The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (6 page)

I started my driving lessons in August. I’d procrastinated nearly two months. In this chronicle I am taking a circuitous route through the summer of 2012, when it turned out that I didn’t get to where I’d hoped to arrive quite by following the plan I’d laid out.

During the four years Aura and I lived together, because of her academic calendar, we always spent most of the year in New York, coming down to Mexico for summer vacations and some but not all of the other school breaks and the occasional long weekend. In the DF, in the summer of 2003, we moved into a stylish one-bedroom loft-style apartment that Aura’s mother had purchased for her, making a down payment before construction on the building was finished. We assumed the monthly mortgage payments, and paid for the work that still needed to be done on the apartment. The building was in a renovated factory or warehouse on a street in Colonia Escandón, adjacent to the Condesa, on a block between the major avenues Patriotismo and Revolución, in a far from gentrified neighborhood filled with garages and stores selling auto parts, hardware, tires, and paint. There were no nearby restaurants open at night. But across the street from our building there were two taco stands, both offering similar fare, including
suadero
, a thin-sliced brisket. One of the taco stands was thriving, and the other was a failure. Aura and I got our dinner at the thriving one a couple of nights a week, whenever we stayed in but didn’t feel like cooking. Our treeless street was mostly deserted at night, except for the taxi drivers and other people from across the city who came, into the early morning hours, to the successful taco stand, where in front there was always a small crowd of waiting customers on the sidewalk, while the other stand was bypassed by all but the most impatiently hungry. When the owners of the successful stand arrived in the afternoons to set up for their long nights of work, they parked their expensive SUVs by the sidewalk. The owners or perhaps merely the employees of the other stand had no vehicles in evidence, though I imagine they had some method for delivery of their meat and supplies other than humping it themselves to the Tacubaya metro station and walking from there, or bringing it by
pesero
directly from a market. The owners of the successful stand were a pair of clean-cut, thick-necked young men who, somewhat atypically, rarely bantered with customers, so concentrated were they on the preparation of their tacos, and they took extremely good care of their impressive knives, and of their thick, gleaming cutting boards, on which they sliced and chopped with vehement speed. I had the impression they’d been at it for years already, earning good money and a reputation on this out-of-the-way, fairly desolate block, and that in another two decades or so they would still be there, with nothing changed besides the inevitable graying of their hair. The two skinny young men in the stand alongside—their cutting boards discolored pieces of thin plank, their knives cheap-looking, their little mounds of neglected meat unappetizing—mostly stood leaning with folded arms against the posts that supported their roof, looking diffident and bored, and sometimes as if they were asleep. Why didn’t they leave or move their stand somewhere else? I’ll never know. Maybe the logistics and expense of a move were beyond them. Sometimes you just get stuck.

Aura and I lived on the building’s ground floor. At one end of our apartment a staircase climbed to the small sleeping loft and bathroom, and at the other end was a floor-to-ceiling window with a sliding glass door, essentially two stories high, that faced a little patio. That first summer I planted a row of bamboos in the patio against the back wall, along with some small
limón
trees. The bamboos looked like a row of young corn plants. Over the years they grew and grew, climbing like magical convolvulus, forming a soft solid mass of rich jungle green that completely hid the patio wall and rose well into the view of the apartment above us. Perhaps because the bamboos blocked sunlight, the
limón
trees never prospered, hiding in the darkened corners of the patio, looking stunted and crinkly. I hadn’t seen the bamboos in over a year that summer afternoon of 2012 when I decided to take the half-hour walk I used to take once or twice daily when I lived there with Aura. During those first years without her I made myself take that walk regularly, like the drunken former British consul Geoffrey Firman in
Under the Volcano
as he perambulates the Mexican town of Quaunnahuac after his wife Yvonne has left him: “revisiting the landmarks, your soul dragged past them as at the tail of a runaway horse.” I’d finally stopped seeking out that kind of pain, until this past summer when I took that walk again—one last time, I told myself—and found myself again standing out on our old street, looking at our old building, the glassy apartments visible above the high wall surrounding it. Inside, our patio was on the far side of our building’s parking lot, separated from it by a concrete wall. I couldn’t enter the building because I didn’t know anyone living there now and had never met the uniformed doorman who was opening the front door to let people in or out. From where I stood in the street, looking over the wall, past the hidden parking lot, I could see our bamboos rising in the relatively narrow gap between the neighboring building and the windowed facades of our building. They’d grown so tall that whoever now lived in the apartment above ours must look out their own window and see little else but our bamboos, while the delicate shoots at the plants’ pinnacles are probably visible through the windows of the two-story penthouse above. Those feathery trees certainly looked anomalous—like some green-plumed Mardi Gras or Tropicana nightclub gigantic hat stashed there—the only thing visibly growing, outrageously growing, in that narrow space between the two buildings.

For three of my first four years in the DF after Aura’s death, I rented a room in the four-story art deco building owned by my friend Yoshua Okón, at the corner of Amsterdam and Ozualuma, a block away from the Glorieta Citlaltépetl. Yoshua lived on that top floor with his wife, Gabriela Jauregui, a friend of Aura’s. My little room was on the floor below, where Yoshua had his art studio and offices. During the years when I had my own apartment on Calle Amsterdam, the ground floor of Yoshua’s building housed an art gallery that he’d founded with friends, La Panadería, named in honor of an old Eastern European bakery that used to be there. The gallery opened in 1994, and before it closed in 2002 it had become one of the “new” Condesa’s most emblematic places. Stark and punk, it was where a generation of now internationally prominent Mexican artists born in the 1970s—including Miguel Cabrera; Julieta Arranda; the artist known as Artemio; and, of course, Yoshua, among others—began their careers. There always seemed to be something going on at La Panadería. I remember walking past one night and looking in the window and seeing the place packed with nerdy-looking teenagers watching some kitschy B movie. Parties on the nights of openings, sometimes with live music, spilled out onto the sidewalks, and usually I’d spot someone I knew, and I’d stop by and have some beers. All this took place several years before I met Aura, but it’s possible that we coincided at a few of those Panadería parties because for a while she briefly went out with an artist who belonged to a clique of
gueyes
(dudes) who hung out there. Like so many of the young Mexican women I’ve known, Aura was guarded about her private life and fairly secretive about her past. I’m often struck by how fearful many Mexican women are of the judgment of others, especially of being judged for behaving even somewhat as any Mexican male is allowed and even expected to behave; plenty of Chilangas cheat, lie, carelessly seduce, leave without any warning, and so on, but from the start their involvements often include an exaggerated element of secrecy, or at least a very high value placed on discretion. “Don’t tell anybody about us. . . . Don’t tell anybody . . . until . . .” Partly, I think, they instinctually protect themselves against a fundamental Mexican misogyny that they’ve known all their lives, that may not be as prevalent as it was in their mothers’ time but is definitely still there. I mean less prevalent now in the DF, for in Ciudad Juárez, notorious for its hundreds of femicides in past decades, in México State, and elsewhere in the narco zones—which is to say in much of Mexico—that misogyny has grown more overt and deadlier than ever, and may be the most intractable, flammable, and depressing of Mexican pathologies. Social commentators and the like are always going on about how radically Mexican culture, especially in Mexico City, has changed over the last forty years; about a supposed breakdown of the Mexican family; and about how traditional mores have been replaced by the laxer, more tolerant freedoms of the developed West, the effects of feminism, and so on. While young women nowadays may seem to live a lot like even their wildest contemporaries in New York or Paris, beneath those apparently liberal surfaces, many women have told me, they can still feel caught between shifting paradigms, between modern freedoms and traditional expectations about how a woman is supposed to behave. “If a woman here says, ‘Look at that guy over there, I want to fuck him,’” a friend, a twenty-nine-year-old newspaper editor, recently told me, “people still act shocked. There are exceptions, of course, but even with your girlfriends, they’ll say things like, ‘But you should wait until you’re in a serious relationship.’ More and more, I feel like I can’t just say what I mean.” I really didn’t care who Aura had gone out with back whenever or what had happened, but sometimes she went to almost comical lengths to keep me from finding out. In the years we were together she was always a little paranoid about running into those particular Panadería guys. I had no idea which one she’d gone out with or if he was even around anymore, but she did occasionally indicate one or another of them to say that he’d been her friend in the Panadería days and that he now shunned her, wouldn’t even say hello. It’s a big deal in Mexico when someone who used to routinely say hello and exchange kisses on the cheek no longer does; it’s called
quitando el saludo
, taking away the greeting, and it’s meant to be cruel, in this case apparently
quitado
by manly art buddies banded together against the woman who’d dissed their boy years before. I could see that it was true, that this one and that one wouldn’t say hello to Aura, including one flashy art world star who I wouldn’t say hello to either, not just because he wasn’t nice to Aura but because I detest his phony punk demeanor and conceited Rodent King smirk. But the hulking, extremely shaggy, extremely tattooed Artemio was always happy to see Aura, and he did say something to me once about a friend of his having been hopelessly in love with her, or maybe he said totally fucked up by her. Artemio told me, after Aura was gone, that when he read
The Savage Detectives
, two of the young main characters, the Font sisters—both poets; both, in different ways, at least early in the novel, young heartbreakers and roamers of the city—had reminded him of the Aura he’d known in the Panadería days. Back then, when she was still a student at the UNAM, people knew Aura as a poet, Artemio told me, a girl who was always giving poetry readings and turning up at readings and founding and participating in ephemeral poetry magazines. That was how he would always remember her, he told me, as being like a Font sister.

Aura, the teenage and early-twenties poet, had barely figured in my sense of her. That’s become a part of living in Mexico City too; every now and then someone tells me something about the Aura she or he knew before I met her. Or a message arrives from a stranger on Facebook, like the one sent by the young woman from Irapuato, in the state of Guanajuato, now living in Belgium, who shared some of her parents’ memories of Aura’s parents back when Aura’s father was Irapuato’s
presidente municipal
, its PRI-appointed mayor, during the first four years of Aura’s life, before her parents split up and her mother brought her to the DF, where they lived, at first, in near poverty. Aura almost never heard from her father again after that and saw him only twice more in her life, when she was in her twenties, the last time by accident. A prime example of the “break-up of the Mexican family” that Aura tortured herself over, because she really never understood what had happened to her family, why her mother had essentially fled with her to Mexico City, or why her father wouldn’t answer the yearning letters she wrote to him during those first years after or even phone on her birthday. Now, at least, thanks to that message, I knew that her father, when Aura was a baby, used to drive around Irapuato, Mexico’s “Strawberry Capital,” in a shiny white Mercedes Benz. Years later, by the time that her mother was established as a respected administrator and researcher at the UNAM, it was her father who’d fallen into relative poverty; that’s something I’d found out on my own, when I went to visit him, in León, Guanajuato, weeks after Aura’s death. Aura’s father has since died too, in 2009. I didn’t know that until I received another surprise message from a stranger—this a long, moving message from Aura’s half sister, also an only child. Aura had not even been certain of her existence; in fact she’d told me that she thought she might have two half siblings, and didn’t know whether they were male or female. But the sole half sibling
had
known that Aura existed and wrote that all her life she’d yearned to meet her, but that it was taboo in her house to even mention Aura, or her father’s first wife. Undoubtedly Aura and Adriana, her half sibling, would finally have met, probably after their father’s death. The mysteries of Aura’s childhood and family history, which so preoccupied her, persist and go on being puzzled out in this phantom way, through me.