The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (4 page)

When Tina and I were renting our room there, a gothic cast populated the house. I was never sure who did live there and who didn’t, or where those who lived there slept. Adela told me that some of the men I saw, such as the one in late middle age who always looked hungover, sporting traces of blue eye shadow and lavishly long dirty fingernails, had been character actors in her father’s films. There was an almost handsome, jug-eared young man who seemed to be a sort of houseboy. He was obviously mentally handicapped, his dramatic eyes perpetually fixed in a silent movie stare, his garbled speech almost unintelligible. Every now and then a man dressed in
charro
gear—tight seamed pants, short matching jacket, and sombrero—would call at the door and sit with Adela on the rim of the fountain in the patio, holding her hand as they conversed. She told me that he had been a stuntman for her father when El Indio acted in movies, and that now, during these visits, the stuntman was again standing in for her father, playing El Indio himself, conversing with her, repairing their sundered relationship. Adela was an alcoholic, a
heavy
pulque
drinker. Sometimes women who said they’d been El Indio’s lovers would show up at the enormous doors and pull on the rope to ring the bell that announced visitors. I remember a very pretty woman with long raven hair who came to that door and told Adela that El Indio was her father. Adela always invited the women in and gave them a tour. She lived in what had been her father’s quarters, on the left side of the courtyard. She invited me in to see it only once, and I was surprised at how spacious, clean, and orderly it was, with everything supposedly just as he’d left it: a manly abode with an expensive feel; hues of rich wood, leather, and stone; filled with books, paintings, and other of the director’s personal treasures, probably including some pre-Hispanic artifacts—a room suited to serve as the set of a Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercial. Adela’s daughter, Atenea, a blond, ethereally beautiful girl, lived in the middle residence; she seemed rarely to leave her quarters, and it was rumored that she was ill. (Atenea died in 2002, at the age of thirty-seven.) The son, Emilio, wiry and always sneering, at least always sneering at me, lived on the right. He looked like what in high school we would have called a greaser. There was an old car up on blocks that he and his friends sometimes worked on. They gathered around it at night, drank, built fires, played loud music. Adela’s son and I intensely disliked each other. Our few conversations, always gruff, were usually over household matters such as his having cut off the water supply to our room again. We faced off one morning in the middle of the courtyard, snarling insults and threats, and were moments from coming to blows. I felt committed to it, adrenaline surging, but the “houseboy” raced to our bedroom door to fetch Tina, frantically baying, “They’re going to fight!” and she came running out and put a stop to it.

Adela frequently rented the Casa Fortaleza for private parties and for use as a setting in
telenovelas
and movies. Some mornings I’d come out of our bedroom and find the courtyard crowded with actors in period dress and film crews and equipment, and I’d help myself to breakfast at the craft services table. One evening when I was coming home women I didn’t know refused to let me past the front doors. The house had been rented for a private lesbian lunar festival party, no men allowed. I furiously insisted that I lived there and had every right to enter, but the women allowed me past only after I promised to stay in my room. Another night there was a party for gay men, thrown, we were told, by the son of an important PRI politician, which was why police had blocked off the street. Back then, almost all the important politicians, even in the DF, were from the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. It had been governing Mexico since 1929, its candidates’ victories in presidential elections every six years often abetted by widespread electoral fraud, until, in 2000, Vicente Fox Quesada of the rightist National Action Party (PAN) was elected president. Gay life in Mexico City was much more hidden in those days, back in the 1990s, than it is now. Gay marriage is legal in the DF, which has been governed since 1998 by a series of leftist governments affiliated with the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and that have made progressive social policies a focus of their governance and campaigns. The only other place in Mexico where same-sex couples can marry, since 2011, is the state of Quintana Roo.

The party in the Casa Fortaleza that night was a bacchanal, an animated explosion of forbidden and repressed sexual energies. Men roamed the mansion-fort looking for private places to have sex—I would have thought the place offered multitudes of private hideaways, but our bedroom, maybe because of the legendary mattress, seemed to strike many as especially promising. The pulling, pounding, and even ramming against our bedroom door, while Tina and I huddled together in bed, having given up all hope of sleep, went on intermittently for hours. Not long after that night, Tina and I decided that it was time to move out of the Casa Fortaleza, and back to New York.
²

During that year in the DF we had made a lot of friends, some who are now among the closest that I have. I don’t remember how I met Paloma Díaz. She was a painter, a feline dirty-blonde from an eminent Mexican family who’d grown up in a large colonial house in Coyoacán with her parents and grandmother, a committed Communist who had a mural of Che Guevara over her bed. Paloma now also had a smaller home of her own several blocks away but seemed to divide her time between the two residences. We grew close, and she introduced us into her circle of friends. I remember long weekend afternoons, eight or so of us all gathered on a big bed in her house, smoking pot, drinking beer, slowly sipping tequila, talking, the hours drifting past, and then later going out to walk around the neighborhood. Most of those friends had known each other since adolescence and even earlier, had dated, eventually had even married each other. It was a relaxed, intimate, kind of sexy, and sophisticated way of being friends that was new to me, my experience of friendship being closer to a carousing, somewhat girl-shy antecedent of “bro” culture. In recent biographical works about Roberto Bolaño—the documentary by Richard House,
La batalla futura
, and Monica Maristain’s book, a mixture of biography and oral history,
El hijo de Míster Playa
—Paloma Díaz has emerged as an important person in his youth. Born in Chile in 1953, Bolaño had moved with his parents to the DF in early adolescence. He met Paloma in 1976. Bolaño dedicated his poem
Olor a plástico quemado,
“The Smell of Burned Plastic,” to her: “
Y las llamas escribirían tu nombre en el estómago del las nubes/ Palomita roja.
”
³
She told Monica Maristain, “He read it to me in his room and I almost died of embarrassment. I was eighteen or nineteen and nobody had ever dedicated a poem to me in my life. It made me nervous because I felt, frankly, that he was coming on to me, but I liked the poem.” They shared a brother and sister love “that rarely exists between true siblings,” Bolaño wrote in one of the long letters he mailed to her after he moved, in 1977, to Spain, where she visited him several times. Paloma never mentioned Bolaño to me, never said anything such as, “I have this other writer friend.” That could have simply been discretion, but I suspect it also reveals how little even some of those who’d been closest to Bolaño in Mexico expected of him then, in the early 1990s, when he was living in obscurity though only a few years from becoming the most deservedly celebrated Spanish-language writer in generations. The book that established Bolaño’s fame, of course, was
The Savage Detectives,
published in 1997, at its core a garrulous multivoiced channeling of his youth and friendships in the DF. That year, 1992, when I met Paloma and her friends, Bolaño was also only eleven years from his own premature death, at age fifty. María Guerra, a brilliant and influential young independent art curator with a lashing wit; the shy and gentle artist Marío Rangel; and Luis Lesur, a handsome, languid young man who became a professional astrologer, were among the friends who used to gather on that bed on those afternoons, and now they are dead too—María and Marío of cancer, Luis a suicide. Too many people die young in Mexico City. People were always breaking off their friendships with María because they couldn’t withstand her often hilariously cutting and inevitably penetrating remarks, and I, who received my share, and a few other friends who also loved her, scorned those people as defensive wimps. María had a freckled, impish face, wore her dark curls in a sort of poodle hairdo, and had a raucous laugh. Her empathetic sense of the painful human comedy, mixed with a disdain for self-pity and for complacency, was expressed as a hectoring, teasing belief in her friends’ capacity to rally and do better. People were always going to her for advice. I remember an afternoon in 1999, after she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, when I phoned her at the hospital to arrange a visit and she answered weeping. She said, her voice overwrought but also characteristically buoyant, “Oh, Frank, I’m sorry, I can’t really talk right now, I’ve just been given terrible news,” and only a few days later she died, in her own bed in her apartment on Avenida Amsterdam, cared for by her twin sister, Ana. Now, thirteen years later, around the anniversary of her death, I’ve noticed how a few people still leave flower bouquets on the sidewalk beneath what used to be her window.

Through María I met Pia Elizondo, her husband, Gonzalo García, and Jaime Navarro, all still among my closest friends. Pia, a photographer, and Gonzalo—a painter, graphic designer, and editor and independent publisher—now live in Paris most of the year but come to Mexico every summer with their three children, in part to spend time with elderly parents and family. Both are the offspring of famous writers, Gonzalo of Gabriel García Márquez and Pia of the major Mexican avant-garde writer the late Salvador Elizondo. After that long night in the hospital when I wasn’t allowed into the emergency ward to speak to Aura, within an hour after Aura died late the next morning, Pia was the first person to arrive at my side. In Mexico City, funerals occur within twenty-four hours of a person’s death, the services usually held at a funeral home, often at one or another of the Gayosso establishments. The casket is usually on display, and people gather there, coming and going throughout the day, until finally, in late afternoon, the casket is taken to the cemetery, or the corpse is cremated. When I found Pia, now in her forties, in the summer of 2010, at the funeral of my good friend the artist Phil Kelly, an alcoholic Irishman who became a Mexican citizen, she said, “Well, here we are again. It seems like these are the only occasions where we get to see all our friends.”

After Tina and I broke up in 1995, she stayed in our Brooklyn apartment, and I moved to Mexico City, and ever since, I’ve never been away for more than a few months at a time. I hadn’t much liked Coyoacán—didn’t like its beautiful but too quiet, melancholy, high-walled streets; its aura of hippie nostalgia; its complacent culture of millionaire Communists; the relative lack of raffish cantinas and bars; and its prominence on the tourist circuit—the museum-homes of Frida Kahlo and Trotsky are there. The Condesa, its exuberant transformation into a new kind of Mexico City neighborhood—a sort of Mexican version of early Soho, or Williamsburg—under way just as I was coming off of a broken seven-year relationship, was much more to my liking. My first apartment, on Juan Escutia, a streaming thoroughfare that channels traffic off the Circuito Interior across a flank of the Condesa, was on the rooftop and consisted of two unconnected rooms: the bedroom and the kitchen. There was no roof over the space between the rooms, so that when it rained I couldn’t go from one to the other without getting wet, and when the rains were heavy, puddles spread inside from the doors, gradually swamping the floors. To reach my home, I came in through a gate off Juan Escutia, down an alley, through the kitchen of a ground- floor apartment rented by a scruffy Japanese couple and out its back door into a small courtyard where a narrow steel spiral staircase, like one on an old freighter, led up past four or five stories to the roof. Mexico City, at an altitude of 7,940 feet, mostly a vast level basin until it climbs the distant valley slopes, always feels close to the sky. My rooftop, higher than most of those around me, looked out on a cubist reef of flat rooftops of varying heights, water tanks, gardens, weather-raked potted trees, hung laundry, complicated and tangled electrical riggings, wooden or cinder-block shacks at complete odds with the architecture of the buildings they’re perched atop. (The beloved Mexico City writer Carlos Monsivais, in an essay listing the city’s essential images, called the flat rooftops “the continuation of agrarian life by other means, the natural extension of the farm. . . . Evocations and needs are concentrated on the rooftops.”) The wide sky overhead can seem like an element we’re deeply submerged in, one that overflows the mountains rimming the horizon as if these were the walls of an extinct volcano’s vast crater, inside of which has arisen a city. Mexico City’s skies are always dramatic, sometimes soaring and azure, with long rows of choreographed white clouds, moving slowly or swiftly; sometimes the clouds seem almost as near and suggestively sculptured as they do from an airplane; or the sky feels leaden and suffocating, or low and churning, or densely black and menacing, billowing in from one horizon as if poured into water from a giant bottle of ink, as a storm approaches and the winds pick up. The city’s pollution-abetted sunsets are spectacular conflagrations, blazing up over the western mountains, filling the sky with balloon dye colors, igniting the glassy modern office buildings that I can see out my rear windows into giant neon rectangles of scarlet. The night sky, sponging up light from the city below, is starless blackish phosphorescence, in which low clouds drift like mesoglea. When the moon is out in late afternoon it looms low over streets and buildings, enormous and pale yellow in the softer blue sky, like a ghostly school bus coming right at us.