The ballistics of poorly poured milk in the morning: ah, what a mess.
These sounds wake me up in Etla:
Dogs barking so continuously they’ve rendered themselves white noise.
The morning announcements screamed breathlessly into a microphone by a man apparently unaware that microphones amplify the voice, thereby making yelling unnecessary.
Roosters, or perhaps a single rooster, crowing again and again. And again and again and again. And again. Si, señor gallo, entendemos: the sun really is up.
Somewhere far off: a burro. Poor little creature, his bray sounds like it requires a magnificent effort to force from his lungs only to emerge fractured, muffled and generally unsuitable for truly conveying his message.
The melodious note of a cow, which, in contrast to the poor burro’s desperate wheeze, carries sweetly as a song across the hilly campo.
And finally, my favorite: the morning marching band, a whole village away, yet resonating off the mountains and out across the valley. Those sensual serenaders are a band consisting only of of bugles, of which exactly none of them actually know how to play. But God bless their little hearts (and astonishingly strong lungs!), that doesn’t prevent a single one of them from welcoming us all to dawn with a fabulous cascade of false starts, wrong notes, flat deliveries, cracking breaks, and generally discordant accompaniments. And bless them twice over for practicing this subtle and difficult instrument in so public of a way for the better part of an hour from 7 to 8 am.
There is, in fact, one other sound worth mentioning (besides the growing chorus of birds) that has woken me up today: it is a human voice originating also in the next village over, yelling angrily at the buglers each time they stop to take a breath of air. I can’t quite make out what this voice is yelling, but it kind of sounds like, “Shut the fuck up, we’re trying to sleep!”
Rocio’s Place
San Augustine Etla, Oaxaca
Mexico
8 am
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