“Notes on Jacaranda Season” by Evelyn Fok
It is always a wonder: an extravagance of blossoms emerging overnight, the shade of lilac — not quite violet but a gentler pastel — so rarely encountered in nature, gracing the intervals of leafy avenues. A gentle surprise. You step out one cool morning to be greeted by their fully-dressed splendour, and that is when you know the interminable, tepid winter has finally ended, and there will be no more evenings spent bundled up in sweaters indoors: spring has arrived in Mexico City.
*
It happened to be a Jehovah’s Witness who first taught me about them, gave a name to the awe I was learning to experience. It had been my first spring in Mexico, and I was still very much friendless, clueless. The amiable stranger found me nibbling on a tlacoyo alone at the market, sitting under one of the great flowering trees. She had moved here from Germany to join the Witnesses, she told me, and had fallen in love with the jacarandas that bloom across town this time of the year. Jacarandas, I repeated after her, feeling the word gently unfurl from my palate to rest against my teeth, a sensation that stayed with me long after she stopped appearing at the market.
*
The city contains many urban legends, including that of Tatsugoro Matsumoto, a landscape architect who had designed for Japan’s Imperial Palace before venturing to Mexico at the end of the 19th century, one of the first Japanese immigrants to arrive out of free will. He served a succession of presidents before and after the Mexican Revolution, years that saw the nation’s capital rapidly expanded upon and redefined as a metropolis. When president Pascual Ortiz Rubio visited Washington, D.C., in 1930, he returned demanding that cherry blossoms be planted across Mexico City, too, a request incompatible with the local climate. Señor Matsumoto proposed to line the streets with the Amazonian jacaranda instead; almost a century later, they are still bewitched by his efforts each spring.
Sheaths of downturned blooms hang from trees that soar 10 to 15 metres tall, nodding lightly in the spring breeze. Along Avenida Reforma, dotted around the Castillo de Chapultepec whose gardens Matsumoto had also tended, sprouting alongside the monuments in centro histórico, popping up across the verdant streets of Roma and Condesa and the running currents of Instagram feeds. A pleasing shock of purple, an inviting respite.
*
Looking for a new place to live, I come upon an apartment listing. It goes duly through the basics: size, floor, number of rooms, age of building, years since last renovation. On the last line, a winning flourish that justifies the price: the view of a jacaranda tree.
The day I move in, an unusually warm day for mid-February, I drift towards the window and there it is: a lone spray of purple, at eye level just a few feet away, waving in the air as if to say welcome.
*
It is our hanami, our equivalent of Japan’s cherry blossom season, my physiotherapist tells me. We chat often about my move here from Tokyo; he is planning to visit this year. But it is happening earlier and earlier every year, he adds.
I had first moved to Japan at the tail end of cherry blossom season, when the only vision that remained was sakura-fubuki, baby-pink petals fluttering to the ground like snow. My new friends had bemoaned the fact: what a pity, you just missed it, the most beautiful time of the year.
Later I repeated the lament to an older Japanese colleague, a solemn man in his late fifties.
It’s called wabi-sabi, he tossed at me without looking up from his papers. It is important for you to learn here: beauty is brief. And it will come back.
Not long after, the company we worked for ceased operations, and I was made to leave the country before experiencing a full hanami. Here in Mexico City, I see the first blossoms out the window and a countdown starts going off in my head. I have only a couple of weeks to enjoy this proliferation of beauty, a month if I’m lucky. I place a chair by the window, spend my days watching the branches burst into mauve clusters of flowers. I can already envision their impending end, the bare branches those pretty posies will leave behind.
*
A coworker who had grown up in the old-money suburbs tells me that his mother plants a new jacaranda in their garden every year. They bloom at different times according to their age, he says; this way the family can enjoy jacaranda season for a little longer. It is an exercise in patience: it can take years, even a decade, for the first flowers to appear.
My downstairs neighbour, who has lived in the building for decades, rings for a visit. Upon entering, she sighs at the proffering of abundance against the glass. You get the best view up here, she says; from her apartment she can only see the supporting trunks.
What had entitled me to this embarrassment of riches? I want to tell her I am here to watch it flower and fall year after year, that this is simply my first charmed season of many to come. I am here to earn my keep, I want to tell her, but my still-faltering grasp of the language fails me.
*
Spring in Mexico City is the hottest, driest time of the year, when the city is at its most polluted, its noses most prone to allergies. The magnificent flowering across the city is the only consolation, an undeserved joy after its mild winters. On the days when a rare wind enters the Anahuac Valley and lifts off a layer of smog, I pause on every other block to watch the avalanche of petals raining from the trees, gathering into a carpet of pastel graffiti. I lower myself to the pavement: the flowers fall intact, a mass of thin, bell-shaped skirts, mischievous flares on the hems.
I take a photo on my phone, share it for the world to see. When I turn around there is an old woman sitting on the stoop, wearing a sunhat, glaring in my direction.
*
I am torn reluctantly from my reverie only when I am obliged to be in the office, three days a week. During a break I sit by the window, watching the building across the street being boarded up. Workers wearing neon vests march around the block, carrying metal fences and orange barricades.
It is a beautiful neoclassical complex at least a century old, home to a minor government department, perhaps the last historical structure standing in the business district. Despite its central location it has always been unusually quiet, a stately oasis. From this height I see for once that its courtyard is crowded with jacarandas too, half in arrival or half departed — from this distance it is not possible to tell.
The coworker next to me notices what I’m looking at. Such a shame, isn’t it, he says.
The construction? The jacarandas?
The use of the land! Imagine the real estate value it is sitting on. They better be tearing it down now.
What would you have rather built on it? I ask.
A building like this! He gestures to the floor we are standing on, dozens of storeys supported by glass and steel and concrete, the latest to be constructed in a parade of gleaming super-talls. His sneakers shine immaculate white against the grey carpet. Unlike the jacaranda-garden colleague, this one had been raised in one of the gated communities of the newly moneyed.
I say nothing. The construction workers below meander towards the purpling courtyard to take a rest from the midday sun, a scene from a Mexico City of another era.
Of course, I am just speaking as a capitalist, the coworker says now, solicitously. How about you, what would you build on it?
*
A lone bud, freshly fallen across the concrete ledge of my window, inches from my feet. A bee wanders about its length for a minute, then burrows its fuzzy collar into the delicately pinched waistline, where the soft billowing begins.
*
In the beginning of this essay I describe the jacarandas as always a wonder, but what do I know? I have been witness to only a handful of flowering seasons, too few to divine rhythm from idiosyncrasy, to tell the cycling of the seasons from the inevitable pace of change. How many trees have been unearthed over the course of the century in the name of development? How many are presently being planted, and to what ends?
How naïve, and how selfish, would it be, to wish that the dignified complex across the street, already blessed with such providence amidst relentless renewal and destruction, will retain its place. That come this time next year I will be able to gaze upon its glory from my glass-and-steel office once more, still longing to be outside with the flowers, if only briefly.
Evelyn Fok is from Hong Kong and lives in Mexico City. Her work has been published in Aeon, Electric Literature, Spittoon, and Hinterland, among others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is currently working on a novel.