The knife guy’s whistling. So is the sweet potato guy. It’s a different whistle, though. The knife guy blows a dry, shrill note, air whining through rust. But the potato guy is spitting steam up an iron pipe. He’ll cook-blow-whistle until late when the bars pretend to close. They both travel by bicycle, pitching noise through the night. But nobody’s buying these days.

The neighborhood is like that. Full of market noise—potatoes, knives, gas, water. Each a cipher for something salable. Except the noises that aren’t. Like the dogs. There’s a young lady that collects them. I hear she left her family in Tuxtla and replaced them with strays. In the first week of every month, she shelters a new dog. Some unwashed beggar-mutt buttoned with tumors and long belly nipples. She feeds it, cleans it, puts it with the others. They get along. But sometimes at night they don’t. And the whole neighborhood, which sometimes can feel like the whole city, hears it. A doggy brawl amongst new friends, a raw orchestra of gnashing yelps and yaps.

The dog fight never lasts more than a minute. The owner soothes them into cooperation or maybe just tolerance, and the neighborhood pretends to sleep again.

So that’s it. Whistles and dogs. And airplanes. All night there are airplanes, bursting to and from in aerial tides. This city is a destination. But not this neighborhood. The planes never touch down here. Its passengers never travel here. I hope it stays that way. And I don’t.

Planes, whistles, and the young lady’s strays.

And the older lady, Yessi, who yells at the strays.

¡Dejen esos perros en paz! ¡Ya!¡Pinche gente! ¡Déjenlos!

And yells at the airplanes.

¡Pinches aves! ¡Déjennos abajo en paz! ¡Ya!

Yessi also lives alone, but on Sundays her daughter visits. I watch them from my oasis, my rooftop garden. I see them through their wide apartment windows, cooking together, washing together, hanging laundry on a line from wall to wall in the bright kitchen. On those nights, the mother never yells.

On those nights it’s quiet. Quiet enough that my thoughts don’t shout their way out of me or get mixed up with the world’s clatter. Instead I can sit on my rooftop garden and listen. I can hear water thread the holes of my watering can. I can sit and hear my plants grow. On those nights, it’s quiet enough that animals brave my company. Like the cacomistle. It comes for my lime tree, which grows from the neighbor’s yard, but its crown reaches into my rooftop garden, like a handshake over a fence. The caco comes for the limes, and when the limes stop blooming and the last pieces begin to crimp and yellow on the branch, then I set out a bowl of wrinkled apples. Because I like the caco. It’s not a screeching pipe or Yessi screaming at planes. It’s not a dog fight or a racoon scattering my garbage. It’s a lime-lover like me. Like a cat but wilder. At night it makes a sound, too. Not a shrill whistle or a yelp, but more like a single note, a baby’s squeal, a quick pitch of delight I can hear through my open window.

It’s cuter than a cat. Except it eats cats. Kittens.

I heard the kittens being born one morning on the rooftop between my garden and Yessi’s big window. The mother made no noise. It was a silent birth until the kittens poked through.  There were four of them, singing those first soft peeps of life. All chirps and whistles and little beeps. The mother wasted no time; she started them on life right away. She fed them, and then the next morning she leapt from ledge to ledge, back and forth, an exhibition. Training.

My roommate Berto went into the alley below our garden. He opened his arms to form a net. He was ready to catch the kittens if they fell. One did. Berto brought it back up. It fit in the crook of his bent elbow. He delivered the kitten to the mom, and it tried again. This time it didn’t fall. We drank beer and watched and listened.

There were four of them. Then the next day there were two and then one. Berto and his boyfriend argued about what happened. The neighbors had theories too. A hawk. Early independence. A rooftop plunge. A pinche taquero. But my theory wasn’t theory but truth.

It was the caco. For a week the caco ignored the last harvest of limes and then the bowl of apples I put out. For a week I heard its high trumpeting squeal of good feeling. The caco was belly-drunk on catmeal. I found fur by a pot of impatiens in my garden. Fur soft like leaves of lamb’s ear. The surviving kitten was cute as hell, though. And tough. We called her Durita. She grew up quick, and now she’s too big to be prey.

It’s tough for a cat on Mexico City rooftops. But she made it, and when the mother left for some better neighborhood, Durita stayed, and now the caco and the big kitten share my rooftop. I can’t call them friends because they’re not friendly, but they don’t fight either. The caco eats the fruit and the cat eats my tortillas after they harden. And she licks the grease drippings from the grill when we have barbecues at night. On these nights Berto invites his friends and we drink and dance on the rooftop, and we all stop listening to the noises of the city but make our own noise instead. We play music too loud until Yessi yells at us as if we’re airplanes or dogs. We yell back OK, we’ll turn it down, but we don’t listen. We turn it down two clicks and then sing louder over it, and this goes on until Berto and his man fight. And it’s not the volume but the stridency that drives their friends away, contempt being louder than men’s hiss and hail. Everyone shuffles out while Berto and his man slam words between my plants. I turn the music off and leave them in the garden.

And then I miss being alone on my rooftop. I miss the whistles and the dogs that fight for a minute and then rest, and I miss the airplanes because all of that is a song. But two men fighting over love-rot is not a song. It’s the sound of cotton tearing. They have to stop pulling to mend it. But they don’t.

And I lied earlier. Because sometimes Yessi and her daughter fight on Sundays, too. On those nights Yessi yells louder at the dogs.

¡Dejen esos perros en paz! ¡Déjenlos morir tranquilos!

On those nights I remember when the daughter knocked on my door and told me a story: her grandfather owned the apartment where Yessi lives and was raised. The apartment used to be musical with song and happy rage. Yessi would follow her father marching through rooms, banging pots and bawling in uproar about the news, about the president, about the deep and natural unfairness of life. The father liked to give noise to this unfairness and open the wide kitchen window and shout beyond from it, porfa, el pinche poder, deja al pueblo en paz. And then one day, he marched in happy rage to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, where the sound of government bullets never officially rang out, from where the only part of him that returned was a silence that helped raise Yessi.

Yessi’s daughter embraced me after the story. And when she held me, I could feel her dead grandfather banging pots through her bones. Now when I see her doing her mother’s laundry, I wave, and I imagine the house as it once was, full of noise, and I hear the distance between us lift, the way a breeze lifts through ash leaves. I consider the distance, its noise, and I measure it in my mind. I measure all of the distances, and somewhere in their sum, I feel a great wave of intimacy spinning through seasons. Can it be calculated? Can the noise reduce that distance? Connect us with an invisible web of zooming threads? Or will it wash through me like a wave, make me suffer it in tides, spin me loose from its axis?

And so when Yessi yells at the dogs and sky, I think about this. She brings the sky closer. She teaches me that aging mothers are daughters, too. If your father is gone, even if he raised you, like he raised me, then you are always your father’s girl, even when you’re not. And you can be two things at once. It is and it isn’t. Like everything else. But that doesn’t make it easy, to be anyone, to be a daughter or a mother or both, to be a caco or a kitten, and it certainly doesn’t make it easy to be alone screaming at planes. So I try not to bristle. Her screaming isn’t noise. It’s part of the song. I hear her as young—her father’s daughter, booming at the babel he’s still making above—singing rage between here and there. It makes more sense that way. Noise, songs, love, anger, all pooling together on the rooftop.

And then inside the house. There are sounds there, too. The washing machine. The hum of the refrigerator, the buzz of the internet modem, the hiss of the water heater. This is not the world. And that’s why I stay on the rooftop most hours, where, if I listen carefully enough, I can hear the hibiscus blossoms unfurl and the tendons of red sunflowers stretch toward new light. And that’s why sometimes I fall asleep in my chair listening to my choir of plants. But I can’t always. Not in the wet season, which is half the year. Then I have to sleep downstairs and inside the house with all the trapped hummings of electric things, ungrown and ungrowing.

On those nights I hear Berto and his man fighting in the bedroom. His man who is a musician, who plays guitar the way I want all men to play guitar—softly, the little gurglings of inner truths slipping loose in a tune. We keep a small travel guitar for him on a hook in the living room, and sometimes he brings it to the rooftop to play after a fight, and I pretend he’s giving a concert to my plants, and to me it sounds like this:

Djent djent give me your time djent djent pero no me des todo djent djent

But the guitar always goes back on the hook and the fighting continues. I hear Berto slur his man, and I hear the bedroom door slam shut. And then the front door. He’s gone. Maybe to his mother’s quiet house north of the park. Maybe to his ex-boyfriend’s studio. He’s gone for the night, his absence louder than his rage.

That’s when I hear footsteps. And that’s when I hear the soft knuckles tap my bedroom door. And that’s when I open the door and let him in. Sometimes we like who we like—gay, straight, men, women, neighbors, animals, and we can’t explain it, but we hear it, in a song, or a note, quiet, but never silent. I heard it. I hear it. But Berto didn’t and doesn’t, and that’s why he isn’t listening when his man plays guitar.

And I’m telling you this so you know that I’m not a passive bystander in this story. I’m not a static object just sitting and observing. We all hear things. And we all choose what noises we let in and keep out. I try to keep open, keep the ears yawning, let it all in. But the truth is that it’s lonely. It’s lonely being wide open on a rooftop garden with the songbook of a city world landing inside you. It can feel like no one else hears what you hear, except the caco, the caco that doesn’t make words but eats apples and new kittens.

So sometimes, even though it’s wrong, being open means opening the door when someone else’s boyfriend knocks on it. We are we who we are. And who we aren’t. I know this because I listen to the salesmen’s whistles, and the airplanes and the dogs and the daughters, and the ripping and the mending, and I hear it coming, and I don’t close the window or the door on it. Not in this city, in this neighborhood. Here, I listen.