Neoteny

From the southern shore of the Lago de Xochimilco, my eyes followed the other brightly-painted trajineras as they gently glided away from the docks across the black water. The late October air was cold and still, but the soft distant sounds of music and families celebrating warmed the occasion. I stood at the back of the line of tourists, finishing off a cigarette before we too disembarked from the shore.

“Welcome aboard the Fountain of Youth!” The tour guide shouted from the threshold of the trajinera. Upon his invitation, the loosely assembled travelers formed into a single file, stepping onto the boat one by one. I lagged behind, trying to get as much out of the cigarette as I could while the others fumbled on board.

“Hey, mija, you’re missing the boat!” He shouted through a large skeletal grin, his face was smeared with a sort of oily, impressionist black-and-white calavera face paint.

“Life is like a cigarette,” I called back to him, abandoning the cigarette and reaching for the rails on the passenger entryway of the gondola. “Smoke it to the butt.”

The undead tour guide stood grinning at the front of the vessel, his bone-white teeth visible in-between the painted skeletal jaws. I made my back to the back of the trajinera, passing by the couples and families embarking together.

“Bienvenidos, my friends. I am called Acalan Sanpedro,” he said. “I will guide us this exploration of death over these dark waters in Xochimilco tonight on this special Día de los Angelitos. As you very smart people may know, truly, Día de Los Muertos is not one day, rather two days. Tonight, we honor los angelitos, the lost innocent ones, our beloved and beautiful children who have died. The children are impatient, they cannot wait their turn to come back to the land of the living. They run ahead and arrive a day earlier than the rest.”

I reached into my pocket, removing a plastic bag filled small white sugar skulls that I purchased from Mercado de Coyoacán after lunch. I placed one of them in my mouth, holding it visibly between my teeth. I caught Acalan’s eye from the front of the trajinera and bit down, collapsing the sick-sweetness of death into crystalized dust in my mouth. The corner of his painted mouth lifted in a smirk. Around the bend, there were four short rows of plastic chairs set before a small stage on the edge of the Laguna Tlílac.

“Please, my friends, look toward the left and you will catch a glimpse of the annual waterfront theatrical performance—La Cihuacoatl, Leyenda de la Llorona! Friends, there was a beautiful woman, Xochitl, who married El Conquistador and together they had two beautiful niños. But then—tragedy!,” Acalan said. “Beautiful Xochitl sees her beloved Conquistador with another woman. Filled with rage, she drowned the babies. Consumed by guilt, she then drowned herself, and now she is cursed to roam this earth until she finds the souls of the lost niños. Perhaps, friend, will we see the children? — Or perhaps, you will hear the infinite sacrificial wails of a mother’s grief.”

He then shared the history of Xochimilco, which he said meant "flower field" in the Nahuatl language.

“These canals are all of what is left of what used to be a vast lake and canal system that extended over most parts of the Valley of Mexico. However, the interconnected lakes of the valley were drained during colonization. The lakes have now been reduced to small canals that connect Xochimilco with the center of the city,” Acalan paused, taking a sip from a plastic water bottle. “And today, my friends? Each year, the water? There is less and less water each year, because the people, they are…”

“Insatiable,” said the boat driver.

“Yes, we people are insatiable, my friends,” Acalan said. “Much like nuestro amigo, el axolotl, which once filled this beautiful lake.”

Acalan extended his right hand toward the boat driver who then opened a compartment near the steering wheel, removing a laminated sheet of paper. Acalan flipped the plastic sheet toward us, revealing a photograph of a baby-pink axolotl floating in a small tank. The salamander stared back at the passengers, grinning like an authentic, Worcester-made smiley face.

“This small, small salamander is said to be the incarnation of Xolotl, the god of fire and lightning, y un psicopompo—a soul-guide for the dead to the afterworld, más allá,” Acalan said as he handed the laminated photograph to a young man sitting in the front row with his wife and children, who then passed it to the family behind them. “Xochimilco was once brimming with our small friends but today, there are as few as fifty axolotl living in the wild as their home is polluted and developed by humans. But many live in captivity, kept as pets or deep fried and served as delicacies as far away as Okinawa.”

The laminated photograph circulated throughout the boat, reaching me last in the back row. The salamander’s head was like a soft-boiled egg surrounded by a laurel of pink rose petal-shaped gills. The head was fixed to its slender body with a translucent tail, creating the illusion that the creature was evaporating before my eyes. But the face—that was what I became fixated on. It was not that it was the face of a human being, but it was close enough for me to sense a sort of kinship with the axolotl. The eyes were blue-black beads suspended over a small, subtly upturned mouth, creating a facial expression that was warm but otherwise vacant.

“Our friend the axolotl is famous, famous for its very special, strange power. Imagine, friends: a world that is not too warm, not too cold, no poisons, only paradise on earth for our little friends. The scientists discovered that, in good conditions, the creature will never fully grow up, much like our beloved Peter Pan.”

“God already gave us His greatest gift, what more could we want?,” the driver muttered.

“But friends, the power of the axolotl does not stop there,” Acalan said, grinning as he grabbed a small insulated cooler. With his index finger, he propped up the plastic lid of the container and reached in with the other hand. The hand resurfaced, revealing two edible replicas of the axolotl, one pink and one black, molded out of marzipan and chocolate. Acalan held the pink candy salamander in front of his face.

He opened his skeletal mouth and tore off the left arm of the model, smiling at the sweet taste. “You see, healers discovered the axolotls' special, special power. The creature that stays young forever can also regenerate itself when they are hurt. In fact, axolotls are known caníbales, eating and eating one another in captivity. Imagine, a few weeks from now, another little arm will sprout like a flower right here, right where I have taken my bite. And if you like, you can have a bite for 40 pesos, all proceeds toward the conservation of great Xochimilco!”

“I’ll take one,” I said, raising my hand. “Though, I was wondering—you said the juvenile axolotls can regenerate themselves… But what about the ones who don’t stay young forever, the ones exposed to harsh conditions or predators, you know? What happens to them if they are hurt—or cannibalized?”

“Good question,,” Acalan smiled, stepping toward me with his bag of axolotl-shaped dulces. “They too are resilient, but the cost they pay for learning to survive the harshness of the world is that they cannot heal as quickly or fully as their young little friends.”

“So, do the young ones nibble on each other, then? To save their friends?” I asked again.

“Don’t you see? The axolotl is simply a beast, just like you and me, and everyone else on this little boat, and on this big, big planet,” said the driver, turning back to face the passengers for the first time since the ship left the shore, his square face warming with passion as he spoke. “Beasts do not worry about the suffering of others, they are only concerned with hunger. Life is insatiable and doomed because of it.”

“Hey, Juanito!” Acalan whipped his head back, snapping his fingers at the driver. He let out a sharp, audible sigh and turned back to face me, grinning through his makeup. “No, mija, the axolotl does not know to spare its friends. How sad! But we are in luck: the scientists keep the axolotl in captivity, creating a perfect environment for them to flourish forever, out of harm's way. Now, which axolotl would you like today, huh?”

I stared back at him, then my eyes drifted down to the twin candy-on-a-stick animals he held in either hand. On the left, a cotton candy pink marzipan axolotl, the forever young, completed with little hard candy gills jutting from the neck. On the right, a humble salamander made of cayenne-seasoned dark chocolate without gills, just like the transformed axolotls in the wild.

“I’ll take the chocolate one,” I said, swallowing hard.

“Excellent choice,” Acalan grinned, handing me the candy. “Enjoy it—and the rest of your ride aboard the Fountain of Youth.”

Acalan explained the rest of the itinerary for the evening, our final destination an old churchyard cemetery on the other side of the lake. The fog swayed like grass as the vessel carried us away over the black water, bringing us one step closer to our visit with the dead, a vision of what is to come, the dark, final culmination of our desires at the end of time.