In Times of Fading Light (10 page)

Dear Marion, I can’t exactly explain anything. All of a sudden I’m in Mexico. A good thing I have the Ohropax, there are dogs on the roof here ... but to be honest, these newfangled earplugs crackle. Next time, please, if possible ... or sleeping tablets. Because of the dogs ...
Woohoo ... which was which again?
One howls, and the other’s voice is quieter now. Hear that? In the background. Beyond the crackling ...
Woohoo ... what happened to the ... to the ... woof ... woof...

He wakes to find the room bathed in bright sunlight. It is 8:00 a.m. He gets up, showers. Looks at himself in the mirror for a while. Wonders whether to shave. Puts his new hat on. What does he see?

Well, what did he expect? A man in a hat. Aged forty-seven. Pale. Unshaven.

He looks older than he is.

He looks more dangerous than he is.

That satisfies him for now.

The hotel breakfast room is too sterile for him. Too European. He breakfasts in the café opposite. An old establishment, with almost the atmosphere of a Viennese coffeehouse, the one incongruous feature being the naked, bright white neon tubes illuminating the whole place. In their light the waitress looks yellow. He asks for a typical Mexican breakfast. He gets something unidentifiable, mushy. Red and green. However, the coffee is good, topped up from a metal pot. Almost viscous, you have to add milk.

And now for Mexico City by day. He has always imagined the city as colorful, but what they call the historic center is gray. It looks much like any big city in southern Spain, apart from the fact that all the buildings tilt at an angle. The damp subsoil, he reads in the
Backpackers’ Guide,
was already giving the ancient Aztecs problems.

He also reads that the Mexicans don’t call it Mexico City themselves, but DF, Distrito Federal.

And he reads about the mariachi bands that will play a serenade in the Plaza Garibaldi for anyone who wants. This square, he reads, is very much a tourist area, and prices are correspondingly high.

A temporary hall is just being erected in the main square, the Zócalo, a hall large enough to make you fear the imminent advent of a touring production of
Holiday on Ice.
He looks around the Metropolitan Cathedral, praised in the
Backpackers’ Guide
as a masterpiece of Mexican Baroque, wanders around the ostentatious nave, stands staring in astonishment at the indecent splendor of a heavily gilded altar twenty meters tall.

Next to the cathedral is the Templo Mayor, the great temple of the old Aztec city, or rather its pitiful remains. Destroyed, plundered, flattened by an earthquake, witness to the battle of two cultures, one peacefully Christian, the other the bloodthirsty Aztec culture demolished within a few months by Hernán Cortés with
slightly over two hundred soldiers
(and a clever policy of alliance, of course). From the ruins of the temple you can see the back of the cathedral, and note that stones from the temple were used to build it.

At the side of the square stands an
indio
in a magnificent feather headdress. There are two more Mexicans inside a chalk circle in front of him, and as he murmurs incantations he is clouding their minds with incense. Ten or twenty people are watching: old people, young people, couples. The
indio
is naked, short and stout, with blue lips.

Four children in a side street, making music. That’s to say, three of them are making music: one plays a clarinet, two are clumsily beating drums, and a little girl in pants rather too short for her is walking around, holding out a hat to passersby. The girl can’t be more than five. Her expression is furtive, ashamed. Alexander gives her a few pesos, wonders whether he ought to give her what he thinks he owed the musicians in the Plaza Garibaldi. But he doesn’t. He is afraid of making a fool of himself—in whose eyes?

He takes the Metro to the Insurgentes station. Itinerant street vendors get in and out. Shouting, selling CDs of terrible music bawled out of battery-driven players. Alexander castigates himself for not giving the children money.

Up aboveground again, the Avenida de los Insurgentes—the Avenue of the Insurgents. An ordinary street, more normal than the center, and dirtier, but this too is not what he imagined Mexico City would be like. People, traffic thundering by. Dry little trees somehow eke out an inexplicable existence on a median strip barely a meter wide between the lanes. The houses lining the street are clumsy copies of Jugendstil architecture, once, as he thinks he can still tell, erected by owners who took pride in them, but now dilapidated, covered with heavy layers of flaking paint. Posters are stuck on the walls. Frameworks above the rooftops hold gigantic screens advertising cheap ninety-nine-peso items.

He goes south down the Insurgentes. The address is outside the section of the map shown in the
Backpackers’ Guide.
He looked up the way on the big map of the city in the hotel. He walks neither slowly nor fast. He passes bars and stores just reopening after their lunch break. Goes past drugstores and photo shops. Past puddles of sewage and building sites, wrecked motorbikes, wrecked bicycles, wrecked pipes; everything around here is wrecked.

He buys a taco or tortilla or whatever it is at a stall, although by now he has read in the
Backpackers’ Guide
that it is unwise to eat food from street stalls. He throws it away before he has eaten half of it. He feels thirsty, goes into a little restaurant in the McDonald’s style and orders a burger and a cola. The tables are plastic and are also wrecked, chipped, with cracks in them. A games machine is yodeling. Two youths come in, wearing hoodies and low-slung jeans. Strange, he thinks, eating his burger, how young people look the same all over the world—or at least a certain kind of young people. The two of them buy something and leave again. Alexander watches them stroll across the road, swaggering, showing off.

Three kilometers farther on Alexander turns left, then left again, then right, and now he has reached his destination: Tapachula Street. It is narrow and treeless. Instead of trees there are streetlights and telephone poles with a spidery network of cables between them. Number 56A is a two-story house barely four meters wide. He recognizes the rail around the roof garden; his grandmother looked down from that roof, but in the picture, although it was a black-and-white photo, it all somehow looked green. Tropical and flourishing.

He peers cautiously through the barred windows on the first floor. There are crates standing around, apparently it’s a warehouse now. He crosses the road and looks at the house from the other side of the street. Tries to feel something. How do you feel the former presence of a grandmother?

All that he feels is that the soles of his feet hurt. So does his back. And his leg muscles, which were considerably weakened by his stay in the hospital.

On the corner he hails a green-and-white taxi, a VW Beetle, although he has read in the
Backpackers’ Guide
that it is unwise to hail taxis on the street. The driver is friendly and wears a clean white shirt, and there is a meter in the cab.

The driver turns right into the Insurgentes, going north, perfectly correct. The traffic is slow flowing, the meter keeps ticking over. Then the driver suddenly turns left, although the city center is over more to the right. Presumably, Alexander reassures himself, he wants to avoid the traffic on the Insurgentes. But instead of taking the nearest reasonably wide parallel street, the cabby follows an unpredictable zigzag course that seems to lead away from Alexander’s destination.

“
Adónde vamos?”
Alexander asks.

The driver answers something, gesticulates. Smiles at his fare in the rearview mirror.

“Stop,” says Alexander.

“No problem,” says the driver, in a kind of English. “No problem!”

But he doesn’t stop.

Three minutes later, he does stop, but in a deserted alley: walls, corrugated iron roofs, decrepitude. The driver honks the horn briefly, indicates to Alexander volubly and with much gesticulation that he is to stay in the car, and disappears.

Alexander waits a few seconds and then gets out. But no sooner is he straightening up after clambering out of the low door of the vehicle than he faces two figures. At first glance, with their hoodies and wide-legged jeans, they look like the couple of guys in the burger restaurant, but then he sees that they are younger. Hardly more than sixteen, lanky, thin. One of them, the taller of the two, has a downy mustache on his upper lip and is holding a handsome, ornate knife. The other, smaller boy, whose intelligent eyes dart back and forth, points to the taxi and asks Alexander something.

Alexander doesn’t understand the words, but he understands all the same: isn’t he going to pay for the taxi ride? Something like that. A silly trick. He says out loud, in German, “I don’t understand.”

“Dinero, peso, dollars,” says the smaller boy.

Alexander takes out his wallet, determined not to give the boys any more than the sum shown on the meter of the taxi. But before he knows it the smaller one has snatched the wallet from him and is checking its contents at a safe distance. Instinctively, Alexander takes a step toward him. The mustached boy raises his knife, waves it around in the air. The smaller boy takes the money out—three hundred dollars and a few hundred pesos—and tosses the wallet back to Alexander. Seconds later the pair of them have disappeared.

He doesn’t stop to think for long, but sets off. He wants to get out of here. He hears someone call. Hears the engine of the old VW start, and it comes closer. For a while the cabby drives along beside him, talking. Alexander ignores him, looking straight ahead, and simply walks on. As if going through a tunnel.

It takes awhile for the right term to occur to him: robbery at knife-point. He has been robbed. By two sixteen-year-olds. Two little boys. He feels humiliated. Humiliated not so much by the knife as by the smaller boy’s quick, intelligent eyes, telling him what he is: a stupid, slow-witted white man who deserves to be mugged. Well, isn’t he? Yes, he is. He feels it. He feels the deception.

He marches on in the direction that, he thinks, must lead him to the Insurgentes sometime. Dusk is falling. The district is already becoming livelier. Lights come on in the buildings. People stand in the street staring at him, the stupid, slow-witted white man. Deception. He sees the stores, the bars: deception. He sees the ads above the rooftops, he sees the taxis racing down the Insurgentes in groups, the itinerant street vendors trying to get him to buy jewelry or sunglasses: all deception. Even at the sight of the stunted trees on the median strip, the sight of the clumsy copies of Jugendstil architecture, the sight of the sidewalk in need of repair, the sight of the cables hanging down all over the place, the sight of the peeling posters, the yellow-painted curbs, the cell phone antennas, the electric wiring, the sight of the snack bar modeled on McDonald’s and the man in his bright white shirt, big rings on his fat fingers, coming out of the door of the establishment with a neon-lit ad flickering above it—even at the sight of all this he knows: it’s deception, and he is surprised that he never noticed it before. He has been deceived all his life. He’s had the wool pulled over his eyes (he chuckles with appreciation at this). In reality,
everything
is deception, and the truth is that he is a stupid, slow-witted white man who deserves to be taken for a ride—what else?

What did he imagine, for heaven’s sake? Did he really think someone was waiting for him here? Did he really think Mexico would welcome him with open arms, like an old friend? Did he really think that this country would—would do what exactly? Cure him? Well, yes, or something like that ... an ugly sound escapes him. He is laughing, his breathing stertorous. He doesn’t know it himself. Mechanically, he puts one foot in front of the other. Rage drives him on. He is thirsty, but he walks, step by step. Feels the dryness in his throat. Feels hoarse from talking—even if it’s only from talking in his mind. Now his feet hurt, but the thirst is worse. He knows about that from running marathons: the pain will pass, but the thirst will get worse. He searches his pockets for a few stray pesos; there are not enough for a bottle of water. He’s three pesos short. But three pesos are three pesos. No use asking. No one is going to give a stupid, slow-witted white man three pesos. Not even if he has cancer. He sits down on a bench. His head feels muzzy. He remembers running a marathon in R., where they took him out of the race in a state of acute dehydration. He works it out: the coffee, that cola—they’re all the fluids he has drunk today. It’s hot, and he must have walked twenty kilometers. He feels tempted to go into a café and drink water from the bathroom faucet. But he mustn’t, says the
Backpackers’ Guide.
He must go on, mustn’t stay sitting here, mustn’t lie down. If he lies down he’s dead. A stupid, slow-witted, dead white man. He sees himself lying dead on this bench in the morning. His hat has been stolen, his pants have been stolen ... At this very moment someone is stealing his Czech walking shoes, the shoes that he’s worn for years, and still with the original laces in them.

“What are you doing?”

Gradually he realizes that the man kneeling in front of him, busy with his right shoe, is a shoeblack.

“No,” says Alexander. “No!”

He withdraws his foot, takes it off the little stool, and puts it on the ground again. The man goes on cleaning his shoe. “I make verry gutt price,” says the man in English as he cleans the shoe, smiling at Alexander. “Verry gutt price.” Alexander stands up; the man is still hanging on to his shoe. Alexander walks away, the man throws himself in his path, pestering him, a blowfly. “Verry gutt quallty,” says the blowfly, leaving it open to doubt whether he means his own work or the shoe itself; Alexander tries to shake off the blowfly and go on. Now, however, the blowfly plants himself in front of Alexander, shorter than he is by two heads, but sturdy.

“You have to pay my work,” says the blowfly.

A small circle of interested onlookers has already gathered. Alexander turns around, tries to get away in the opposite direction.