The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (3 page)

I procrastinated on the driving project, but I wore the eyeglasses all the time. Print was now magnified and clearer. By day the world lost its soft blur. My eyeglasses were a cinematographer who’d mastered the noirish expressionism of Mexico City’s nighttime streets, shadows starkly outlined; street lamps like glass flowers instead of spreading haze; the rediscovery of one-point linear perspective in long, receding double files of softly gleaming parked cars; the intermittently illuminated facades of old and sometimes very old buildings like glimpses into individual personalities that are hidden by day, revealing scars but not secrets, battered but proud endurance, psychotic earthquake cracks, the maternal curve of a concrete balcony holding out its row of darkened flowerpots.

In the late spring and early summer of 2012 I had to travel a lot: to Poland; back to New York; then to Mexico to set up the new apartment in Colonia Roma that I was renting with my friend Jon Lee, a journalist who needed a base in Mexico; to Paris less than a week later; to Lyon, broiling with summer heat; back to Paris and from there directly to Buenos Aires to teach a workshop, arriving to snow flurries and a deep wet winter cold. Then I touched down for a few days in the DF, before having to fly to Aspen, Colorado, for a literary conference. Among my responsibilities at the conference was to teach a two-day morning-long seminar on Latin American and U.S. Latino fiction. Most of the students were adults, many retired. On the second morning we discussed Roberto Bolaño and a couple of his stories. This led to a long conversation about Mexico. The students wanted to talk about the so-called narco war, and many of them had grisly perceptions of life in Mexico, which were not inaccurate but were certainly incomplete. Yes, vast portions of Mexico were currently enmeshed in the nightmare and bloodbath of the narco war launched by President Felipe Calderón in 2006, when he’d made his disastrous decision, partly at the behest of the U.S. government, to send the military into the streets to fight the cartels, which were already doing battle with each other. But Mexico City, I told them, specifically the DF—which is what most people mean when they say Mexico City—was a different story. The DF had been largely spared the catastrophe of the murderous narco war; in fact its homicide rate was comparable to New York City’s, I told them, and lower than that of many other U.S. cities, such as Chicago and Miami. I’d lived there off and on for twenty years, and had witnessed how the city had evolved. A dozen years of fairly progressive and energetic political leadership in the DF, among other factors, I told them, had seen the city become a vibrant, relatively prosperous, uniquely tolerant place, however beset with poverty and other problems, a great world city though entirely idiosyncratic, comparable to no other. People say that Buenos Aires is like a European city, but what other city anywhere is the DF like? It doesn’t resemble any other city. In many ways, I told them, Bolaño’s depiction of 1970s Mexico City, especially in his novel
The Savage Detectives
, as an inexhaustible, gritty, dangerous, but darkly enchanting and sexy sort of urban paradise for youth, but not only for youth, seemed as true to me now as it must have to him when he’d lived there in his adolescence and early twenties. And I went on in this way, my voice swelling with homesick emotion.

“Oh, come on, what a bunch of bullshit,” a student, a middle-aged physician, barked out angrily, cutting me off. “Everyone knows Mexico City is violent, corrupt, overpopulated, and polluted as hell! How can you be talking about it like that?”

For nearly twenty years, since 1995, I’ve been living off and on in the DF. What living there means now is that I often spend day after day without leaving my block in Colonia Roma, or barely leaving it. In the morning I take the elevator from the sixth floor down to the lobby and say hello and sometimes stop to chat with the doorman, Davíd or Eugénio, and sometimes also the security agents, all drawn from the Mexico City police—that is, the few I’ve grown friendly with—who protect my downstairs neighbor Marcelo Ebrard, who a few months ago, in December, finished his six-year term as
jefe de gobierno,
or mayor, of the DF. Then I go out the door and cut diagonally across the Plaza Río de Janeiro to the Café Toscano, where I have breakfast—almost always the same, papaya with granola, juice, coffee, or, whenever I’m hungover,
chilaquiles verdes
—and then I stay to work there, often for many hours. Then I go back to my apartment and try to work some more, until evening, when I like to go to the gym. At night I often drop into a cantina, usually the Covadonga, just around the corner on Calle Puebla, though sometimes the nights extend well past the cantina’s closing hours, taking me to other places, usually within the neighborhood, or not that far from it. Before, when I lived in the Condesa, my life wasn’t so different: going to a café in the morning to start my workday, and then often moving from one café to another—I’m a restless person, too restless, I sometimes think, to have chosen a writing career—counterclockwise all the way around Parque México. Only during the four years that I lived with Aura in Colonia Escandón, where there were no cafés nearby, did this routine vary much. Mostly I worked at home. I didn’t go as often to my favorite cantinas. Sometimes in the evenings I went to meet Aura far away in the city’s south, when she’d been to the UNAM, the great public autonomous university, or visiting her mother—Aura had studied as an undergraduate at the UNAM and her mother worked there and lived near the Ciudad Universitaria.

I’d first visited Mexico City in the 1980s, when I was mostly earning my living as a freelance journalist in Central America, and two or three times traveled up from there to receive payment from magazines by bank wire that couldn’t be sent to Guatemala City banks. I never stayed more than a couple of weeks. I remember, during that first trip, in 1984, attending a clamorous party thrown by the embassy of the Soviet Union in the foreign press club where my friends and I were generously plied with vodka poured from bottles encased in rectangles of ice while being interrogated about our impressions of Central America by cheerfully persistent strangers speaking Boris Badenov Spanish and English. (In Central America I never encountered a Soviet journalist outside Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua, probably because any Soviet journalist who ventured into Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras during those years was likely to be arrested and deported or even killed.) I also remember being taken by a journalist friend up to the Reuters office, seeing my first fax machine, and being dumbstruck, dazzled. An unforgettable kiss outside the Museo Tamayo with a really beautiful girl, an art school student with delicate Mayan features whom I’d met inside the museum and then never saw again. A Guatemalan urban guerrilla
subcomandante
whom I met with in a seedy tiny hotel room in the center, who received me in his underpants and draped a towel over his lap as we spoke, and who passed me a large manila envelope thickly packed with U.S. bills that I was to smuggle in my luggage back to Guatemala City to hold for a stranger who would come to my door and speak a password. The
subcomandante
was going to cross back into the country on foot, with guerrillas, and he proudly showed me the multicolored cheap plastic barrettes arrayed on a piece of cardboard that he’d bought to hand out to the women and girls in the guerrilla camp. The
subcomandante
, as his cover, worked in Guatemala City as a photographer for a newspaper society page, while his clandestine role was to establish contacts with foreign journalists, human rights investigators, and the like, and we’d become friendly. In 1986, I think it was, he was forced to flee Guatemala, to Canada, which granted him political asylum, and I never heard from him, or anything about him, ever again.

A lot of memorable things happened during those first few visits to the DF, but it was a different city then. I traveled there again not long after the cataclysmic earthquake of 1985. There was rubble everywhere—collapsed buildings and lots filled with silent hills of concrete boulders and twisted iron amid the restored urban bustle—and dust was mixed like a thickening agent into the pollution and ubiquitous smell of sewage, with bright sunshine turning the air into a gleaming toxic haze, like a physical incarnation of the smelly, persistent aftermath of sudden death and trauma that ran out of your hair when you showered, and burned your eyes. Mexico City’s south was mostly spared the earthquake’s devastation because it rests atop a substratum of hardened lava flows, unlike the center and surrounding areas, which are constructed over what used to be Lake Texcoco, a vast mushy bed of volcanic clay, silt, and sand into which much of the city has been slowly sinking. Any visitor to the city’s center notices the visibly awry tilting of many monumental sixteenth-century cathedrals and churches—a tour guide sets an empty soda can down on the floor of an old church and the can rolls away. Entire streets and blocks of old buildings, all drunkenly tilting, sinking unevenly into the soft earth. Aura grew up in the DF, in the city’s south, during the years of its pollution crisis, when nearly every winter day brought a thermal inversion emergency, and school was often canceled so that children wouldn’t have to go outside. It was the probable cause of Aura’s sinus problems. She remembered riding her bicycle in the parking lot of her housing complex and an asphyxiated bird dropping dead out of the sky, landing right in front of her wheel.

That first time I ever lived in Mexico City for any considerable length of time was in 1992, with my then girlfriend, Tina. It was her idea that we move there for a while, and she went down ahead of me from New York to find a place for us to live, which turned out to be in the more or less genteel colonial neighborhood of Coyoacán (square 186 in the
Guía Roji
grid, in the south). Tina found us an inexpensive room in the Casa Fortaleza de Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, the fortress-mansion constructed by Mexico’s greatest Golden Age movie director, who was also an actor familiar to English-speaking audiences as Colonel Mapache in his friend Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
. Perhaps not even Cortés had dreamed himself such a grandly triumphant and martial conqueror’s palace as the one El Indio had built. Tina was initially charmed by the place because when she arrived there for the first time the massive wooden doors leading into the broad stone patio were open and a dead horse was being carried out in a wheelbarrow. When Fernández died there in 1986—on his deathbed he said, supposedly, “Heaven is a bar in the tropics full of whores and
machos
”—he was, or so his daughter Adela Fernández, a writer, has told interviewers, penniless, having depleted all his money to pay for and maintain his Xanadu. Adela had been estranged from her father after running away from home and the macho autocrat at fifteen; he wouldn’t let her have boyfriends, and pressured her to be a “genius.” She returned to live in the Casa Fortaleza with her two children only after his death, and began renting out rooms. The fortress-mansion has high walls built of ash-black-brown volcanic stone, the same stone cut into large bricks for the heavy, fortified-hacienda-style architecture inside, which included a massive watchtower with arched windows, topped by a crenellated mirador. To provide access during the fortress’s construction, El Indio had to carve out a new side street, which he named Dulce Olivia after the actress Olivia de Havilland, whom he had some kind of thing for.

Three seemingly separate residences—did secret corridors or sliding bookcases connect them?—faced the main courtyard, which had a dry fountain in the middle. A broad stone staircase led back into the rest of the mansion, always permeated by the chill of cold stone, and filled with staircases and corridors and rooms and galleries and halls that had once held huge parties attended by Marilyn Monroe and other stars but that no longer seemed to serve any purpose. The whole place had the abandoned air of the ruined presidential palace where Gabriel García Márquez’s ancient monstrous dictator lives out his last days in
Autumn of the Patriarch
, stray cows chewing on the velvet curtains. The mansion-fort was a mess. There was always dog shit in those long empty corridors, at least that’s how I remember it. Our room was just off that main staircase. “Formerly a guest room,” Adela told us when she showed us in. On its walls were colorful murals of wasp-waisted, long-legged nude woman bullfighters with luscious, pointy breasts, painted by a friend of El Indio, Alberto Vargas, who was famous for his illustrations of pinup “Vargas girls” featured in
Esquire
magazine, back before
Playboy
introduced its centerfold. Our horsehair-stuffed mattress was ancient, dingy, really disgusting-looking, but when I said that I would buy a new one, Adela declared that I certainly could not. “You don’t know the great men who’ve left their semen in that mattress,” she said. She then pointed to the big French windows and told us how as a girl she used to hide on the wide stone ledge outside and spy on her father’s famous friends and their lovers. She had seen many immortals fucking on what was now my and Tina’s bed. Anthony Quinn, André Breton, John Huston, Peckinpah, Agustín Lara—she rattled off a list of celebrities and artists, Mexican and foreign, who’d spent nights in that bed. That afternoon, Tina and I walked to the shopping center on the other side of Avenida Miguel Angel de Quevedo and bought a stiff plastic covering, the sort used for child bed-wetters, in which to enclose the sacred mattress.

The enormous windows in our room overlooked a deep-walled, now dry, stone pool in the back garden, which was both lush and desolate. We had a daily visitor on the same ledge from which Adela used to spy—a retired fighting rooster, a beautiful animal with lustrous brown-bronze feathers and scarlet comb and wattles and a furious, stupid stare, who not only crowed but always pecked manically and relentlessly at our windowpanes in the dawn hours, waking us. One morning I opened the window and tried to nudge the rooster off the ledge with a broom, but instead of scooting away he just toppled off the ledge and plummeted, wings fluttering, to the distant bottom of the dry pool. The rooster, it turned out, was blind, his eyes pecked out years before in a fight. He wasn’t injured by the fall, and Adela had him moved to some other part of the property. A tabby cat, with one clouded iris and a mottled nose, came in through the window one morning and adopted us for the rest of our stay. We named the cat Don Bernal, after the conquistador who wrote
The Conquest of New Spain
. Tina and I were allowed to use the huge Puebla-style kitchen, decorated with blue and white tiles, which in El Indio’s time had produced the Mexican fare for countless lavish parties. It had an immense stove with deep ovens and seemingly as many gas burners as a golf course has holes; though this was also in ruins, and filthy, a few of its rusted burners still worked, and so we did cook there occasionally. Ceramic
ollas
, the traditional earthenware casserole-like big pots used for stovetop cooking, many probably not washed in decades, were stacked into such tall, crooked, swaying towers that we were afraid to touch them. The Puebla tiles were cracked or had fallen out of the walls. Tina and I spent one entire day futilely cleaning. Recently, on the Casa Fortaleza’s Facebook page, I saw a photograph of the kitchen being restored, the Puebla tiles all in place and pristinely gleaming. It seems that the Casa Fortaleza is being transformed into a cultural center. Tours of the property are offered once a week, some given by Adela, who is now seventy, and, according to a newspaper article, reportedly suffering from cancer but still chain-smoking. I wonder if she shows visitors our old mattress and tells them about the great men and their semen.