Last week, during my Spanish class, my teacher asked me to Google image search "Mexico City" and pick one I liked. Among the usual skylines, what came up on the first page was a vintage photo of a woman, a pedestrian, who had been pinned between a car and a pole near my house. She quite obviously had not survived the impact. My teacher and I studied it for a minute, before selecting a painting of the Zocalo back when it had trees.

On Sunday, a man in a white sedan slammed on his brakes to avoid a massive burgundy SUV driving the wrong way down Avenida Chapultepec, sending his car careening through a bus stop and through the glass of a storefront, while the burgundy SUV froze in fear in the middle of the street. The man in the sedan appeared fine, rolling down his good window to shout obscenities at the SUV, but his car was totalled. The micro in which I was riding rolled on, its passengers craning to watch the impending brawl.

On Monday, my roommate sent me a link to an article about an American kidnapping prevention expert who has been kidnapped. It does not appear to be a normal (as in: for profit, odds good) kidnapping. "Van a matarlo," said my colleagues. They're going to kill him.

This morning I watch the video attached to this article, about the piling up casualities of the narco war in Mexico, which tells me nothing I don't already know and shows me nothing I've not seen a hundred times before, but which fills me to the brim with dread nonetheless.

I am suddenly, painfully, acutely aware of my own mortality and my ability to suffer while meeting it. I am hypersensitive to threats that, before, seemed reasonably easy to avoid with some common sense. Every street crossed is one more minute lived, but not in a grateful zen way but rather in a breathless anticipation of some tragedy that is bound to come, every moment sooner. I am waiting for the worst case scenario to befall me, every time I leave the house or the office.

Why have such normal occurances as car accidents and corpse images triggered me so, and why now and not before? Did the puddle of blood on the street really screw with my head to such a degree, or is it something more?

More importantly, will it pass?

I love this country, yet this rampant fear is making me twitchy to return to safer climes (if those even exist). The sudden onset of this sensation, however, doesn't convince me that the risk is greater, only that I have somehow made it personal, internalized it, emotionalized it, am now worrying it like a dog with a particularly juicy hamhock.

I want to go back to being cautiously confident, damn it. If I should be scared of anything, it's the fact that I work maybe one kilometre away from the amusement park in Chapultepec I can barely make out the rollercoaster through the smog. Now THAT is something putting me in mortal peril...