Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  But Mexico City is not a museum; it is a vibrant, pulsing organism, like any great city, and is always shifting. What is astonishing to me is how much of the city I knew still remains. So whenever I go back, I visit the two government-run handicraft shops on Avenida Juárez and buy masks, Michoacán altars, ceramic sculptures, or handmade toys. The prices are low and clearly marked; no bargaining is necessary, and the workmanship and imagination are extraordinary. On any given afternoon I might stop for coffee at the Opera Bar on Cinco de Mayo Street, where you can still view the bullet hole made in the ceiling by Pancho Villa to bring calm to an unruly meeting of his comrades in the Division of the North. I usually go at least once to the vast market at Lagunilla, behind the Plaza Garibaldi, where you can buy everything from VCRs to used toothbrushes and where years ago I actually saw a guy selling snake oil. “It’s the only thing for your nerves!” the man shouted to a small crowd. “Did you ever see a nervous snake?”

  In the evenings I might dine on the roof of the Majestic, at the Fonda del Refugio in the Zona Rosa, or at the Café de Tacuba, where musicians, artists, and ordinary citizens feast together on the posol or the enchiladas in pipián sauce, in a long, bright room decorated with Puebla tiles. There are dozens of other good restaurants: Belling-hausen, Prendes, Suntory for Japanese food, the Rivoli, La Gondola, Delmonico’s — hell, I even like the huevos rancheros at Sanborn’s. I always go at least once to the Tenampa on Plaza Garibaldi to hear the mariachis sing and to look at the murals and watch people submit to toques (“electric shocks”) from a wizened old man who has been there, I think, since about the time of the sack of Tenochtitlán. Or I might go out to the Salon Margo, where some of the most beautiful women in Mexico show up on Saturday nights to dance to such visiting salsa bands as those of Ray Barretto, Celia Cruz, and Tito Puente.

  And as a newspaper freak, I load up on the city’s papers. There are twenty-one dailies published in the capital, along with more than two hundred magazines, ranging from Vuelta (edited by Octavio Paz and Enrique Krauze) to a wide variety of porno rags. My favorite paper remains Esto, an all-sports tabloid that led its earthquake coverage with the headline: WORLD CUP SAFE! The best of the city’s morning broadsheets is El Universal; it’s well written, carefully edited, and allows some diversity of opinions. Excelsior waddles around like an aging clubman, calling itself the New York Times of Mexico; but it is atrociously edited, with some stories jumping through six or seven pages in the back, so that only the archaeological mind can track them to their finish.

  Many Mexican newspapermen still take money (embutes) from the people they cover and are expected to solicit advertising from the various government agencies, for which service they are paid a commission. The best newspaper of all is a left-wing morning tabloid called La Jornada; it resists the Mexican penchant for running oratory as news, draws on the best international news services, does the most sustained reporting on the horrors of life in the Mexican countryside, and has the hippest cartoonists. The staff is known as the least corrupt in the city. There is an English-language newspaper called the Mexico City News; I can’t be objective about it, because I once spent some months unhappily trying to make it into a good newspaper. It does carry Doonesbury.

  The city contains some enduring mysteries. Over the past few years I’ve visited the bookshop of the Palacio de las Bellas Artes seven times. It has been closed each time “for inventory.” I think I have personally counted the books at least three times through the locked glass doors. Over the past thirty years I’ve gone to the San Carlos Academy a dozen times. It is said to contain a superb El Greco and some fine paintings by Cranach, Titian, Tintoretto, and Zurbarán. It has never been open. Not once. The last person I know to have ever been inside was Diego Rivera, who was thrown out of the art school in 1902.

  I did solve one mystery for myself. For years the circular glorieta at the intersection of Bucarelí and the Reforma featured a huge bronze statue of a man on a horse. The man was Carlos IV of Spain, and the massive statue was affectionately called El Caballito, “the little horse.” The piece had a history of peregrination: It was originally planted in the Zocalo in 1802, was hidden away during the first revolutionary era, then emerged on the grounds of the old university beyond the Zocalo and finally came to rest on the Reforma. In post-revolutionary twentieth-century Mexico nobody cared much about the dead Spanish king. Nor did anyone claim it was great art. But the statue was a familiar reference point; people would meet in its shadow as they once did in New York beneath the Biltmore clock. Then a few years ago it disappeared.

  “Where is El Caballito?” I would ask a cabdriver.

  “It moved.”

  “Where?”

  “Quién saber

  Who knew? The statue was hardly worth a search, but sometimes I would drive through the intersection and its memory would become another part of the Mexico that was lost. I imagined it being crated and shipped north, to help pay off the foreign debt. Or saw it coming to rest in some squalid and forgotten warehouse. And then one afternoon, coming out of the main post office, I looked to my right. And there was El Caballito. It was standing before the Palace of Mining in a small, gloomy square. I spoke to a young guard with a flat Indian face; he had no knowledge of how the statue had arrived in its final neighborhood.

  “I’m from Oaxaca,” he said and shrugged.

  Later I learned that the mining building was designed by Manuel Tolsá, who was also the sculptor of El Caballito. So the man’s major works are joined at last. But I no longer see girls standing beside the great beast, wearing starchy dresses, eating ice-cream cones, and waiting for their boyfriends.

  Every morning during our most recent stay in Mexico, the bells of the Metropolitan Cathedral would begin to ring. The two towers of the cathedral house a great variety of bells, ranging in size from the 27,000-pound giant in the west tower to a variety of smaller ones that sound almost like jingle bells. On the first morning the sound had a certain charm. But every morning after that, the bells played without any relationship to the time. One morning they rang at 6:42, on another at 7:20. Sometimes a bell was struck nine times, the following morning three times, the next eleven times. On the one morning when I decided to get up early and defeat the bells, they didn’t ring at all. Here mysteries abide.

  One final mystery also eluded solution. At about six one morning a few years ago, I awoke to the sound of a band playing the brass parts of that traditional Mexican tune “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” I gazed out the window, but my view was blocked by the great stage. The band stopped. Then started again, played two-thirds of the tune, stopped, then began again. They were going to play this thing until they got it right. My mind teemed with explanations. The parade marking the Day of the Revolution was to have a sports theme; the baseball players Fernando Valenzuela and Teddy Higuera were honored guests. But neither played for San Francisco. Was Roger Craig a Mexican? Or was Tony Bennett staying in our hotel? I asked at the front desk. Nobody had an answer.

  Days later my wife and I went to the parade, hoping to solve the riddle. At least thirty-five bands played “La Bamba,” that year’s unofficial anthem of Mexico. We watched drum majorettes twirling batons to “La Bamba.” We watched five motorcycle cops do amazing stunts to the strains of “La Bamba.” We saw charros do roping tricks to the rhythms of “La Bamba.” We watched great armies of bureaucrats trudge by, properly devoid of music, sending only one blunt message to the thinning crowds: Look How Many Jobs We Have Invented. We saw guys in Villista costumes waving from wooden railroad trains and singing “Yo no soy marinero. …” We watched the entire parade. Nobody played “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

  At the end, as fathers took their sons by the hand and headed to the Metro, and traffic began to appear again on the blocked streets, and the many cops smoked in doorways, I glanced across the Re-forma and my eye stopped on the sign of the Kentucky Fried Chicken store. Suddenly he whirled: the Man with the Blanket. I was sure he could answer t
he question about the San Francisco song. But I’d avoided talking to him now, in all of his guises, for more than thirty years. I took my wife’s hand and we started walking back to the hotel. In the distance, we could hear the bells tolling in the cathedral.

  CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER,

  November 1989

  CITY OF CALAMITY

  For days, the sirens never stopped. The ambulances came screaming down the Paseo de la Reforma, the sound preceded by cars packed with young men waving red flags, honking horns, demanding passage. The ambulances went by in a rush. And then more came from the other direction, cutting across town on Insurgentes, grinding gears at the intersection. In the ambulances you could see doctors, nurses, tubes, bottles, a dusty face with an open mouth and urgent eyes. And then they were gone, heading for one of the hospitals in the great injured city of Mexico.

  “Somos los chingados,” a man named Victor Presa said to me, standing in the crowd in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the district called Tlatelolco. We are the fucked. Presa, 41, a tinsmith, didn’t know if his wife and three children were alive or dead. He lived with them in the 13-story Nuevo Leon building of the Nonoalco-Tlatel-olco housing complex (one of 96 buildings erected in the ’60s to make up the largest public housing development in the country). When the terremoto hit at 7:19 on the morning of September 19, Victor Presa was coming home with friends. “We were up all of the night. Yes. I don’t have work, you understand? Still, no excuse. I was out, yes, we were drinking, yes …”

  The residents of Nuevo Leon had been complaining for eight months to the project’s officials about the dampness of the concrete, seepage of water, unrepaired fractures, the feeling of instability. The housing bureaucrats ignored them. And at 7:19 a.m., when Victor Presa was still almost a mile from home and thick with pulque, the building seemed to rise up, swayed left, then right, then left again, and all 13 stories went over, reeling down, slab upon slab, concrete powdering upon impact, pipes and drains crumpling, steel rods twisting like chicken wire. Within the gigantic mass, smashed among beds and stoves, sinks and bathtubs, among couches and cribs, bookcases and tables and lamps, ground into fibrous pulp with the morning’s freshly purchased bread, boxes of breakfast cereal, pots of coffee, platters of eggs, bacon, tortillas, there were more than a thousand men, women, and children.

  * * *

  “Somos los chingados,” said Victor Presa, sore-eyed, his hands bloody, voice cracked, smoking a cigarette, staring at the ruins, as a small army of firemen, soldiers, and residents clawed at the rubble. A woman kept calling for a lost child: Ro-baiiiiiiir-to, Ro-baaaaaiiiii-irrrr-to. The scene seemed almost unreal; surely some director would now yell “cut” and everyone would relax, the calls to the dead and dying would cease, the special effects men would examine their masterpiece. But this was real all right, and Victor Presa stared at the building, summoning whatever strength he had left to join the others who had been smashed by what was being called El Gran Chingon. The Big Fucker.

  “This was all we needed,” said an exhausted, hawk-nosed 24-year-old doctor named Raul Tirado. “Things were bad enough. Now this, the catdstrofe. Pobre Mexico …poor Mexico.”

  Before the catastrophe was the Crisis, always discussed here with a capital C, a combination of factors that were at once political, economic, social. The %$6 billion foreign debt. The incredible $30 million a day that leaves Mexico just to pay the vigorish to the banks, never denting the debt itself. The accelerating slide of the peso (for years, 12.5 pesos were pegged to the dollar; last week you could get 405). The collapse of the price of petroleum. All these were intertwined with a wide-ranging cynicism; a loss of faith in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that has ruled Mexico without interruption since 1929; contempt for the obesity of the state, where almost four million Mexicans are employed by federal, state, and local governments out of a total work force of about 20 million; despair at the monstrous growth of Mexico City and its transformation into a smog-choked, soul-killing crime-ridden purgatory; fatalism about the daily, hourly arrival of more and more and more children; and above and below everything, touching every level of the national life, persisting in the face of exposure in the press and President Miguel de la Madrid’s oratory about “moral renovation”: the rotting stench of corruption.

  “There will be a Mexico when this is finished,” said Dr. Tirado. “But if they only clean up the physical mess, then we are doomed.”

  So the cranes will soon arrive to remove the top four floors of Continental Hotel on the corner of Reforma and Insurgentes, but neither the building nor Mexico will be easily healed. In 1957, when an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale rolled through the city, killing 51 people, the Continental was a year old, a proud new member of the Hilton chain, with a blue-green mosaic mural rising from street level to the roof. That quake split the mural and fractured the building, but repairs were made and business went on. There were only 3.5 million people in Mexico City that year, and the city brimmed with optimism. But Hilton’s name was long ago removed from the building, and the mural torn away, and when I walked around the corner to Calle Roma to look at the aging weather-stained edifice from the rear, the top floors seemed to have been mashed by some gigantic fist. Business there will not go on. Not after El Gran Chingon. Across the street from the Continental there’s a statue of Cuauhtehmoc, the valiant Aztec prince who fought Cortez after Montezuma had failed; Cuauhtehmoc survived 1957 and survived September 19. But his pollution-blackened face now seemed sadder than ever.

  “There’ll be nothing there next year,” said a 31-year-old insurance executive named Maria Delgado, staring at the Continental. “Who would build there again? Who would grant insurance? Who would build in many other parts of the city?”

  Walking the city in the days after the quake, much of the damage did seem permanent. On the corner of Hamburgo and Dinamarca, a gallery called the Central Cultural de Jose Guadalupe Posada had been compacted from five floors into two; the art work had been removed, the building cordoned off behind a string of sad dusty pennants, but it didn’t matter now: there was nothing left to steal. Across the street, rescue workers combed the rubble of an apartment building: cops, soldiers, doctors in Red Cross vests, university students, men with flat brown Indian faces, all lifting broken concrete, smashed furniture, calling for sounds of life, hearing nothing. Such groups would soon be familiar all over the ruined parts of the city, and they helped compile the statistics of disaster: nearly 5000 dead, another 150,000 hurt, an estimated 2000 trapped in the rubble, dead or alive. Some bureaucrats, afraid of permanently losing tourist business, rushed to minimize the effects of El Gran Chingon; Mexico is a large city, they said (ít sprawls over 890 square miles); only 0.1 per cent of its buildings were destroyed. And that was true.

  But you couldn’t minimize what happened to the people who’d been directly affected. On Calle Liverpool, a blue moving van from Romero’s Mudanzas was parked in front of Shakey’s Pizza y Polio, loading furniture from a damaged apartment house; in middle-class areas, moving vans were part of the scenery, like salvage boats after a shipwreck. A few doors down, the tan cement skin had peeled off the facade of another apartment house, revealing cheap porous concrete blocks underneath. On Calle Londres, two buildings to the right of the Benjamin Franklin Library tilted to the side like drunks in a doorway; cops warned pedestrians not to smoke because there was gas in the air. At the corner of Londres and Berlin, tinted windows had been blown out of a building, its walls sagged, the street was piled with broken glass and rubble; but in one window you could see the back of a spice rack, its jars neat, orderly, domestic, suggesting life in a place where nobody would ever live again.

  The contrasts from one block to another, one building to the next, seemed baffling. Why did this house survive and that one collapse? Of the more than 450 colonial-era buildings listed with the Mexican equivalent of the landmarks commission, not one had been destroyed. But more than 100 new government-owned buildings had fallen, including
three major hospitals and many ministries; hundreds of others (including many schools) were mortally wounded. Fate had never seemed more capricious. But every Mexican I spoke to offered the same basic explanation and it had nothing to do with God, faith, subsoil erosion, fault lines, the Cocos Plate, or the superiority of the 19th century to the 20th. Their answer was simple: corruption.

  “Today, more than ever, it has been shown that corruption is a very bad builder,” said the Committee of 100, a group formed last March to combat the environmental disasters of Mexico (its members include writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz, artists Rufino Tamayo and Jose Luis Cuevas). “It is no casual thing that the historic center of the city, made to last, has survived the two tremors …”

  Senator Antonio Martinez Baez, a professor emeritus of the National Autonomous University, said that corruption was widespread in the building industry, particularly in the 1970s, when Mexico was booming with oil money. Martinez Baez said the corruption involved more than government bureaucrats, who looked the other way when shoddy materials were used; it included contractors, engineers, building owners and their intermediaries, usually hustling lawyers.

  “They should not be allowed to clear these areas until a thorough examination has taken place,” said an engineer named Rafael Avella-nor. “Concrete, steel, everything must be tested, measured against the original specifications. And then the guilty should be jailed for murder.”