The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle Read Online Free

nearby, did this routine vary much. Mostly I worked at home. I didn’t go as often to my favorite cantinas. Sometimes in the evenings I went to meet Aura far away in the city’s south, when she’d been to the UNAM, the great public autonomous university, or visiting her mother—Aura had studied as an undergraduate at the UNAM and her mother worked there and lived near the Ciudad Universitaria.
    I’d first visited Mexico City in the 1980s, when I was mostly earning my living as a freelance journalist in Central America, and two or three times traveled up from there to receive payment from magazines by bank wire that couldn’t be sent to Guatemala City banks. I never stayed more than a couple of weeks. I remember, during that first trip, in 1984, attending a clamorous party thrown by the embassy of the Soviet Union in the foreign press club where my friends and I were generously plied with vodka poured from bottles encased in rectangles of ice while being interrogated about our impressions of Central America by cheerfully persistent strangers speaking Boris Badenov Spanish and English. (In Central America I never encountered a Soviet journalist outside Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua, probably because any Soviet journalist who ventured into Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras during those years was likely to be arrested and deported or even killed.) I also remember being taken by a journalist friend up to the Reuters office, seeing my first fax machine, and being dumbstruck, dazzled. An unforgettable kiss outside the Museo Tamayo with a really beautiful girl, an art school student with delicate Mayan features whom I’d met inside the museum and then never saw again. A Guatemalan urban guerrilla subcomandante whom I met with in a seedy tiny hotel room in the center, who received me in his underpants and draped a towel over his lap as we spoke, and who passed me a large manila envelope thickly packed with U.S. bills that I was to smuggle in my luggage back to Guatemala City to hold for a stranger who would come to my door and speak a password. The subcomandante was going to cross back into the country on foot, with guerrillas, and he proudly showed me the multicolored cheap plastic barrettes arrayed on a piece of cardboard that he’d bought to hand out to the women and girls in the guerrilla camp. The subcomandante , as his cover, worked in Guatemala City as a photographer for a newspaper society page, while his clandestine role was to establish contacts with foreign journalists, human rights investigators, and the like, and we’d become friendly. In 1986, I think it was, he was forced to flee Guatemala, to Canada, which granted him political asylum, and I never heard from him, or anything about him, ever again.
    A lot of memorable things happened during those first few visits to the DF, but it was a different city then. I traveled there again not long after the cataclysmic earthquake of 1985. There was rubble everywhere—collapsed buildings and lots filled with silent hills of concrete boulders and twisted iron amid the restored urban bustle—and dust was mixed like a thickening agent into the pollution and ubiquitous smell of sewage, with bright sunshine turning the air into a gleaming toxic haze, like a physical incarnation of the smelly, persistent aftermath of sudden death and trauma that ran out of your hair when you showered, and burned your eyes. Mexico City’s south was mostly spared the earthquake’s devastation because it rests atop a substratum of hardened lava flows, unlike the center and surrounding areas, which are constructed over what used to be Lake Texcoco, a vast mushy bed of volcanic clay, silt, and sand into which much of the city has been slowly sinking. Any visitor to the city’s center notices the visibly awry tilting of many monumental sixteenth-century cathedrals and churches—a tour guide sets an empty soda can down on the floor of an old church and the can rolls away. Entire streets and