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| How Mexico City saved me from grief | How Mexico City saved me from grief |
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| As Mexico City traffic roundabouts go the Glorieta Citlaltépetl, in Colonia Condesa, is a tranquil one, with only two streets feeding in and out. One late-morning, 10 or so years ago, as I was walking across the Glorieta, I noticed a Volkswagen Beetle going around and around it. Probably it was nothing more than that repeated circling that made me stop and watch. Or else maybe, for a moment, I wondered why a taxi – because back then, most of the VW Beetles you saw in Mexico City were taxis – would be going around and around like that, as if the driver couldn’t find the exact address on the roundabout that his passenger was stubbornly insisting on, or else was running up the fare on his sleeping or passed-out passenger in this demented way. However, lettering on the VW’s doors identified it as a driving school car. When it went past again I saw that the student driver, his instructor seated alongside him, was a silver-haired man with a moustache, well into his 70s at least, dressed in white shirt, tie and suit jacket. | As Mexico City traffic roundabouts go the Glorieta Citlaltépetl, in Colonia Condesa, is a tranquil one, with only two streets feeding in and out. One late-morning, 10 or so years ago, as I was walking across the Glorieta, I noticed a Volkswagen Beetle going around and around it. Probably it was nothing more than that repeated circling that made me stop and watch. Or else maybe, for a moment, I wondered why a taxi – because back then, most of the VW Beetles you saw in Mexico City were taxis – would be going around and around like that, as if the driver couldn’t find the exact address on the roundabout that his passenger was stubbornly insisting on, or else was running up the fare on his sleeping or passed-out passenger in this demented way. However, lettering on the VW’s doors identified it as a driving school car. When it went past again I saw that the student driver, his instructor seated alongside him, was a silver-haired man with a moustache, well into his 70s at least, dressed in white shirt, tie and suit jacket. |
| What, I wondered, had inspired this elderly man to learn to drive at his age? I imagined the scene at his home earlier that morning when he was leaving for his lesson, an affectionate and proud send-off from his wife, or maybe an affectionately teasing one. Or maybe it was one of those inertia-defying widowerhood decisions, that he would finally learn to drive, which is pretty much precisely what, in the summer of 2012, it would be for me. July 25th would mark the fifth anniversary of my wife Aura Estrada’s death. Aura died in Mexico City, in the Angeles de Pedregal hospital in the city’s south, 24 hours after severely breaking her spine while bodysurfing at Mazunte, on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. She was 30 years old, and we’d been married a month short of two years. | What, I wondered, had inspired this elderly man to learn to drive at his age? I imagined the scene at his home earlier that morning when he was leaving for his lesson, an affectionate and proud send-off from his wife, or maybe an affectionately teasing one. Or maybe it was one of those inertia-defying widowerhood decisions, that he would finally learn to drive, which is pretty much precisely what, in the summer of 2012, it would be for me. July 25th would mark the fifth anniversary of my wife Aura Estrada’s death. Aura died in Mexico City, in the Angeles de Pedregal hospital in the city’s south, 24 hours after severely breaking her spine while bodysurfing at Mazunte, on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. She was 30 years old, and we’d been married a month short of two years. |
| Unlike the elderly man circling the rotary, I wasn’t a beginner. I did know how to drive, but I didn’t know how to drive in Mexico City, where I mostly depended on taxis and public transportation to get around. I could count on one hand the numbers of times I’d tried to drive there, though I’d been living in the Distrito Federal, the DF, as the city is formally but also popularly called, off and on for 20 years. The DF has a population of about 8 million, but during weekdays, with so many commuters pouring in from surrounding metropolitan México state to work, the number swells to 20 million. | Unlike the elderly man circling the rotary, I wasn’t a beginner. I did know how to drive, but I didn’t know how to drive in Mexico City, where I mostly depended on taxis and public transportation to get around. I could count on one hand the numbers of times I’d tried to drive there, though I’d been living in the Distrito Federal, the DF, as the city is formally but also popularly called, off and on for 20 years. The DF has a population of about 8 million, but during weekdays, with so many commuters pouring in from surrounding metropolitan México state to work, the number swells to 20 million. |
| The seemingly anarchic chaos and confusion of the city’s traffic had always intimidated and even terrified me: intersections and roundabouts like wide demolition derby arenas, cars crisscrossing simultaneously from all directions and all somehow missing each other, streaming through each other like ghosts; busy cross-streets without traffic lights or stop signs; one way streets that change direction from one block to another; jammed multi-lane expressways and looping overpasses, where a missed exit inevitably means a miscalculated turn on to another expressway or avenue heading off in some unknown direction, or a descent into a bewildering snarl of streets in some neighbourhood you’ve never been to or even heard of before. | The seemingly anarchic chaos and confusion of the city’s traffic had always intimidated and even terrified me: intersections and roundabouts like wide demolition derby arenas, cars crisscrossing simultaneously from all directions and all somehow missing each other, streaming through each other like ghosts; busy cross-streets without traffic lights or stop signs; one way streets that change direction from one block to another; jammed multi-lane expressways and looping overpasses, where a missed exit inevitably means a miscalculated turn on to another expressway or avenue heading off in some unknown direction, or a descent into a bewildering snarl of streets in some neighbourhood you’ve never been to or even heard of before. |
| My greatest fear was getting lost on an expressway, on the Anillo Periférico or the Circuito Interior, during one of the torrential summer rains, thunder and lightning in the low flat heavy sky like sonic sledgehammers falling on the car roof, and the rain, dense, blinding, trapping you inside a steady frenetic metallic vibration, and even welting hail menacing the windshield, and in a panic making for the first near exit and descending into drain-clogged streets that are suddenly and swiftly flooding, crap-brown water engulfing stalled cars, the tide rising to door handles; newspapers publish photographs of those routine calamities all summer long. | My greatest fear was getting lost on an expressway, on the Anillo Periférico or the Circuito Interior, during one of the torrential summer rains, thunder and lightning in the low flat heavy sky like sonic sledgehammers falling on the car roof, and the rain, dense, blinding, trapping you inside a steady frenetic metallic vibration, and even welting hail menacing the windshield, and in a panic making for the first near exit and descending into drain-clogged streets that are suddenly and swiftly flooding, crap-brown water engulfing stalled cars, the tide rising to door handles; newspapers publish photographs of those routine calamities all summer long. |
| 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 there was a problem or riddle I had to solve and that somehow Mexico City held a solution. 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. | 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 there was a problem or riddle I had to solve and that somehow Mexico City held a solution. 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. |
| * * * | * * * |
| I was living in a newly rented apartment in Colonia Roma. Often when Aura and I had taken a trip, 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 symbolise several aspects of grief, its listlessness, loneliness and withdrawal, its gruelling 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 any more. | I was living in a newly rented apartment in Colonia Roma. Often when Aura and I had taken a trip, 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 symbolise several aspects of grief, its listlessness, loneliness and withdrawal, its gruelling 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 any more. |
| I wasn’t intending to just get in a car and randomly drive around, 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 experimental writing games of formal restriction and chance, and also of the I Ching. But what if carrying it out was actually more of the same, yet another grief ritual, a desire to 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 that, had become my sacred place, and my home in a way no other place ever had. | I wasn’t intending to just get in a car and randomly drive around, 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 experimental writing games of formal restriction and chance, and also of the I Ching. But what if carrying it out was actually more of the same, yet another grief ritual, a desire to 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 that, had become my sacred place, and my home in a way no other place ever had. |
| My spiral-bound large format 2012 edition of the Guía Roji divides all of Mexico City’s streets and neighbourhoods into 220 pages of zone by zone maps; at its front, 178 additional pages of indexes list some 99,100 streets, and 6,400 neighbourhoods. The Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue told me that when he was a boy an aunt gave him a Guía Roji as a gift, inscribed, “This book contains all roads.” | My spiral-bound large format 2012 edition of the Guía Roji divides all of Mexico City’s streets and neighbourhoods into 220 pages of zone by zone maps; at its front, 178 additional pages of indexes list some 99,100 streets, and 6,400 neighbourhoods. The Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue told me that when he was a boy an aunt gave him a Guía Roji as a gift, inscribed, “This book contains all roads.” |
| The driving project had something to do with my relationship to Mexico City, Aura’s city, the city where she died | The driving project had something to do with my relationship to Mexico City, Aura’s city, the city where she died |
| Whenever I flip through 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 (Iron Workers). Never heard of it. Though Metalúrgicos is obviously appropriate for a colonia named Iron Workers, 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 centre of it all? That your street, your colonia, is a magnet, pulling the entire universe down towards you. 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 Mexico state, lies just beyond. I want to go to Calle Metalúrgicos. | Whenever I flip through 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 (Iron Workers). Never heard of it. Though Metalúrgicos is obviously appropriate for a colonia named Iron Workers, 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 centre of it all? That your street, your colonia, is a magnet, pulling the entire universe down towards you. 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 Mexico state, lies just beyond. I want to go to Calle Metalúrgicos. |
| 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 kind of embarrassing to enrol 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 gear stick, I’d only driven an automatic. Learning to drive standard, I decided, would justify enrolling in a driving school, because then I would be overcoming two inhibitions at once. | 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 kind of embarrassing to enrol 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 gear stick, I’d only driven an automatic. Learning to drive standard, I decided, would justify enrolling in a driving school, because then I would be overcoming two inhibitions at once. |
| 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.” | 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 40s, 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, a constantly smouldering anger, and a sense of humour 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 with a gear stick 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 only tolerate a couple of beers, and this only with the help of two daily pills of naproxeno sodico. I told him my loss had nearly turned me into an alcoholic as well. | My driving teacher from the Metropolitan Driving School was Ricardo Torres. He was in his 40s, 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, a constantly smouldering anger, and a sense of humour 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 with a gear stick 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 only tolerate a couple of beers, and this only with the help of two daily pills of naproxeno sodico. I told him my loss had nearly turned me into an alcoholic as well. |
| In boyhood and adolescence, Ricardo was worshipfully attached to his father, a Mexico City police detective. When he was 16, his father was killed in a shootout with narcos. 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. I’d chosen the Escuela de Manejo Metropolitana at random in an internet search, though it was also less expensive than other schools. | In boyhood and adolescence, Ricardo was worshipfully attached to his father, a Mexico City police detective. When he was 16, his father was killed in a shootout with narcos. 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. I’d chosen the Escuela de Manejo Metropolitana at random in an internet search, though it was also less expensive than other schools. |
| The small black saloon 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 gear-stick lesson, which turned out to be nearby, on a long stretch of Calle Jalapa running alongside a walled park enclosing a public housing complex and an elementary school. 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 beginner-driver treatment. He insisted I write down everything he said, and then embarked on a methodical tour of the dashboard. Then he quizzed me, twice. Without glancing at my notes – my handwriting is usually illegible, but I hadn’t written so neatly in decades as I did in that notebook – I answered correctly every time. It was the first and perhaps last time Ricardo would be so pleased with me. Though being displeased, often vociferously, was what I suspect really gratified him. | The small black saloon 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 gear-stick lesson, which turned out to be nearby, on a long stretch of Calle Jalapa running alongside a walled park enclosing a public housing complex and an elementary school. 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 beginner-driver treatment. He insisted I write down everything he said, and then embarked on a methodical tour of the dashboard. Then he quizzed me, twice. Without glancing at my notes – my handwriting is usually illegible, but I hadn’t written so neatly in decades as I did in that notebook – I answered correctly every time. It was the first and perhaps last time Ricardo would be so pleased with me. Though being displeased, 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 …” Ricardo spoke his memorised instructions in a reedy growling voice that could quickly turn cajoling and shrill. | 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 …” Ricardo spoke his memorised 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 victimised 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 press the clutch 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 a no-parking lane, me tentatively achieving the required balance between clutch and gas pedal. 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 of 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. | Metallic crunch of gears, car jerked to a stop, both of us rocked forward and back. I feel victimised 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 press the clutch 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 a no-parking lane, me tentatively achieving the required balance between clutch and gas pedal. 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 of 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. |
| * * * | * * * |
| The Colonia Roma apartment that I’d rented at the start of the summer is on the sixth floor, overlooking the Plaza Río de Janiero, its living-room window offering a big view of sky over the tree-filled plaza and buildings on the other side. I love to watch the summer afternoon rains from that perch at the front window, especially when they are torrential, heavy and dense or lashing, diffuse lightning flashes startling the purplish-grey chilly gloom, followed by shattering thunder, and then rattling hail, otherworldly like a storm on Mars; you hear sirens wailing all over the city. But often the rains are peaceful and luscious. The rains clean the air, bringing, when they wane, the fresh scent of trees, churned earth and wet stone. Concentration and hours to write come more easily to me in the DF than anywhere else, but especially when it rains. Time in Mexico City, at least to me, seems somehow slowed down, so that days feel twice as long there as they do in New York. A mysterious energy seems to silently thrum from the ground, from restless volcanic earth, but one that is also produced, I like to think, by the pavement-pounding footsteps of the millions upon millions who labour every day in the city, by their collective breathing and all that mental scheming, life here for most being a steadfastly confronted and often brutal daily challenge, mined with potential treachery but also, in the best cases, opportunity, one sometimes hiding inside the other like in a shell game; also by love, desire, and not so secret sexual secretiveness, the air seems to silently jangle with all that. | The Colonia Roma apartment that I’d rented at the start of the summer is on the sixth floor, overlooking the Plaza Río de Janiero, its living-room window offering a big view of sky over the tree-filled plaza and buildings on the other side. I love to watch the summer afternoon rains from that perch at the front window, especially when they are torrential, heavy and dense or lashing, diffuse lightning flashes startling the purplish-grey chilly gloom, followed by shattering thunder, and then rattling hail, otherworldly like a storm on Mars; you hear sirens wailing all over the city. But often the rains are peaceful and luscious. The rains clean the air, bringing, when they wane, the fresh scent of trees, churned earth and wet stone. Concentration and hours to write come more easily to me in the DF than anywhere else, but especially when it rains. Time in Mexico City, at least to me, seems somehow slowed down, so that days feel twice as long there as they do in New York. A mysterious energy seems to silently thrum from the ground, from restless volcanic earth, but one that is also produced, I like to think, by the pavement-pounding footsteps of the millions upon millions who labour every day in the city, by their collective breathing and all that mental scheming, life here for most being a steadfastly confronted and often brutal daily challenge, mined with potential treachery but also, in the best cases, opportunity, one sometimes hiding inside the other like in a shell game; also by love, desire, and not so secret sexual secretiveness, the air seems to silently jangle with all that. |
| The Colonia Roma apartment was a luxury I couldn’t really afford, but I wanted to live there and decided what the hell. Something good is going to happen here, so it’s worth the money: that’s what I felt. The place is huge, three bedrooms and a maid’s quarters, the living room large enough to toss a football around in, which is what, usually late at night after the neighbourhood cantinas had closed, I often ended up doing with my friends that summer. The football had been in storage for nearly five years, but it still had some air in it. | The Colonia Roma apartment was a luxury I couldn’t really afford, but I wanted to live there and decided what the hell. Something good is going to happen here, so it’s worth the money: that’s what I felt. The place is huge, three bedrooms and a maid’s quarters, the living room large enough to toss a football around in, which is what, usually late at night after the neighbourhood cantinas had closed, I often ended up doing with my friends that summer. The football had been in storage for nearly five years, but it still had some air in it. |
| After Aura died, her mother, nearly crazed by a grief that sought an outlet in blame, expelled me from our apartment, and I’d hurriedly packed-up and taken nearly everything into the cramped storage space in the basement of the building where the parents of Aura’s cousin Fabiola lived. Now, that May, nearly five years later, I’d hired a moving truck and brought it all to my new place in Colonia Roma, accompanied by Fabiola and her boyfriend Juanca. The movers piled what they could into the elevator, and hauled the furniture up the six flights of stairs. Boxes of Aura’s books, papers, and stuff, some of it dating to her childhood, went into the putative maid’s quarters behind the kitchen. Will I be carrying all of that, from place to place, the rest of my life? I threw out many things, clothing and obvious junk. Here were the industrial black rubber boots that Aura had bought only a day or two before we’d left for our long-awaited beach vacation in Mazunte. She’d only worn the boots once, to mop the flooded bathroom, though I imagine she would have used them again, to walk in rain-flooded streets. There was no way I was throwing those boots out. We unpacked boxes of kitchenware, pots and pans, cutlery, dining sets, glasses and cups, appliances, much of it wedding gifts. Then the yellowing, dusty newspapers all those kitchen objects had been wrapped in nearly five years before, printed with the dates of some of the most vibrantly happy and promising days of my life, because there was so much that we were looking forward to, not least our imminent beach vacation, dates that also marked the last days and weeks of Aura’s life, caused a surge of sadness, as if I’d just understood – as if, because I guess at that moment I didn’t understand anything other than that the familiar sadness had just overtaken me – that time itself, for me, wasn’t the challenging drama I thought it was but just something made of dust, paper and old forgotten, irrelevant news. It was like a rebuke of my current conception of those nearly five years since Aura’s death, their relation to ongoing time itself, as being like an invisible but weighty hibernating animal inside me, sides always rising and falling, that I somehow had to get moving again before it would all be too late, that I had to expel from inside myself and follow out into the world. | After Aura died, her mother, nearly crazed by a grief that sought an outlet in blame, expelled me from our apartment, and I’d hurriedly packed-up and taken nearly everything into the cramped storage space in the basement of the building where the parents of Aura’s cousin Fabiola lived. Now, that May, nearly five years later, I’d hired a moving truck and brought it all to my new place in Colonia Roma, accompanied by Fabiola and her boyfriend Juanca. The movers piled what they could into the elevator, and hauled the furniture up the six flights of stairs. Boxes of Aura’s books, papers, and stuff, some of it dating to her childhood, went into the putative maid’s quarters behind the kitchen. Will I be carrying all of that, from place to place, the rest of my life? I threw out many things, clothing and obvious junk. Here were the industrial black rubber boots that Aura had bought only a day or two before we’d left for our long-awaited beach vacation in Mazunte. She’d only worn the boots once, to mop the flooded bathroom, though I imagine she would have used them again, to walk in rain-flooded streets. There was no way I was throwing those boots out. We unpacked boxes of kitchenware, pots and pans, cutlery, dining sets, glasses and cups, appliances, much of it wedding gifts. Then the yellowing, dusty newspapers all those kitchen objects had been wrapped in nearly five years before, printed with the dates of some of the most vibrantly happy and promising days of my life, because there was so much that we were looking forward to, not least our imminent beach vacation, dates that also marked the last days and weeks of Aura’s life, caused a surge of sadness, as if I’d just understood – as if, because I guess at that moment I didn’t understand anything other than that the familiar sadness had just overtaken me – that time itself, for me, wasn’t the challenging drama I thought it was but just something made of dust, paper and old forgotten, irrelevant news. It was like a rebuke of my current conception of those nearly five years since Aura’s death, their relation to ongoing time itself, as being like an invisible but weighty hibernating animal inside me, sides always rising and falling, that I somehow had to get moving again before it would all be too late, that I had to expel from inside myself and follow out into the world. |
| * * * | * * * |
| I had never paid much attention to Mexican politics. For years, I’d considered the DF my place of escape from, or my neutral place between, the two bordering countries where before I’d spent almost all my adult life: the United States and Guatemala, countries whose politics are impossible to ignore, and that can exhaust, sour, and depress anybody. I’d thought of my old apartment on Avenida Amsterdam as a refuge where I could hole up for months of long workdays and intense concentration. Often weeks could go by without my even opening a Mexican newspaper. I even used to boast about that. And in the years since Aura’s death, my indifference to Mexican politics had only grown. So why, in the summer of 2012, did I become so interested in Mexico’s national elections and the protest movement which sprang to life in May, only six weeks before the July 1 vote? It was an aspect of that summer’s general awakening, I guess, but also of a specific awakening to what was happening in Mexico. | I had never paid much attention to Mexican politics. For years, I’d considered the DF my place of escape from, or my neutral place between, the two bordering countries where before I’d spent almost all my adult life: the United States and Guatemala, countries whose politics are impossible to ignore, and that can exhaust, sour, and depress anybody. I’d thought of my old apartment on Avenida Amsterdam as a refuge where I could hole up for months of long workdays and intense concentration. Often weeks could go by without my even opening a Mexican newspaper. I even used to boast about that. And in the years since Aura’s death, my indifference to Mexican politics had only grown. So why, in the summer of 2012, did I become so interested in Mexico’s national elections and the protest movement which sprang to life in May, only six weeks before the July 1 vote? It was an aspect of that summer’s general awakening, I guess, but also of a specific awakening to what was happening in Mexico. |
| The student movement known as #YoSoy132 was born in the immediate aftermath of a visit made by the presidential candidate of the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution, or PRI, Enrique Peña Nieto, to the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City on 11 May. The PRI, having ruled Mexico for 71 years in an authoritarian and corrupt manner, had been out of power since 2000, but Peña Nieto was claiming to represent a party that had learned its lessons and reformed. Expecting a polite reception, the perfectly-coiffed PRI candidate walked into an auditorium overflowing with students shouting their repudiation of him and his part in the violent suppression of land rights protesters. When he arrogantly defended his actions, the students exploded with shouts of “Murderer!” and “Get out!” The candidate and his entourage were forced to retreat from the auditorium, chased by chanting students into the building’s corridors, where they briefly found refuge in a second story men’s room. | The student movement known as #YoSoy132 was born in the immediate aftermath of a visit made by the presidential candidate of the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution, or PRI, Enrique Peña Nieto, to the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City on 11 May. The PRI, having ruled Mexico for 71 years in an authoritarian and corrupt manner, had been out of power since 2000, but Peña Nieto was claiming to represent a party that had learned its lessons and reformed. Expecting a polite reception, the perfectly-coiffed PRI candidate walked into an auditorium overflowing with students shouting their repudiation of him and his part in the violent suppression of land rights protesters. When he arrogantly defended his actions, the students exploded with shouts of “Murderer!” and “Get out!” The candidate and his entourage were forced to retreat from the auditorium, chased by chanting students into the building’s corridors, where they briefly found refuge in a second story men’s room. |
| In the aftermath of this humiliating incident, PRI spokesmen attempted to portray what had occurred as an organised provocation carried out by infiltrators. In response, an Ibero student called for students to make videos, asserting their spontaneous part in a legitimate protest. He received 131 videos that he edited into one and posted on YouTube, and that was how the protest movement #YoSoy132 was born. All across Mexico students from private and public universities, from every social class, came together to form a non-violent movement to prevent Peña Nieto from becoming president. (They failed, although the new president was voted in, amid accusation of vote buying schemes, with a vastly reduced majority). | In the aftermath of this humiliating incident, PRI spokesmen attempted to portray what had occurred as an organised provocation carried out by infiltrators. In response, an Ibero student called for students to make videos, asserting their spontaneous part in a legitimate protest. He received 131 videos that he edited into one and posted on YouTube, and that was how the protest movement #YoSoy132 was born. All across Mexico students from private and public universities, from every social class, came together to form a non-violent movement to prevent Peña Nieto from becoming president. (They failed, although the new president was voted in, amid accusation of vote buying schemes, with a vastly reduced majority). |
| In Mexico City some of the #YoSoy132 marches stretching for three miles through the city streets, were festive carnivals, with costumes and marching bands, resounding with political chants and raunchy songs. At the marches I kept an eye out for blue and gold UNAM banners and especially for the ones spelling out Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, the department where Aura had studied and even taught for a while, and whenever I found one, I always tagged along with those contingents for a while. That summer of 2012, the political fervour in the streets pretty much woke me from the long political disengagement of my grief years. A lot happened in my life that summer. Time had begun to move again. | In Mexico City some of the #YoSoy132 marches stretching for three miles through the city streets, were festive carnivals, with costumes and marching bands, resounding with political chants and raunchy songs. At the marches I kept an eye out for blue and gold UNAM banners and especially for the ones spelling out Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, the department where Aura had studied and even taught for a while, and whenever I found one, I always tagged along with those contingents for a while. That summer of 2012, the political fervour in the streets pretty much woke me from the long political disengagement of my grief years. A lot happened in my life that summer. Time had begun to move again. |
| I’d stuck to my plan. I’d taken a week of classes in preparation for my “driving project”. Was I really ready to venture out on my own into the city’s traffic, trying to reach whatever street and neighbourhood my finger had plunked down on in a randomly opened page of the Guía Roji? I felt that it was now or never – it was already mid-August. My life had taken a surprising turn in the three weeks since the fifth anniversary of Aura’s death. The “new start” that I’d originally hoped my driving project would somehow instigate had, most unexpectedly already come to me. I’d done nothing to earn it other than enduring, not always admirably, what I’d endured. If I was in a better place in my own “circuito interior” than I’d expected to be earlier that summer, this was no time to take a dishonourable early exit from the route I’d planned through it. It all might even become undone, I felt, if I failed to complete that route, and didn’t honour what I’d initially meant to honour. | I’d stuck to my plan. I’d taken a week of classes in preparation for my “driving project”. Was I really ready to venture out on my own into the city’s traffic, trying to reach whatever street and neighbourhood my finger had plunked down on in a randomly opened page of the Guía Roji? I felt that it was now or never – it was already mid-August. My life had taken a surprising turn in the three weeks since the fifth anniversary of Aura’s death. The “new start” that I’d originally hoped my driving project would somehow instigate had, most unexpectedly already come to me. I’d done nothing to earn it other than enduring, not always admirably, what I’d endured. If I was in a better place in my own “circuito interior” than I’d expected to be earlier that summer, this was no time to take a dishonourable early exit from the route I’d planned through it. It all might even become undone, I felt, if I failed to complete that route, and didn’t honour what I’d initially meant to honour. |
| * * * | * * * |
| One evening soon after my last driving class I sat down with my Guía Roji, prepared to reveal my first destination. I closed my eyes, opened the Guía Roji on my lap, and put my finger down on the page. My finger had landed on tiny Calle Tonacatecuatl, on map-page 205, in a neighbourhood where the surrounding streets had similarly unfamiliar pre-Hispanic, probably Nahuatl, names. | One evening soon after my last driving class I sat down with my Guía Roji, prepared to reveal my first destination. I closed my eyes, opened the Guía Roji on my lap, and put my finger down on the page. My finger had landed on tiny Calle Tonacatecuatl, on map-page 205, in a neighbourhood where the surrounding streets had similarly unfamiliar pre-Hispanic, probably Nahuatl, names. |
| I rented a car at an Alamo outlet on Paseo de la Reforma, a red Chevrolet compact, and drove it back to my building and parked. My first solo drive in Mexico was complete. But before setting out, I wanted to practise. The route I’d mapped out would begin with a long drive up Avenida Insurgentes Sur, which I’d be able to get on to via the Glorieta Insurgentes, a roundabout only a few blocks down Calle Puebla from the Plaza Río de Janeiro. The taxi drivers I’d polled regarded that multi-spoked dervish roundabout to be one of the city’s most challenging. In On the Road, when late in the novel the characters take their ridiculously goofy trip to Mexico, this is how Jack Kerouac describes legendary driver-supreme Dean Moriarty’s encounter with a Mexico City roundabout: “He got on a circular glorietta drive on Reforma Boulevard and rolled around it with its eight spokes shooting cars at us from all directions, left, right, izquierda, dead ahead, and yelled and jumped with joy. ‘This is traffic I’ve always dreamed of. Everybody goes!’” I thought that I’d better practice roundabouts. There was another one in Colonia Roma, the also five-spoked Plaza de Cibeles. Glorieta Insurgentes’ high-speed roller-derby feeds in and out of major avenues, but Plaza de las Cibeles channels traffic off relatively quiet streets. | I rented a car at an Alamo outlet on Paseo de la Reforma, a red Chevrolet compact, and drove it back to my building and parked. My first solo drive in Mexico was complete. But before setting out, I wanted to practise. The route I’d mapped out would begin with a long drive up Avenida Insurgentes Sur, which I’d be able to get on to via the Glorieta Insurgentes, a roundabout only a few blocks down Calle Puebla from the Plaza Río de Janeiro. The taxi drivers I’d polled regarded that multi-spoked dervish roundabout to be one of the city’s most challenging. In On the Road, when late in the novel the characters take their ridiculously goofy trip to Mexico, this is how Jack Kerouac describes legendary driver-supreme Dean Moriarty’s encounter with a Mexico City roundabout: “He got on a circular glorietta drive on Reforma Boulevard and rolled around it with its eight spokes shooting cars at us from all directions, left, right, izquierda, dead ahead, and yelled and jumped with joy. ‘This is traffic I’ve always dreamed of. Everybody goes!’” I thought that I’d better practice roundabouts. There was another one in Colonia Roma, the also five-spoked Plaza de Cibeles. Glorieta Insurgentes’ high-speed roller-derby feeds in and out of major avenues, but Plaza de las Cibeles channels traffic off relatively quiet streets. |
| A Metrobús was bearing down on me and in panic I swung a heedless U-turn on to Alvaro Obregón. My hands were shaking | A Metrobús was bearing down on me and in panic I swung a heedless U-turn on to Alvaro Obregón. My hands were shaking |
| I backed the car out of the garage, and drove to the Plaza de Cibeles, its central fountain a bronze replica of the marble original in Madrid. I whizzed around the rotary, accelerating ahead of a car trying to angle across me from the inside and shot, homeward, into Durango. But then I took another left, got back on to Oaxaca and circled the rotary again. Woohoo! If not quite yelling and jumping with joy, I felt impatient to take on the Glorieta Insurgentes. Calle Puebla, as usual, was choked with traffic. But even advancing at a crawl, I bafflingly missed the turn on to the Glorieta. I made a few impulsive turns, found Chapultepec and then, only blocks from home, got lost and somehow ended up on multi-lane Niños Heroes. Following my not always keen sense of direction, I finally found my way home. I tried that route the next morning. I followed Alvaro Obregón into the wide Insurgentes intersection and, so as not to drive across a row of raised safety reflectors in the pavement that also confused me, turned sharply left, directly into a northbound Metrobús lane. A Metrobús was bearing down on me and in panic I swung a heedless U-turn back on to Alvaro Obregón. My hands were shaking. What, I couldn’t find my way on to Insurgentes Sur on my own, not even that? Humiliated and discouraged, I drove home and parked. I didn’t take the car out again that day. I brooded over the Guía Roji. | I backed the car out of the garage, and drove to the Plaza de Cibeles, its central fountain a bronze replica of the marble original in Madrid. I whizzed around the rotary, accelerating ahead of a car trying to angle across me from the inside and shot, homeward, into Durango. But then I took another left, got back on to Oaxaca and circled the rotary again. Woohoo! If not quite yelling and jumping with joy, I felt impatient to take on the Glorieta Insurgentes. Calle Puebla, as usual, was choked with traffic. But even advancing at a crawl, I bafflingly missed the turn on to the Glorieta. I made a few impulsive turns, found Chapultepec and then, only blocks from home, got lost and somehow ended up on multi-lane Niños Heroes. Following my not always keen sense of direction, I finally found my way home. I tried that route the next morning. I followed Alvaro Obregón into the wide Insurgentes intersection and, so as not to drive across a row of raised safety reflectors in the pavement that also confused me, turned sharply left, directly into a northbound Metrobús lane. A Metrobús was bearing down on me and in panic I swung a heedless U-turn back on to Alvaro Obregón. My hands were shaking. What, I couldn’t find my way on to Insurgentes Sur on my own, not even that? Humiliated and discouraged, I drove home and parked. I didn’t take the car out again that day. I brooded over the Guía Roji. |
| The next morning I drove up Puebla again, and followed a sign indicating a right turn on to Insurgentes Sur. In fact, it led directly into the Glorieta Insurgentes, which was open again, and I was shot into the dreaded circle of fast dense crisscrossing traffic – it felt at first like a bout of madness – streaming off of or angling towards a series of exits, Avenida Chapultepec, Insurgentes on the north side, Chapultepec again, Oaxaca, all two-way multi-lane avenues … But quickly, instinctually, you understand that the only option, the only way around, is to keep faith in the sanity and competence of other drivers, and that the worst thing to do is not stay up to speed, just aim for your exit, ease up on the accelerator just enough when it’s obvious that you have to, and trust that others will do the same for you. | The next morning I drove up Puebla again, and followed a sign indicating a right turn on to Insurgentes Sur. In fact, it led directly into the Glorieta Insurgentes, which was open again, and I was shot into the dreaded circle of fast dense crisscrossing traffic – it felt at first like a bout of madness – streaming off of or angling towards a series of exits, Avenida Chapultepec, Insurgentes on the north side, Chapultepec again, Oaxaca, all two-way multi-lane avenues … But quickly, instinctually, you understand that the only option, the only way around, is to keep faith in the sanity and competence of other drivers, and that the worst thing to do is not stay up to speed, just aim for your exit, ease up on the accelerator just enough when it’s obvious that you have to, and trust that others will do the same for you. |
| The drive down Insurgentes Sur was long and uneventful. There’s really nothing especially fun about a long slow hot drive down Avenida Insurgentes, one of the world’s longest avenues. I played rock loud on the radio, and listened to a lengthy and interesting interview, on the same station, with a group of teenage working-class transsexuals; inhaled traffic fumes; watched out for motorcyclists in the side-mirrors. At red lights vendors stroll between cars while performers rush out into the intersections: fire-eaters; jugglers; grown men with little girls, apparently though not necessarily their daughters, standing on their shoulders, shaking their grotesquely or comically padded big butts. They end their acts in time to be able to pass down the rows of cars asking for change before the light turns green. The DF’s vital principle, the hard everyday hustle all around you. Live here long enough, you might stop really noticing and hand out your coins almost automatically, unless you’re not the coin-giving type. Insurgentes finally brought me to the edge of the massive UNAM – National Autonomous University of Mexico – and the Copilco neighbourhood. And there, on my left, was the housing complex where Aura grew up, in the two-bedroom apartment where she shared a room with her step-sister, the setting of so many of the short-stories she started and only sometimes finished during the last two years of her life. It was also where we’d spent our first night together, in August of 2003, days before she left for New York to begin her PhD studies at Columbia. A low whitewashed wall running the length of the complex hid from view the parking lot where Aura used to ride her bicycle and roller skate, the grassy parts and benches where barely adolescent Aura liked to hang with older teenage neighbours, furtively smoking and drinking. | The drive down Insurgentes Sur was long and uneventful. There’s really nothing especially fun about a long slow hot drive down Avenida Insurgentes, one of the world’s longest avenues. I played rock loud on the radio, and listened to a lengthy and interesting interview, on the same station, with a group of teenage working-class transsexuals; inhaled traffic fumes; watched out for motorcyclists in the side-mirrors. At red lights vendors stroll between cars while performers rush out into the intersections: fire-eaters; jugglers; grown men with little girls, apparently though not necessarily their daughters, standing on their shoulders, shaking their grotesquely or comically padded big butts. They end their acts in time to be able to pass down the rows of cars asking for change before the light turns green. The DF’s vital principle, the hard everyday hustle all around you. Live here long enough, you might stop really noticing and hand out your coins almost automatically, unless you’re not the coin-giving type. Insurgentes finally brought me to the edge of the massive UNAM – National Autonomous University of Mexico – and the Copilco neighbourhood. And there, on my left, was the housing complex where Aura grew up, in the two-bedroom apartment where she shared a room with her step-sister, the setting of so many of the short-stories she started and only sometimes finished during the last two years of her life. It was also where we’d spent our first night together, in August of 2003, days before she left for New York to begin her PhD studies at Columbia. A low whitewashed wall running the length of the complex hid from view the parking lot where Aura used to ride her bicycle and roller skate, the grassy parts and benches where barely adolescent Aura liked to hang with older teenage neighbours, furtively smoking and drinking. |
| Just past the housing complex, Avenida Copilco bends sharply to the left, but the Guía Roji map in my head failed me and I went straight and found myself on a narrow street running along the outskirts of the UNAM called the Paseo de los Facultades. To get back on to Copilco, I turned on to an even narrower street called Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, and had the sensation of having driven directly into Aura’s past, for Filosofía y Letras was the academic department Aura had studied in. The street was nearly impassable with students. It was like driving into the middle of a rural village on market day. Kids in their late teens and early 20s, almost all of them raven-haired like Aura, in denim and T-shirts, skirts and loose blouses, sweatshirts and hoodies, backpacks over every shoulder. Nobody parted to let my car pass, I rolled along at their walking pace, in a state of near hallucination, not sad, a mix of happiness to have suddenly found her, for Aura was surely somewhere in this crowd, and of saudade, for surely she wasn’t there, the presence of an absence. If I had been able to choose where to scatter Aura’s ashes – the truth is, I don’t know what Aura’s mother did with her ashes, because she took the box holding them home with her after the funeral and I haven’t seen her again since – it would have been somewhere in the UNAM, in the sculpture garden that was her favourite spot for solitude, or maybe in the stretch of shaded lawn near Filosofía y Letras known as el aeropuerto, a favourite place for students to lay back and get high. I think that as I drove along Avenida Copilco again, I already understood that unexpected diversion on to Calle Facultad de Filosofía y Letras as a long-postponed leave-taking, something that finally had to be, a first ceremonial goodbye though there will never be a final goodbye. So now there is a place in this city that marks that goodbye as surely, maybe even more surely, as spreading her ashes there would have been meant to do. Wasn’t this what I’d hoped the Guía Roji driving project would bring me to in the first place? The combination of will and chance, of getting lost in order to unexpectedly find, had brought me close to Aura in this new way, one in which she was both present and absent, both asserting a permanence and letting go. | Just past the housing complex, Avenida Copilco bends sharply to the left, but the Guía Roji map in my head failed me and I went straight and found myself on a narrow street running along the outskirts of the UNAM called the Paseo de los Facultades. To get back on to Copilco, I turned on to an even narrower street called Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, and had the sensation of having driven directly into Aura’s past, for Filosofía y Letras was the academic department Aura had studied in. The street was nearly impassable with students. It was like driving into the middle of a rural village on market day. Kids in their late teens and early 20s, almost all of them raven-haired like Aura, in denim and T-shirts, skirts and loose blouses, sweatshirts and hoodies, backpacks over every shoulder. Nobody parted to let my car pass, I rolled along at their walking pace, in a state of near hallucination, not sad, a mix of happiness to have suddenly found her, for Aura was surely somewhere in this crowd, and of saudade, for surely she wasn’t there, the presence of an absence. If I had been able to choose where to scatter Aura’s ashes – the truth is, I don’t know what Aura’s mother did with her ashes, because she took the box holding them home with her after the funeral and I haven’t seen her again since – it would have been somewhere in the UNAM, in the sculpture garden that was her favourite spot for solitude, or maybe in the stretch of shaded lawn near Filosofía y Letras known as el aeropuerto, a favourite place for students to lay back and get high. I think that as I drove along Avenida Copilco again, I already understood that unexpected diversion on to Calle Facultad de Filosofía y Letras as a long-postponed leave-taking, something that finally had to be, a first ceremonial goodbye though there will never be a final goodbye. So now there is a place in this city that marks that goodbye as surely, maybe even more surely, as spreading her ashes there would have been meant to do. Wasn’t this what I’d hoped the Guía Roji driving project would bring me to in the first place? The combination of will and chance, of getting lost in order to unexpectedly find, had brought me close to Aura in this new way, one in which she was both present and absent, both asserting a permanence and letting go. |
| • The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, is published by Grove Press UK on 2 April. | |
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