Insomnia & The Old Woman in the Night

A Mysterious Midnight Encounter in the Heart of Mexico City

At 4:30 in the morning, I’m awakened by the sound of a solitary singer crooning a soft, mournful tune into the city night. In the Historic Center of Mexico City, I’ve grown accustomed to being woken in the middle of the night — a store alarm, an ambulance’s siren, a motorcycle’s growl, a drunk’s tortured shout — but I have never heard this dreamlike harmony before.

Curious, I rise from bed, go to the window and open the wooden doors to my balcony to look down on the street, where I see a procession of men and women walking in the direction of the Zócalo.

The night is cool, and the women wear thick shawls. Some have blankets wrapped around their shoulders and waists. They look tired and their faces are flushed from the cold air and the journey.

How many miles have these people walked? Where is their final destination?

Perhaps they’re headed to La Basilica de Guadalupe, I think, as they file past, undeterred by the gringo perched on the balcony watching. The Basilica is a place many congregations and communities make pilgrimages to. If I’m correct, they still have a long way to go, since it’s located about six kilometers from the city center.

The song is coming from the front of the line, but it has passed so I cannot make out the singer. The voice floats back into my ears like sonic smoke. Also at the front, men are carrying a wooden box that holds a Catholic Saint, but it too is beyond my field of vision and perhaps resides only in my sleepy imagination.

As the people pass, about ten meters behind the penultimate person, I see an old woman with a cane. She is in her mid to late 80s, and when she notices she’s fallen behind, she quickens her pace. Before long, a younger woman circles back and lends her an arm to lean on — and together, in the dark of night, in the heart of Tenochtitlán, the two women march toward some unknown, mysterious destination.

“Where are you going?!” I want to shout. “Why are you going where you’re going in the cold, dark, heart of the night?”

But I only watch with wonder. And when the procession passes out of sight, I close the doors to my balcony, climb back in bed with my Chihuahua, and think about the remarkable strength and resilience of the Mexican people.

Where does it come from?

Is it part of the Catholic tradition? After all, Jesus wasn’t complaining on the cross.

Is it part of the indigenous tradition? A lesson gained from falling, but learning to survive in a new world?

I think about Christmas at my mother-in-law’s house, where dinner is served sometime after midnight and the party that follows often lasts until dawn. And how no one leaves to “put the kids to bed,” but rather, the kids fall asleep on couches or in corners, drop off like flies — learning at a young age to put the desires of their parents, and hence the world, before their own.

I think about how I have never heard my mother-in-law — who is in her 70s and spends her days cooking for her enormous family and the flocks of people who come to her restaurant for tamales and menudo — say the words, “I’m tired.”

Then, for some reason, a vision comes. I’m a pedicab driver in New Orleans again, watching a group of friends in their 60s and early 70s on Bourbon street, hooting and hollering as they speed their motorized wheel chairs down the middle of the street, drinks in hand, heading for some distant destination, but almost certainly another bar.

With eyes closed and head on the pillow, I think about the woman at the back of the line — hunched over but head up — her armed intertwined in the arm of a sturdy love — hobbling through the cold dark of the deep night towards some symbolic or imaginary destination — old but wise, slow but steady, frail but determined —unimaginably powerful in her conviction.

Lastly, I wonder why at five, then six in the morning, my mind won’t stop walking, opining, imagining some symbolic or imaginary destination I will never reach — carrying on, step over step, thought over thought, word over word — into the deep cold recesses of the night — when what I really need in the moment is to be still, quiet, and fall asleep.

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