In Toluca, I called my mom. I told her that my extended stay in Nexpa was simply a desire to soak up the sun. Now that I was safe and far from the coast, the cartel felt fake. I gloated to her about the butterflies. The cathedrals. The music festival. The colors and flowers. The constant parades. The food. It was as if Mexico had tortured me with that desert, testing me to see if I was worthy. Now she was showing me all her riches. I was falling in love with a country I’d never really considered. Sometimes love sneaks up on you, doesn’t it.
But then, perhaps we had only been lucky.
Chapter 8
THE CATHEDRAL SITS ON THE TEMPLE
(Mexico City)
10,740 miles to go
Mexico City is a beast, the second-largest city in the world, spreading out in every direction. Not too many skyscrapers. Just apartment buildings and homes and flat rooftops and satellites sticking out of windows and clothes on lines and honking cars. Originally the city was the capital of the Aztec empire, and the city’s very existence is a testament to Aztec genius. This high-elevation valley had been a shallow lake, but the Aztecs made their own land by packing mud and grass to create ever-expanding islands. When the Spanish conquistadors showed up in the 1500s, they set out to erase that empire. Today, ancient trade routes lie buried under freeways. The massive cathedral at the city’s center rises on the foundation of the destroyed temple and pyramids beneath it. In some kind of karmic justice, the cathedral leans right, sinking further into the mud year after year.
I thought about how the church of my youth had built a cathedral on top of me. On top of my sexuality. Burying my desires. Trying to erase an insurrection. I knew that the Gospel was true, and therefore it was worth spreading it at any cost. Right? For the saving of my soul. For the saving of the Aztecs. Right?
We got our bikes out of the truck right outside the giant plaza in front of the massive cathedral. Its proper name is the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. Whoa. It’s the largest cathedral in the Americas. We gawked at it for a few minutes but quickly strapped our things back on our bikes. We walked over to a park bench and sat down. We had to bike to some suburb to meet our host, and I needed to study the map. City biking. Dear God.
We had found a girl on Instagram who offered to host us. She had messaged me:
If you need a place to crash in southern Mexico City in the area of Coyoacan (you will love) as we say in Mexico, my house is your house :), also, I can show the city or whatever you need in their days in the city.
Good life forever!
—Beatriz
She sounded great. We had no idea who she was, of course, but when we checked her photos on Instagram and tags to see if she had friends, if she had weird tastes or any red flags, she seemed normal enough. She liked coffee shops and getting drinks with friends and the occasional museum. Instagram stalking felt oddly trustworthy. Studying how people represented themselves said a lot about who they were. At least, that was our hope.
Looking at my map, I had forgotten to click the button for turn-by-turn directions. Google Maps could show me the streets, but without Wi-Fi it couldn’t show the route. Shit! I checked for open Wi-Fi. “DF WiFi Gratis” came up immediately. I clicked it. There were some directions in Spanish I didn’t understand, but a box to check. I checked it. Then I had Wi-Fi. Full bars. This entire plaza had free Wi-Fi. Los Angeles had nothing like this.
Weston had lost his phone again. “I think I left it in the truck,” he said casually. Classic. So I navigated for us, which was normal. I stuck my phone in the little clip between my handlebars and let the map tell me where to go through a maze of turns. This would be the most confusing navigation I’d done. Usually, we were on country roads or two-lane highways in the middle of nowhere. This route was a mess. Turn after turn and roundabouts and alleys. While I scrolled around the map and cursed under my breath, Weston rolled a joint and took a couple of puffs. He was looking around and soaking up the plaza. I was sweating over my phone. The sun was out and sharp and hot. At 7,300 feet, the elevation of Mexico City made the sun feel closer.
We started biking, with Weston right behind me. Cars were everywhere. Honking. Speeding. Mirrors whizzing by and clipping my panniers. Meanwhile, Weston was taking puffs on his joint and riding gleefully, zigzagging and taking his time. Many of the intersections were clotted and chaotic. I’d pump as quickly as I could through them, only to stop on the other side and see him looking in the other direction. I’d call his name and he’d see me, and grin, and take his time to cross. “Sorry, man. I’m coming. This place is awesome.”
At a few of the intersections, we had to carry our bikes over one of the caged-in walkways above the street. The act of lifting my bike with all its gear up the stairs, one step at a time, felt like moving a refrigerator—but a bony, sharp, floppy refrigerator that rolls out of your grip and tears at your shins.
In thirty minutes, we made it about halfway to Beatriz’s. Then I lost Weston. I had crossed a bridge, and then an on-ramp, and stopped on the other side. Weston was a bit behind me but in clear view. He was leisurely crossing the bridge, humming and bopping his head. He wasn’t looking at me, or anything really, just grinning and bopping. As he was about to cross the on-ramp, maybe twenty feet from me, he veered right, following the natural curve of the road. I shouted his name. I shouted again. He didn’t look up at all. He was vibing to unheard music without a care in the world. He merged onto the freeway and disappeared under a bridge and into the flow of 65 m.p.h. traffic.
I stopped yelling his name. I stood there with my mouth wide open. Surely Weston would instantly get struck and killed. He didn’t know where we were going. He didn’t have a phone. My phone didn’t work to make a call in Mexico. Anyway, who would I call?
Crossing back to the bridge, I looked down onto the freeway. He was gone. How the hell would we find each other? But Weston is scrappy. He’s fine. Right? He doesn’t know where we’re headed, but he’ll know to find a computer somewhere and e-mail me or Facebook message me. He’s not an idiot. Okay, I’ll just get to this girl’s house and then I can message him. Ugh.
I pushed on, imagining Weston high as hell and finding his way to God knows where. An hour later, I arrived at Beatriz’s apartment building and followed the instructions she’d e-mailed me. She lived in a big concrete building with a call box at the front door. The neighborhood seemed quieter, more suburban. A place for families. I buzzed her and she answered right away. “I am coming!” she said, and appeared moments later. Beatriz was short, with black hair and a kind face. She wore ripped jeans and a sweater and was probably in her mid-twenties.
“Where is your other friend?” she asked me. I told her that I had lost him in the city and that I needed to get to Wi-Fi soon so that I could see if he’d tried to e-mail me. She laughed with a worried face and hurried me up to her apartment—two bedrooms, brown carpet, and a balcony full of plants. She said her dad lived with her but was always traveling, so it was mostly just her. The place smelled of cigarettes and weed.
I thanked her profusely for welcoming strangers into her house. “I can tell from your Instagram,” she said, “that you are not crazy. I like what you write and the journey you are on. I can tell you are a nice person. I wanted to make sure you saw a good Mexico City.” I checked my e-mail, but no Weston yet. I was worried. Beatriz brought me a beer and she lit up a cigarette and we swapped stories. She didn’t like her job and fantasized about travel. What Weston and I were doing was very inspiring to her. She had used Couch Surfer to see Europe on a budget, and had traveled quite a bit. I liked her. My phone beeped and I had a Facebook message from Weston. “I found an internet cafe. Oops. I got lost. What’s the address? I only have 5 pesos so I can only afford 10 minutes. Maybe someone will give me a bit more.”
When I sent him the address, he replied. “Ok I’ll ask how to get there. See you soon. :)”
>
He showed up at the door two hours later, sun-kissed and grinning. I shouted with joy and hugged him. “You motherfucker, I thought you were dead!”
“I am not the dying type,” he said through a charming smile. I was so happy to see him. But I also wanted to strangle him, to unleash a tirade against weed and his addiction to it.
Beatriz made us feel at home. We’d ordered in dinner and sat on the carpet telling stories. She rolled a joint with Weston. She took pride in the way she rolled a joint, a delicate precision, and Weston was thrilled by it. “Can you show me?” he said. “Of course! I learned in Europe.” She told us about the museums and the cafés and the history of Mexico City. She tried to get us to properly pronounce the volcano to the south of the city. “Popocatépetl,” she said. “Pocahantas-potato?” I said. We laughed and laughed as they got higher and higher.
With her expertise, we spent the next two weeks exploring Mexico City. We consumed every morsel of street food we could get our hands on. Tiny Buddha-shaped women, with dark skin and aristocratic noses, sat on the ground next to black round skillets, frying blue corn tortillas, then serving them up with white cheese and mystery meat soaked in an earthy brown sauce. The flavors were addicting. We waited in line for more, along with men in business suits, fashionable hipster girls, a few lucky tourists, and elderly couples.
Mexico City reminded me of Los Angeles in some ways, with beautiful old buildings situated next to hasty new construction and derelict buildings covered in old spray paint and new street art. The elevation makes its temperature entirely dependent on the sun. At 1:00 p.m., the city can feel as hot as the desert. But when the sun goes down, the temperature cools markedly. You’ll be out exploring in your T-shirt during the day and end up shivering at sunset.
We researched the best coffee in the city. I wanted a taste of home: some bougie hipster coffee. This was not easy to find. Yelp is so overrun with tourist reviews that it is difficult to differentiate between popular places reviewed by cheesy tourists, and places that got the vibe right. We wanted third-wave coffee, the kind with pour-overs and single-origin beans and baristas in denim aprons with thick leather straps and good hair. There had to be a coffee snob or two around Mexico City somewhere, right? Deep googling and horribly auto-translated blog articles helped us find a lead—a place called El Tercer Lugar, claiming to be “craft coffee made with the precision of science and the care of an artist.”
We hopped in a cab and headed straight there.
The cab whirled through the chaos of the Mexico City streets to bring us to the edge of the Zona Rosa, a part of town with European-looking buildings, old fancy mansions, and lush squares with mature trees and beautiful people reading on benches. Beatriz had said it was the “It” area, with the best restaurants and hip people and speakeasies. The place where rich kids open restaurants and bars with their parents’ money.
We found the coffee shop on a side street with tall, thin brownstone houses and arching witch-fingered trees. We walked in and immediately felt at home. Exposed brick walls, antique chairs lining a communal table, fancy coffee gadgets behind the bar: all of it overseen by a barista who looked disinterested and intelligent. Absolute snobbery, and perfection. We started to pathetically order in broken Spanish, but the barista mercifully interrupted. “You can just order in English if you want. But thank you for trying.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said, laughing.
“This place is amazing,” Weston said. “We haven’t had good coffee since San Diego.”
“Did you just get in today?” said the barista.
“Yesterday. It’s been quite the journey.”
“What brings you to Mexico City?” he asked.
“We’re bicycling to Chile.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” the barista said with wide eyes and a wide grin. We had gotten used to people’s surprise, but hadn’t heard someone speak with an American accent in a while. It was funny.
“Wow! You speak English really well,” I said.
“Because I went to college in Oregon.”
“Are you from the U.S.?”
“No, I’m Mexican.”
“Oh, you’re the owner!?…How old are you?”
“Twenty-five. But there are other investors. I’m the majority owner.”
“Whoa. Cool,” I said.
He was handsome, with dark hair and small round glasses. He told us that he’d been living in Portland, which was where he’d fallen in love with coffee. And where he’d had an epiphany. “I noticed that the coffee-drinking countries weren’t the coffee-producing countries,” he said. “And that seemed to be a disservice to the places where the coffee comes from. I wanted the best coffee in the world to be roasted right where it grew. Grown, roasted, and enjoyed right here in Mexico. So I started this place.”
His name was Diego, and the name of his shop, El Tercer Lugar, translated as the Third Place. “You know the saying? The three places. The first place is your home,” Diego told us. “The second place is your work. The third place is where you go by choice. Where you meet friends. Hang out. We want this to be that third place.”
As he talked, I realized Diego was the type of person I would be friends with. (I was tempted to write “in real life” to finish that sentence, as if this moment weren’t real life.) Whenever I meet someone, even in the most passing way, my brain subconsciously analyzes their speech, their diction, their humor, their demeanor, looking for signals that fit into the preselected categories of “cool” and “like me.” For the most part, my brain automatically discards the vast majority of people as forgettable. But sometimes my recognition software triggers a message. “We found one!” The brain then shoots waves of endorphins and energy and words to nudge me toward investigation. This was one of those moments.
Diego explained the finer things of coffee to us for an hour, then invited us to his roasting headquarters down the street. He made a phone call and a pretty young barista showed up to relieve him of duty so that he could spend more time with us.
* * *
—
OVER THE NEXT few days, we spent a lot of time with Diego. It was obvious that he enjoyed shaping our view of Mexico City. He would bring us to a new bar, a restaurant, an art installation, and watch us absorb it all. He was tasting his city through the eyes of a newcomer, seeing it fresh again, glowing with an ambassador’s pride.
He took us to a wild and huge market, full of fruits we had never seen and fish and pigs split down the middle and displayed. The smell of ripe fruit, flowers, raw meat, spices, mushrooms…it was almost too much to handle. The smells combined to make a new aroma, unrecognizable to the brain, alien.
He took us to the National Museum of Anthropology, a giant building too big for one visit, overflowing with the most important artifacts of the Maya, Aztecs, and all the native peoples of Mesoamerica. I stumbled through the halls, slack-jaw gawking at statues and bones, trying to read the descriptions for every stone head, every hieroglyph, every carved column.
At the center of the museum’s capacious main entry hall we came upon a stone circle twelve feet across and intricately carved. It was lit up and wanted to be noticed. In the middle was a face and then carved scenes radiating out. I knew it immediately. The Mayan calendar, I whispered to myself. I had seen it printed on countless Mexican shirts and flags and painted on walls. There it was, the real one. I walked up to it as if possessed by it and went straight to the plaque. No. It isn’t a Mayan calendar. It isn’t even Mayan. It’s Aztec. That is a common mistake, it said. It’s also not exactly a calendar. Anthropologists disagree, but modern scholars now believe it was a battle floor, a ritualistic altar for gladiator sacrifices. It does seem to depict different eras, and it has the Sun God in its center. So its proper name is the Sun Stone, or the Stone of the Five Eras. It seems to have been carved in the early 1500s, and wasn’t meant to be displayed
upright on a wall, as it is now. It was on the ground, like a holy boxing ring, where warriors would wrestle or fight to the death. Or it was an altar for sacrifices. I stood there, imagining their blood flowing through the carved stone images as they died.
Pre-Columbian cultures have always been a keen interest of mine—the complexities of their cities and customs, all developing in the absence of the arch, the wheel, and for the most part, written language. The stories of their doomed resistance to European conquest and disease. Their religions, their kings, their sacrifices. How the Spanish tricked them, wowed them with firepower, won their trust only to lie and steal from them, so rabid were those Christian warriors for gold and power. How the contagion of greed mixed with evangelism led Spain and Portugal to take over a landmass much larger than Europe, toppling empires that had been thousands of years in the making. All the while congratulating themselves for civilizing the savages.
As I walked through the museum, a familiar sense of guilt set in. My white skin, my European heritage. Europe had gotten rich off stolen gold. Stolen labor. Stolen land. The United States prides itself in being this great democratic experiment—a modern representative democracy of 300 million inhabitants that has a low corruption rate and the largest economy in the world. I love my country. I love reading the words of the Founding Fathers, the thoughts they tested while trying to build a nation on virtue, wisdom, and fairness. But the wealth, beauty, and privilege of the West parades on top of the bones of the defeated.
To Shake the Sleeping Self Page 14