Street sounds in our Colonia
Each time I hear a new noise I am tempted to look out of the window to see if I can identify the source. It might be a wheezy whistle, or a clear warble, a distant trumpet, or a marimba played with 4 hammers, or distant but uplifting snatches of brass band music; or, as yesterday and today, the unrelenting and shattering sound of nearby road works. So today, to escape the frightful din, I popped out before lunch to Sanborns’ to drink a beer, and to recollect the more pleasant, interesting, and distinctive sounds of Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico City. Sounds that make this so very different from my little village in middle England.
One such sound comes from the truck that tours round each street each day offering to collect any old iron. The cry comes over a loudspeaker with the same childish female voice, the same unvarying intonation, the same repeated words, of which I only catch “..estufas, microondas,…” (stoves, microwave ovens). Towards evening another truck, using a similar business model, advertises “tamales, oaxaqueñas, " and suchlike food.
I prefer, for its old fashioned quaintness, the wheezy whistle that advertises roasted sweet potatoes (camotes). Toward evening, a man lights a small wood fire on his trolly, which presumably roasts the camotes, but at the same time makes steam. When all is ready, he pushes his trolly out onto the street and opens the valve to the whistle. This emits a piercing shriek that dies slowly away to a dismal groan.
Another sound, which I had often heard over the years, I identified only yesterday, but relish for its throwback quaintness. An elderly man cycled slowly up the road towards me, one hand holding the handlebar, the other holding a small set of panpipes. Every now and then he warbled a handful of notes. Behind, on the carrier, he had a small two-stroke motor that would drive two grinding stones. So here was the 'sharpener of knives and scissors' that I had heard spoken of. One has to know the meaning of his warble in order to rush out and catch him before he disappeared down the road.
The brass band was a one-off. But the other day, as I worked at my computer, I enjoyed for an hour their rousing snatches of melody and, occasionally, song. I had to go out onto the street to find the source. It did not take me long. The band were having their practice in the converted gym across the intersection, now called "La casa del humor", which, on weekend evenings, emits gales of laughter and applause.
When I sat down to lunch just now, I heard the distant thump-thump of a drum, and some disjointed notes from a brass instrument. As they slowly approached our house I got up and looked discretely out. A man, on the far side of the street, thumped the drum keeping level with a man on our side playing the disjointed notes on a shiny trombone. I was reminded of a tip my father told me regarding busking in London before the war; "the worse you play the more you collect". A similar strategy may have motivated this duo.
Not so the marimba duettists. They played their two or three pieces with considerable panache and some skill, though I am afraid they collected little or nothing from either of their two stands in our street.
These sounds, also, seem to be from a bygone era. These days, with iPod and earphones piping Mozart or Reggae straight into people's brains, who needs a barrel-organ or a marimba duo to enliven the siesta hours?
