Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  The Spaniards were astounded: This city of heathens and barbarians was the size of Seville. Years later the tough old conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo would write: “And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.” No wonder that Cortés, after conquering the Aztecs with guile, courage, gunpowder, and luck, was capable of describing Tenochtitlán in his report to Carlos I of Spain as “the most beautiful city in the world” while determining to wipe it from the face of the earth.

  We stayed at the Hotel Majestic, whose entrance is on the street named Madero, after the martyred leader of the 1910 revolution; it was once called Calle Plateros — “Street of the Silversmiths” — and is still crowded with jewelry shops. All over this city of intense bargaining, shops selling similar goods are clustered together; there is a street of bookdealers, a street of goldsmiths, a street of musical instruments, another of bridal gowns, one of religious articles, a street that specializes in bathroom fixtures, streets devoted to boilers, TV sets, sexy underwear, old radios — even stolen car parts.

  A few blocks north of the Zocalo is one of my favorite places in the city, under the arcades facing the Plaza de Santo Domingo. This is the street of the escribanos, the public writers who help illiterate people fill out government forms and tax returns, send notices to family members in distant parts of the republic, and write love letters. Most of them are old men now, clattering away at wonderfully preserved old Royals or working at antique hand-operated printing presses. Illiteracy in Mexico has been cut to 6 percent, but there are still many customers. I am always cheered on this block, knowing that no matter what might happen in my life, I can always retreat here to write for strangers.

  “I like most of all writing the love letters,” one old escribano told me one afternoon. “That is the most creative work. The government documents are the worst.”

  Not far away, the first printing shop was established in the New World in 1539 — twenty-five years before the birth of Shakespeare, eighty-one years before the Pilgrims glimpsed Plymouth Rock, eighty-seven years before the first Dutch settlers established what was to become New York City. Mexico also established the first university in the Americas (1553), and the first hospital, Jesus the Nazarene, where the bones of Cortés came to a final resting place after his death in Spain in 1547. People of the United States ethnocentrically call themselves Americans, but even the most superficial reading of Mexican history teaches us that “America” was a Spanish creation, an imposed mixture with the great civilizations that existed here before any European ever raised a lance in triumph.

  The modern American city called Mexico is also an extraordinary accomplishment. It is brighter, more French, more given to wide boulevards than most of those in what Mexicans still call the Colossus of the North. The masterpiece is the Paseo de la Reforma, one of the great avenues of the world. Maximilian built it in 1864, supposedly at the urging of the adoring Carlota, who wanted to see him ride from Chapultepec Castle to work at the National Palace. He modeled it on the Champs-Elyseés, lined it with the bronze busts of various now-forgotten men, and called it the Paseo de los Hombres Ilustres (“Boulevard of Illustrious Men”). After the illustrious Maximilian was himself placed against a wall in Querétaro and shot, the name was changed to honor the reforms of Juarez, who had ordered the emperor’s execution. Today there are still some blasted office buildings standing on the Reforma as reminders of the 1985 earthquake, but it remains a wonderful street for walking, on days when the air is breathable.

  At the far end of the Reforma (past the hotels, the fortress of the American embassy, the various branches of Sanborn’s) is Chapultepec Park. This urban glade covers about a thousand acres and has been called the lung of Mexico City (the singular is well-advised). On a Sunday afternoon, when Mexicans of all classes gambol on its lawns and kids watch in awe as the last charros move by on horseback, the park is a delight. The great Museum of Anthropology is here, as is the Rufino Tamayo Museum (not so great) and the erratic, sometimes surprising Museum of Modern Art, which owns collections of the splendid photography of the Mexican master, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and superb nineteénth-century landscapes by José Maria Velasco, whose gifts, in the opinion of some critics, were in a class with Lorrain or Constable.

  Again, strolling through Chapultepec, we are in a place that is at once used in the present and suffused with the past. The Aztec emperors repaired here during the rainy summer months (Chapultepec means “hill of the grasshoppers” in the old language), and Cortés lived for a while here with his Indian mistress, Doña Marina. In the clumsily designed castle you can still see the rooms where Maximilian and Carlota lived, the brocaded walls, the Sevres vases, petit point chairs, and crystal chandeliers; guides tell you that late at night you can still hear ghostly laughter, tinkly music playing a waltz, the murmur of foreign tongues. Carlota is said to have designed the lovely gardens, with their thousand-year-old ahuehuetes, bougainvillea, creeping myrtle, Spanish moss, and violets, and to have played here with her lovers while Maximilian was off trying in vain to convince the Mexicans of his decent intentions. The garden features a monument to Don Quixote, a perfectly apt symbol of the folly of their brief and bogus empire.

  And it was from the ramparts of this castle that a group of young Mexican cadets chose to leap to their deaths rather than surrender to the conquering troops of General Winfield Scott at the end of the U.S. war against Mexico in 1847. At the park’s entrance, a monument to the boy heroes honors their sacrifice while reminding all Mexicans that long ago the United States took one-half of Mexico’s territory at gunpoint. I remember gazing at this monument one afternoon, wondering what sort of twentieth century both Mexico and the United States might have had if Mexico had retained the oil of Texas, California, and Oklahoma. Brooding on these cosmic matters, I turned and saw the Man with the Blanket. He stared at me as if the purchase of a blanket from Saltillo would be the only sensible act of reparation. I shook my head and walked away.

  When the Reforma moves through the park it climbs into the Lomas of Chapultepec, where many rich Mexicans and foreign diplomats live in superb modern houses. There is a belief that the Lomas is above the smog line; on most days its air is as vile as that of El Centro. Many of the older trees are brown around the edges, withering in the pollution. And the automobile traffic is horrendous. Among other things, the traffic of Mexico City has virtually ended that most intelligent of ancient rituals, the siesta. In the old days (just twenty years ago), men would leave their shops or offices and lunch at home, or in the casa chica occupied by a mistress. Then they would nap and return, replenished, to their labors. Today this is impossible: Enduring two traffic jams a day is punishment enough; four a day would be to reside in the dark night of the soul.

  In the 1985 earthquake there was almost no damage in the Lomas; the same could not be said for the other end of the Reforma, the area called Tlatelolco. In the heady days of the 1960s, a vast development of state-financed high rises was built here. But even the most modern architecture could not hold back the ancient Mexican gift for the tragic. In 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where a small Aztec pyramid, a colonial church, and a modern building symbolically shared a space, the government chose to save the Olympics by killing more than five hundred protesting students. I remember interviewing some of the survivors; they were in flight, hiding in safe houses, trying to leave the country. Many of their friends were dead, others in prison. Suddenly they had grown up. But if the massacre was bad, nobody in Tlatelolco was prepared for the utter destruction caused by the 1985 earthquake. This is where that fourteen-story building fell over on its side. When I arrived two days later, an army of human beings was digging in the dust of broken plaster and twisted beams. One of them, without announcement, was Placido Domingo. Members of his family lived in the building. Today there are blank spaces where the buildings were.

  “Life goes on,” an old Mexican woman shrugged, when I went by the project. “You can do nothing abo
ut some things.”

  That fatalism is one of the most attractive qualities of the Mexican character. You see it on the faces of prizefighters at the Arena Coliseo when, bleeding and beaten, they refuse to quit. It is general among those trapped in the coiled traffic. There is a hopeless patience among those on line at the Correo Mayor, the central post office on San Juan de Letran (a broad street that nobody calls by its new name of Avenida Lazaro Cárdenas). This is another amazing building designed by the Italian architect Adamo Boari, who began, but did not finish, the Palacio de las Bellas Artes, the grand old museum across the street. Neither suffered any damage in the earthquake while their more modern neighbors were crumpling into broken piles. And the fatalism is most apparent in the way so many Mexicans have reacted to the appalling economic crisis that has afflicted the country since 1982. Income, purchasing power, and the value of savings have been cut by at least 50 percent; Mexico remains peaceful.

  My wife and I were in Mexico once when the government allowed a 32 percent devaluation of the peso against the dollar. We arrived on a Sunday, with the peso fixed at 1,700 to the dollar; by Wednesday it was 2,300 to the dollar, and the afternoon papers were screaming that it might go to 6,000. We sat down to breakfast in Sanborn’s knowing that our meal would cost less when we finished than it did when we ordered. Our hotel was $35 a night when we checked in; when we checked out it was $22. Everywhere else on earth the U.S. dollar was weak; in Mexico it retained its old swaggering power. And although there were scare headlines, much talk on TV shows, great muttering and complaining among ordinary citizens we talked to in the street, nobody did anything.

  “What can be done?” a mechanic named Esteban Torres said. “The government people knew it was coming, so they all bought dollars ahead of time. The rich keep their money in Texas. The middle class, they keep it in dollars, under their mattresses. The poor don’t have any money anyway. So what can be done?”

  Fatalism is combined in this city with a deepening cynicism. In the 1988 presidential elections, thirty-seven of the city’s forty election districts were won by the opposition candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who headed a coalition of leftist parties. They voted against mismanagement of the economy that had eroded the value of their work, against the pollution of the air, and most of all, against the endemic corruption.

  Most Mexicans can recite personal examples of bureaucrats holding up business licenses for small (and sometimes large) mordidas; traffic cops extorting money for real or imaginary infractions; telephones magically installed after months, even years, of waiting, by the simple expedient of passing money across a desk. Much of the corruption involves low-level bureaucratic members of the ruling Party of Revolutionary Institutions (PRI), and even some of its most ardent acolytes admit that their candidate, Salinas de Gortari, probably lost the election to Cárdenas. But after days of counting and recounting, of unexplained computer breakdowns, of charges and countercharges, Salinas was declared the winner by the smallest margin in modern Mexican history.

  Even then there wasn’t much talk of revolution, There were protest marches, angry rhetoric, insults cast back and forth, but no guns fired in anger. After taking office the Harvard-educated Salinas moved quickly to repair his soiled image: He arrested the boss of the corrupt petroleum workers’ union; he jailed one of the hottest players in Mexico’s corrupt stock market; he moved against some of the drug kingpins in northern Mexico, arresting several hundred corrupt cops in the process. Most important, he arrested and indicted the killers of Manuel Buendía, who was Mexico’s most influential newspaper columnist when he was shot in the back and killed five years earlier. The “intellectual author” of the crime turned out to be the man placed in charge of its investigation by Salinas’s predecessor. These moves were at once practical and symbolic; Salinas was proving he had the right to govern by actually governing. And in Mexico City the fatalists began to suspend their disbelief.

  “He has some set of timbales,” said my friend Ricardo Hernandez. “Everybody is surprised. But still …we’ll see, we’ll see.”

  (By early 1995, only weeks after completing his six-year term as president, Carlos Salinas found his reputation in ruins. The economy had collapsed. There was an unresolved armed rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas. Salinas’s older brother, Raul, was in prison, charged with being the “intellectual author” of the murder of a high-ranking official of the PRI. The man Carlos Salinas had appointed to investigate that murder was in an American jail awaiting extradition to Mexico. The victim was his own brother and the Mexican government wanted to try him for covering up the truth about the crime. At the same time, American investigators had discovered more than $10 million in his Texas bank accounts. Carlos Salinas went on one of the shortest hunger strikes in history, about four hours, to demand the restoration of his own reputation; the entire country mocked him, and he soon was forced into exile. In Mexico City, one of my friends shrugged, smiled bitterly, and said: “They’re all the same. Poor Mexico.”)

  Most “Chilangos” (as Mexico City residents are called) have long felt that they have little control over the management of the city. The mayor (or regent, as he is called) is appointed by the president and doesn’t have to submit his performance to the approval of the voters. The last mayor is now in charge of the National Lottery. The new mayor, Manuel Camacho Solis, is a forty-three-year-old economist with an M.A. from Princeton. He is very good on television, speaking with a merciful minimum of nationalistic oratory. In several minor disasters (the explosion of a fireworks factory, a subway crash), he took personal charge on the scene, giving orders with a bullhorn like a Mexican Fiorello La Guardia.

  His job has been made easier lately as a result of Salinas’s ardent courting of Japan (the president’s children attend a Japanese school in Mexico City). A few months ago the Japanese government promised to send teams of antipollution technical experts to Mexico City and pledged one billion dollars in credits over three years to help clean up the city’s most critical problem. That amount is only one-third of what Camacho Solis and Mexican environmentalists believe they need; they hope to get the rest from the World Bank and the International Development Bank. But for the first time in twenty years, there is some hope. Meanwhile, of course, children still die and birds fall from the sky.

  In spite of the enormous problems, the city remains a vibrant and surprising metropolis. Whenever I go back I return to the same places. I walk the Reforma. I have my shoes shined in the Alameda Park and tip my hat to the splendid memory of Don Tomás Treviño de Sobremonte, who, while being burned here by the Inquisition in 1649, shouted: “Throw on more wood! I paid for it with my own money!” I have lunch at the San Angel Inn, where the food is adequate but the setting, in an old colonial hacienda, is simply beautiful. Then I stroll through the cobblestoned streets to the Plaza San Jacinto and lay a rose before the memorial to the Batallón de San Patricio — the St. Patrick’s Battalion — a group of Irishmen in the U.S. Army who swiftly decided that the American war against Mexico was unjust and switched sides. They fought alongside the Mexicans all the way to Mexico City, and after the defeat Winfield Scott ordered sixty of them executed for desertion. Mexico, of course, honors them as heroes.

  On the last trip 1 drove out to the neighborhood called Coyoacán. The first stop was the house of Frida Kahlo, the powerful and disturbing Mexican painter who was married (twice) to Diego Rivera and whose brave and painful life was the subject of a 1986 film starring Ofelia Medina, Mexico’s finest actress. This was the famous “blue house” on Londres Street, where Kahlo grew up and where she lived off and on with Rivera from 1929 until her death in 1954. The excellent biography of Kahlo by Hayden Herrera tells most of the story. In this house, while Rivera worked at his studio in San Angel, Kahlo had an affair with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi; he once had to escape by way of an orange tree, missing a sock, when Rivera came marching on the house with a gun. Here, too, she and Rivera gave shelter to Trotsky when he arrived in Mexico in 1937. A
nd here she painted her fierce, unsettling pictures.

  Wandering through the first floor gallery (Kahlo’s best paintings are elsewhere), you can sense the crippled woman’s naive and desperate need for faith. Her spinal column, collarbone, and right leg and foot were broken in a bus accident when she was eighteen; a steel bar pierced her body at the pelvis. For the rest of her life she was in pain. She found no solace in religion; she sought it in Marx. One of her paintings here is called Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick. It shows Kahlo still wearing the corset that held her broken body together, but she is throwing away the crutches, holding a red book.

  In Frida’s bedroom, her four-poster bed faces a wall adorned with portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, surely a grim and solemn quartet to ponder before sleep. But Herrera’s biography contains one final mention of Isamu Noguchi. In 1946, Frida traveled to New York for still another operation on her ruined spine. Among her visitors was Noguchi, who brought her a gift: a glass-cased box of butterflies. On my visit to the Blue House, I glanced at those pictures of old Communist icons and then squatted to see how Frida might have seen them from her pillow. Attached to the canopy above her bed was the box of butterflies.

  Not far from the Kahlo residence is the house where Trotsky was murdered in 1940. He had come here the year before, after his break with Rivera (some say it was because of Trotsky’s own brief affair with Kahlo; others blame politics). Behind the high walls Trotsky is buried in the garden, and the house remains as it was when he was killed by a Stalinist agent named Ramón Mercader. The small doors are still covered with sheet iron; there are guard towers in the corners of the garden. This security was added after the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros and a group of other mad Stalinists tried to kill Trotsky with rifles and machine guns on May 24, 1940. Those bullet holes are still ugly gouges in the wall of Trotsky’s bedroom, where he and his wife, Natalya, escaped death by rolling onto the floor. And the study is just as it was three months later when Mercader stepped behind Trotsky’s desk and split his skull with an ice ax. There are books everywhere: Dos Passos’s The Big Money, D. H. Lawrence’s Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent, many Russian books, Trotsky’s own works, books on Stalin and Hitler in French and English, a copy of Dreiser Looks at Russia, stacks of yellowing ideological magazines, newspaper clippings, letters, a Dictaphone, a Russian typewriter. The air seems stale with old quarrels, made only more intense by the presence of murder.