by Nas Hedron
“This place has been a meeting spot for expats for over two hundred years,” David said when we arrived, pulling the door open. “Even before there was an Empire. Most of them come in the evening, the journalists and so on, but we usually show up earlier.”
I followed him in. The coolness was refreshing. Waiters dressed formally in black pants and vests, with crisp white shirts and black bow ties, served drinks and food to two groups of customers at tables draped in peach-colored tablecloths.
The first group consisted of three well-dressed men speaking in quick, colloquial Spanish, drinking beer while keeping an eye on a soccer game on the holo. Definitely not our people.
The second was a motley bunch mostly dressed in guayabera shirts and Forces fatigue pants. They were circulating a large bottle of tequila, doing shots.
“Aren’t you guys supposed to give up intoxicants?” I asked David as we approached.
“Ideally, sure.” He shrugged. “But we’re not monks, gringo.”
“Gringo? Since when are you not a gringo?”
“Amigos!” David called to the others, who looked up.
There was a chorus of hellos.
“Hey David,” said a young guy with wispy facial hair and a hesitant smile.
“Hey Miller, you okay?” David put his hand on Miller’s head, the way you might do with a nephew.
“I’m all right,” he said, nodding, but he looked a little delicate to me.
“So guys, my friend Gat here just asked me why I’m not a gringo anymore.”
At this the entire table erupted in cheers and applause. Miller stood up and shook David’s hand, then quickly sat down again as several of the others got to their feet and wrapped David in big bear hugs.
“I’m a little lost,” I said to no one in particular.
Miller spoke up, blushing for some reason.
“It means that Nieve said yes,” he said. “They’re getting married.”
“That’s right gringo,” David said, finishing with the hugs and turning my way. “You’re going home alone, my friend. I’m staying right here.”
A blonde woman in dark military shades sidled up to him playfully.
“Too late to change your mind, Halldórsson?” she asked.
“Keep your hands to yourself French,” he said, grinning. “Your boyfriend will have my guts for garters.”
A well-dressed Mexican guy who had remained sitting at the table grinned and made a gun of his forefinger, miming a killshot.
We all sat down and began an afternoon of serious drinking.
I don’t remember everything we talked about. I do remember that people opened up more as they got drunker.
Hutch, a Black guy who’d served in the Texas forces, had been honorably discharged after five years of service, but he’d alienated his family with his foul moods and waking nightmares before fleeing across the border, as though maybe his demons couldn’t follow him. They did, but he also found some people like himself and slowly started to pull himself together.
Veronica had been in the Cali forces. She hadn’t been in Tijuana, but she’d helped put down the San Diego uprising, as I had. After admitting that much, though, she refused to say anything more about it. Now she was permanent here: Mexican boyfriend, passable Spanish, forged identity documents. She was never going back.
Miller, the blushing guy, was also from Cali, and he had been in Tijuana. He talked about it a little, in his quiet way, detailing atrocities on a par with anything I’d seen, most of which he’d been part of. He blushed about this, too, as though slaughtering people had been bad manners. I could tell that underneath the surface he knew exactly what he’d done—the meaning and magnitude of each thing—but his time in the Forces had scrambled his outward reactions.
We stayed until late that night and others came and went, but I drank too much to remember their names and most of what we talked about. Eventually David and I stumbled into a cab and went to Nieve’s, where I passed out on the sofa.
I was tempted to stay in Mexico—I might have made a place for myself in that makeshift family, that sangha—but I couldn’t do it. I had a goal and I couldn’t reach it living there.
The thing I needed most in life was to avoid dying again for as long as I could, preferably forever. For that I needed money, and the money was in Cali. And as it turned out I had already been given the one indispensible thing that David and his crew could offer me anyway: a mechanism for grounding myself, for getting some control over my nightmares. Not completely, but enough to be able to execute the rest of my plan.
That was three years ago. As my plane approaches Mexico City, I think about finding David and the others, but I’m not sure I want to. He was exactly the right person to meet at that moment in my life, but the moment has passed and it seems better to leave things the way they are. Besides, I have an appointment to keep and no real idea where it will lead me.
Sixteen: Things Are Measured Differently Here
The Mexico International Airport lies to the east of Mexico City proper but within the Distrito Federal, in an area where cheap land prices allowed the developers to maximize their bottom line. Bright and sparkling clean, it is avidly policed by guards in khaki whose primary mandate is to ensure that no tourist is harassed, accosted, or even approached by a Mexican, unless it is one of the legion of licensed porters and other aides. Everyone is either a tourist or in a uniform.
The airport is surrounded by a cocoon of luxury hotels and beyond that by razor wire. The towers rise high into a perfect blue sky, each one painted adobe white, the only color permitted by the Independent Airport Authority. There’s no beach since Mexico City is landlocked, but everywhere you look in this village of hotels the impossible turquoise of the tropical ocean is reproduced in swimming pools that glitter in the sunshine. Here there is no crime, no begging, no trouble. It is here that conventions and international meetings are often held, business men and women relaxing in the ample, air-conditioned boardrooms.
If you want to enter the city itself, you can rent a car, but you will more likely take a taxi or one of the reliable, timely shuttle buses. In any event, your vehicle will leave by the only route available: an elevated highway that leads directly to a similar cluster of hotels downtown, with no off-ramps along the way. Ostensibly the reason for a raised highway is to allow tourists to travel quickly into the heart of the city without being bothered by traffic. In reality it has a second goal, which is to prevent any non-Mexican from seeing the slums that form a ring outside the cluster of airport hotels. Beyond the airport grounds the only electricity is pirated and there is no running water. The sewer system is unreliable and regularly floods into the streets. The streets themselves are mostly unpaved, alternately baked hard in the sun and turned to muck by the rain.
Vicente Suarez’s headquarters, the home of the Suerte, is in an area called Paraíso Perdido—the lost paradise, and it’s located in these slums. Originally the name had applied to a government-planned community that was built to house a large population of squatters who were forcibly removed from dangerous, earthquake-damaged buildings downtown, ostensibly for their own protection. The overblown poetry of the title was supposed to suggest Shangri-La, or Eden, or some such thing. It was to be a place of refuge where the poor could at last find peace.
The grand plan foundered for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the government’s real intention had simply been to vacate valuable downtown land upon which the poor were inconveniently situated. The model community was deliberately placed in the area just outside the airport, already a slum. The community was built cheaply and, once built, was abandoned to its own devices. There was no follow-up, no funding for maintenance, no employment for the residents, nothing. The buildings soon deteriorated and the slum reasserted itself, growing up through the cracked pavement like an unkillable weed.
Soon the area was as poor and crime-ridden as the surrounding neighborhoods. Those with a literary bent took to calling it not
just Paraíso Perdido, but El Paraíso Perdido. Adding that one small “el” turns it into the Spanish title of “Paradise Lost,” Milton’s classic tale of Lucifer’s fall from heaven into hell. It was an appropriate bit of black humor that took hold, but was eventually abbreviated. Now almost everyone simply calls it El Paraíso. The obvious irony of referring to this bleak area as “the paradise” wore off a long time ago and now El Paraíso is simply a name, nothing more.
Even though my destination is less than three kilometers from the airport, I can’t get there directly. I take a shuttle bus from the hotel along the obligatory path to the downtown cluster of hotels. Once off the bus, I wander away from the hotels and into the streets. A boy of ten or eleven is doing a fire-eating act, much to the delight of some gringos, who throw money into his hat. There are stalls selling sim decks and bootleg recordings, underwear, folksy blankets and pottery, roast corn, T-shirts, and a thousand other things. The prices are cheap and so is the quality. As I get farther from the hotel, there are prostitutes, mostly young, some vaguely pretty, some just forlorn. All of them smile and try to talk to me—a lone gringo is potentially a big score. I smile and pretend not to understand what they’re talking about. One girl lifts up her shirt and flashes her breasts at me to make sure I get the message, but I move on anyway.
Once away from the hotel I find a cab and climb in. I take the headpiece for my kaikki from my pocket, unfold it, and slip it on, fitting the earpiece into my right ear and adjusting the mic so it’s an inch or so in front of my mouth. I activate the translation program and direct the driver to begin backtracking toward the area of the airport but not to the airport itself.
He looks confused, but driving a cab is a decent job and it won’t do to offend foreign passengers by questioning their orders. The car leaves the patch of downtown hotels and enters the real Mexico City. It is colorful and, at first, relatively prosperous. As we drive in the direction of El Paraíso, however, the income of the residents drops precipitously, as do the quality of the road and the state of the buildings. Finally my driver can’t stay quiet any longer.
“Are you quite sure this is the direction you wish to go sir? The D.F.—Mexico City, I mean—is confusing, even for those of us who grew up here. Perhaps you intended… ”
He begins to construct excuses so that I can change my destination without losing face.
“This is just fine, we’re going the right way,” I tell him, looking out at a woman in the street who is fetching water from a rain barrel. After filling her pot she closes the barrel’s lid and padlocks it. I turn back to the driver. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Emilio sir,” he says, evidently hesitant to add his last name in case I intend to complain to his boss.
“Emilio, I’m going to the El Paraíso, you understand?”
He doesn’t nod or say ‘yes,’ but from the widening of his eyes in the rearview mirror I can tell he understands perfectly well.
“Now, I wouldn’t ask you to drive me all the way there. I know it’s not safe. I know you don’t want to go there, and I know you don’t want to have to tell your boss that you dropped off some foolish gringo in there, am I right?”
“I would rather not sir, no.”
“Fine. What I’d like you to do is to take me about another two kilometers. From there I’ll walk. The only thing I want from you after that is directions, okay? Can you do that?”
“Of course,” he says. He still looks apprehensive, but somewhat relieved, as though he doesn’t have to worry about himself any more but can’t help wondering what’s going to happen to me.
For a while we drive in silence. Emilio watches the odometer the whole way. Eventually he draws to a careful stop.
“This is two kilometers sir.”
We’re surrounded by a neighborhood of closely-packed, low-rise apartments, most with rickety balconies. Clothes flap on innumerable clotheslines, and children play games of tag. There are chickens, some in pens and some loose, and below the balconies raggedy stray dogs dig in the dirt and play-fight with one another.
I tell Emilio the address I’m looking for, which Machiko gave me this morning. I suppose it’s well known, because on hearing it go he loses all civility and all worry about his job. He leaps from the cab and pulls my door open.
“Out senõr. Get out of my cab now.”
I climb out. The odor of the neighborhood is upon me immediately: animal dung, sweat, vegetables cooking, sewage, wood smoke, laundry.
“I only want directions.”
“I know nothing about such a place,” he says, crossing himself.
“So why are you crossing yourself? If you know nothing about it, it might be a monastery, or an orphanage.”
“You know it isn’t.”
“Yes, and so do you. Now all I want is directions.”
“No senõr. I will not. If you belong in such a place you will find it yourself. You don’t belong in my cab, that is the truth.”
With that he slams my door, gets back in, slams his own door behind him, and disappears in a cloud of dust and exhaust. As soon as the cab leaves, the local children surround me, begging in Spanish for money. One of the older girls, still a teenager, tries to nuzzle up against me. I gently move her to arm’s length and hold her there. I drop a handful of change in the dirt to divert the other children, then lead the girl by the arm to a spot a few meters down the road. She misunderstands me and begins leading me toward one of the buildings, but I stop her.
“No, no sex.”
She looks confused. Maybe it’s just that she was certain I wanted sex. What else has any gringo ever wanted from her? Or maybe, given where she lives, she’s never heard a machine translation before. The combination of my natural voice, speaking in English, with the mechanical overlay of Spanish, sounds strange even to my ears, and I’m used to it.
“What do you want?”
Her voice in the original Spanish is melodious, but suspicious. The English translation in my ear is flat and emotionless, but functional. I’ve used the kaikki for translation enough times and in enough languages that I’m used to listening to both voices at once and can get a fairly accurate impression, not only of the words being spoken, but of the speaker’s intonation and mood. It’s a habit I formed early so it’s hard to avoid doing it, even when I want to, as I often did in Tijuana. There—I know from my dreams and my piecemeal memories—I would have done anything to avoid hearing the emotional content of what people were saying: cursing, begging, imploring, despairing. I shake my head to clear it of the memory. Taking out a ten-peso bill, I show it to her.
“I need you to lead me to an address. I’ll give you ten pesos now, fifty more when we get there.”
Sixty pesos is no doubt more than she’s ever had at one time before, several months’ earnings at least, even though it’s only about twenty dollars at today’s exchange rates. I again recite the address Machiko gave me. I feel like shit because the moment I’ve said it the girl turns pale, but I’m holding out the ten peso note and there are fifty pesos more on the line. It will convince her, against her better judgment, to take me where I want to go. I loathe using her poverty against her this way, but it’s the only way to get the job done. After a moment she gives an abrupt nod and snatches the bill from my hand. She turns and begins walking and I trot to catch up with her.
As we walk, the neighborhood around us seems to deteriorate before my eyes. I thought it looked poor and run down where we started, but what do I know? I’m from Cali, and things are measured differently here. Poverty has a deeper, harsher bottom than it does in L.A. The clothes on the people, children and adult alike, become more ragged. Their faces look prematurely old and empty of emotion. The smell gets worse and the sun ripens it. The heat is so intense it threatens to press me into the earth and bury me there.
In one area three adjacent buildings have partially collapsed in an earthquake and run together into a pile of brick, mortar, snapped wood beams, and bits of paper. It looks li
ke a mudslide. Parts of the buildings remain standing and, amazingly, people live there. I can see them moving around, hear them talking and shouting. In some places they’ve hung blankets from clotheslines, or nailed them over the open spaces, to protect their privacy where the earthquake sucked away walls, leaving the interior rooms visible to the outside world. I can’t imagine how they keep their children from falling off the edges where the floors abruptly disappear. Maybe children do fall sometimes, I don’t know.
Mexico City has occasional earthquakes and in that way it resembles L.A. Los Angeles lies on top of five fault lines. Each one is named after a neighborhood, some of which are gone now: the Hollywood, the Santa Monica, the Newport-Inglewood, the MacArthur Park, and the Echo Park. I’ve seen buildings demolished like these are, people killed, cars crushed, stores burst open, their goods strewn into the street like the pulp of fruit that’s been stepped on. But in L.A. there’s money to rebuild and there’s the political will to restore what’s been destroyed. Maybe in some parts of Mexico City those things exist, but they aren’t in evidence here. From the weathering on the partially fallen buildings I can see that they have been sitting, skewed and partially gutted, for a few years at least.
As we move further into the slum, the music changes, too. When I got out of the cab I immediately noticed the racket of numerous stereos. The music came from shops, from homes, from cars. At that point the music was largely Latin pop: bouncy dance songs and smooth love ballads. Here, though, the music is aggressive, assaultive. Latin beats still form the foundation, but on top of that angry, crunching guitars spit and crackle while singers chant bitterly. Most of the lyrics are in Spanish, but some are Nahuatl, the ancient Aztec language that many people use even now. Still others use dialects that I can’t identify and that the kaikki can’t process. Sometimes the traditional rhythms are slowed to a crawl, the guitars are replaced with forlorn synthesizers, and the lyrics are sung quietly, desperately, creating tunes that are gothic and macabre.