Ikal.

At nineteen, Ikal went up to Cuernavaca with a backpack and one hundred and eighty pesos. One hundred and eighty. A friend had offered to help him get a foot in the door at a motorcycle workshop on the federal highway, and Ikal figured it was time to test whether he could sleep somewhere else. The workshop was real. The work was real. The mattress in a shared room with two other mechanics was real too.

What failed was the body. He couldn't sleep the first night. The second night either. By the third he started to understand that he'd spent his whole life falling asleep to the sound of water coming in through the canals and that fifteen blocks from the nearest river there was no way to fool the eardrum. He lasted three weeks. He came back with his first two-week paycheck, thinner, with an irritation on the skin of his arm that took a month to heal. He almost never talks about it. When someone asks if he'd leave Xochimilco, he says he already tried and that the skin has memory.

The backpack is carried by a young man who speaks slowly and mixes Mexican Spanish with three or four Nahuatl words he uses as working tools, not for show. *Atlapalacatl* is the water hyacinth that has to be cleared before it strangles the canal. *Xochitlāllpalli* is the floating earth that holds up the chinampa. *Atl* is water, plain — the kind that comes in and out of the canal without asking permission. He learned them by ear, repeating them while running a hand across a plant or through the mud, and he still uses them because they're the precise words for what he does every day.

Ikal doesn't explain the words to anyone who doesn't ask. If a restaurant customer in La Condesa wants him to tell the story while paying for the watercress, Ikal gives the price, takes the money, and leaves. The backpack carries his portrait, not his biography. Whoever recognizes the axolotl from the canal and connects it to the words that go with him will recognize the character. Whoever doesn't will take home a well-printed backpack with an unusual portrait, and that's fine.