The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (14 page)

I always tell people that Aura was the funniest person I’ve ever known. It’s the truth that I’ve never laughed so much, or so constantly, with anybody else, and she was committed to humor itself like a great comedian who thoroughly enjoys and develops her gift. Eventually Aura formed the conviction that we’d evolved (or devolved) our own sense of humor, one that no one else would find funny or understand, that was roll-on-the-floor hilarious only to us. This could be another way of saying that because only I got her quirkiest jokes, I was the only one she shared them with. One quiet spring evening soon before we left New York for that last summer in Mexico, when we had nothing else to do and were just sitting at our long dining table, Aura, really just like that, came up with a game of inventing anonymous messages that we could mail to people, and it consumed us for the next half hour or so. A cardboard fish in an envelope, with the message, “Hello, this fish is your cousin. Take good care of him.” An envelope mailed to a friend who was always borrowing money, containing a pair of dollar bills and the message, “Hello, here is two dollars for your cigarettes in jail.” I guess you had to hear the way she pronounced “Hello” in English, lowering her already chesty voice, “Hell
ooo
,” and that adorable grammatical slip, “is,” and see her wide-eyed deadpan expression. Giggles igniting into laughter, practically quaking, as we imagined our friend’s nervous bewilderment when he opened the envelope, it just grew and grew, hahaha, two dollars for your cigarettes in jail! Well, it really was only supposed to be funny to us. Aura said it was my turn. I said that I thought it would be funny to mail somebody an envelope with only some toothpicks inside.

Together we’d look at that final page of
The New Yorker,
which always shows a cartoon without a caption and challenges contestants to come up with one. We’d always invent captions that seemed pretty clever to me, though we never submitted any of them. After Aura was gone, whenever I looked at that page, no funny caption ever came to me.

The Colonia Roma apartment that I rented at the start of the summer is on the sixth floor, overlooking the Plaza Río de Janeiro, 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, with diffuse lightning flashes startling the purplish-gray 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 it is also produced, I like to think, by the pavement-pounding footsteps of the millions upon millions who labor 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 as in a shell game; also by love, desire, and not so secret sexual secretiveness, the air seems to silently jangle with all that, it’s like you breathe it in and feel suddenly enamored or just horny; so much energy that in the late afternoons I don’t even need coffee. The writer Juan Villoro says that all Chilangos
carry a seismograph inside. Like everyone else who lives here, I have experienced earthquake tremors that have turned my knees to jelly, and maybe it is partly that too which helps me to focus here, my senses alert, both inwardly and outwardly. That inner seismograph senses more than just literal earthquakes.

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 I often ended up doing with my friends and sometimes people I barely knew, during this summer when the apartment became a late-night-into-dawn and sleepless morning hangout and crash pad, the football zinging through the air, rarely careening off the ceiling, pretended drunken circus catches in the far corners, bodies banging against walls or dropping to the parquet floor. It was funny how quickly Mexicans who’d hardly ever or maybe never tossed a football in their lives picked it up. The football had been in storage for nearly five years, but it still had air. After Aura died, her mother, nearly crazed by a grief that sought an outlet in blame, expelled me from our Escandón apartment, and I’d hurriedly packed up and taken nearly everything into the cramped storage space in the basement of the building where Fabiola’s parents lived. Later those possessions were moved into a spare bedroom into the apartment she now shared with her boyfriend Juanca (Juan Carlos) in Colonia Juárez, cramping their living space, though with their characteristic generosity, they hadn’t said anything about it. Then last May we hired a moving truck and brought it all to my new place in Colonia Roma. 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 other such 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 some 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. What happened that day came back to me with the clarity of hallucination: Aura, in her discreetly mortified way, tersely telling me only not to use that bathroom and that she’d be right back, leaving the apartment and then returning soon after with that pair of black rubber boots, which she must have purchased at the cavernous hardware store down the block. She got a mop from the kitchen and carried it upstairs with the boots. Minutes later she spoke to me, I don’t remember what she said, only that I looked up and saw her at the top of the stairs. To mop the overflowed toilet mess in the bathroom, she’d donned the boots and a pair of red gym shorts, and I was suddenly dazzled by the beauty of her legs, that symmetry of gliding toned thighs and ballerina calves perched just over the boots’ gaping tops. That was far from the first time I’d been struck by the beauty of Aura’s legs, but in that instant I was especially struck; that contrast between utilitarian plumber’s boots and feminine shapeliness, so young and vigorous. She’d worn the boots only that once, to mop the 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—Fabis, Juanca, and I—unpacked boxes of kitchenware, pots and pans, cutlery, dining sets, glasses and cups, appliances, much of it wedding gifts. The yellowing, dusty newspapers all those kitchen objects had been wrapped in nearly five years before were 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. They 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. Cleaning out our apartment after Aura’s death, I’d decided that any of my clothing that was not solemnly colored had to be packed away. Now I stuffed most of it into garbage bags to be thrown out, knowing that it would all be scavenged and put to use, but I kept a couple of old favorites, a linen shirt-jacket with a zippered front, a pair of pants I’d bought in Hong Kong with Aura. It felt strange, but also kind of hopeful, to be wearing clothing I’d last worn back when I was married to Aura. But it was strange, too, the way that this clothing practically fell to shreds over the coming months, ripping not just in the expected places, such as knees and elbows, as if it were made of the same substance as those old newspapers. Our several pieces of furniture looked miniature, like toy theater props, in the enormous front room. The writing desk I’d bought for Aura would now be my desk. The beautiful, large, and very heavy set of wooden bookshelves that we’d hired a carpenter to build just before leaving for the beach in Oaxaca and that Aura never got to see was carried up the building’s back staircase. Every landing was a slow, awkward, grunting battle for the movers, trying to turn the corner with their massive burden and hoist it up another floor, until, on the fourth-floor landing, the space and the turn inexplicably narrowed, and so, after a futile struggle, they had to carry the bookshelves back down. One of the movers, sweat drenched and out of breath, said to me, “My father warned me but I never listened. Now this is what I get for not having studied in school.”

The Plaza Río de Janeiro, directly in front of my ten-story building, built in the 1960s, probably the only architecturally ugly building facing the plaza, has a fountain in the middle, and in its center, mounted on a pedestal, is a black cast-iron replica of Michelangelo’s
David
encircled by rising plumes and jets of water. The statue is not a very good copy: in fact it seems subtly misshapen or misconceived in some way that makes it monstrously bad; partly it’s the way the plumed water often falls continuously only on the statue’s lower part, making its muscular horse buttocks gleam wetly and black in the sun, while leaving the upper torso and head a salt-stained-looking gray. Only a few days ago, when I was briefly in another country, I heard a Mexican remark, as if it were settled fact, as if he’d read it in a book by an unimpeachable authority, that the statue in the Plaza Río de Janeiro is the ugliest reproduction of
David
in the world, and I felt pleased with myself for having come to the same conclusion on my own without ever having particularly noticed or maybe even seen another replica anywhere else. Though for most people, including myself, the statue isn’t ugly enough to ruin the plaza because the plaza, really a park, is beautiful. It’s like a tropical suburb of the Jardin des Plantes, a compact jungle of enormous trees, palm plants, and shrubbery traversed by curving stone paths lined with short, barred iron fencing. A concrete esplanade surrounds the fountain. Children swim in the fountain’s wide basin and play in the spray and so do dogs, and I’ve seen homeless men wading in it too. On weekends, Boy Scouts engage in sumo-like wrestling matches in the water while their scoutmasters look on. During the hot, dry, gritty days of April, when the rainy season is still a month or so away, the water plumes are turned up higher so that anyone walking anywhere near the fountain passes through a cooling misty cloud of spray. Rainbows sometimes hover in the air alongside the statue. There are musical dance-step aerobics classes for elderly people who in their youth may have mamboed to the likes of Peréz Prado in Mexico City’s legendary old dance salons, and who still shuffle their feet and move their hips, if not so limberly, with impressive rhythm and grace. Every weekend, a pair of grizzled, sinewy old Mexican men turn up to practice what appears to be a strenuous, ancient form of Chinese swordplay, synchronizing their movements, holding their kicks in the air, two-handedly thrusting and whirling their huge swords, letting out ferocious shouts. Bicyclists coming down Calle Durango’s bike lane, which stops at one edge of the plaza and continues on the other side, meanderingly circle the fountain and move on. A flash mob of teenage hula hoopers invaded the park one weekend afternoon and stayed for hours, blasting music from speakers, a hundred kids or so twirling and tossing their neon-colored hoops and dancing inside them, one, two, three hoops at once, up and down their lithe torsos and limbs, and I wandered among them for about an hour, entranced by the sweet joy of that unexpected circus and wishing that I were a father raising a teenager in this neighborhood. At dusk, when the fountain’s water jets have been turned off, the plaza fills with neighborly dog walkers who stand chatting or sitting on the fountain’s rim while their dogs race around; parents bring their children to the little playground and stay past dark.

In the daytime, especially, there are always lovers making out on the plaza’s park benches, splayed out in each other’s arms or otherwise closely entangled. Most are teenagers—there are a few secondary and middle schools in the surrounding blocks—but there are also older young and not-so-young couples, students, office and shop workers, from busy, ramshackle Calle Puebla, lined with food and juice stands and the burned-out shell of an old mansion that now shelters indigents and junkies, one block away, just off the Glorieta Insurgentes metro station, one of the city’s busiest hubs, or from the nearby office building blocks just beyond the Circuito Interior and Avenida Chapultepec. In the Plaza Río de Janeiro, the partly fenced-in, solid concrete benches along the shaded paths are the most coveted by lovers; whenever I head out hoping to be able to sit on one and read for a while, they’re always all taken. Recently I asked Davíd, the younger of my building’s two doormen, who spends hours standing in the door or on the steps watching the plaza, what was the most memorable thing he’d ever seen there, and he answered without hesitation in his soft-spoken, working-class singsong, “
Gente cogiiiiendo
,” people fucking. People fucking in broad daylight, when the plaza is always so full of people, he’d really seen that?
Where? “
Esa es la buenaaaa,
that’s the good one,” he said, gesturing at the park bench closest to us, across the street, just inside the plaza. He described a couple, in their early twenties, he guessed, the guy sitting on the bench and the girl straddling him. But how did he know they were fucking? Davíd explained that they’d draped a sweatshirt over their laps, but when the girl stood up, the sweatshirt fell away, briefly exposing panties down around her thighs. He said that he saw female couples too, teenagers mostly, kissing and
manoseando,
fondling. I said that I’d never seen any of that going on in the plaza, and Davíd said that if I stood there and watched long enough, I would.