Rain
Original Publication: Novedades — Sunday Supplement, June 13, 1948.
Author: LIC. OSCAR MÉNDEZ CERVANTES.
Topics: Philosophy and Culture.
By LIC. OSCAR MÉNDEZ CERVANTES
The rainy season takes on its own sign and purpose in the city. It is not so much the promising marriage of earth and water that the countryside awaits in loving, watchful vigil.
Rather, it carries a beautiful sense of cleansing and purification. It is the necessary washing of the immense urban surface, so urgently in need of being cleared of dust storms and the grime of a neglect already chronic… Let heaven at least do what our city planning neglects.
Because of that rainy hope for cleanliness in the capital, we cannot help welcoming with heartfelt joy this unbraiding of the clouds as they let their liquid gift slip down, washing industrial smoke from our air; the dirt of neglect or poverty from our houses; and Texcoco’s chalky dust from our lawns and trees.
Of course, the season also brings us the fierce contest we wage with water, wagering on who will outwit whom: whether it will outwit us with the cruel joke of sudden downpours—which tend to play hide-and-seek with the meteorological observatory—or we will outwit it with the relative protection of the raincoat, rubber footwear, and, sometimes, still!, that individual canopy, the umbrella, now almost a mere survival from the Porfirian era, dispensed with by young people disinclined to encumbrances that complicate hurried travel and the inevitable crush of the bus or tram.
But the rains also bring, year after year, the charm of the melancholy romanticism of girls who have reached the age of love’s first pangs: the persistent drizzle offers them exasperating allegories of impossible loves, of vague exaltations of the spirit. It also becomes an occasion for wistful longings among little old women whose rheumatic aches carry the most faithful and sensitive of rain gauges, and who thread, cherish, and live memories ‘of the good old days’ through the strands of their needlework, behind the window bay whose panes echo the monotonous tapping of myriad drops of water.
And after the downpour, we shall often be gladdened by the magic of afternoons when the storm clears. Then the soul and the eyes rejoice to see façades, pavements, and gardens gloriously watered. In that interval when the city conjures the marvel of a great piece of fresh pottery, fragrant with damp clay newly shaped by skilled fingers, colored by the slanting light of the dying sun; while along the shores of a small, fleeting lake—drawn by the rainfall in the park’s compact geography—a little boy with a sailor’s yearnings launches paper ships, and when he sees the first star reflected in the tiny waves—traversed by wonderful voyages driven by the wind of a child’s imagination—he senses that it is the sweet hour of returning to his mother, in whose heart the slight uneasiness of someone beginning to wait is starting to stir…
At that hour, the city appears to us bathed as in a baptismal rite of sprinkling. And it looks at us with a child’s clean, clear, joyful gaze.
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