The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (22 page)

I didn’t agree with everything Juanca said, but I was grateful for his message. I acknowledge my culpability in the incident at all levels. Self-debasing calamity or brush with death and wake-up call, it changed everything, or rather, in culminating in that night of sidesplitting laughter nearly two weeks later, it somehow did. I was on a new
circuito
now—“on a good path,” at last, I hoped—but with the former one welded forever inside me like the components of a circuit board.

I decided that I’d just drive my rental car to parts of the city that I wanted to see. I wanted to drive on the Circuito Interior, and I wanted to go to Tepito. It was August 31, and the last day I’d have the car. I picked up David Lida, who knew the way to Tepito, in my car at his apartment at the edge of the Condesa, and we got onto the Circuito Interior. A long expressway packed with crawling traffic, that’s all. The trick was to know when to get off. We exited to be able to circle through a neighborhood David likes. Then, relying on his sense of direction, we made our way through other neighborhoods to Tepito, the barrio that contains what is said to be the world’s largest pirated goods market. If it weren’t for the market, I suppose it would resemble any other poor neighborhood in the city—alley-like streets lined with cramped, shabby, cratered tenement buildings; still-standing shells of buildings destroyed by the 1985 earthquake that were never rebuilt—but you notice little of that because the market sprawls everywhere, crowded along the main avenues and on side streets like tunnels, one stall after another selling pirated DVDs, clothing, fabrics, electronics, perfumes, animals, everything, much of it pirated, counterfeited, or acquired in some other illegal manner. David didn’t want to get out of the car because he had his iPhone with him and had forgotten to take the credit cards out of his wallet; recently two of his friends who’d come to the market to shop for DVDs had been brutally assaulted and robbed. So I drove, exceedingly slowly and cautiously, through the market’s warren of streets, the mercantile bustle and hustle all around us reluctant to part or make way. Finally we emerged from the labyrinth, onto the Eje 1, and I drove to Paseo de la Reforma. Whenever I’m on Paseo de la Reforma, I remember a story Aura told me about herself. How, in predawn hours, she sometimes liked to walk alone there, and sit on the steps of the Ángel de la Independencia, the
glorieta
with the statue of a golden winged angel atop a soaring column. Once, when the Paseo’s sidewalks were being repaved, Aura got hold of one of its old paving stones, and somehow transported the heavy slab home to Copilco. It was smooth and marble-hued on top, jaggedly rough on the sides. I used to wish I could have been there with her, walking on the Paseo, sitting on the steps of El Ángel as the darkness lifted, or that I could have helped her lug the stone back to her family’s apartment in Copilco. When we moved to our apartment in Escandón, Aura brought the paving stone with her. It must still be there, in the dirt of the patio, hidden by the bamboos.

I turned in my car at Alamo. David and I walked into the Zona Rosa for a beer, and the summer of 2012 was over, and so was my driving project.

7
Interior Circuit Redux

IN FEBRUARY
2013, Jovi suddenly left me. Throughout the fall of 2012 and into the winter of 2013, I’d flown regularly, sometimes on a weekly basis, from Mexico to New York—taking a train to Hartford to teach my class at Trinity College—and then back, sometimes leaving the DF on Tuesday and returning on Thursday, sometimes spending an impatient nine days in Brooklyn, waiting to get back to the DF. After one such week plus two days in New York, I flew back to the DF and discovered, most unexpectedly, that the relationship was over. I was devastated because I was in love with Jovi. But even so my reaction was out of proportion. The sudden loss of Aura had been irreversible and this one wasn’t that. True, it actually seemed possible that I might never see Jovi again, but she was still alive, and could still answer e-mails. But my nervous system and subconscious seemed not to recognize the difference, and five-year-old trauma symptoms came flooding back. My Mexico City friends recognized what was happening, and were, once again, by my side. But this also meant a return of desperate insomniac prowling nights and all manner of excess, the only way I knew how to outlast and exhaust and finally quiet, for some hours, enough to get some sleep, the bedlam inside me. I believed, probably mistakenly, that without those nights—I was my own boozy Smoky the Bear on midnight to dawn patrol—mind and spirit might have blazed even more toxically. I still had to manage my schedule of flying back up to New York to teach my classes too. One night I dismissed my seminar an hour early because I felt so bereft that I could hardly speak. On the long bus ride back to New York—the bus didn’t get to the Port Authority until nearly two in the morning—I felt the return of the bleak, hollowing despair that had so frightened me five years before.

But this time, I was determined not to go through all that again, not to be swallowed by that abyss. I needed to wrestle myself back onto the “good path” that I’d found myself on at the end of the summer, but without having to reenact that forced march to the bottom first. Instead I decided to retrace my steps through that summer by writing about it. I could use words as my compass to map the route I’d taken and give it a narrative order, a sequence of incident and meaning, and rescue it from being something other than just circumstantial and ephemeral. It was my own life, after all, and now I needed to draw some strength from it. The stories one tells about oneself aren’t necessarily true, of course, but I wanted this one to be as true as I could make it. This didn’t mean that it all had to be factually true, but I decided that this story needed to be factually true too, a dependable
Guía Roji
of the summer.

In that story a man in at least some ways wrecked by loss and long under the control of grief and its grinding solipsism is determined to find his way out. He finally arrives, if not exactly by his planned route, at a reawakening. He even falls in love again. One thing he discovers—during the writing of it, after having lived it—is that a place, Mexico City, has become an essential part of his own story. He understands the ways in which Mexico City has nourished and invigorated him, and has in certain ways brought him “back to life.” But, of course, the city doesn’t exist only for him; the city isn’t his stage. He understands that he owes the city his attention, and maybe even more than only that. He is curious about the city now in a way that he never was before, hungry for information about it, and to feel a part of it. He wants to celebrate but also defend the city—the same impulse he felt in Aspen when that physician shouted out, “What a bunch of bullshit”—but hopefully he can respond more articulately now, with more knowledge and less innocence.

It was March, a month after Jovi had left me, that I began writing this chronicle. We were exchanging messages again, and began to meet occasionally, at first always in public places, like a couple on the verge of a secret affair. By May Jovi and I were back together, and I was happy and proud that we were. Had I not started writing this chronicle, maybe we, or I, wouldn’t have been able to fix our relationship. I’d gotten hold of myself, pure and simple. I was back on that better route. A few words from a Nicanor Parra poem had served as a mantra:
Corazón caliente, cabeza fría.
“Hot heart, cool head.”

I finished writing my chronicle of the summer of 2012 in June. At last I could get back to my novel. But a lot had changed in Mexico City since the summer before. Now I knew I also had to write about the summer of 2013.

After Heavens:
Summer of 2013

Tepito is the synthesis of Mexico.

—Humberto Padgett
⁷

7
“Ofrecen Rosario a la Muerte,”
Reforma,
November 2, 2003, quoted in Claudio Lomnitz,
Death and the Idea of Mexico,
p. 496.

IT WASN
’
T UNTIL THIS YEAR
, 2013, that the #Ladies really took off in Mexico, capturing even international media attention. There were a few honored precursors, such as, in 2011, María Vanessa Polo, a former beauty queen who, after being pulled over with a friend for a traffic violation in her upscale neighborhood, erupted in imperious rage, berating two policemen as
asalariados de mierda,
“shitty salary men,” and
pinche putos de mierda,
“shitty fucking fags,” and flailing at them with her fists. All over Mexico, virtually overnight, she became known as #LadyPolanco.
⁸
Andrea Benítez, this past April, was tagged #LadyPROFECO after she threw a fit because she didn’t like the table she was given at fashionable Maximo Bistrot in Colonia Roma, and then called in inspectors from PROFECO, the federal consumer protection agency run by her father, to shut the restaurant down. In May, there was Dalia Ortega, #LadyRoma, a wealthy drunk driver who, after running over a female pedestrian in Colonia Roma with her Porsche, indignantly warned police that if they arrested her she would use her family connections with the city government to have them fired. All of those incidents were captured by witnesses with smartphones, whose tweets and posted images and videos went viral, humiliating their subjects and even helping to exact justice—#LadyRoma was charged with homicide after the woman she’d hit died of brain injuries days later; #LadyPROFECO’s father, appointed by the new PRI president to his powerful post, was forced to resign; #LadyPolanco had to pay a fine in order to escape a fifteen-month prison sentence for assaulting authorities and for discrimination. Without those smartphone blitzes, probably none of those #Ladies would have faced any consequences for their actions. They weren’t the only #Ladies, though they were among the most notorious.

The
New York Times
published a story about #LadyPROFECO and the new phenomena of “broad and swift social media campaigns” through which Mexicans vent their indignation over such high-handed abuse. “Andrea Benítez simply did what many rich, connected Mexicans have always done: she used her influence to step on the lower born,” wrote Randall Archibald, the
Times
reporter. He quoted a patron of the restaurant where Benítez earned her hashtag: “‘It’s such blatant corruption that’s right in our faces,’ said Max St. Romain, 42, a filmmaker who saw the inspectors slap an enormous ‘suspension of activities’ sticker on Maximo Bistrot on Friday night. ‘It’s a connection to the corruption that ruled Mexico for decades—the fact that a child of someone in power can use it just on a whim, on a tantrum.’” Now the corruption that ruled Mexico for decades is back in power. At least those who may have felt newly uninhibited by the restoration of the PRI about flagrantly exhibiting their own moral corruption now have to worry that an offended and alarmed nation lies in wait, smartphones ready.

So that’s a bright spot, one of the few in Mexico these days. It’s not only PRI elites who have to watch out. The most recent incident was #LadySenado, Luz María Beristáin, a PRD senator who, when she turned up with a female friend at an airline counter in Cancún too late to board her flight to the DF, first tried to intimidate the young female employee who refused her a boarding pass. When that didn’t work, Beristáin grossly harangued her. In her parting shot, the senator sneered, “Where did you study?” and her friend chimed in, “Surely in Tepito,
pinche esquincla
, fucking brat.”

“The return of the PRI is the worst news that our generation has received,” former mayor Marcelo Ebrard told me. “It’s in the PRI’s genes to restore a semi-authoritarian regime. That’s the logic of the PRI.” When we spoke in the spring, the PRI not only had regained the presidency, but also held the governorships of twenty-six out of thirty-two states, as well as near majorities in both houses of the Mexican Congress. Ebrard said that since Peña Nieto took office, the PRI’s reforms have granted the president ever more control over the country’s politics, concentrating power in the “Eagle’s Seat” and federal government to create a new twenty-first-century PRI hegemony.

One early manifestation of the PRI’s restoration was in the situation faced by journalists, which was dire enough before Peña Nieto’s election. Article 19, a human rights group that monitors free expression issues, reported on June 30 that during Peña Nieto’s first six months in office acts of violence and intimidation against the press rose 46 percent in comparison with the same period in 2012. Eight of the nine Mexican states with the highest homicide rates during Peña Nieto’s first hundred days in office were governed by the PRI.
⁹
During the first nine months of Peña Nieto’s presidency kidnappings rose 19 percent throughout Mexico, compared with the previous year’s rate.
¹⁰
Amnesty International recently estimated that half the disappearances in Mexico occur with the collaboration or complicity of government authorities.
¹¹

On July 7, 2013, there was a new round of nationwide elections, this time for state governorships, mayors,
presidentes municipales
, state legislatures, and other local posts. During and after the elections, the PRI’s opponents and many voices in the media accused Peña Nieto’s party of having waged the dirtiest and most violent campaign in memory, murdering candidates and other opponents, terrorizing and intimidating voters, employing widespread vote buying and fraud, and conniving with organized crime’s violent and corrupting intrusions into the campaign on the party’s behalf. The PRI’s summer campaign was not,
as some observers were determined to perceive it, a masterful if ruthless renewal of traditional Mexican electoral tactics that had served the “wily” old party so well during the last century. It was an in-your-face crime spree shielded by the impunity provided by presidential and PRI power. After the elections, opposition party leaders vented angrily for about a week, even threatening to pull out of the “Pact for Mexico,” their legislative agreement with the PRI on an agenda of proposed political and economic reforms, unless Peña Nieto punished at least those within his party responsible for the most outrageous offenses. But just as with last summer’s presidential elections, the mainstream national television networks and major newspapers, rather than investigating or reporting or editorially denouncing wrongdoing in a sustained way, yielded to Peña Nieto and the PRI, and the criminal election campaign evaporated as a news story and issue.