by Steve Hely
Not sure about the park, but the best time to walk the streets of Mexico City, for my money, is in the early evening or on Saturday night.
I stayed at the Condesa DF hotel, which is spectacular. Traditional on the outside, hypermodern on the inside. Tasteful, intelligent people are there, and as far as I could tell, they’re who run the place. It’s great. As I was writing this I wondered, How did I hear about that place again? and I checked my e-mails and I see I heard about it from a friend of mine who I don’t think would mind being described as excellent, elegant, and definitively gay.
So maybe they thought I was gay. There were plenty of straight people there, too, though, in fact straight people who looked like they were skilled and robust and fortunate in their sexual lives, attractive and energized.
In my room, now that I think of it, there was a video playing when I arrived and each time I came back, with soothing music and images of the naked flesh of a beautiful woman and a strong, wet man. You saw the woman’s nips for a prolonged point.
It made me feel a bit stupid that I was traveling alone. But sometimes that’s the sacrifice of the explorer. Like the Mayan proverb says, if you try to see the world, better go alone.
* * *
One way to take in Mexico City in a burst is to go see Diego Rivera’s mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park. It’s a great wide painting of characters from the whole history of Mexico crammed together for a kind of trippy group portrait. If you can identify everybody in this portrait, I think they give you an honorary PhD in Mexican history.
But if paintings aren’t your thing, you can walk the streets and see a living mural.
Mostly, I walked around my neighborhood, the Condesa. That’s a famously beautiful neighborhood. Some of the buildings around it are old, old enough to have ghosts in them, but they all look healthy and alive, and the new buildings look interesting and alive, too. Neighborhoods change, and Mexico City neighborhoods change extra fast. Somewhere around here used to be Montezuma’s clown neighborhood, and now maybe it’s all motorcycle shops and tire places. On March 15, 2014, the Condesa was full of people and alive and fantastic. I walked pretty far that night, but I came back to the Condesa very late, and kept walking around.
I got lost for longer than I should have on Avenida Amsterdam. It seemed like I was going in circles. I didn’t know then but know now that there was a good reason why it seemed that way. Avenida Amsterdam forms an oval, because when it was laid out, it followed the course of a horse racing track, the track of the course of the Jockey Club on land owned by the Countess of Miravalle—the condesa herself who gave the neighborhood its name.
That story I got from the writer Francisco Goldman, who wrote an incredible book called The Interior Circuit. If you want to read 300 pages about Mexico City, read that. I barely saw my own neighborhood—colonia is the word. Francisco Goldman tells us that the index of the Guía Roji, an atlas to Mexico City, lists some 6,400 colonias. There’re 259 different streets called Calle Morelos, Goldman says. That’s just the calles, not the avenidas, cerradas, and so on.
For expertise I can’t top Goldman, or Daniel Hernandez, who wrote Down and Delirious in Mexico City. The guy I really can’t top is Roberto Bolaño, who summons up the special and mysterious and troubling magic of Mexico City nights in his novel The Savage Detectives. Let alone the hundreds or thousands of writers born and raised in Mexico City.
But those guys and gals were residents. When you live somewhere, it doesn’t take long until the astounding becomes familiar. You learn the place, become part of it. Almost no one can see themselves clearly, or describe with any distance places they’re absorbed in. Maybe an open-eyed observer traveling through can’t do much better, but at least he can report on what he found amazing.
If you’ve never been to Mexico City, and you want to hear it from someone who’s just had flashes of short but intense experiences there, here are some impressions:
* * *
In some neighborhoods the way electric lights are strung makes it feel like a carnival. There is carnival energy, absolutely, in some places very strong. Just like at a carnival, there are some alleys you may not want to wander down, because what’s down there might be upsetting or fucked up.
If you like wild unplanned color combinations, you will like Mexico City. Blues on reds, yellow and black against brick, pinks and turquoises and stripes of spray-painted fluorescence—if you’re tidy in your color schemes, you won’t like it.
There’re also some chunks of Mexico City that’re boring, let’s be real, to the walker especially. You might find yourself having to walk under a pretty long concrete underpass. Or for a ways along, say, the Paseo de la Reforma, which is a very nice shady street, but so wide that it’s dehumanizing. A totalitarian kind of idea. We’re lucky the whole place isn’t like that. Most of its neighborhoods were put up by people who aren’t trying to redesign the whole thing in one stroke. They’re just livin’ life.
I don’t want to say anything about Mexico City being dangerous. It may be, it maybe was, it maybe will be again, it probably is in some places and isn’t in others. Nowhere I walked seemed stabby. From what I read, Mexico City’s murder rate is something like 8.4 per 100,000, lower than Washington, DC’s. But that’s just murders. There’re all kindsa crimes, and who knows where these numbers come from? Who’s to say, really? I’m like six foot three, a giant, a gentle giant but still a giant, but there were no problems from me, on my patrols.
The food is good. On one trip, I ate at some restaurants I read about, but they all seemed off, kind of fancy but fancy in weird ways that I didn’t understand or care about. So after that, I ate my food from stands on the street. I’d just find one that seemed to have people at it, and point to what somebody else was having, and have it. Almost always tacos. They were all at least okay and some were delicious. Some were greasier-meated or blander than others, but the gamble was half the game.
Drinking is good. I drank a lot. Any juices that looked good. Coffee, from any places that made coffee with obvious care. And bars of every kind. Any bar that caught my eye, and let me assure you that this was a fair trial: Any bar I passed got a chance to catch my eye. Victoria beer, in the bottle, ice-cold, that is what you want, and it is easy to get. Mexico City is an overwhelming place, the streets are intense, even a short walk will take it out of you. You must refresh yourself well and as often as possible.
The impenetrable night. In the night in Mexico City, there is everything that makes a night sexy. The heat is burning off from the flat roofs, but cool air comes in from the mountains, and it is crowded and there’s a steady din some places, music live and recorded playing across a lot of it. There are big families piled together and feuding families living next to each other and a woman scootering to a political meeting and students congesting, every kind of dance place, and the way the lights work better in some places than in others means you can keep your night light or take it as dark as you want. Or jump back and forth.
Weaving and intersecting across Mexico City, there are groups of cool and sexy and sophisticated and dangerous young people. That’s true in any city, of course, but it’s especially true in Mexico City. Walking in the Condesa, drinking the homemade batch at some cantina where the owners are re-creating some old formula for pulque, a beer made from maguey sap, you can feel that, something sensual and ecstatic and fantastic is going on in the Mexico City night.
Believe me, I tried to join in. But just when I’d get close to the magic of a night out in Mexico City, it would seem to shimmer away, dissipate. I could never quite become a part of it.
Recommended Walk
Start at the Casa Azul, at Londres and Ignacio Allende, at, say, five p.m. That’s what I did, getting out of a taxi juuuuust when it was closed. You’ll forgive me if I was a little relieved. This was Frida Kahlo’s house. I bet Frida Kahlo had terrific stuff on her walls and shelves. But do
you really think she would’ve wanted me to wait in line, and buy a little ticket, and look at a brochure or listen to the audio guide? Fuck that. She would’ve agreed. I saw it from the outside, paid my respects, and walked on.
Whichever way looks good to you, that’s what I recommend. I have no idea what’s out there in several of the directions, to be honest, but the one I took was awesome. I walked, by accident, past the fortified monastery of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de Churubusco, where in Montezuma’s day there’d been a temple. The invading Americans in 1847 and some Mexican diehards shot it out here. It was dark, but I could see bullet holes in the walls, and around it was now a park, empty. If I’d known what I was looking for, I could’ve found the house where Leon Trotsky got killed with a mountaineering axe by one of Stalin’s agents.
Instead, I found a subway station, got on a train, went back to my hotel. The next morning, I had some chilaquiles and papaya juice and thick coffee with thick cream and these tasty little sausages. There was a car waiting for me, and the driver took me to the airport. Off an overpass I could see a small statue of Charlie Chaplin.
That afternoon, I flew over the dry scruff of southern central Mexico, and a few hours later I got off the plane in the heat and sun at the small airport in Oaxaca.
Under the Oaxacan Sun
The city—or town, let us say town, it’s more a town—of Oaxaca is on a hillside along a valley. Fresh tomatoes, church bells, the afternoon sun beaming off roof tile and old glass: Oaxaca can seem like, well, like a Mexican version of an Italian town, some fantasy Italian town from a spaghetti sauce commercial. No one moves too fast on the cobblestones. Why would you? At night, the thin phosphorescent lights of a few stores don’t do much to illuminate the pavement, though they buzz up the mountain air.
In Oaxaca, in the daytime, I drank beer. Late afternoon, the day I arrived, on the roof of my hotel I drank a cold Sol beer while across the street and over an alley, on a rooftop beyond, an old woman shook out dry laundry.
Never once did I think, Man, I could really help that old lady. Instead, I pulled rich sips of my beer and smacked my lips and said, “Ah, Oaxaca.”
In Oaxaca I also drank mezcal, the clear liquor of the agave plant. It comes in four ages: joven, resposado, añejo, dorado. I drank them all. I am a joven man. I think fermented cactus water doesn’t exactly age that great, or else they haven’t figured out the tricks of aging, the way the Scotch guys have. But, hey, just about any mezcal is worth trying.
* * *
At the market in Oaxaca, you can buy grasshoppers, chapulines. Not totally sure how much the Oaxacan people eat them, but there’re barrels of them. The guides sometimes make a point of saying they’re grasshoppers, not crickets, but if you can tell me the difference between a grasshopper and a cricket without looking it up, I’ll be impressed.
You can even, across from the old church of Santo Domingo, get grasshopper ice cream. As I ate some, a woman, a black woman of maybe sixty-four, walked up to me and watched.
“Some of your grasshoppers fell on the ground,” she said, and pointed.
It was true, but to be honest, it didn’t bum me out too much to lose a few grasshoppers.
“I could never eat those. Are they good?”
“Umm, they’re okay,” I lied.
We talked for a while longer. I told her I was on my way to the bottom of South America.
“Well, that’s a long way.” She said it without any judgment or surprise or really any emotion.
We said our good-byes and I went on my way.
The city of Oaxaca is a wonder. But I also wanted to see what was out in the hilly, cactus-spotted countryside. Ten miles out of town, there’s a ranch where for three hundred pesos they’ll let you ride horseback, see their operations, and they’ll cook you lunch. There were three Yelp reviews of the place, two of them bad. The least happy reviewer was upset, most of all, when the rancher showed her his fighting roosters. She considered cockfighting a cruelty.
This did sound worth seeing, though, so the next day I went.
There were three roosters, their cages in order of rank, and in each cage with each rooster were two or three hens. The fighter’s reward.
“They have to train,” said the rancher, “just like any athlete.”
“How do you train them?
“They train theyselves, mostly.”
The last cage held a rooster that was one of the most hideous monsters I’ve ever seen. His featherless skin was like a vulture’s, scabbed into a leathern armor.
“That’s a five-time champion right there,” the rancher said. “After a fight they need a year. I don’t fight ’em for nothing. I won’t take a fight for less than thirty thousand pesos.”
He pointed at his horrible champion. “To kill him now, you’d have to get him right in his heart.”
Before this, we’d been riding horses, the rancher and I. Across the road, a few miles away, there was a high ridgeline. I asked the rancher if anyone lived up there.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “strange people. They speak Zapotec.”
“Zapotec.”
“Hell, some of ’em are three and a half feet tall. There’s a village up there that’s just twelve of ’em. They span the century in ages.”
“How long would it take to get up there, if you took me?”
“Six days,” he said. Too long.
On the way back to town the rancher took me to see the world’s widest tree.
* * *
The world’s widest tree has a trunk that’s around forty feet across. At a VERY leisurely pace, it took me four minutes to walk around it.
No one can say how old it is. A thousand years old? There’s been some dispute about whether it might actually be three trees, and not just one. In his wonderful book Remarkable Trees of the World, Thomas Pakenham says about that (I’m quoting him exactly), “Who cares?” To me, it looked like three trees.
We left El Tule. On our way back to the center of Oaxaca, we passed through its fringe towns, which looked pretty rough and poor.
“These other towns aren’t doing as good as El Tule,” the rancher said. “El Tule’s got the tree.”
Up in the Hills of Chiapas (with Marco of Croozy Scooters)
After an overnight bus ride, I got to San Cristóbal at maybe five in the morning, early enough to see a bit of darkness, and then to see the sun come up over it. San Cristóbal is in Chiapas, which in the mid-nineties, when as a civic-minded high schooler I used to read the newspapers, was sometimes in the newspapers.
There was a kind of open, running, scattershot uprising in Chiapas, something between a political movement and a revolt. At its center, or at least the most dramatic character from it, was a man (or men) (or: a woman?) who went by the moniker Subcomandante Marcos. Read for yourself about Subcomandante Marcos. Try to, and see if you can figure out what was going on—what happened when he himself (maybe?) announced that sometimes he had been a hologram.*
I cannot speak to this, or to the recent history of Chiapas, with anything helpful at all to offer. As a student of it, I am still in my own stages of bafflement. It is political to say anything about Subcomandante Marcos, it took me a while to realize. Nobody I talked to was interested in continuing the line of conversation if I brought up the name. So I stopped doing it, and I don’t know anything about it. I can describe only things I saw with my own eyes, and what I myself heard and experienced.
What I actually saw, myself, of Chiapas was so pastoral and magical it was like falling into some bonkers fairy tale.
To say that some special and remote but beautiful place in Latin America seems half-magical is the oldest trick in the book. Literally, it is in the oldest cloth codices inked by the Maya and it’s in the accounts of the conquistadors, in sixteenth-century books printed in Toledo and Salamanca, and then it’s been reinvented, many times over—“magical
realism.” Places where the familiar and the fantastical cross paths.
Well, maybe this cliché is a cliché because it’s true. There are places in Latin America that are like that, that are half-magical. The villages in the valleys and mountains around San Cristóbal are like that.
I’m not the first person to discover this. In the 1960s and ’70s, a whole parade of anthropologists came to this part of the world to study this magic and try to write it down.
I’m holding one of their books here in my hand: The Black-man of Zinacantan: A Central American Legend. The book is a collection of sometimes sexually explicit tales collected and categorized by Sarah C. Blaffer, who on the jacket of the original 1972 edition looks like a very sweet young woman. I say that at the risk of being horribly patronizing, and if so, I retract it, but before you get mad at me, take a look for yourself and just be honest and ask, Does this look like the kind of girl you’d expect to be camping out in Mexico or in a hut writing down dirty stories the old men tell?
Because that is what she was doing, let’s be clear, even if her book includes eighteen tables charting and categorizing types of “spook identities” (her words).
I am only teasing Sarah C. Blaffer. I admire her, obviously, and the other anthropologists who came here. There weren’t roads then, let alone TV and Internet.
These places are changing, fast. Zinacantan has big long greenhouses now, where they grow flowers that can be shipped, fast, on paved roads.
“The monster,” Marco said, pointing these out. “Globalization.”
Marco was the guy who ran Croozy Scooters. We were on scooters. I’d wanted a fast way to see some of the towns in the hills in a single day, and next thing I knew, we were on scooters, winding up through the pines on steep mountain ridges. It was good times.