Ikal.

This tote bag of Ikal has two fixed destinations that repeat every week, and neither of them is the supermarket. The first is the Cuemanco dock in the southern outskirts of Mexico City, where don Elías — a wholesale vendor, seventy-four years old (seventy-four, not "seventy-something": seventy-four exactly) — has been holding stand twelve for Ikal since he was seventeen. Don Elías calls him *morrillo* — never Ikal, never kid —, buys the vegetables from the field, and pays in cash on Tuesdays and with some delay on Saturdays, because that's how he's run the stand his whole life and nobody's changing it at this point.

On Tuesdays and Saturdays, then, Ikal loads the bag with whatever the land has given that week: small crates of watercress in spring, purslane in the warmer months, the occasional bundle of squash flowers when it's the season, and sometimes lamb's quarters he doesn't even bother to weigh beforehand. The fabric holds the weight. Don Elías asks about the canal work, about the neighbor, about the water. Ikal answers briefly. Loads up, gets paid, says goodbye.

The second destination of the bag is harder to explain, so it's worth telling. Inside, alongside the crates, Ikal usually carries a padded envelope, a small sketchbook, and his phone. The envelope travels to a post office box near the dock, and from there crosses the entire Atlantic: the recipient is [Mansa](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/mansa/), an elephant working in a veterinary hospital in Maun, Botswana, about thirteen thousand kilometers from Xochimilco.

Mansa and Ikal write to each other every two or three weeks by email, but sometimes also by physical mail. They met through an institutional wildlife conservation exchange that put them in contact, and since then have maintained a strange correspondence: she sends him blue ballpoint drawings of rare birds she sees near the Okavango delta; he sends her photos of the canals and the occasional plant he can't identify. They communicate in broken English and worse Spanish, and the friendship works partly because there are thirteen thousand kilometers between them and neither feels watched. If there's curiosity about her, Mansa's biography tells her side.

The bag becomes an involuntary bridge between the two routines. Inside it go watercress that will never reach Botswana, and letters that won't be traded for anything at Cuemanco. They travel together on Tuesday mornings, separated only by the sketchbook.