The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (5 page)

I used to like to sit outside on my roof getting ready for the night with a few tequilas, music playing loudly on my boom box—no need to worry about disturbing the neighbors when you are up on a rooftop. Then I’d meet friends or head out alone, to my favorite cantina, or to a nightclub, or occasionally to an art scene party-performance or something like that in a gallery or in a rented space, an old cantina or club, often dragged there by María Guerra, and when everything else was closed maybe hitting an after-hours dive (El Bullpen, El Jacalito) or a
teibol
(as table-dance places, or strip clubs, are called), almost all of these places in the neighborhood, or in the Centro. I wasn’t part of any 1995 equivalent of the decade-later hard-partying scenester Condesa evoked in Daniel Hernández’s 2012 memoir of his life among the city’s young “urban tribes,”
Down and Delirious in Mexico City.
Still, I got around. Feeling newly liberated, at forty, from a failed relationship and eager, if not desperate, to test myself, I set out every night in search of women. Those were happy, free-spirited months. I brought a number of women, including at least one
teibolera
, up to my rooftop before moving to a new apartment and into what would turn out to be an obsessive, on-and-off relationship with a young Mexican woman who lived in the neighborhood. That relationship wouldn’t completely die out for another four years or so, and would finally leave me depleted and fairly hopeless about love, which is how I would mostly remain until I met Aura in the fall of 2002.

Since 1995 I’ve always lived within squares 168 and, only this year, 169 of the
Guía Roji
grid, in six different apartments, including the one on Avenida Amsterdam, in the Condesa, that I moved into in 1998 and kept for five years. Amsterdam is a long oval that follows the path of a horse racing track laid out in the first years of the twentieth century for the Jockey Club of Mexico on property belonging to the Countess of Miravalle, who owned all the land for miles around; thus that neighborhood’s formal name, Colonia Hipódromo Condesa—Countess Racetrack. But within a few decades—overlapping with the Mexican Revolution’s 1911 overthrow of Porfirio Díaz, and the years of warfare and political upheaval and reform that followed—all the countess’s land had been subdivided. The racetrack quickly evolved into what it is today, a tree-shaded, narrow boulevard without beginning or end, lined mostly by single-family homes and apartment buildings of predominately art nouveau and art deco architecture, a Saul Steinberg–like conglomeration of curvy, sharp, and jazzy shapes; austere and pastel-painted facades; wrought- iron balconies, and others like ovoid bathtubs overhung with tree limbs. In the 1920s and 1930s many Eastern European Jewish immigrants and refugees settled in the Condesa. The ever more numerous contemporary-design glass-concrete-and-steel apartment buildings now squeezed in with the older architecture reflect the neighborhood’s swift transformation from what was then a low-rent, somewhat sleepy, insular neighborhood, where, in the early 1990s, you could still find dusty old Mittel-Europa cafés and bakeries, into Mexico City’s epicenter of relatively affluent hipster-bohemianism. Over the last several years, much to the appalled annoyance of its now somewhat aging, family-raising, emblematic residents, its commercial blocks have also devolved into a party zone of raucous bars and nightclubs that draw young people and suburbanites from throughout the metropolitan area, and that raid the quieter side streets at night with a hit-and-run army of daredevil valet parkers.

But at night, walking on Avenida Amsterdam is like following a path through what can seem like a Pre-Raphaelite urban forest, the pinkish light of mercury-vapor street lamps suffusing and patterning the dark leafy effulgence overhead. Of course, you might get mugged walking down its cracked, root-humped sidewalks—two diminutive young thugs with punk-dyed hair and carrying razors suddenly emerging out of the darkness, crossing the street in perfectly angled pursuit to trap you on the sidewalk, which happened to me once, a few years ago, though a block away, by the park. On another night I was walking with Aura on Amsterdam when a gate opened in our path as a boy of about thirteen, moving quickly but glancing back over his shoulder, let himself out of a small, dark garden that softly flared with light as the front door of the house facing the garden opened and a girl of the same age slipped out, closed the door, and summoned the boy back for a hit of the joint she’d just lit and taken a pull from. The boy skipped back to her, took the joint, and after he’d exhaled she, a few inches taller than the boy, put her hands on his shoulders and gave him a deep kiss on the mouth, and then she went back into the house. It all happened very quickly. The boy darted back out onto the sidewalk, bringing a gust of marijuana scent, a scrawny, pretty cherub boy with messy curly hair, face beaming, and when he saw us he grinned hugely, his big black eyes skittering with excitement, as if exclaiming, Did you see that? Can you believe it?—and then he scampered away down the sidewalk, glancing back at us again, still grinning. We were sure that we’d just witnessed what must have been his first kiss, at least his first kiss with that girl. I don’t remember if that incident occurred before or after Aura and I were married. She’d never liked my ramshackle Avenida Amsterdam apartment at all, but in December and January 2003—during her winter break from Columbia, where she was studying for her PhD—we’d loved each other there in the way couples do when a love that will happily endure is still new. That spied-on “first kiss” and those first Christmas vacation months with Aura, though they may have occurred as many as three or four years apart, now seem like part of the same moment in lost time, dispersed somehow into the leafy glowing nighttime darkness of Avenida Amsterdam.

Aura and I didn’t have a car in New York but, as I’ve said, we took a lot of trips in rental cars, during which I almost always drove, and once, with her family, in Mexico, when we went to Taxco in two cars, I drove too, following behind her stepfather, becoming so dizzied by the incessantly curving mountain highway that I kept veering into the oncoming traffic lane and Aura became alarmed. Aura owned a car in Mexico, a small bright red Chevy hatchback, and I thought of her as a capable Mexico City driver, a nimble native of the ecosystem. Because she saw her mother, Guadalupe, several times a week, she spent a lot of time in traffic, always driving back and forth from our part of the city to the south—when the traffic is especially heavy, which it usually is, bottlenecked to the horizon, it’s a drive that can easily take an hour or more each way—to the UNAM, or to her mother’s apartment nearby, or to meet her mother somewhere else in the south, for example in one of those shopping mall restaurants they liked. But not everyone remembers Aura as such a great driver. This summer the poet Nicolas José, her boyfriend when they were undergraduates at the UNAM, published a memory piece about Aura in his blog at the magazine
Letras Libres
that included this passage:

It was truly dangerous to be in the car with Aura. Wrong way down one-way streets. For some reason we always ended up going the wrong way down one-way streets. Everything was just around the corner, according to her, and then we’d get lost. “Technicolor Butterfly” by Fito Páez—I hate Fito Páez—playing full blast and the two of us singing along like dwarfs.

Well, Aura did always get lost, even while, after four years of living there, walking around our neighborhood in Brooklyn. Whenever we had to meet up somewhere in lower Manhattan, especially, she almost always walked north when she had to walk south, or east instead of west, and arrived an hour or so late, and then she’d be miffed by even mild teasing, Yeahyeahyeah—she liked that Brooklynese yeahyeahyeah—I went the wrong way, hahaha, spacey Aura, so what.

On my first day of driving classes I was given a CD that on its title screen announced, “Defensive Driving. A theoretical course for the students of La Escuela Metropolitana de Manejo.” On the next screen I read, “The fear of driving can influence the mood to such a degree that a person can endure suffering from the moment he gets behind the wheel,” and a few paragraphs after that, “Does a red light mean nothing? Unfortunately this is a cultural problem of many people who live in Mexico.”

My driving teacher from the Metropolitan Driving School was Ricardo Torres. He was in his forties, but looked older, his leathery face ravaged, and he had sagging, bleary eyes, sad-looking and a little mistrustful. I sensed in Ricardo, over the next week, a disposition of frayed gentleness, edgy nerves, wisdom earned by hard experience, constantly smoldering anger, and a sense of humor that is very Mexican, at once explosively sardonic and bemused. I explained my situation to him right away—fifth anniversary of my wife’s death, wanting to mark it by learning to drive a stick shift in Mexico City. That seemed logical enough to him. He told me that two years earlier he’d gone through a divorce, after which he’d drunk hard and steadily for months, until he’d ruined his stomach. Now he could tolerate only a couple of beers, and those only with the help of two daily pills of
naproxeno sódico
. I told him that my loss had nearly turned me into an alcoholic as well, that I’d pretty much stayed drunk for the first five months. I didn’t tell him, though, what had finally happened at the end of those months, when, after many hours of drinking, in the early morning hours after Halloween night, on Sixth Avenue in New York City, I was struck by a car. I remember thinking, Maybe there’s a bar that’s still open over there, and then eagerly striding out into the avenue, and waking up in the back of an ambulance, paramedics shearing my suit jacket and sweatshirt off me, and clasping monitors to my chest. A few hours later, in the hospital, I was told that I might die, CAT scans having revealed a spot of blood on my brain that could presage a hemorrhage. Those following two nights in St. Vincent’s hospital were the first nights since shortly after Aura’s death that I didn’t get drunk. After I was released from the hospital, I tried to modify my behavior, telling myself that I had a duty to try to live in a way that wouldn’t embarrass Aura, and I succeeded in certain ways, though regarding my drinking only somewhat, and not always. It seems, compared with Ricardo at least, that I have an iron stomach. None of my Mexico City friends were surprised when they heard I’d ended up in a hospital after being hit by a car. “Frank
anda al cuidado de Díos
” a friend said people had been saying about me during those months after Aura’s death—“Frank is in God’s hands,” a Mexican way of saying that something bad was sure to happen to me.

In boyhood and adolescence, Ricardo was worshipfully attached to his father, a Mexico City police detective. When he was sixteen, his father was killed in a shoot-out with narcos in the upscale neighborhood of Polanco. Ricardo had to leave school and go to work to help support his family. Eventually he became a driving school instructor. The morning of my first lesson he picked me up in front of my apartment building in Colonia Roma Norte. I’d chosen the Escuela Metropolitana de Manejo at random in an Internet search, though it was also less expensive than other schools. The small black sedan in which I had my first lesson was older and shabbier-looking than most of the driving school cars I’d seen around. While I sat in the passenger seat, Ricardo drove to where I would have my first stick shift lesson, which turned out to be nearby in Roma Sur, on a long stretch of Calle Jalapa running alongside the walled park enclosing a public housing complex and an elementary school. The street didn’t seem to draw a lot of traffic, and parking was prohibited, a rule that was more or less obeyed though a few garbage trucks were always parked there, and taxi drivers liked to stop there for a break. That no-parking lane was also popular with driving school cars. We parked and got out to switch seats. Ricardo had told me to bring a notebook. My first lesson was about the dashboard. He was giving me the beginning driver treatment. He insisted I write down everything he said, and then embarked on a methodically didactic tour of the dashboard. “That orange light indicates a mechanical problem,” he said. “Whenever that light goes on, you must immediately bring your car to a garage to be inspected.” These were memorized phrases he’d been speaking to his students for years, but he concentrated on getting them right, correcting himself whenever he fumbled a line. “Red light, that’s the hand-brake light. This reminds us to release said brake. If we don’t comply, we’ll damage the entire brake system.
This
red light is the oil light. When this light is illuminated, it indicates that the motor has no oil. Procedure—park in a safe place, turn off the motor, and ask for help.” Then he quizzed me, twice, pointing around the dashboard. Without glancing at my notes—my handwriting is usually illegible, but I haven’t written so neatly in decades as I did in that notebook—I answered correctly every time. It was the first and perhaps the last time Ricardo would be so pleased with me. Though being unpleased, often vociferously, was what I suspect really gratified him.

We moved on to the clutch. “Basic procedures. How to initiate the advance from a full stop . . . Press down on the clutch, shift into first gear, accelerate by pressing your foot down on the gas pedal approximately a quarter of the way, at the same time slowly liberating the clutch until the point of advance. Maintain this position for the space of about two or three meters, afterward entirely releasing the clutch. Continue, gently accelerating.” Ricardo spoke his memorized instructions in a reedy growling voice that could quickly turn cajoling and shrill.

Metallic crunch of gears, car jerked to a stop, both of us rocked forward and back. I feel victimized by my own ineptitude, by the baffling hostility of the machinery. “Fran, Frrra-a-a-an, why don’t you listen to me? I said only a quarter of the way, but you press down too hard!” Or else I took my foot off the clutch too soon. But soon I, more or less, got the hang of it. We proceeded up that no-parking lane, me tentatively achieving the required balance between clutch and gas pedal to roll softly forward for those two or three meters, and then shooting forward a bit, and braking. After we reached the end of the block that first time, I received a lesson in how to back up. For a couple of hours, it seemed, we went up and down that block. Finally, maybe bored and tired of the repetition, of Ricardo’s hectoring, of the ache in my neck from having to twist myself around to look straight out the rear window every time we backed up, I began to screw up again. The first day of driving classes ended with Ricardo driving me back to my building, both of us in a grumpy mood.