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I made my way haphazardly to the Plaza Garibaldi and the sensational complex of markets beyond; I walked through a covered gallery of fibreglass and plaster brides with fulsome lashes and scary lips, lavishly hobbled in a profusion of synthetic ruffles and mantillas and petticoats and trains; a dreamily Freudian experience to saunter, lemon icecream in hand through corridors of expectantly immobile brides.

Exhausted I get into a cab with a nice man listening to a radio talk about the importance of living calmly and at peace with oneself. "Ah, esto es cierto" he said beatifically as he battled his way at tremendous speed into a space surely smaller than his cab, joining the phalanx of VWs charioteering triumphantly down Reforma.

My last day in Mexico City. Finally to Las Bellas Artes where I was struck with the most wonderful picture by Diego Rivera: EL HOMBRE CONTROLAR DEL UNIVERSO. Marxist science and philosophy, Hegelian destiny made graphic; I have never seen such an exciting envisionment of a political philosophy; it is enough to make one a Marxist-Leninist.

Rivera and indeed all twentieth century Mexican painting gave me a sudden revelation. (In the Museum of Modern Art I suddenly have a vision of what European art might have been if it had not, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century (with impressionism) or the first few decades of the twentieth (the formalist, abstract, and conceptual routes we know) been hijacked away from the representational. For here was an alternative art history that Europe might equally have had; representational art had been by no means exhausted by 1900. Here was how it could have continued.)

From the Bellas Artes up the Latino Americano Tower. The Sears Tower in Chicago is a meaningless experience, too much like the experience of flight. The Latino Americano Tower is firmly rooted in the ground, (or not so firmly, a fact you are reminded of in every lift by the notices that tell you what to do in the case of TEMBLOR.) The interior is of a pleasantly antiquated modernity. (and there is always a pathos in the once oh-so-modern.) From the observation floor Mexico City dwindles away in each direction apparently to the horizon. The glittering of the traffic down the EJE Central like a necklace, a special bronzy glitter that I think may come from the special light of a thousand tinted windscreens.

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