The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (2 page)

I didn’t see how I could ever know enough to drive in Mexico City, that population-twenty-two-million sprawl covering and climbing up the sides of the Valley of Mexico, the world’s third-largest metropolis, with its seemingly countless jigsaw-puzzle neighborhoods and infinite streets. Every taxi driver I’ve ever asked about it admits to getting lost. I’ve ridden in countless taxis that, in fact, were lost, even as we blundered through familiar neighborhoods that I would have guessed the drivers knew too, since I infrequently venture far from the areas of the DF where I and most of my friends live and hang out—neighborhoods, or
colonias
, that cover a small swath in the lower quadrant of the floor-to-ceiling
Guía Roji
Mexico City wall map hanging in the apartment I live in now. In this map the DF, inside its scarcely delineated borders, is dwarfed by the metropolitan Mexico City area, in México State, filling the map’s upper two-thirds. Always, when getting into a taxi at the airport, I’m silently dumbfounded, or else kind of awed, by the drivers who seem to have no idea of how to get to colonias Roma or Condesa, the nucleus of my inexhaustible little world, especially since about a quarter of the passengers on my favored evening flight from New York City to Benito Juárez International Airport always at least look like typical residents of those neighborhoods. The taxi drivers have their own horror stories about getting lost (they have other genres of horror stories too), such as dropping passengers off deep inside the maze of a never-before-encountered, poorly lit neighborhood and not being able to find their way out for hours.

There was one night, twelve or so years ago, when I mastered driving in the DF, or at least felt I had, charging a long distance across the city with unself-conscious confidence, effortless control and speed. I’m night-blind and should never drive in the dark without eyeglasses, but I didn’t even own a pair back then. I really shouldn’t have been driving at all, because I was pretty drunk. The car belonged to a Cuban friend, and we’d been at a wedding party in Desierto de Leones, on the outskirts of the DF. My friend, who’d only recently learned to drive and was proud of it, was such a haltingly haphazard driver that I often felt impatient riding with him, silently comparing him to Mr. Magoo. Maybe I was in a hurry to get somewhere that night, or maybe I was envious because he could now drive himself around the city whenever he wanted—we’d been taxi-bound friends for several years—but as we were getting into his car I insisted that he hand over the keys. What I remember is a euphoric ride, racing down Avenida Insurgentes Sur, passing cars, an impression of lights bursting and streaming past and vanishing behind, going superfast, and thinking, maybe even shouting, that I was driving like Han Solo, rocketing toward the Death Star. Ever since, the thrill of that drive had lodged inside me as a challenge and as a rebuke to the argument that it was too late to learn to drive in Mexico City, or that I could never overcome my fear. It must be in me to do it again, I repeatedly told myself, though next time less recklessly. Then I’d remember that elderly man in his suit and tie circling the Glorieta Citlaltépetl in the driving school car and tell myself that of course it wasn’t too late.

Every year, it has seemed to me, grief changes, persisting in shape-shifting ways that, as the years go by, become more furtive. But as that fifth anniversary of Aura’s death approached—a year that would mark a period in which I’d now been mourning Aura longer than I’d known her—the intensity of my grief was, unsurprisingly, resurgent, weighing on me in a new and at times even somewhat frightening way that I didn’t know how to free myself from. There was maybe not much logic to this, but I felt that there was a problem or riddle I had to solve and that somehow Mexico City, or something in my relationship to the city, held a solution. For example, sometimes I told myself that one logical step would be to leave the city and begin anew somewhere else, a city I’d never lived in before, one free of memories and associations with Aura but also one in which I’d be able to escape my complicated role as private but also rather public widower. But whenever I thought it over, I’d decide that leaving was an inconceivable step and that maybe the solution lay in staying. And not merely staying, but going further in, embracing with more force what I’d been tempted to flee, maybe that was how to find a way to live in Mexico City without Aura. The approaching anniversary had more than a little to do with my decision that this was the summer when I was finally going to learn to drive in Mexico City.

I was living in a newly rented apartment in Colonia Roma, though I still had our place in Brooklyn. Often when Aura and I had taken a trip out of New York City, or when we were in Europe, or were staying at a Mexican beach, we’d rented cars and I’d been happy to drive. But I hadn’t driven a car, not once, since Aura’s death, and that did seem to symbolize several aspects of grief, its listlessness, loneliness and withdrawal, its grueling duration. Five years without getting behind the wheel of a car suggested a maiming of the spirit but one that should be easy to repair. I just had to start driving again. But I wondered if I even knew how to drive anymore.

One afternoon in early July, I visited my therapist, Nelly Glatt, in her office in Las Lomas. I hadn’t seen her in about a year. Before Aura’s death I’d never been to a therapist, but within days afterward I was directed by a friend to make an appointment with Nelly, a
tanatologa
or grief specialist, and I obediently went. I remember that first visit well because all I did was sit or slouch or fall over on Nelly’s couch and sob. Nelly, a queenly, extremely beautiful middle-aged woman with pale blue lynx eyes, a diaphanously ivory complexion, and a manner at once soothing, warm, and direct, did so much to help me get through those first few years. That afternoon we spoke about what the fifth anniversary would mean for me, and about whether or not I was ready to re-embrace life, maybe even love again. When I told Nelly about my plan to learn to drive in Mexico City, she approved. She said it signified I was ready to reassert control over my life, as opposed to allowing it to be controlled by grief as if by self-imposed obligation. Nelly said that something inside me had decided that I “owed” Aura five years. I’d refused to move or allow myself to be moved off that one square in the vast grid of possibility.

Couldn’t learning to drive in Mexico City also be something I was determined to do for its own sake? I wasn’t intending to just get into a car and drive around randomly; I’d actually come up with an elaborate, Aura-like method for carrying out my “driving project,” as I called it. She was a fan of Oulipo-like experimental writing games of formal restriction and chance, and also of the I Ching, as well as a devoted Borgesian. But what if carrying it out was actually more of the same, yet another conjured grief ritual, a desire to maneuver and explore the streets of Aura’s childhood by executing a performance game that she would have liked, all in order to intermingle with her city as I might yearn now to trace with my fingertips the contours of her lips, her eyes, her face? I wasn’t sure. But I had formulated a notion that the driving project had something to do with my relationship to Mexico City, Aura’s city, the city where she died and the place that held her ashes, and that now, because of this, had become my sacred place, and my home in a way no other place ever had.

From the air, on a flight in, what the eye mostly picks out from the megacity’s stunning enormousness is a dense mosaic of flat rooftops, tiny rectangles and squares, and a preponderance of reddish brown, the volcanic
tezontle
stone that has forever been the city’s most common construction material, also other shades of brown brick and paint, imposing an underlying coloration scheme. But there are also many concrete and metallic surfaces and many buildings painted in pastel and more vivid hues like bright orange, and rows of trees, and parks and
fútbol
fields, and modern towers rising here and there, in Polanco, Santa Fe, and the august Torre Latino Americano at the edge of the Centro, and the straight and snaking traffic arteries, beady and silvery in the sunlight, and an infinite swarm of streets. You think, of course, awed, of the millions and millions of lives going on down there. (I reflexively think, as I have for years whenever flying into the city, that she’s down there somewhere, living her mysterious life beneath one of those tiny squares, her too, and also her, Chilangas, female residents of the DF, who over the past two decades I’ve met only once or twice but who left an impression, women who almost surely no longer remember me.) From the air, perhaps because it is such a predominately flat city and almost all the roofs are flat and because so much of it is brown, Mexico City looks like a map of itself, drawn on a scale of 1:1, as in the Borges story “The Exactitude of Science,” which refers to “a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.”

Supposedly the young Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad), seeing a map of Africa, put his finger in its cartographically blank center, the void of an unmapped Congo, and said, “I want to go there.” An opposite of that map would be the
Guía Roji
, which evokes Borges’s map sliced and bound into an inexhaustible book. My spiral-bound large-format 2012 edition presents Mexico City’s streets and neighborhoods in 220 pages of zone-by-zone maps; at its front 178 additional pages of indexes list some 99,100 streets, and 6,400
colonias
, or neighborhoods. The Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue told me that when he was a boy an aunt gave him a
Guía Roji
as a Christmas gift, inscribed, “This book contains all roads.” The
Guía Roji
also suggests a Borgesian metaphysical limitlessness, a bewildering chaos that is actually possessed of a mysterious order that even those who’ve spent a lifetime exploring the city can only dimly perceive. The
Guía Roji
may be every taxi driver’s bible but he or she needs a microbiologist’s eye, quick mind-hand coordination, and a strong, intuitive memory in order to use it effectively—i.e., find the way to an obscure destination—along with, probably, apt patience and interpersonal skills for engaging with querulous, frustrated, drunken, clueless, and otherwise unhelpful passengers. For instance, the first page of the index, under the letter A—which, like all the other index pages, has six vertical columns of street names in tiny bold print, each street’s
colonia
listed below each name in infinitesimal print, with map-page number and map quadrant (B-3, for example) to the right—reveals 82 different Mexico City streets named Abasolo. I didn’t recognize Abasolo as an iconic Mexican name, like, for example, Juárez or Morelos. I asked some of my friends why there were so many streets named for Abasolo, and no one had any idea, though it turns out Mariano Abasolo was a relatively minor revolutionist in the war of independence from Spain. In an exercise akin to counting grains of sand, I took the time to count 259 streets named Morelos in the
Guía Roji
index; Calle Morelos’s columns are followed by several more of Morelos variations: the numerous Morelos that are
avenidas, cerradas
(dead-end streets),
calzadas
(inner-city highways),
privadas
, and so on. Let’s not count all the streets named for Benito Juárez, far more numerous than even Morelos. As for Calle Abasolo, two separate
colonias,
both named
San Miguel, have streets named Abasolo, one on map-page 246, the other on page 261; so do two distinct Colonia Carmens. There are numbered streets too. Over a hundred Calle 1s; nearly as many Calle 2s. The city has some 6,600
colonias,
and fourteen of them are named La Palma and five are named Las Palmas. And so on.
Buenas noches, señor,
please take to me to Calle Benito Juárez in Colonia La Palma . . . now the fun begins.

Whenever I flip through the minutely mapped pages of the
Guía Roji
, I like to put my finger down on a randomly chosen page, and then, lifting my fingertip, leaning close, and squinting, discover, in tiny print, the name of the street I’ve landed on—just now, Calle Metalúrgicos, on map-page 133, in a
colonia
called Trabajadores de Hierro (Ironworkers.) Never heard of it. Though Metallurgists is obviously appropriate for a
colonia
named Ironworkers, it still seems like a pretty weird name for a street. What’s it like to be a child, trying to incorporate the fact that you live on Calle Metalúrgicos into your sense of the world’s hidden meanings and magic and of your place at the very center of it all? That your street, your
colonia
, is a magnet, pulling the entire universe down toward you? Turning to the index I find that Mexico City has five different Calle Metalúrgicos, in five different
colonias.
I look at the gridded Mexico City map on the back cover of the
Guía Roji
and find the square numbered 133, situated almost in the middle, just within the yellow-shaded northern border of the DF. Green-shaded metropolitan Mexico City, in México State, lies just beyond.

Calle Metalúrgicos, in Colonia Trabajadores de Hierro. What’s it like there? That was the driving game I’d come up with. To use the
Guía Roji
almost like the I Ching, open to any page, put my finger down, and try to drive wherever it landed. A game of chance and destination, if not destiny. Of course, first I had to learn to drive around Mexico City. Since, technically, I did know how to drive, it seemed redundant and embarrassing to enroll in a driving school, but doing so also seemed a good way to get used to being behind the wheel again while also learning the city’s traffic rules and layout under the instruction of a knowledgeable guide. I’d never learned to drive with a stick shift; I’d driven only with automatic. Learning to drive standard, I decided, would justify enrolling in a driving school, because then I would be overcoming two inhibitions at once. I looked up driving schools on the Internet. I went to the
Guía Roji
store on a gritty street in Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec, and bought the huge map of Mexico City that now hangs on my wall; my 2012
Guía Roji;
and a small, rectangular illuminated magnifying glass that would surely prove crucial for reading those densely intricate map pages, especially if I found myself lost while driving in the dark. I went with my friend Brenda to Dr. York, a trendy Colonia Roma eyeglass shop that also sells secondhand English books. Brenda picked out for me a pair of eyeglass frames that I had outfitted with bifocal lenses, and I also bought a copy of Halldor Laxness’s
Independent People
, a book I’d been meaning to read for years.