The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (16 page)

For whatever reasons, enduring a complicated grief was a vastly different experience in Mexico City from what it was in New York. Maybe I’ve never really fitted in in New York, have never felt truly at home there, and the loneliness of grief starkly exposed that. Maybe it was only because New York doesn’t have cantinas.

Are Mexicans at least more “comfortable with death” in a way that most people are not if they haven’t grown up in societies where they see themselves depicted as skeletons in school? Few people are comfortable with the looming specter of their own death or that of loved ones or neighbors, no matter how prevalent death might be around them, as anyone who has ever spent time in a war zone knows. Under the most sustained horrific circumstances, as in many parts of Mexico now, people may become resigned to the possibility of violent death, a melancholy experience, however tinged with dogged disbelief or defiance. But Mexicans are comfortable with death in the sense that they’re neither squeamish nor willfully anodyne about it, not freaked out by it—by dying friends or family, or in the company of the bereaved—in contrast to the “denial of death” cultures in the United States and Western Europe that have so often been criticized. Of course, in recent decades, there has been something of an informal movement in the United States to correct this, variously expressed—as in many high-profile books that directly or indirectly address the subject (though in Hollywood movies the beloved dead still return as loving ghosts, young and beautiful forever). That’s one reason—the presence of huge numbers of Mexican migrants in the country is another—that the Day of the Dead and its imagery became so popular there. From what I’ve observed, people in the United States usually overcome whatever aversions or fears they may have and do come through for their dying family members and friends, often heroically. But as many of those people discover after their loved ones have died, a bewildering and lonely bereavement often follows. In the way that such corrective societal lessons tend to be absorbed into practice in the United States, what overcoming the “denial of death” often translates into is highly self-conscious, awkward behavior. Many people seem to feel now that they are obligated to be “supportive” of the bereaved, which means making an effort to sincerely converse with a bereaved person about what they believe he or she may be suffering. They are even ready to offer, as it were, an instant therapy session, often involving the stumbling enunciation of practically memorized phrases, including, with now notorious frequency, the seemingly encouraging but actually rebuking advice about “moving on,” about how now may be the time to “move on,” or about how—soon or someday—the time to “move on” will inevitably arrive like rain after a long drought, bringing the blessing of renewed life and release and relief from the suffering that so wearies and bores us all. Of course because even the possibility of having to endure such a conversation would discomfort almost any sane person, people can’t help avoiding the bereaved. Or else they stand their honest ground and say bizarrely self-revealing things, like the friend, a writer of course, who told me that he envied me because now I had a tragic but beautiful love story attached to my life, one that I’d be able to write about. Who wants a bereaved person and the accompanying obligation to be supportive at a festive dinner party? Is festivity even allowed in the presence of the bereaved? One New York friend stopped inviting me to his home because he and his wife couldn’t bear to tell their daughter that Aura had died, and while this did not end our friendship, I suppose it did loosen the bond between us.

When I did,
very
occasionally, get invitations to dinner parties in New York, I was sometimes the only single person at the table, and often found myself sitting among people whom I’d never met before and who didn’t know why I was single, and I would sit there wondering if politeness obligated me to pretend that Aura had never existed so as not to cast a pall over the dinner party, or if anyone was going to mention her, or if I should go ahead and blurt it out, or should I just swill more than my share of the wine and try to take part in the dinner conversation—I always embarked on the last, getting smashed behind my Noh mask, but usually got around to blurting too, and then sometimes the host would jump in to gallantly fill out the narrative, usually with an air of embarrassment but also of relief, as if he or she too had been tied in knots about whether or not to mention Aura. It was never a comfortable moment. Why do these moments have to happen? What, if anything, are these well-intentioned people doing wrong?

I did have wonderful friends in New York who never shunned me during the worst of those grief years, and around whom I never felt even the subtlest pressure to submit to an amputation of myself so as not to discomfort others. Most though not all of them were women, some good friends of Aura’s too. They somehow did know just how to be with me, and understood that mostly I wanted to drink and hang out and talk about whatever or just be silly, and they would talk about Aura in a genuine manner whenever I or they wanted to talk about Aura, and, anyway, they were still grieving for her too. They understood not only that it is perfectly OK to be “festive”—funny, I mainly mean—in the presence of the bereaved but that this is often just what the bereaved person craves, along with the simple nourishment of listening to people being themselves, unembarrassed to talk about their own problems even though these might not be as tragic as yours.

Of course, as in Mexico, I preferred to talk as honestly as I could about what I was going through with my therapist. Kim helped lead me where I knew I was going anyway, on my own, deeper and deeper into the inevitable solipsism of the thing, for traumatic grief—such was the diagnosis—discharges an apparently narcotic-addictive adrenaline throughout your body and you live in its dark atmosphere like a hooked lab rat; of course she also wanted me to take psychotropic pharmaceuticals to help “take the rough edges off,” but I didn’t want to take those edges off, and refused, my stubborn conviction being that to go all in was the only way out, to exhaust and deplete the thing until I’d finally be left with a hard-won alchemical residue I’d be able to live with forever. “
La muerte no se reparte como si fuera un bien. Nadie anda en busca de tristezas
,” says Susana San Juan, in
Pedro Páramo
. “Death is not divided up as if were a property. Nobody goes around looking for sadness.” No, you own it pretty much all by yourself, and you’d be able to give out only empty handfuls. I think this is something that all of my Mexican friends just simply understood: that I wasn’t trying to share it out.

In Mexico, I never sensed that anyone felt obligated to say or display anything in particular in the presence of a “bereaved person,” and nobody stopped inviting me anywhere. Nobody, once, ever, said anything about “moving on”—does this slogan even exist in Mexican Spanish? Aura never felt like someone I had to hide, even among strangers, because they simply weren’t discomforted, and certainly never looked as if they’d just been electrocuted when they learned that my young wife had died in the summer of 2007. When I spoke about all this at a Mexico City dinner party one recent night a guy there shrugged and only said, “
La
ligereza
,” and maybe that’s all it is, an easygoing quality that certainly feels prevalent in the DF. That good-natured
ligereza
is an often remarked-on Mexican cultural trait, a complicated one, in combination with Mexican formality, that also conceals. Outside commentators frequently describe Mexicans as a people who mask their “true” thoughts and feelings. I usually feel that I don’t need people to express their “true” thoughts and feelings. It was always a good way to pass the time, with my friends in a cantina, where there was little possibility that my bereavement or inner gloom would cast a pall over a table and its alcohol-buzzed
ligereza
.

“Being now arrived at middle-life, he resolves never to quit the soil that holds the only beings ever connected to him by love in the family tie,” Herman Melville wrote of his fictional John Marr, the retired sailor who relocates to a Midwestern prairie town where his young wife and infant child are carried off by fever, and buried there in a coffin built with his own hands. “While the acuter sense of his bereavement becomes mollified by time, the void at heart abides. Fain, if possible, would he fill that void by cultivating social relations yet nearer than before with a people whose lot he proposes sharing to the end.”

It’s Mexico City that feels like home how. Many of my closest friends in Mexico City are a lot younger than me, in their thirties and forties. Some were among Aura’s circle of friends, and they became and remain my friends, and through them the circle widened. People my age, in their fifties, tend not to go out so much at night; they stay home with their families or else, especially in New York, socialize at dinner parties with friends more or less their own age. Of course, when I was married to Aura what I’d planned to be doing in the near future was staying home with my family too. But if I’ve always liked to go out at night, widowerhood turned it into an obsessive need. That summer of 2012, I put in long hours of work every day, but I also drove myself hard at night, too hard, in a self-destructive but often euphoric fury, toward a finish line that I no longer believed was even going to be a finish line.

The Covadonga, just around the corner on Calle Puebla, is where I mostly went last summer, and throughout this past year. The Covadonga is actually a Spanish place; it doesn’t provide free food with drinks, as the best traditional Mexican cantinas do. It used to be a center for the Spanish community that settled in Mexico City especially during the years of the Civil War and the establishing of what would be General Franco’s long dictatorship. There’s a restaurant and sort of ballroom upstairs, but I’ve rarely been upstairs. I always go straight into the cantina, a sprawling, brightly lit room with marble columns, a wood-paneled bar, television sets all around, fans twirling from the ceiling, and long rows of square tables that can be pushed together for large parties—for the huge parties of revelers of which, especially on Thursday and Friday nights, there are always several. The waiters wear white shirts, black bow ties, and vests. They greet regulars by name, “
Buenas noches señor Frank,
” and always remember what you like to order first; even the washroom attendant and resident shoeshine man always comes by to shake your hand. On the wall is a trio of large, framed, somewhat crude copies, painted on tiles, of Velázquez’s
The Triumph of Bacchus,
two close-up sections and one of the whole work. The original hangs in the Prado and is popularly known as “The Drunks.” The painting depicts Bacchus outdoors with a rowdy cluster of men getting smashed at his side, two of those ruffian drinkers staring straight out from the canvas with the haggard four a.m. expressions—one with an arrogant drunken grin and the other with ribald hilarity—of
gueyes
who’ve been drinking
mezcal
all night and slipping off to the washroom to snort coke. The Cova closes relatively early, at two, though I doubt that this has anything to do with why in the copies of the paintings the drunkard’s malicious grin, probably the most memorable and iconic detail of the original, is a muddied grimace, and the puffy-cheeked man at his side looks as if he’s trying not to throw up instead of sharing some lewd joke. When I mentioned the missing famous grin to the waiter he went away to ask some veteran about it, and when he came back—by then I’d pretty much forgotten all about it—he recited the name of the painter who’d done the Cova version, as if that explained everything, and he repeated, almost apologetically, that it was only “a replica.”

In the afternoons in the Cova there are always elderly men from the neighborhood sitting at the tables playing dominoes. They are there at night too, whether it’s a slow night and they are almost the only customers, the big room nearly silent but for the clacks of dominoes falling like tripped circuit breakers, or whether it’s one of those nights when the place is mobbed and the elderly domino players sit at their scattered tables surrounded by a noisy sea of hipsters, young and not so young art world and literary types, rock ’n rollers, journalists, newspaper reporters and editors, and so on. On those nights I can go there alone and I will always find someone I know at one of the tables. Up until a few years ago, when I went to the Covadonga at night, occasionally a waiter used to stand in front of the bar and shout out a name, and people in the cantina would respond with cheerfully roared shouts of “
Culero!
” or “Assfucker!” Initially, I’m not sure why, I thought the waiter was calling out the names of people whose credit cards had been declined, but then I found out anybody could pay the waiter to call out a name and make everyone shout
culero
. I don’t recall how much it cost, but it wasn’t much. That waiter had a strong, almost operatically resonant voice that cut through the cantina roar on a busy night and silenced it. Later I found out that the other waiters referred to that voice, and to the waiter himself, as “the Bell.” A few summers ago when Colm Tóibín was visiting, that ritual delighted him, and he decided that he just had to have a name shouted out. So we both paid to have the names of writers we disliked shouted out and, twice, in short succession, the Bell’s voice rang out, badly if loudly garbling each of those Anglo surnames that probably nobody there would have recognized even if they’d been coherently articulated, and twice the room roared back, “
Culero
!” In New York and Dublin, perhaps, moments apart, two pairs of ears went red, and two literary minds thought the same thought: Someone somewhere is talking about me, with admiration and love, of course! The drunken
pícaro
grin in the Velázquez painting was suddenly restored, and appreciatively widened. Last summer, when I moved to the neighborhood and became a Cova regular, I noticed that this call-and-response wasn’t being performed anymore and asked about it. I was told that decades before, when The Bell was a newly hired waiter, he’d introduced the ritual. The waiter had retired a year or two before, and had taken his bell home with him.