The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle Read online

  The Interior Circuit

  ALSO BY FRANCISCO GOLDMAN

  Say Her Name

  The Art of Political Murder

  The Divine Husband

  The Ordinary Seaman

  The Long Night of White Chickens

  The Interior Circuit

  A Mexico City Chronicle

  Francisco Goldman

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2014 by Francisco Goldman

  Lines from “Circuito Interior,” page 1, by Efraín Huerta taken from Poesía Completa de Efraín Huerta. Copyright © 1988, Fondo de Cultura Económica. All rights reserved. México, DF.

  Lines from “Olor a plastico quemado,” page 27, by Roberto Bolaño taken from El Hijo De Míster Playa: Una Semblanza De Roberto Bolaño by Mónica Maristain. Copyright © 2012, Almadía, Mexico. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

  Lines from “Manifiesto,” page 172, by Nicanor Parra reprinted with kind permission of Ediciones UDP, Chile.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2256-8

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9263-9

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Jovi

  Contents

  The Interior Circuit: Summer of 2012

  1 The Student Driver

  2 #YoSoy132

  3 Mayor Ebrard Drives the Bus

  4 Driving Lessons

  5 The Driving Project

  6 The Party Bus

  7 Interior Circuit Redux

  After Heavens: Summer of 2013

  Appendix Note

  Acknowledgments

  The Interior Circuit:

  Summer of 2012

  Amor se llama

  el circuito, el corto, el cortísimo

  circuito interior en que ardemos.

  —Efraín Huerta, “Circuito Interior.”1

  1 “It’s called love, the circuit, the short, the very short, interior circuit in which we burn.”

  1

  The Student Driver

  FROM 1998 TO 2003 I rented an apartment on Avenida Amsterdam in the Mexico City neighborhood La Condesa, dividing my time between there and Brooklyn, where I also had a rented apartment, sometimes spending at least most of the year in one city or the other, and sometimes, during especially hectic periods—teaching job, some other paying commitment up north, love interest in Mexico—moving between the two cities almost weekly. Avenida Amsterdam encircles lush Parque México and the narrow one-way avenue that rings it. On both sidewalks and down its median runs a stately procession of jacaranda, elm, ash, palm, rubber, and trueno—thunder—trees, among others. The median is a stone-paved walkway flanked by packed dirt where people exercise their dogs, by shrubbery and flower beds, and inside the curb at many intersections stand windowed shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the daytime the avenue is a canopied green tunnel from which you emerge into the Glorieta Citlaltépetl, a traffic roundabout with a fountain in the middle, as if into a sunny jungle clearing.

  As Mexico City roundabouts go the Glorieta Citlaltépetl is a tranquil one, with only two streets feeding in and out, Amsterdam and Calle Citlaltépetl, the latter just a few blocks long, also with a tree-lined median. But during the rush hours even this circle gets hectic, as the Condesa fills with traffic, horns blaring and jabbing, cutting through the neighborhood to and from the major thoroughfares that border it. That’s when drivers circling the roundabout from the direction of Parque México and busy Avenida Nuevo León routinely invade Calle Citlaltépetl’s opposite traffic lane for a shortcut left onto Calle Culiacán, about thirty yards down. Whenever one car seizes an opening, making a break for that lane, others, speeding up, follow, in almost festively paraded outbursts of banal traffic delinquency. Many times, before it became automatic to look to my right before crossing, I had to hurl myself back onto the curb.

  One late morning, ten or so years ago—the traffic, as usual at that hour, light—as I was walking across the Glorieta Citlaltépetl, I noticed a dark-colored 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 semiconsciously 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 as if the driver were lost in a manner that just circling the roundabout was unlikely to solve, or couldn’t find the exact address on the glorieta that his passenger was stubbornly insisting on, or else was running up the fare on a sleeping or passed-out passenger in this demented way. But I must have quickly noticed that it wasn’t a taxi. 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 alongside in the passenger seat, was a silver-haired man with a mustache, well into his seventies at least, dressed in white shirt, tie, and suit jacket. The student driver sat erect behind the wheel, grasping it with both hands at ten and two o’clock, his posture, his protruding neck above the tie, giving an impression of elegant lankiness. My memory of his face seems vivid, except the face I recall exactly resembles that of Jed Clampett, the Beverly Hillbillies patriarch, though with a brown complexion. What, I wondered, had inspired this man to learn to drive at his age? His attire suggested that the driving lesson was a pretty momentous occasion for him, or maybe he was just that sort of old Mexican who never went out anywhere unless in suit and tie. 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 or ironic one. Or maybe he lived with a daughter. Or maybe it was one of those inertia-defying widowerhood decisions, that he would finally learn to drive, which is almost precisely what, in the summer of 2012, it would be for me. July 25 would mark the fifth anniversary of my wife Aura Estrada’s death. Aura died in Mexico City, in the Ángeles de Pedregal hospital in the city’s south, twenty-four hours after severely breaking her spine while bodysurfing at Mazunte, on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. She was thirty years old, and we’d been married a month short of two years.

  Unlike the elderly man circling the glorieta, I wasn’t a beginning driver. 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 twenty years. The DF has a population of about eight million, but during weekdays, with so many commuters pouring in from surrounding metropolitan México State to work, the number swells to twenty million. The seemingly anarchic chaos and confusion of the city’s traffic had always intimidated and even terrified me: octopus intersections and roundabouts like wide Demolition Derby arenas; cars densely 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 invariably means a miscalculated turn onto another expressway or avenue heading off in some unknown direction, or a descent into a bewildering snarl of streets in some neighborhood you’ve never been to or even heard of before. My most gripping 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. Everyone tries, though it isn’t always possible, to keep a distance from the careening peseros, hulking minibuses whose bashed and scarred exteriors attest to the Road Warrior aggression of their notorious pilots, responsible for so many accidents and fatally struck pedestrians that two consecutive jefes de gobierno, or mayors, of the Distrito Federal have vowed to abolish the fleet entirely. Trucks and buses crowd and bully traffic. Electrified trolleybuses inexplicably run down major avenues in the opposite direction from the traffi
c in their own not always so clearly marked lanes; you just have to know that you’re on one of those avenues and watch out.

  I didn’t see how I could ever know enough to drive in Mexico City, that population-twenty-two-million sprawl covering and climbing up the sides of the Valley of Mexico, the world’s third-largest metropolis, with its seemingly countless jigsaw-puzzle neighborhoods and infinite streets. Every taxi driver I’ve ever asked about it admits to getting lost. I’ve ridden in countless taxis that, in fact, were lost, even as we blundered through familiar neighborhoods that I would have guessed the drivers knew too, since I infrequently venture far from the areas of the DF where I and most of my friends live and hang out—neighborhoods, or colonias, that cover a small swath in the lower quadrant of the floor-to-ceiling Guía Roji Mexico City wall map hanging in the apartment I live in now. In this map the DF, inside its scarcely delineated borders, is dwarfed by the metropolitan Mexico City area, in México State, filling the map’s upper two-thirds. Always, when getting into a taxi at the airport, I’m silently dumbfounded, or else kind of awed, by the drivers who seem to have no idea of how to get to colonias Roma or Condesa, the nucleus of my inexhaustible little world, especially since about a quarter of the passengers on my favored evening flight from New York City to Benito Juárez International Airport always at least look like typical residents of those neighborhoods. The taxi drivers have their own horror stories about getting lost (they have other genres of horror stories too), such as dropping passengers off deep inside the maze of a never-before-encountered, poorly lit neighborhood and not being able to find their way out for hours.

  There was one night, twelve or so years ago, when I mastered driving in the DF, or at least felt I had, charging a long distance across the city with unself-conscious confidence, effortless control and speed. I’m night-blind and should never drive in the dark without eyeglasses, but I didn’t even own a pair back then. I really shouldn’t have been driving at all, because I was pretty drunk. The car belonged to a Cuban friend, and we’d been at a wedding party in Desierto de Leones, on the outskirts of the DF. My friend, who’d only recently learned to drive and was proud of it, was such a haltingly haphazard driver that I often felt impatient riding with him, silently comparing him to Mr. Magoo. Maybe I was in a hurry to get somewhere that night, or maybe I was envious because he could now drive himself around the city whenever he wanted—we’d been taxi-bound friends for several years—but as we were getting into his car I insisted that he hand over the keys. What I remember is a euphoric ride, racing down Avenida Insurgentes Sur, passing cars, an impression of lights bursting and streaming past and vanishing behind, going superfast, and thinking, maybe even shouting, that I was driving like Han Solo, rocketing toward the Death Star. Ever since, the thrill of that drive had lodged inside me as a challenge and as a rebuke to the argument that it was too late to learn to drive in Mexico City, or that I could never overcome my fear. It must be in me to do it again, I repeatedly told myself, though next time less recklessly. Then I’d remember that elderly man in his suit and tie circling the Glorieta Citlaltépetl in the driving school car and tell myself that of course it wasn’t too late.

  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 that there was a problem or riddle I had to solve and that somehow Mexico City, or something in my relationship to the city, held a solution. For example, 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. The approaching anniversary had more than a little to do with my decision that this was the summer when I was finally going to learn to drive in Mexico City.

  I was living in a newly rented apartment in Colonia Roma, though I still had our place in Brooklyn. Often when Aura and I had taken a trip out of New York City, or when we were in Europe, or were staying at a Mexican beach, 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 symbolize several aspects of grief, its listlessness, loneliness and withdrawal, its grueling 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 anymore.

  One afternoon in early July, I visited my therapist, Nelly Glatt, in her office in Las Lomas. I hadn’t seen her in about a year. Before Aura’s death I’d never been to a therapist, but within days afterward I was directed by a friend to make an appointment with Nelly, a tanatologa or grief specialist, and I obediently went. I remember that first visit well because all I did was sit or slouch or fall over on Nelly’s couch and sob. Nelly, a queenly, extremely beautiful middle-aged woman with pale blue lynx eyes, a diaphanously ivory complexion, and a manner at once soothing, warm, and direct, did so much to help me get through those first few years. That afternoon we spoke about what the fifth anniversary would mean for me, and about whether or not I was ready to re-embrace life, maybe even love again. When I told Nelly about my plan to learn to drive in Mexico City, she approved. She said it signified I was ready to reassert control over my life, as opposed to allowing it to be controlled by grief as if by self-imposed obligation. Nelly said that something inside me had decided that I “owed” Aura five years. I’d refused to move or allow myself to be moved off that one square in the vast grid of possibility.

  Couldn’t learning to drive in Mexico City also be something I was determined to do for its own sake? I wasn’t intending to just get into a car and drive around randomly; 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 Oulipo-like experimental writing games of formal restriction and chance, and also of the I Ching, as well as a devoted Borgesian. But what if carrying it out was actually more of the same, yet another conjured grief ritual, a desire to maneuver and 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 this, had become my sacred place, and my home in a way no other place ever had.

  From the air, on a flight in, what the eye mostly picks out from the megacity’s stunning enormousness is a dense mosaic of flat rooftops, tiny rectangles and squares, and a preponderance of reddish brown, the volcanic tezontle stone that has forever been the city’s most common construction material, also other shades of brown brick and paint, imposing an underlying coloration scheme. But there are also many concrete and metallic surfaces and many buildings painted in pastel and more vivid hues like bright orange, and rows of trees, and parks and fútbol fields, and modern towers rising here and there, in Polanco, Santa Fe, and the august Torre Latino Americano at the edge of the Centro, and the straight and snaking traffic arteries, beady and silvery in the sunlight, and an infinite swarm of streets. You think, of course, awed, of the millions and millions of lives going on down there. (I reflexively think, as I have for years whenever flying into the city, that she’s down there somewhere, living her mysterious life beneath one of those tiny squares, her too, and also her, Chilangas, female residents of the DF, who over the past two decades I’ve met only once or twice but who left an impression, women who almost surely no longer remember me.) From the air, perhaps because it is such a predominately flat city and almost all the roofs are flat and because so much of it is brown, Mexico City looks like a map of itself, drawn on a scale of 1:1, as in the Borges story “The Exactitude of Science,” which refers to “a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.”