The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (18 page)

I tried that route the next morning. I followed Alvaro Obregón into the wide Insurgentes intersection and, so as not to drive across a row of raised safety reflectors in the pavement that also confused me, turned sharply left, directly into a northbound Metrobús lane. A Metrobús was bearing down on me and in panic I swung a heedless U-turn back onto Alvaro Obregón. My hands were shaking. What, I couldn’t find my way onto Insurgentes Sur on my own, not even that,
caray
? Humiliated and discouraged, I drove home and parked. I didn’t take the car out again that day. I brooded over the
Guía Roji
. There was another way to get onto Insurgentes Sur off Puebla that would skirt the
glorieta
.

The next morning I drove up Puebla again, and followed a sign indicating a right turn onto Insurgentes Sur. In fact, it led directly into the Glorieta Insurgentes, which was open again, and I was shot into the dreaded circle of fast dense crisscrossing traffic—it felt at first like a bout of madness—streaming off or angling toward a series of exits, Avenida Chapultepec, Insurgentes on the north side, Chapultepec again, Oaxaca, all two-way multilane avenues . . . I would have to go almost all the way around the
glorieta
to exit, headed south, onto Insurgentes Sur. But quickly, instinctually, you understand that the only option, the only way around, is to keep faith in the sanity and competence of other drivers, and that the worst thing to do is not stay up to speed; just aim for your exit no matter how perilously squeezed by the other cars or trucks closing in around you, ease up on the accelerator just enough when it is obvious that you have to, and trust that others will do the same for you.

The drive down Insurgentes Sur was long and uneventful. I mostly stayed in the inside lane next to the one now occupied by the Metrobús. Many drivers initially were upset, or they are still, about having lost a driving lane to the Metrobús on such a crucial thoroughfare—Insurgentes is one of the world’s longest avenues, traversing the city from north to south—though they were at least partly compensated by the elimination of
peseros
and other buses from the route. I only needed to guard against being edged by traffic into the long yellow slabs that border the Metrobús lane; the Metrobuses often swooshed by close enough to touch, wafting hot wind through my window. Whenever one of the buses idled alongside at a red light, it was as if an oven door had opened. There’s really nothing especially fun about a long slow hot drive down Avenida Insurgentes. I played rock loud on the radio; listened to a lengthy and interesting interview, on the same station, with a group of teenage working-class transsexuals; inhaled traffic fumes; watched out for motorcyclists in the side mirrors. I passed Parque Hundido, where in
The Savage Detectives
Ulysses Lima stalks Octavio Paz. Stopped at red lights, you have to be ready to aggressively wave your finger no or shout at the ragged kids who close around the car to clean the windshield, or have coins ready for when you haven’t reacted quickly enough. You want to be supportive of the effort, but don’t need your windshield cleaned six times on a single ride either. At red lights vendors stroll between cars while performers rush out into the intersections: fire-eaters; jugglers; grown men with little girls, apparently though not necessarily their daughters, standing on their shoulders, shaking their grotesquely or farcically padded big butts. They end their acts in time to be able to pass down the rows of cars asking for change before the light turns green. The DF’s vital principle, the hard everyday hustle all around you. Live here long enough, and you might stop really noticing and hand out your coins almost automatically, unless you’re not the coin-giving type. Taxi drivers, something like the mounted infantry of the daily struggle, often hand out coins through their windows too, and that always impresses and chastens me. Insurgentes, headed south, is lined for most of its length by office and apartment buildings of gleaming glass, concrete, and steel, including the fifty-two-story World Trade Center; restaurants and fast-food places, the usual American crap purveyors and local franchises, like Hamburguesas Memorables, whose name entices me, though I doubt I’ll ever get around to trying a
hamburguesa memorable
. Many of these restaurants, mall-style steakhouse franchises from the north, Sonora and the like, are the kinds of places where Aura used to go with her family on Sunday afternoons, and to which I accompanied them many times. I keep my eye out for a restaurant whose name I don’t even remember but that was the last one we all went to together, on an Easter Sunday afternoon, and there, just past the Eje 6 intersection, I see and recognize it, Palominos:
arrachera
served with pasty enchiladas and a goopy puddle of beans and guacamole;
micheladas
and tequilas; the family comedy or drama of undisguised personalities, facial expressions as emblematic and seemingly permanent as those of Benito Juárez or Sor Juana on Mexican peso bills; the stupor of dessert, coffee, and anise; the substratum of love and nerve-eating passions and enervation of family. On my drive to Our Meat of the Jaguar, I pass two Hooters, the one in Del Valle where I sometimes go with friends to watch NFL football games, and the one in San Ángel where I sometimes watched games with Aura’s stepdad, who was a star running back for the UNAM “American football” team during one of the rare seasons when it unseated Tec de Monterrey for the Mexican university championship. The avenue seems endlessly lined with nightclubs, discos, mall-type bars, casinos, and strip clubs with awnings and valet parking out front. These always fill me with curiosity. Who goes there? Office workers, I’m always told. And what is their nightlife like? How is it different from ours?

Insurgentes finally brought me to the edge of the UNAM, and Copilco, where Aura grew up. I needed, via Avenida Copilco, to get onto Avenida Pedro Henriquez Ureña. And there, on my left, was the housing complex
where Aura grew up, in the two-bedroom apartment where she shared a room with her stepsister, the setting of so many of the short stories she started and only sometimes finished during the last two years of her life. It was also where we’d spent our first night together, in August 2003, days before she left for New York to begin her studies at Columbia. Aura was living alone there because her mother had bought a new apartment in Las Aguilas, alongside the Periférico. I hadn’t seen the Copilco housing complex in years, maybe in almost a decade. I pulled over, parked against the curb, and looked across the avenue at the long row of matching buildings, their stucco facades with alternating horizontal rectangles painted Picasso harlequin colors, carmine and cream-yellow. I couldn’t identify which building had been Aura’s. A low whitewashed wall running the length of the complex hid from view the parking lot where Aura used to ride her bicycle and roller-skate, the grassy parts and benches where barely adolescent Aura liked to hang with older teenage neighbors, furtively smoking and drinking; some of them, I remembered now, were the children of exiles from the Argentine Dirty War settled in the complex by a government agency. Painted in red on the wall outside was a long “
♥
MORENA”—Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s new political organization.

Just past the housing complex, Avenida Copilco bends sharply to the left, but the
Guía Roji
map in my head failed me and I went straight and found myself on Paseo de los Facultades, a narrow street running along the outskirts of the UNAM. To get back onto Copilco, I turned onto an even narrower street called Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, and had the sensation of having driven directly into Aura’s past, for Filosofía y Letras was the department Aura had studied in. The street was nearly impassable with students; it was like driving into the middle of a rural village on market day. Kids in their late teens and early twenties, almost all of them raven-haired like Aura, in denim and T-shirts, skirts and loose blouses, sweatshirts and hoodies, a backpack over everyone’s shoulder. Nobody parted to let my car pass, I rolled along at their walking pace, in a state of near hallucination, not sad, a mix of happiness to have suddenly found her, for Aura was surely somewhere in this crowd, and of
saudade
, for surely she wasn’t there, the presence of an absence. If I had been able to choose where to scatter Aura’s ashes—the truth is, I don’t know what Aura’s mother did with her ashes, because she took the box holding them home with her after the funeral and I haven’t seen her again since—it would have been somewhere in the UNAM, in the sculpture garden that was her spot for solitude, or maybe in the stretch of shaded lawn near Filosofía y Letras known as
el aeropuerto
, a favorite place for students to lie back and get high. I think that as I drove along Avenida Copilco again, I already understood that unexpected diversion onto Calle Facultad de Filosofía y Letras as a long-postponed leave-taking, something that finally had to be, a first ceremonial good-bye, though there will never be a final good-bye. So now there is a place in this city that marks that good-bye as surely as, maybe even more surely than, spreading her ashes there would have been meant to do. Wasn’t this what I’d hoped the
Guía Roji
driving project would bring me to in the first place? The combination of will and chance, of getting lost in order to unexpectedly find, had brought me close to Aura in this new way, one in which she was both present and absent, both asserting a permanence and letting go.

The rest was anticlimax. Avenida Pedro Henriquez Ureña to Candelaria to Avenida División del Norte, actually an expressway, busy avenues that wall in a maze of quiet working-class neighborhoods and streets, amid which Our Meat of the Jaguar is like one strand of a particularly dense cobweb of streets hung between two parks. Almost at random I chose a street, Árbol de Fuego, off División del Norte, and entered the walled maze. I drove around inside it for a long time. I am dyslexic enough to confound my sense of left and right and complicate my map reading. Over and over, I pulled to a curb to study my
Guía Roji
. One problem was that all the streets were one-way but the map in the
Guía
didn’t indicate which way, as it does, with minuscule arrows, for avenues. I’d get very close, Calle Omecihuatl-or-Temoc-close, but was unable to get closer, pulled away by a street going in another direction, and then farther and farther away, as if by a malevolent spell, all the way to Popocatépetl, and then I’d chart a path back. On that
Guía Roji
map-page the streets were crowded together so closely that their names were in especially tiny print, which I was unable to read even with my eyeglasses on, and so I resorted to the magnifying glass I’d bought at the
Guía Roji
store. Some of the streets leading directly into Our Meat of the Jaguar were left blank because there was no space to squeeze a name in. And then, while I was pulled over, studying the map, the magnifying glass slipped from my fingers and disappeared under the seat and I was never, for the rest of the week that I had the car, able to find it.

I finally found Tonacatecuatl—Our Meat of the Jaguar—where it crossed Calle Xoloc. The streets in all four directions had hardly any traffic, and there were even fewer pedestrians. One- and two-story cement houses, painted in Mexican primary colors, in cobalt blue, or in two shades of pink or yellow. A few scraggly trees throwing stark afternoon shadows onto the concrete sidewalks. I’d parked by a little
tienda
on the corner, and went in and bought a bottle of water, and went back outside. An old man sat on a stool alongside the front door, next to a small table displaying raw roughly plucked chickens covered in flies. I tried to start up a conversation. The neighborhood was
tranquilo
, he said. At night too? I asked. At night you had to be careful, he responded indifferently. He was in no mood to talk, this old Aztec merchant with his festering clumps of jaguar meat. I leaned against the car, drinking water, smoking a cigarette, my back sweaty and prickly with car seat itch, surveying this small bleak territory as if I were its discoverer.

I took another route home, blundering my way back to Avenida Insurgentes Sur. With poor Gerardo Ortiz Gutiérrez in mind, I’d set out in the morning in order to be sure to avoid the afternoon rains. But it was five hours later and the sky was dark when I pulled into my building’s parking space, feeling drained, with stinging eyes and a headache and nauseated from traffic fumes. It’s a terrible way to spend your day, or even a couple of hours of it, in Mexico City traffic. People who commute by car endure that daily, to say nothing of taxi drivers.

“You know what I learned,” former mayor Marcelo Ebrard told me. “You can beat the traffic thing by planning your day intelligently. Try not to leave your zone. It’s when you leave your zone that you have problems. Half of the problems people have when driving come from not planning their day. Eighty percent of people do the same thing every day.”

Of course, most of those people have little choice in the matter, when it’s a matter of driving to and from work. In my case, if I had to cross the city to get to work every day, I’d definitely prefer to go by Metrobús or subway and maybe even by
pesero.
I couldn’t have agreed more, though, about staying in your zone. I always try to stay within my neighborhoods, at least in the daytime. And I always prefer to walk.