The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (17 page)

On July 25, I went to evening Mass at Sagrada Familia, a Jesuit church just around the corner from my building and the plaza. Out the left-side window by the desk where I work I can see the church, its Gothic spire and silvery glittering dome, and the tolling of its bell often wakes me during predawn hours when it’s easy to fall back asleep. As I’ve done every summer for the last five years, I went to a church office several weeks before July 25 and signed up and paid to have Aura’s name read out during the part of that day’s Mass when a prayer is said for the souls of the departed. Aura wasn’t a churchgoer, but insisted that she wasn’t an atheist, and, like most Mexicans, she had an at least folkloric or inherited devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, so it has felt like the correct thing to do, to have a prayer said at Mass for Aura on the anniversary of her death. For the first four years, I always invited our friends and some of Aura’s relatives to Mass at Santa Rosa de Lima, a church in the Condesa. This year, I wanted to be alone, so I didn’t actually tell anybody. However, at the end of a Facebook post asking people to remember Aura on that day, which included a paragraph quoted from her writing, I dutifully included the information about the Mass. I arrived a bit early at Sagrada Familia, and sat in a pew in the middle of the congregation, on the side of the church facing a portrait of La Guadalupana. I wanted to be alone to be able to especially concentrate on this being the fifth anniversary, to find within myself, and be able to mark this date with, a comprehensible and even sacred significance. Why is this day different from all other days? To me it symbolized the arrival of the once dreaded day when I had now been apart from Aura longer than I’d been with her, but did that really signify a tangible before and after, or augur a change? Perhaps it really wasn’t different from any other day, and didn’t and wouldn’t. A British composer and musician, more an acquaintance than a friend, something of a gadfly, came into the church accompanied by a pretty, chic-looking blond woman—she turned out to be a Slovak photographer who was collaborating with him on a project—and sat down alongside me. He’d seen the Facebook post. It was kind of him to have come with his friend, of course, but there went my yearned-for solitude. Aura’s stepfather, Arturo, came into the church, and sat in the back. Sagrada Familia is a pleasant church, with high vaulted ceilings in the nave, chandeliers, long stained-glass windows, lots of paintings, and a statue of the Holy Family behind the altar, and it is permeated with a rich smell of old wood. The Mass began, and I knew it would be a long wait until the priest would read the names of that day’s departed, including Aura’s. The priest was old, perhaps ninety or so, roly-poly and bald, his perpetually smiling bronze face reminiscent of one of those ancient Chinese figurines of laughing old men. The deacon had to help him up the stairs to the altar, and throughout the Mass, as he slowly shuffled from one spot to the other, altar boys guided him by the arm. The British composer is Jewish and whenever something about the Mass or the church itself struck him as remarkable, beautiful, confusing, or odd, he spoke to his companion about it. My mother is a practicing Catholic and I’ve long been accustomed to being in church. Later we all agreed that the old priest was adorable and funny. The priest’s sermon included a riddle that had been either posed or solved by Santiago, St. James, and that the priest now put to the congregation and, receiving no answer, completed himself, nearly doubling over with chortled laughter—that Santiago, what a card—his hands clasped to his ample belly. The acoustics of the church and the priest’s own softly croaking speech made it hard to understand what he was saying, but I understood for sure that he dedicated some of his sermon to a protest against Mexican social injustice and impunity, and against the “imposition” of Enrique Peña Nieto as president of Mexico. When at last it was time for the prayer for the departed, the priest mispronounced Aura’s name, calling her Aurora Estrada.

After the Mass, we, including Aura’s stepdad, went to a little bar across the street for a round of beer and
mezcal
. I excused myself just before the next round was ordered, and went back to my apartment.

Every summer, Aura and I used to throw a big barbecue. Mostly I made hamburgers, using a classic 21 Club recipe, but also ribs, sausages, and some grilled portobello mushrooms for the vegetarians. Fabiola always contributed
fideo seco,
a Mexican pasta dish that she’d learned to make from her grandmother Mamá Loti. We held it in the bamboo-shaded patio of our Colonia Escandón apartment. After Aura’s death, Fabiola and I decided that we should continue the tradition, holding it on the same day as the Mass or within a few days, on the weekend. We used the patio of Fabiola’s apartment, just across the hall from where Aura and I had lived. I do not much enjoy parties but I love to barbecue, so standing over a grill for hours, drinking, lost in my own thoughts or talking to whoever has come to stand around the grill with me, has always been my preferred way to get through a party if I have to be at one. Because it was July, it always rained at some point, usually late in the afternoon, and though somebody always stood by me holding up a shaky beach umbrella, I inevitably ended up covered in a wet smoky grime, which I also liked. We always set aside a moment to toast Aura and share memories, and one summer we held a group reading of her writings. But by the fourth summer, it had really just become a party. Juan Carlos Reyna, from Tijuana, the Nortec Collective guitarist and writer, a handsome, irrepressible fellow in his early thirties, never knew Aura, though he’d become one of my closest friends. He brought along to the barbecue a girl he was fucking—there’s no other way to put it, with him there always seem to be one or two or more a week who never stay in his life very long—who got very drunk and asked me if I was gay. It wasn’t her question that offended me. I said no, and asked, “Don’t you even know why we’re holding this barbecue?” Reyna told her, and she broke out in embarrassed tears, sobbing really loudly, and I wished he would just take her away, and wondered if it was time to put our annual “Aura” barbecue to rest. Still, this summer, it being the fifth anniversary, we decided to do it again, but as Fabiola had sublet her apartment in our old building to move in with Juanca, we held it in her parents’ condo in Las Aguilas. Fabiola’s parents’ patio was much larger than ours in Escandón, with a view overlooking the city. It turned out to be a good party, mostly good friends in good humor, plenty to eat and drink, though there were people there I’d never met before. Reyna’s close friend, the young rock musician Juan Cirerol—often described as a kind of Mexican punk Johnny Cash/Bob Dylan—showed up, and played a few songs. Gonzalo and Pia’s fourteen-year-old son, Jerónimo, is a guitar prodigy who was fronting a band, in Paris where they live during the school year, with other musicians a few years older than him. In Paris, he’d downloaded Cirerol’s recordings, and had taught himself those songs, so it was a thrill for Jerónimo to play in duet with Cirerol, and pick up some advice. Afterward, though, Fabiola and I decided that this did seem like the right time to end our summer “Aura” barbecues.

5
The Driving Project

BY NEARLY MIDNIGHT
on August 23, a Thursday, it had been raining so heavily since the late afternoon that many streets flooded, especially in the city’s south. On a section of Avenida Insurgentes Sur, the water rose so swiftly that it reached the door handles of stalled automobiles. A fifty-three-year-old man named Gerardo Ortiz Gutiérrez apparently panicked and sought to save himself from being drowned inside his car. Carrying some papers or documents high in one hand, Ortiz Gutiérrez got out of his car and, up to his waist in water, waded toward the Marcela de Joya Metrobús stop, clearly intending to haul himself up onto its platform. A few steps from reaching it, he vanished beneath the water’s dark surface. It turned out that he’d been sucked down a deep drain that was missing its sewer lid. For days, deploying robot cameras and scuba divers, firemen and workers from the Mexico City water system searched the network of possible underground routes down which the storm-propelled water could have carried Ortiz Gutiérrez, but they were unable to find his body. The newspaper
Reforma
published a story about the frequency with which the heavy cast-iron sewer lids were being stolen in the city, apparently to be sold for scrap. Scuba divers finally found Ortiz Gutiérrez’s corpse six days later in a sewage drain in the center of Tlalplan, 1.5 kilometers away from where he’d disappeared. Family members came to the morgue and were able to identify him only by the clothes he was wearing.

I didn’t want to drive to Calle Begonia in México State. I decided that I should confine the
Guía Roji
project to the DF. The driving project had been conceived as a way to make or find something new in my relationship to the DF, to Aura’s DF and mine, not to Peña Nieto’s México State. I put the big map book on my lap and went through the routine again, and on the second or third try my finger landed inside the DF, on Calle Tonacatecuatl, in Adolfo Ruíz Cortines, on map-page 205 of the
Guía Roji
, a neighborhood where the surrounding streets had similarly unfamiliar pre-Hispanic, probably Nahuatl, names (Omecihuatl, Calmécac). I wrote to a professor acquaintance at CIESAS (an institute for advanced studies in anthropology) to ask about the etymology of Tonacatecuatl. A Nahuatl expert at the institute, after talking it over with a colleague, informed her that it was a historically nonexistent word and hypothesized that it must be a Hispanicized version of Tonakatekwani, which means “our meat of the jaguar.” Did that mean something like “this jaguar meat that we’re going to eat” or “jaguar meat that is corporeally or spiritually a part of who we are”? I don’t know.

During the last week of August, the day after Ortiz Gutiérrez was sucked down the drain at the Marcela de Joya Metrobús stop, I finally rented a car at an Alamo outlet on Paseo de la Reforma. It was the cheapest one available, a red Chevrolet compact, and I drove it back to my building in Colonia Roma and parked, alongside my bicycle, in the apartment’s reserved space in the garage. My first solo drive in Mexico was complete. But before setting out for Our Meat of the Jaguar Street, I wanted to practice. The route I’d mapped out would begin with a long drive up Avenida Insurgentes Sur, which I’d be able to get onto via La Glorieta Insurgentes, a traffic circle only a few blocks down Calle Puebla from the Plaza Río de Janeiro. The taxi drivers I’d polled regarded that multi-spoked dervish roundabout, along with Glorieta Camarones, in Colonia Sindicato de Electricistas, in the city’s north, to be the city’s most challenging. This is how, in
On the Road
, when late in the novel the characters take their ridiculously goofy trip to Mexico, Jack Kerouac describes legendary driver-supreme Dean Moriarty’s encounter with a Mexico City roundabout: “He got on a circular glorietta drive on Reforma Boulevard and rolled around it with its eight spokes shooting cars at us from all directions, left, right,
izquierda,
dead ahead, and yelled and jumped with joy. ‘This is traffic I’ve always dreamed of. Everybody
goes
!’” I’m not sure which
glorieta
Kerouac was describing, or whether those eight spokes were an exaggeration of memory or perhaps an amalgamation of two roundabouts, the four-spoked one circling the Ángel de la Independencia on Reforma and the nearby five-spoked Glorieta Insurgentes. Kerouac visited William Burroughs in Mexico in the late 1940s, long before the city mushroomed into a megalopolis, and though I don’t doubt that drivers did
go
—Kerouac describes a bus driver as if writing about a contemporary
pesero
road warrior—nobody ever recalls traffic having been a problem back then. I thought that I’d better practice roundabouts. There was another one in Colonia Roma, the also five-spoked Plaza de las Cibeles. But the high-speed roller derby of Glorieta Insurgentes feeds into and out of major avenues, while Plaza de las Cibeles channels traffic off relatively quiet streets.

I backed the car out of the garage, and drove to Plaza de las Cibeles, whose central fountain, with a bronze statue of the Roman fertility goddess in a chariot pulled by lions, is a replica of the marble original in Madrid. I whizzed around the rotary, accelerating ahead of a car trying to angle across me from the inside, and shot, homeward, into Durango. But I took another left, got back onto Oaxaca, and circled the rotary again.
Woohoo!
If not quite yelling and jumping with joy, I felt impatient to take on the Glorieta Insurgentes. Calle Puebla, as usual, was choked with traffic. But even advancing at a crawl, I bafflingly missed the turn onto the
glorieta
. From the Zona Rosa, I made a few turns, found Chapultepec, and then, only a few blocks from home, got lost and somehow ended up on multilane Niños Héroes. I had no idea where I was going but I drove fast because nothing makes Mexico City drivers pounce on their horns and furiously shout obscenities out their windows like another driver’s hesitation. Impulsively exiting down a side street, and following my not always keen sense of direction, I came upon the very street where I’d had my stick shift lessons with Ricardo Torres. A driving school car was wanly rolling in reverse down its long no-parking lane. In the lobby of my building I ran into Guillermo Osorno, who told me that construction or repairs were being done on the Glorieta Insurgentes—that that was why I hadn’t been able enter it off Puebla—and he suggested an easy alternative route onto Insurgentes Sur.