Editors Dare to Use the L-word

TEACAPAN, SINALOA, MEXICO -- Every morning, except when there’s a beisbole game or he forgets, a small boy named Ulysses pokes the day’s Noroeste newspaper through the slot in my pedestrian gate and cheers, hozanna, hip hip hooray and the tiger, I can read all there is to be told about love. Love, love, sweet love.

It won’t be front page news but then few things are what we would call front page news here.

Page One of Noroeste is normally taken up with a speech made by the loudest politician to be found in the previous 24 hours. His words will relate to the sewage system, the “disappeareds” of decades past, the drug trade or shrimp fishing. If the Americans capture Omar Bin Laden, it probably won’t make Page One, even if it turns out he is hiding in Chiapas, as is rumored. This doesn’t matter. By the time Ulysses gets here I will already have read the world news in the Globe and Mail, New York Times or the Vancouver papers, thanks to Internet.

No, none of the above make me wait for Ulysses. It’s love I am waiting to read about and there is no one so frank, so open, so boundlessly enthusiastic about that subject as the social editor of Noroeste.

Next to finding Oberon, King of the fairies, dancing in your garden, these social pages are best.

Here I learn that Fernando and Consuela have agreed to “join their destinies.” Another couple were “invaded by love.” Yet another senorita “listened to the commands of her heart and accepted her suitor.”

“The most beautiful sentiment of which humanity is capable of feeling, love, united Lluvia Selena Hernandez Vargas and Mario Javier Blanco Vergara. This love, sky high, caused them this day to give their oaths to honor and to understand one another for the rest of their lives.” Is she going to understand for a whole lifetime why he can never remember to lift the toilet seat? Don’t ask. This is a wedding.

Another report: “Many changes come about in human life but there is none greater than to be loved. Alma Rosa Diaz Fajardo experienced this change and departed from her solitary life to change into a wife, companion and friend, in short, to begin a new path as the bride of Mario Betancourt.”

Wheeewh.

“Our Lord Jesus Christ was the special guest at a ceremony in which Elizabeth Madrada Freeman and Rigoberto Castaneda Alcantrara decided to unite their lives in the indissoluble bonds of matrimony.”

All the marriages here are forever, the newspaper says, and all the wives and husbands will love, honor and fight with one another for as long as they draw breath.

It might be noted here that the Mexican divorce rate is climbing to meet ours at the fifty per cent mark of all marriages. It might be noted` but in the Mexican papers it won’t be.

Perhaps what is so surprising is the wild, reckless use of the word love. It seldom appears in cold print in the northern newspapers. Editors there would question whether it’s in good taste to use it. They would be almost as likely to permit a shorter, sharper, Anglo Saxon word associated with the same processes, the f-word you once went to jail for using but which now is fairly common in the gringo press.

Not in Mexico. The suggestion that there might be physical aspects to love is never contemplated in the newspaper. Penetration, ejaculation and orgasms surely must occur in Mexico, as elsewhere, but we learn of that only indirectly by reports on these very same pages that this wife or that is “expecting a visit from the stork,” a tribute not only to modesty but also to the fact that this is the only region of the Western Hemisphere which has storks.

I live with the hope and faith that I shall read, some day, about a wife who is about to present her husband with a “proof of her affection” in the style of the Victorian Age ladies, but that hasn’t happened yet. Neither have I found the classic English report of a wedding in which “the marriage was consummated in the vestry.”

They’re worth watching for, every day, and the word will be brought by little Ulysses. At home in B.C. if I caught a Spring Salmon the size of Ulysses I would be obliged to throw him back, but here things are different.

March/02