The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (19 page)

The poet Efraín Huerta (1914–1982) was known to work on his poems even when stopped at red lights in his car. There is now a street named after him in Colonia Chiconaulta 3000, map-page 66 in the
Guía Roji
, near the top of the grid, in Tecamac, a municipality in México State. Huerta was considered a sort of Mexico City bard, his poetry an aesthetic expression of the city itself and of the splendors and miseries of an ardently lived life there, somewhat in the manner that near contemporaries in the New York School, Frank O’Hara for example, expressed New York City. In 1977 Huerta published a long poem, “Circuito Interior,” that is, juxtaposed with other metaphorically interrelated aspects, an ode and also a dirge, about love, loss, and walking in the city. It begins:

One inconsolable day I said, I’ll call you tomorrow,

and tomorrow, that morning, I say, never

came to us—nor the clear mirror in which you see yourself,

whole and nude as joy. . . .

And it continues:

Because to be in love, fall in love always

With an idler city is to walk around blank;

Conjugate and suffer an icy verb

Walk the light, trample it and remake it

And go in circles and circles and start again. . . .

And it ends:

City in love, well, a city

in which to be hopelessly in love,

and to live inside her and suck on her—immense udder—from feet

to head,

her.

During my first years of living in the DF, I was under the sway of the commonplace that the city was uniquely surreal and that this surrealism was the key to grasping the city’s personality, its “truth.” I used to set out on long walks determined to not turn back until I’d witnessed or discovered something that expressed that surrealism, a living moment or image of the sort that the famous photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the maestro of Mexico City surrealism, might have captured with his camera. Alvarez Bravo found his surrealism in intimate and static moments and images that were quietly strange, lonely, off-kilter, fantastic in the most ordinary, easy to overlook way, and that were also somehow very Mexican, amid the hurried chaos of the city. The elderly student driver circling the
glorieta
near my apartment counted, for me, as one of those found images—it was a very short walking expedition that day. One night I had to walk a very long time until, at about two in the morning, maybe even later, I came upon, on Calle Durango, a small beauty salon with its venetian blinds down and the sound of
ranchera
music and voices coming from inside. I peered through the blinds and saw three middle-aged women, still in their beautician uniforms, sitting on folding chairs, a boom box and a nearly finished bottle of tequila at their feet.

Maybe the most surreal moment I witnessed was in a taxi one night: at every dog we passed in the street, the driver slowed his taxi and barked loudly out the window.

Eventually I stopped exoticizing the city like that, less like a photographer following an aesthetic compulsion than like a pretentious tourist. I no longer wanted or needed to frame the city in that way, by distinguishing certain moments or images from all other moments and images as being uniquely characteristic of the city, which they’re not, no more than what I saw while walking down Alvaro Obregón the other day is: two lovely-looking long-haired teenagers, a boy and a girl, standing in the doorway of an apartment building, each lifting a handful of the other’s hair to his or her nose. They kissed, and the girl went inside. Why were they sniffing each other’s hair? To test whether the scent of marijuana in their hair would be discernible to their parents, or at least to the girl’s?

You don’t usually catch scenes like that from a car. It’s the kind of scene you might see in any big city, but, as I walk on down the sidewalk, it makes me feel bouyant with memories of teenage stealth and sexy intimacy. Even if I experienced very few moments, if any, of such intimacy when I was a teenager, it was all that I wanted back then, and as I walk I remember the lonely, insecure kid I was and share his desperate daydreams and yearning for a moment just like that, sniffing my pretty girlfriend’s hair before she goes inside to her parents.

The other day the Colombian writer Santiago Gamboa, who was visiting the DF, said that every time he walks down the sidewalks of Colonia Roma he wishes he were at least ten years younger, so that he’d be able to enjoy the life here. I felt a little defensive, since I’m older than he is. Even though I do enjoy the life here, I knew what he meant. Roma and Condesa too, maybe like no other part of Mexico, are magnets for beautiful young people. The island of luscious-skinned tattooed youth, endlessly cycling by on their
ecobicis
, strolling down the sidewalks, hurrying across the Plaza Río de Janeiro with their artwork tubes or rolled yoga mats slung over their shoulders, sitting at the outdoor tables outside
mezcal
bars and cafés, smoking on the sidewalk outside the Cova. Their music and voices pouring from their apartment windows high above the street at night. Over the past several years those lives had come to seem more mysterious and distant from me than when I was with Aura, of course, though during the summer of 2012, they became a little less mysterious, and sometimes, in the predawn hours, came right into my apartment.

The walk we took, David Lida, Jovi Montes, and I, late in the fall of 2012, on a Sunday afternoon, our bellies full, from Ka Wong Seng, a Chinese restaurant in Colonia Viaducto Piedad, back to la Roma. Ka Wong Seng is the best Chinese restaurant in the city—Lida discovered it—certainly New York Chinatown quality, and I’ve never had a better wonton soup anywhere outside Hong Kong. It’s a family-run place, with generic old-fashioned Cantonese decorations, in a remote, nothing-much-goes-on-around-here, lightly industrial, somewhat shabby and melancholy neighborhood. The reason Ka Wong Seng is located here is that the family’s real business is the importation of Chinese food ingredients, which they sell and deliver to restaurants throughout the city and beyond. Their warehouse is here and their delivery trucks are parked on side streets. The owners’ pretty daughters sometimes work as waitresses, and at least one seems to have a Mexican husband who sits with their infant at the family table on Sundays. A little Chinatown has taken root in the surrounding streets, mostly unappetizing hole-in-the-wall restaurants, clothing shops, and trinket and toy shops. The walk home took us through three
colonias
: Vista Alegre, Obrera (female worker), and Doctores. Quiet, shaded streets, small homes, sooty pastel hues, livelier than the neighborhood around Our Meat of the Jaguar; in the city’s sometimes hard to decipher economic ladder, these
colonia
s seemed more prosperous. As I walked, I daydreamed about buying a little house and disappearing into this neighborhood: life, work, maybe a wife, living there as if inside one tiny panel depicting one not-much-goes-on-here street in the infinite comic book that depicts every street in the world. But I will particularly remember this walk because I felt so happy, and was chattering away, I realized, as I hadn’t done in years, and that was because of Jovi—I am getting closer to that part of this chronicle, how I met Jovi and the night that redeemed the summer of 2012. We walked down a street where all the Sunday-shuttered businesses offered
suajeados
. What was that? Not even Jovi knew. And why here, on this street? Later I found out that a
suajeado
is a cylindrical metal machine that cuts patterns into cardboard, fabric, paper, or other materials, to make jigsaw puzzles, for example, or those polyurethane maps with detachable countries. If you need that done in Mexico City, this is the street you must come to.

Another time I walked with Susana Iglesias—winner of the first Premio Aura Estrada—from the center to the Merced, the old market quarter, near Tepito. Susana grew up in those neighborhoods, near Tepito. She was soon to publish her first novel,
Señorita Vodka
. She’s a rowdy hard-partying girl who makes vodka in her bathtub, used to blog as “Miss Masturbation,” works with street dogs, and sometimes on her days off brings street dogs back to her apartment and gives them haircuts and shampoos. Colm was with us too. We went into an old-fashioned department store because Colm wanted to buy a portable CD player and it seemed like the kind of place that might still sell them, though it didn’t. The bakery in the store’s basement reminded me of the bakeries of my childhood, the lurid thick frostings and glazes, the fat sugar cookies, the rich buttery smell. We walked from Isabel la Católica all the way to the
eje
de circunvalación
at the far edge of the Merced, leaving behind the restored Historic Center and passing through progressively rougher neighborhoods, stopping in a little clandestine bar situated beneath a tenement stairwell where people, mostly students, sat on chairs sipping from the thirty-two-ounce
caguamas
of beer that were handed out through a narrow door. It was night by the time we were on the
eje
, looking for a taxi. Everywhere people were packing up market stalls, wheeling stacked cartons, products, and mannequins on dollies. The
eje
route out of the Merced was lined with vendors and their makeshift outdoor stalls, which they have to set up every morning and take down again at night, packing up their wares and bringing them home or to some other place of storage. The nearly futile-seeming massive endeavor of it all, of so many people selling by the side of the
eje—
it seemed impossible that they could all earn enough to feed themselves and their families. We were in a taxi, stalled in traffic, when I noticed a woman on the corner, in her late twenties or thirties, packing up her wares, pulling down cheap plastic toys—superhero figurines, masks, and such—that were hanging from her aluminum racks, putting them away into a large cloth sack. She was wearing a red clown nose. How many more toys did she sell, how much more food was she able to provide for her children, thanks to that nose? That modest innovation, a toy seller wearing a clown nose, did it give her at least a small edge over her competition? I hope so.

6
The Party Bus

ON SUNDAY
,
APRIL
21,
2013, I was standing in the bathroom when I said to myself in the mirror, probably in a whisper, “There’s going to be an earthquake today.” And all day I felt uneasy and sometimes frightened. There’s going to be an earthquake, all day and into the evening that thought and the fear it stirred up kept coming back. At about eight-thirty that night, it hit. I was at my desk. The long unfastened window to my right was clanging in its metal frame, as were all the other unfastened windows; throughout the apartment, doors were opening and slamming shut. Everything was moving. I opened the apartment door and saw the heavy, long mirror hanging in front of the elevator swinging wildly back and forth like a thing supernaturally possessed. The building was groaning, seemingly from deep within, a sound of straining wooden beams as on an old wooden sailing ship caught in a storm at sea.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I run down the six flights of stairs? Or should I just stay inside the doorframe? Stay inside the doorframe. That’s the advice usually given to people residing on upper floors, on the theory that in earthquakes doorframes hold up better than stairwells. In my mind’s eye I watched the ceiling and walls slowly giving way and crumbling, the floor splitting open and collapsing around me, and myself surviving within a rectangle of beams in a still-standing grid with doorframes. I trusted the building to hold up, and stayed calm enough, but also understood that in minutes or seconds I might be dead. The shaking wouldn’t stop. Later people said the quake—5.8 on the Richter scale—went on for about two minutes. Then silence and stillness returned, to the walls, at least. Outside sirens were wailing, all over the city, it seemed. Though my knees felt wobbly-weak, I ran down the stairs as fast as I could. In the dark stairwell, on two different landings, elderly neighbors were standing flattened against the service elevator doors, inside their sturdy steel frames, and they smiled as I passed. When I reached the lobby, Marcelo Ebrard and his wife, Rosalinda Bueso, were just coming back inside from the sidewalk. They wore matching short white bathrobes, initials monogrammed on the lapels, their long legs bare. He grinned sheepishly, and we shook hands, and I shook hands with his wife too. She was holding their schnauzer under her arm and grinning like an embarrassed schoolgirl. The Ebrards live on the fourth floor. So it must be the right thing to do, to run down the stairs and out of the building, because if anyone should know what to do, it would be the former mayor. Incredibly, the quake caused little damage in the city. Last year, when I was in New York, the DF endured an even stronger one and people still talk about how terrified they were, but those were the most prolonged strong tremors I’d ever felt.