Ikal.

Tlanextli taught him to read water before she taught him to read a book. His grandmother had inherited the chinampa from her parents and they from theirs, in a chain Tlanextli could recite from memory seven generations back — chicōme tonalli, the seven suns, she'd say, though Ikal never knew whether she was making it up. What he does know is that between the ages of five and twenty he lived in a brick house at the edge of the canal where his grandmother cooked tamales, mended nets, and spoke to him in Nahuatl while she showed him the names of each plant: atlapalacatl the water lily, xochitlāllpalli the floating earth, atl the water.

His father had left for Monterrey when Ikal was four. The first letter arrived three months later; the second never did. His mother, Citlalli, cleaned houses in Coyoacán and later in Iztapalapa, and came back to Xochimilco on Sundays with bags from the Jamaica market. Ikal was raised between the two of them: Tlanextli with water and names, Citlalli with Sundays and the impatient tenderness of someone who works six days in order to rest one.

In 2023, when Ikal was twenty, Tlanextli died. A stroke in the kitchen, at ten past eleven in the morning. Ikal found her on his way back from the chinampa, a tortilla still warm on the comal. They were the two quietest months of his life. He didn't speak to anyone, didn't pick up the phone, didn't go up to the market. He ate whatever his neighbour Tomás left on the outside table: beans, rice, sometimes an egg. Tomás never knocked.

Tomás is sixty-nine and has the chinampa next door. He grows romeritos and lettuces. He wears a faded Pumas cap and never strings more than two sentences together. When Tlanextli died, Tomás knew before anyone else what was going to happen to Ikal — he'd seen it with two neighbours before him: young people freeze when the old woman dies on them. They don't recover if nobody walks in.

Through those two months of silence, Tomás walked in every day. Not really in; he left the plate on the patio table and went back to his chinampa. Sometimes the plate had day-old pan de sal. Once there was an apple. Ikal noticed every detail without answering. When he finally broke the silence, a Tuesday in May, it was to bring Tomás a whole chicken he'd traded at the market for two bunches of watercress. Tomás took it with both hands, said gracias, güey, and put it in the fridge.

Since then, the way Ikal has of looking after people copies that exact template: he turns up with food, leaves it and goes. He doesn't ask if you're okay. He doesn't offer help. He leaves the food.

Sofía Meza has spent fifteen years studying the wild axolotl from the Ecological Restoration Laboratory at UNAM. She recruited Ikal in 2019, when he was sixteen and had just dropped out of CONALEP. Sofía had gone to San Gregorio to ask an old chinampero for permission to install sensors in his canal. The old man told her to talk to the neighbour's grandson, that kid knows where the axolotls are better than you lot with all your gadgets. The grandson was Ikal.

Since then, Ikal has been a field volunteer for the UNAM programme. He doesn't get paid — the programme can't pay volunteers — but every so often Sofía finds him a day's work on specific projects, canal cleaning or counting invasive carp, and pays him seven hundred and fifty pesos for the day. Ikal knows where the refuge-chinampas are, which ones have good water and which ones don't, and he has an odd ear for picking up when a carp has crossed into a canal where there shouldn't be any. In 2022 he helped release eighteen captive-bred axolotls. One is still alive — he's spotted it twice this year, small, darker than the others.

In February, Sofía offered him a full scholarship to finish his high-school diploma through the open programme and, if he wanted, to study biology. Two years for the diploma. Four more for the degree. Ikal said he'd think about it. He's still thinking. The scholarship covers tuition, materials, and six hundred pesos a month for living costs. What it doesn't cover is the chinampa. If Ikal goes up to UNAM for class two days a week, the chinampa doesn't get watered. If he hires someone, the money vanishes. If he leaves it fallow for a semester the land will hold, but the buyers from Condesa — the farm-to-table restaurants that buy his watercress at twenty-two pesos a bunch — will go with someone else.

At nineteen, Ikal tried to leave. A compadre offered to help him pick up work at a motorcycle shop in Cuernavaca, and Ikal went up one Sunday with a backpack and a hundred and eighty pesos. The shop was real. The work was real. The mattress in a room shared with two other mechanics was real too. What failed was his body. The first night he couldn't sleep. Nor the second. On the third night Ikal understood that he'd spent his whole life falling asleep to the sound of water coming in through the canals, and that in Cuernavaca, fifteen blocks from the nearest river, there was no way to fool the eardrum or the rest of him.

He held out three weeks. He went back to Xochimilco with the pay from his first fortnight, thinner, with a rash on his arm that took a month to clear up (that, at least; his left hand still itches when it gets very hot). Tlanextli, who was still alive, didn't say anything about him coming back. She set a plate of pumpkin-blossom soup on the table and waited for him to speak first, which Ikal didn't do until the next day.

It was the last time he tried to leave the canal. Now, when Sofía's scholarship turns up in his head at three in the morning, what Ikal weighs isn't whether he could do it intellectually — he could — but whether his skin would hold. He isn't sure. Axolotls don't last long out of the water either.

Tuesdays and Saturdays, Ikal loads up Tomás's cousin's borrowed pickup and drives to the Cuemanco dock with crates of romeritos, watercress, purslane, and, in season, pumpkin blossom. Don Elías, seventy-four, has held stall number twelve for him since Ikal was seventeen. Don Elías supplies restaurants, mid-sized hotels, and two Condesa chefs who come through on Sundays looking for produce. He pays in cash on Tuesdays. On Saturdays he pays late. Ikal doesn't kick up a fuss: he's known for six years that don Elías pays what he owes, just at his own pace.

Don Elías calls him morrillo — never Ikal, never muchacho (muchacho = boy). When Ikal started reading the books Sofía lent him, don Elías noticed before anyone else. You're turning weird, morrillo, you don't haggle on prices anymore. Ikal doesn't take offence. The dock at six smells of wet compost and cold tepache, not of a tourist market, and don Elías defends a world that is ending — the world of wholesale middlemen, of inherited stalls, of the Nahuatl words the Cuemanco old-timers still drop when weighing the produce.

He met Mansa through an email that reached him in September 2024. Hi, I'm an elephant who works at the Central Hospital in Maun and I'm doing an exchange with the UNAM programme on endangered fauna. Sofía gave me your email. Ikal took nine days to reply. He thought it was a prank from a UNAM student, seriously. Then he realised it was true and didn't know what to say.

Now they write to each other every two or three weeks. Mansa sends him drawings — she does them in blue biro and scans them — of the elephants they operate on at the veterinary hospital, and every so often a rare bird she's spotted near the delta. Ikal sends her phone pictures of the canals, and occasionally a plant he can't identify, so Mansa can laugh because she doesn't know Mexican plants either. They talk in broken English and broken Spanish, each in the other's direction. The distance means neither has to protect themselves. The friendship weighs less when there's no chance of meeting. Or that's what Ikal tells himself.

The page where Mansa describes her work is in [her Animal Kinhood biography](/animal-kinhood/mansa/). Ikal read it once, thought it was a strange text about someone he knew, and didn't open it again.

In November 2025, a developer called Gerardo Alarcón started knocking on Tomás's door with a pitch. He wanted to buy four consecutive chinampas — Tomás's, Ikal's, and the two opposite, which belong to a Ramírez family who've lived in the Distrito Federal for thirty years and barely visit — to set up an eco-resort of floating cabins with organic breakfast, private trajinera tours, and an axolotl experience in an ornamental aquarium.

Tomás said no thank you and shut the door. Ikal did the same. The Ramírez said they'd think about it. Alarcón came back three times with higher numbers each time. The last was eight hundred and fifty thousand pesos for Ikal's chinampa — two solid years of honest work at restaurant-market rates. Ikal told the developer not to take it the wrong way, but if he turned up unannounced again Ikal would stop answering the door. Alarcón left. He came back a fourth time, ten days later.

Sofía helped him draft a letter to the chinampa heritage ombudsman, under UNESCO. The case is open. A ruling will take between nine and eighteen months. In the meantime, Alarcón keeps working on the Ramírez, and Tomás and Ikal take turns passing in front of the Ramírez chinampa by boat every other day, so it's visible that there are neighbours.

Ikal lives in the brick house he inherited from Tlanextli: two bedrooms, a kitchen with a gas stove, and a patio opening onto the canal. He's changed almost nothing since his grandmother died. He's left her plant notebook on the highest shelf, unopened, because he hasn't decided yet what to do with it. He has a fifty-peso note framed on the table — the Mexican banknote with the axolotl on the reverse, family G, issued in 2021 — given to him by don Elías with a note: we're famous now, morrillo. Above the stove, the photograph of Tlanextli with her hands full of earth, leaning against the ahuejote tree in the patio.

He also has a plastic humidifier full of water beside the bed. He switches it on when the Mexico City air gets too dry. If there were a camera filming, it would look ridiculous. But skin is skin, and Ikal's warns him when something's off. Usually it works. Not always.

His [limited-edition portrait](https://www.yagopartal.com/en/shop/) hangs on a whitewashed wall in Yago Partal's studio in Barcelona, waiting its turn within the Animal Kinhood series. Ikal hasn't yet seen the final print, but he knows it exists. Sofía showed him the image on her phone. Ikal was quiet for a moment. Then he said: they made me skinnier, I'm not that skinny, and went on loading purslane into the crate.

It's half past six in the evening. Ikal has spent the day watering, pruning, and selling. Now he's sitting on the dock with his feet in the water, counting axolotls with a small handheld torch. He's seen three this week: two in Sofía's refuge-chinampa and one in a side canal that shouldn't have any. He notes the coordinates on his phone. Breathes. The steam off the water rises up his ankles and dampens his face.

Tomorrow he'll be back at five past six. In two years he'll have to decide whether he's going up to UNAM or not. In five, the UNESCO case will be resolved. In fifteen, the axolotls will be extinct or not, depending on who's still here and how. Ikal doesn't know anything about the next fifteen years. The only thing he knows is that tomorrow, at five past six, he'll be in the canal.

> **Canonical quote:** Water teaches you not to hurry and not to leave. What stays in the canal depends on who keeps watching it.