On September 20, the afternoon after the earthquake, I left Maru reading in my room at the Sheraton while I walked over to the Hotel Century in the Zona Rosa. I had to plan our earthquake coverage with other journalists sent by Scripps Howard, including my old friend from El Paso, photographer John Hopper. I took the elevator to the fourth floor, and I found them in their room, which featured a round bed that made the place look like a love nest. We joked around, glad to see each other. The intensity of the earthquake story made us giddy; it was a news buzz.
Sitting on the bed, I picked up the phone to call Maru at the Sheraton to tell her I would be late for dinner. While I was dialing, with my back to the room, the bed started to rock. I laughed, thinking John was “playing earthquake” and shaking the bed, but when I turned around, he was running out the door with his camera bag. A woman in the hall yelled, “¡Está temblando! ¡Dios mío, está temblando!” Oh my God, it’s shaking!
The room rumbled and dipped as deeply as a ship at sea. The overhead lamp clanged like a bell. I felt a rush of adrenaline, and at first it was surreal and exciting. I was fairly calm collecting my things, but the shouts from the hallway grew louder and more panicked. The reaction of the people was more frightening than the movement of the building. My colleagues already had run down the hall headed for the stairs.
When I got there the narrow stairwell was packed with guests and hotel employees pouring down at full speed. They were screaming and crying, and someone was yelling, “Don’t run! Don’t run!” But you had to run or you would be trampled. I took the stairs three at a time, seeing cracks opening and closing in the walls of the stairwell. Chunks of cement and plaster rained on our heads. Around and around, down the stairwell, four flights to the street.
Outside there was a terrible noise of buildings clapping together and rubbing their concrete shoulders, shattering glass, and crashes of concrete falling to the street. Standing on the sidewalk I had to crouch and bend my knees as if I were surfing on the shifting pavement to keep from falling. There was no way to run; even trying to walk was like wearing magnetic shoes on a metal plate. You could feel the pull of gravity. I sensed for the first time the movement of the Earth and the precariousness of my position upon it. People had their arms around thick palm trees. A man was on his knees holding a crucifix to the sky.
I looked at my watch. I would need the exact time for the story. The worst shaking stopped within ninety seconds. Half-dressed guests, some wearing only towels, staggered back inside the hotel and yelled for their bills. People were packing suitcases in the lobby and in the street.
Maru.
I had left her a few blocks away in the Sheraton. I ran so hard my chest ached. I pushed through crowds of people who had emptied out of offices and apartments and filled the sidewalks. They were crying and embracing, looking up at the buildings. Cars, doors left open, were abandoned in traffic. Why had I let them give me a room on the top floor? What if the whole thing had collapsed? Why had I left Maru there?
I ran around the corner and saw the Sheraton still standing. I relaxed a little, but I was afraid to use the elevator, so I raced up 18 flights of stairs. I ran down the hall to my room, and since I hadn’t stopped for a key, I knocked hard. No answer. The hall was deserted, quiet. I ran back down the stairs and outside to where people were staring up at the hotel, wondering what was going to happen next. I pushed and shoved my way through them, frantically scanning their faces. Sitting on the curb, crying with her head on her knees, was Maru.
“Where were you?” she wailed, mad and relieved, hugging me hard and kissing my face.
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry,” I told her, holding her tightly and kissing the streaks of tears from her cheeks. “How was it? I bet this sucker really moved.”
“Don’t joke, Pito,” she said, punching me in the arm. “It was terrible. It started to shake, and I didn’t know what to do. There was an American man in the hall who tried to talk to me in English. I think he was telling me not to be scared, but he was more afraid than I was. Why did you leave me here?”
“Come with me, hurry,” I said, taking her hand and running. “We’ve got to get back to the other hotel.”
People were walking around in a daze. I stopped to interview one man, careful to get his name, age, and occupation. We ran into the lobby of the Hotel Century and past all the guests trying to check out. I had to file. I had to get the news to Washington. The receptionist told me the phones were not working, and I knew that with everyone calling at once, the international circuits would be jammed. I had to beat them somehow.
I searched the hallways until I found an unmarked door behind the front desk; it had to be the phone room. I opened the door and looked inside. The room was empty, the switchboard unstaffed. The operators were still on the street, afraid to return to the weakened building. But I smiled when I saw something familiar from when I worked at City News: a Teletype machine.
I grabbed Maru, closed the door behind us and sat at the Teletype. I needed a minute to remember, but then I punched out the code for Scripps Howard in Washington. The keyboard made a clunking sound, and I was on line. I wasn’t sure the signal was getting out of Mexico, but I had to try. Normally I would have cut a tape and fed that into the machine, but I was afraid of losing the connection or getting kicked off by the operator, so I went live, making it up as I typed. I clicked the keys as fast as I could: “A second earthquake hit Mexico City Friday night . . .”
I wrote about three hundred words and stopped, not sure if the story was being transmitted. I sat there for a second, and the keys started to move by themselves: “Great story. Send more.”
I did send more, lots more during the next few weeks. I knew this was page one all over the world, and I didn’t want to slow down. I tried to convince Maru to come with me when I worked, thinking she could help do interviews and monitor the radio. “Come on,” I told her. “Keep me company. It’ll be fun.”
To me it was a story, something I was expected to cover and wanted to cover. During my career so far, I had written about murders, car wrecks, fires, coups, and wars, and interviewed plenty of grieving relatives. I saw events as “news,” not my life, and people as sources; it was a psychological survival mechanism. And this wasn’t even my town, not really. I had lived in Mexico City for nearly two years, and I called it home, but I still was an outsider, a visitor. If things got too scary, I always could go back to the United States.
Maru refused to go reporting with me, and, although I had hoped she would, she never asked to read my stories. We didn’t talk about it, but she was living something I was only covering. In the weeks after the earthquake, I did not sleep enough because I had so much work. I worried about being able to find a good story every day and file on time. I worried because the New York Times had five people there, and I didn’t want to get beat on my story. Maru did not sleep because she was afraid to close her eyes: her nightmares were vivid and terrifying. In one dream she saw her entire family standing in the stairwell of a crumbling building. I used her dream in a story I wrote about the psychological scars left by the earthquake.
I was still trying to get a handle on the damage. If people in charge had a true estimate of the casualties, they weren’t saying. The government seemed embarrassed by the destruction, knowing it would make them look bad, and the “official” death toll was kept low. Government leaders understood no one believed anything they said, so if they released a low casualty number, people automatically would calculate a higher and more accurate number.
There was no way to survey all the ruined buildings, but I could get an idea of the number of dead. People would be missed, and relatives would demand answers. In search of numbers, I planned to visit the makeshift morgues set up around the city. There were so many bodies, there was nowhere to put them, and many large buildings were used for storage. Modesto had freed my car from the garage, so I went for a drive.
At the first morgue, people were standing outside or sitting on the grass,
some of them volunteer rescue workers, others looking for lost relatives. I walked inside to find someone who could tell me how many bodies they had. I was hoping to get a list. I didn’t even need the names. If I could just get the number of bodies, I would seek out the biggest morgues until I had a rough count of the dead. The number was in the thousands.
“I’m a reporter from the United States,” I explained to a young woman wearing a white smock and a surgical mask. “I would like to speak to the person in charge.”
“Upstairs,” she said.
There was a crush of people walking up the stairs. I climbed along with the crowd, not sure where I was going, looking for someone carrying a clipboard or sign of authority. At the top of the stairs, at the entrance to a room the size of a basketball court, I found myself being pushed onto a trail of wooden pallets spread on top of the floor. I was already in the doorway and could not go back because of the people shoving me forward. The smell was of an old dusty hospital ward: thickly medicinal but not crisp and clean. The air was dank and heavy, cooler than outside.
The room had no furniture, only the wooden pallets on the floor. The pallets snaked through shallow puddles of bloody water mixed with formaldehyde. I took a few steps into the room on the wobbly pallets before I realized what had caused the floor to be so wet.
The path wound among hundreds of bodies packed side by side, their middles covered with plastic garbage bags full of melting ice. Only their heads and feet were showing. There was a little girl in a flannel nightgown. There was an old man, his head turned to one side and split like a dropped watermelon. Their faces were blue, sort of a frosted blue because of a coating of dust.
The earthquake had struck at 7:18 a.m., so many of these people had been asleep. Some had been crushed by the rubble, others had suffocated under its weight.
I felt guilty, like a vulture, but I was strangely fascinated and wanted to look. I told myself it was my job. I thought of all the gore I had seen in horror movies; this was no worse. Had I become so desensitized after being a reporter for five-and-one-half years? The other people on the wooden trail were looking for parents, children, friends, and lovers. I was looking for a body count, color, a detail, a good quote for my story. I walked faster but the pallets were narrow and unsteady, and groups of people, even young children, had stopped to speak in whispers, holding their noses and pointing down at the bodies. I hurried for the exit.
Outside, finally outside, the sun was shining. Volunteers distributed balls of cotton soaked in alcohol to hold under our noses. It would cut the smell, they said. My shoes were wet with bloody water, and my clothes felt clammy against my skin, as though I had climbed out of a damp grave. I wanted to shower and change. People were throwing up on the grass. Someone was selling tacos. I left in a daze and never did find out how many bodies were on the floor. I gave up on my plan to count the dead.
It was too early to write my daily story, so I got into the car, which was comfortingly warm from being parked in the sun, and drove a few blocks to a medical center that had collapsed. I interviewed some volunteers clearing the rubble, and then I crossed the street to what was known as the French Cemetery. There was a long row of flower vendors outside the walls of the cemetery, and business was brisk. I bought an enormous bunch of yellow and white marigolds, dripping wet and wrapped in newspaper, for one dollar. I drove over to Maru’s apartment and knocked on the door, the flowers hidden behind my back.
“What have you got?” she asked with a grin and a giggle.
“Flowers,” I said, smiling and handing her the bunch of marigolds.
Her smile vanished. Her eyes narrowed, looking at my face for a clue.
“Oh,” she said cautiously. “They’re pretty.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said, reluctantly taking the flowers. “I’m just surprised. We’ll put them in water.”
Surprised? I may not have been the most attentive boyfriend, but flowers should not have been such a surprise. She looked as though she had seen a ghost.
Later I told a Mexican friend what had happened. He laughed and gently called me an idiot. “You should know by now that cempasúchil, what you call marigold, is the Aztec flower of the dead. We use them on graves.”
There were more than one hundred aftershocks in the weeks following the two big earthquakes. I suddenly would feel dizzy and wonder if it was the earth moving or me. I watched the overhead lamp in my dining room to see if it was swaying, and then debated whether to run outside or brace myself under a doorframe. By the time I decided, the shaking had stopped. We all were so sensitized that I even began to feel when a heavy truck rolled by, setting the building asway ever so slightly.
I knew if another big one hit, I would be as exposed as anyone else living here: my blue American passport and reporter’s notebook wouldn’t protect me. Then I began to have nightmares, cold-sweat dreams of being trapped in rubble, suffocating, inhaling dust and choking, clawing at the dirt and stone until my fingers bled. When I closed my eyes, I saw the frosted blue faces from the morgue, especially the toothy frozen smile of the man with his head cracked open.
I had to keep working, moving fast and straight ahead. John Hopper and I drove to a hospital to see a baby who had been born three hours before the earthquake. When the maternity ward collapsed, doctors, nurses, and patients, including the baby’s mother, were crushed. Days later, rescue workers found the baby kicking and screaming and strapped into a tiny metal bassinet, which, like a wire birdcage, had sheltered the newborn until rescuers dug her out of the rubble. It was a miracle, and I was desperate to write something positive and upbeat.
We walked up to pediatrics, where nurses and hospital workers were gathered to see the baby, thin but healthy, under a plastic oxygen tent. The doctors speculated that her metabolism had slowed while trapped in a dark, quiet corner of the rubble, sort of a concrete womb. Physically she was fine, but no one knew the psychological effects of losing her mother and being trapped in the rubble. “The experience was recorded in her mind,” a doctor told me. “What we don’t know is how it will be played back when she is older.”
The baby’s father, Ursino Valencia, was sitting in a waiting room. He was about my age, slim, dark-skinned, and dressed in blue polyester slacks shiny with wear.
“I’m sorry about your wife,” I said, looking up from my notebook. “But you must be happy to have the baby. It’s a miracle, don’t you think?”
“I would rather have my wife,” he said. His eyes filled with tears. John stood behind me taking pictures. “What am I going to do with a baby? My mother says she will take care of it for me. We gave it the name Sara. That’s my wife’s name.”
I had expected him to be happy about the baby. I already had imagined the quote I was going to use: “It was a miracle: God took my wife but gave me a child.” He never said it, though. Far from it. He was depressed and despondent, lost and unsure what to do. I looked at him but could not think of anything to say. Finally, I said the baby must be strong to have survived.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“You must be proud of her.”
“Yes,” he said.
“People are coming from all over to see her,” I said.
He nodded.
“How did you meet your wife?”
“I was working.”
“Where?”
“Selling stuff in front of the subway.”
“Was it love at first sight?”
“No, it took awhile.”
“Was she pretty?” I didn’t know whether to use the present or past tense. It seemed so final.
“To me she was very beautiful.”
“Do you have any other children?”
“A boy, Edgar.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “how much money do you make?”
“About four dollars a day.”
“Did you eat meat at home often, or a lot of beans?”
“Beans, mostly.”
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br /> “Was your wife a good cook?”
“Yes.”
I stood up, folding my notebook and putting my pen in my shirt pocket. Not much of an interview, but I had enough for a story. I shook his hand. “Well, thank you, Mr. Valencia. With your permission, we will be going now.” He thanked us and kept staring at the floor.
John and I stepped into an elevator full of nurses and visitors. “Did you get any snaps?” I asked John. I always said “snaps” to tease him.
“Yeah,” he said. “A few. Good stuff of the baby.”
The elevator door closed. I started thinking about Valencia, no longer just as a character in my story but as a man. As someone like me. He was right about the baby. What would I do with a baby? What was he going to do with her? They did not even have enough to eat. I couldn’t bear to be unable to feed my children. I imagined losing Maru and being left with our baby. She would have Maru’s big eyes, the left one a little more almond-shaped than the right. A faint mole on her lower lip. And when the baby started learning to speak, and would say things the way her mother did, I would hear Maru’s voice and remember . . .
I felt my throat tighten and my eyes fill with tears. Damn, I don’t want to cry. But my defenses were worn too thin to protect me. Big heaving waves of pain and sadness rose up my back and shook my shoulders. Tears ran down my cheeks, and I looked down to hide my face. “Sorry, Hopp,” I said, sobbing. He put his hand on my shoulder.
We got outside, but I couldn’t stop crying. Days of tension and fear were draining out with the tears. I had not let myself really feel anything, keeping my distance, treating it as a story, but like baby Sara, everything had been recorded in my mind. These weren’t my people, but Maru was, and I loved her more than anything. Mexico wasn’t just a place I lived anymore; it wasn’t just a story.
Finding the News Page 13