The Bermuda-Triangle bookstore: I found you, sucka!

Last August, wandering aimlessly around Colonia Roma, I found a cute, hole-in-the-wall bookstore. About as big as a rich person's walk-in closet, it had shelves and piles stacked with used books, some ordered by subject, some by author, and some just a complete desmadre. Books in Mexico are expensive, even used ones, but the prices in this little jewel are so low that you get the urge to hurriedly grab every book with a pretty-looking cover or by an author you vaguely remember from literature class waybackwhen. I carried only 100 pesos that day, but left with a few English books (for my English classes) and a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Soon after that serendipitous encounter, I moved out of Roma neighborhood, and into the centrally located Juarez, and the bookstore became lost into the nowheres of my mind...

...until yesterday.

Well, I didn't -forget- about the bookstore itself, I just forgot -where- it was. You can't forget something like that. With the near-coma-inducing excitement, I didn't pay attention to which street it was on. Then in December I moved back to the Condesa neighborhood (next to the Roma) and looked for the bookstore several times, with no luck. I often get lost, even in my own neighborhood, among the labyrinth of streets – some of them changing names suddenly, some curving and merging and splitting and poorly labeled.

Yesterday, as I was on the bus back from work, I got the ganas to rediscover my precious. This time I was determined to find it. So I started on Aguascalientes street, walked down a few blocks, turned down the next street, then Actopan, Piedras Negras, Manzanillo, Nautla, Champotón, Tepic, Taxco…

Nope, I thought. Either I’m looking too late (8 p.m.) or the bookstore closed up shop, or it shrunk even more and has disappeared like the new iPod shuffle.

Exasperated, I decided to give it one more shot. I headed toward the Chilpancingo metro station, right on Baja California, assured that the bookstore wasn’t beyond that point. And, surprise, there it was, on a little side street that is sucked into Baja California.

I don’t have to explain how I felt, but this time there seemed to be double the amount of books packed in – with no room left on the shelves, they were now stacked high in perilous mountains, all of the knowledge ready to crush you if you breathed on it wrong.

I left the store with no books, only with the pure excitement that I had found this sucka, that it hadn’t become lost, like so many Mexican small businesses do, in the Bermuda Triangle.