The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle
Read The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle Online
Authors: Francisco Goldman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #Travel
The Interior Circuit
A
LSO BY
F
RANCISCO
G
OLDMAN
Say Her Name
The Art of Political Murder
The Divine Husband
The Ordinary Seaman
The Long Night of White Chickens
The Interior Circuit
A Mexico City Chronicle
Francisco Goldman
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2014 by Francisco Goldman
Lines from “Circuito Interior,” page 1, by Efraín Huerta taken from
Poesía Completa de Efraín Huerta.
Copyright © 1988, Fondo de Cultura Económica. All rights reserved. México, DF.
Lines from
“Olor a plastico quemado
,” page 27, by
Roberto
Bolaño taken from
El Hijo De Míster Playa: Una Semblanza De Roberto Bolaño
by Mónica Maristain.
Copyright
© 2012, Almadía, Mexico. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Lines from “Manifiesto,” page 172, by Nicanor Parra reprinted with kind permission of Ediciones UDP, Chile.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or
[email protected]
.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2256-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-9263-9
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
For Jovi
Contents
The Interior Circuit: Summer of 2012
The Interior Circuit:
Summer of 2012
Amor se llama
el circuito, el corto, el cortísimo
circuito interior en que ardemos.
—Efraín Huerta, “Circuito Interior.”
1
1
“It’s called love, the circuit, the short, the very short, interior circuit in which we burn.”
1
The Student Driver
FROM
1998
TO
2003 I rented an apartment on Avenida Amsterdam in the Mexico City neighborhood La Condesa, dividing my time between there and Brooklyn, where I also had a rented apartment, sometimes spending at least most of the year in one city or the other, and sometimes, during especially hectic periods—teaching job, some other paying commitment up north, love interest in Mexico—moving between the two cities almost weekly. Avenida Amsterdam encircles lush Parque México and the narrow one-way avenue that rings it. On both sidewalks and down its median runs a stately procession of jacaranda, elm, ash, palm, rubber, and
trueno—
thunder—trees, among others. The median is a stone-paved walkway flanked by packed dirt where people exercise their dogs, by shrubbery and flower beds, and inside the curb at many intersections stand windowed shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the daytime the avenue is a canopied green tunnel from which you emerge into the Glorieta Citlaltépetl, a traffic roundabout with a fountain in the middle, as if into a sunny jungle clearing.
As Mexico City roundabouts go the Glorieta Citlaltépetl is a tranquil one, with only two streets feeding in and out, Amsterdam and Calle Citlaltépetl, the latter just a few blocks long, also with a tree-lined median. But during the rush hours even this circle gets hectic, as the Condesa fills with traffic, horns blaring and jabbing, cutting through the neighborhood to and from the major thoroughfares that border it. That’s when drivers circling the roundabout from the direction of Parque México and busy Avenida Nuevo León routinely invade Calle Citlaltépetl’s opposite traffic lane for a shortcut left onto Calle Culiacán, about thirty yards down. Whenever one car seizes an opening, making a break for that lane, others, speeding up, follow, in almost festively paraded outbursts of banal traffic delinquency. Many times, before it became automatic to look to my right before crossing, I had to hurl myself back onto the curb.
One late morning, ten or so years ago—the traffic, as usual at that hour, light—as I was walking across the Glorieta Citlaltépetl, I noticed a dark-colored Volkswagen Beetle going around and around it. Probably it was nothing more than that repeated circling that made me stop and watch. Or else maybe, for a moment, I semiconsciously wondered why a taxi—because back then, most of the VW Beetles you saw in Mexico City were taxis—would be going around and around as if the driver were lost in a manner that just circling the roundabout was unlikely to solve, or couldn’t find the exact address on the
glorieta
that his passenger was stubbornly insisting on, or else was running up the fare on a sleeping or passed-out passenger in this demented way. But I must have quickly noticed that it wasn’t a taxi. Lettering on the VW’s doors identified it as a driving school car. When it went past again I saw that the student driver, his instructor alongside in the passenger seat, was a silver-haired man with a mustache, well into his seventies at least, dressed in white shirt, tie, and suit jacket. The student driver sat erect behind the wheel, grasping it with both hands at ten and two o’clock, his posture, his protruding neck above the tie, giving an impression of elegant lankiness. My memory of his face seems vivid, except the face I recall exactly resembles that of Jed Clampett, the
Beverly Hillbillies
patriarch, though with a brown complexion. What, I wondered, had inspired this man to learn to drive at his age? His attire suggested that the driving lesson was a pretty momentous occasion for him, or maybe he was just that sort of old Mexican who never went out anywhere unless in suit and tie. I imagined the scene at his home earlier that morning when he was leaving for his lesson, an affectionate and proud send-off from his wife, or maybe an affectionately teasing or ironic one. Or maybe he lived with a daughter. Or maybe it was one of those inertia-defying widowerhood decisions, that he would finally learn to drive, which is almost precisely what, in the summer of 2012, it would be for me. July 25 would mark the fifth anniversary of my wife Aura Estrada’s death. Aura died in Mexico City, in the Ángeles de Pedregal hospital in the city’s south, twenty-four hours after severely breaking her spine while bodysurfing at Mazunte, on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. She was thirty years old, and we’d been married a month short of two years.
Unlike the elderly man circling the
glorieta,
I wasn’t a beginning driver. I did know how to drive, but I didn’t know how to drive in Mexico City, where I mostly depended on taxis and public transportation to get around. I could count on one hand the numbers of times I’d tried to drive there, though I’d been living in the Distrito Federal, the DF, as the city is formally but also popularly called, off and on for twenty years. The DF has a population of about eight million, but during weekdays, with so many commuters pouring in from surrounding metropolitan México State to work, the number swells to twenty million. The seemingly anarchic chaos and confusion of the city’s traffic had always intimidated and even terrified me: octopus intersections and roundabouts like wide Demolition Derby arenas; cars densely crisscrossing simultaneously from all directions and all somehow missing each other, streaming through each other like ghosts; busy cross streets without traffic lights or stop signs; one-way streets that change direction from one block to another; jammed multi-lane expressways and looping overpasses, where a missed exit invariably means a miscalculated turn onto another expressway or avenue heading off in some unknown direction, or a descent into a bewildering snarl of streets in some neighborhood you’ve never been to or even heard of before. My most gripping fear was getting lost on an expressway, on the Anillo Periférico or the Circuito Interior
,
during one of the torrential summer rains, thunder and lightning in the low flat heavy sky like sonic sledgehammers falling on the car roof, and the rain, dense, blinding, trapping you inside a steady frenetic metallic vibration, and even welting hail menacing the windshield, and in a panic making for the first near exit and descending into drain-clogged streets that are suddenly and swiftly flooding, crap-brown water engulfing stalled cars, the tide rising to door handles; newspapers publish photographs of those routine calamities all summer long. Everyone tries, though it isn’t always possible, to keep a distance from the careening
peseros,
hulking minibuses whose bashed and scarred exteriors attest to the Road Warrior aggression of their notorious pilots, responsible for so many accidents and fatally struck pedestrians that two consecutive
jefes de gobierno,
or mayors, of the Distrito Federal have vowed to abolish the fleet entirely. Trucks and buses crowd and bully traffic. Electrified trolleybuses inexplicably run down major avenues in the opposite direction from the traffic in their own not always so clearly marked lanes; you just have to know that you’re on one of those avenues and watch out.