One, two, three, thirty golden hats.

A wave of homologous signs invades the course, settling like foam on the side of the propylaea. An undertow of golden sunflowers looks in the opposite direction at the St. Alexander’s Fair. A multifaceted crowd approaches.

The passageway infiltrated by golden hats hides the discovery of a new arrival: las flores de pascua. This year they will hybridize Orobic Christmas. I watch the stop-and-go of the golden hats moving in unison. Concentrated to the max, they compose narrow columns of light in the morning fog. Christmas is coming to Bergamo, too.

It is December 12, 1888. I have just gotten up, while this spectacle is already being organized in the large avenue I observe from the window of my hotel room. Hypnotized by the repeated patterns, I feel a strange sensation.

My long journey has taken me to northern Europe, and now I am heading down south. I am here to revive the Aztec past. Although the Iglesia más conservadora fears lethal hybridization, an opposing ideological threat.

I left Mexico, from Belén, four months ago. The nomadic roots of las flores de pascua will soon cling to the soil of this continent as well. Phantom shadows of distant lives snag my hair, tugging at it, as I eat breakfast.

I step out into the street. The mist deposited between the columns of monuments shifts as I pass. And so do the golden hats, letting my past turn into the present of this city.

I entered the fair space to check that everything is working as planned. The next train is waiting for me and I must move quickly. The ticking of the clock punctuates my breathing.

“Sir, do you remember me?”
The priest’s white hand reaches toward me. I hint a cold smile.

“Of course, good morning. Nice to see you again.”

The red leaves of the plant that the Aztecs used as a medicine draw a pattern of blood reds behind it. When one of them breaks, it lets out a white milk-like slime. That liquid was smeared on the breasts of nursing mothers to increase their milk production.

I look at the man in front of me and imagine a trickle of that sticky liquid dripping onto his black suit, piercing its fabric and being absorbed into his skin.

What could Aztec ointment produce in him? What language did Franciscan missionaries stifle in the 16th century when they began using the indigenous flower to decorate nativity scenes? What idiom could be imposed on his beliefs to alter them?

As I think, several buyers, past the cordon of golden hats, buy the flowers that are spread out on the square as a patch of fluid color. The fluid in the leaves will find its way to re-emerge and hybridize the earth it is touching.

Here, too, my work is completed. Outside the closing fair space, golden hats are thinning into floating shapes. In the cold morning air, las flores de pascua are about to become poinsettias.

I take a leaf from these plants and let a few drops of its milk slip into my glass of water. I return in the direction from which I came, to my precise task, to the destiny that no one here can understand.

I will soon return to 2347, after the unforeseen integration of the old continent is finally grafted in. I have come so far to sow Aztec traces that will be reborn in the early 2000s and change the course of history.

One of the golden hats stops and stares at me uneasily as he opens the carriage door. He looks Indian. In his eyes a flash, a trace of recognition, of understanding.

Or maybe it’s just the illusion of fog distorting the morning shadows.