The book club doesn’t talk about books anymore now that we meet on Zoom. Jill and Lisa mention the solace they’re finding on the rooftops of their Mexico City apartment buildings, a momentary escape from four walls to be surrounded by sky and, until recently, the effusion of jacarandas in bloom. I too go to my rooftop, every night right around sunset. Jill wants to know if I’ve seen the roomful of Diego Rivera’s sunset paintings in the Dolores Olmedo museum. I have. There are twenty of these small, simply-framed gems arranged in an arc on a long wall. I often think of them right around 7:50 pm, the time when the sun that moves so imperceptibly across the sky all day picks up speed as it nears the horizon.
Layers upon layers of mountain line my westerly view, and somewhere beyond these ridges lies the lip of the Pacific Ocean. That’s where Diego watched his sunsets in 1957. He was broke and sick with cancer, on his fifth and last wife, living in an Acapulco beach house on loan from his patron Lola Olmedo. Painting until the end, recording every single sunset as if it were the last until it was.
