The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle Read Online Free Page B

a new one, Adela declared that I certainly could not. “You don’t know the great men who’ve left their semen in that mattress,” she said. She then pointed to the big French windows and told us how as a girl she used to hide on the wide stone ledge outside and spy on her father’s famous friends and their lovers. She had seen many immortals fucking on what was now my and Tina’s bed. Anthony Quinn, André Breton, John Huston, Peckinpah, Agustín Lara—she rattled off a list of celebrities and artists, Mexican and foreign, who’d spent nights in that bed. That afternoon, Tina and I walked to the shopping center on the other side of Avenida Miguel Angel de Quevedo and bought a stiff plastic covering, the sort used for child bed-wetters, in which to enclose the sacred mattress.
    The enormous windows in our room overlooked a deep-walled, now dry, stone pool in the back garden, which was both lush and desolate. We had a daily visitor on the same ledge from which Adela used to spy—a retired fighting rooster, a beautiful animal with lustrous brown-bronze feathers and scarlet comb and wattles and a furious, stupid stare, who not only crowed but always pecked manically and relentlessly at our windowpanes in the dawn hours, waking us. One morning I opened the window and tried to nudge the rooster off the ledge with a broom, but instead of scooting away he just toppled off the ledge and plummeted, wings fluttering, to the distant bottom of the dry pool. The rooster, it turned out, was blind, his eyes pecked out years before in a fight. He wasn’t injured by the fall, and Adela had him moved to some other part of the property. A tabby cat, with one clouded iris and a mottled nose, came in through the window one morning and adopted us for the rest of our stay. We named the cat Don Bernal, after the conquistador who wrote The Conquest of New Spain . Tina and I were allowed to use the huge Puebla-style kitchen, decorated with blue and white tiles, which in El Indio’s time had produced the Mexican fare for countless lavish parties. It had an immense stove with deep ovens and seemingly as many gas burners as a golf course has holes; though this was also in ruins, and filthy, a few of its rusted burners still worked, and so we did cook there occasionally. Ceramic ollas , the traditional earthenware casserole-like big pots used for stovetop cooking, many probably not washed in decades, were stacked into such tall, crooked, swaying towers that we were afraid to touch them. The Puebla tiles were cracked or had fallen out of the walls. Tina and I spent one entire day futilely cleaning. Recently, on the Casa Fortaleza’s Facebook page, I saw a photograph of the kitchen being restored, the Puebla tiles all in place and pristinely gleaming. It seems that the Casa Fortaleza is being transformed into a cultural center. Tours of the property are offered once a week, some given by Adela, who is now seventy, and, according to a newspaper article, reportedly suffering from cancer but still chain-smoking. I wonder if she shows visitors our old mattress and tells them about the great men and their semen.
    When Tina and I were renting our room there, a gothic cast populated the house. I was never sure who did live there and who didn’t, or where those who lived there slept. Adela told me that some of the men I saw, such as the one in late middle age who always looked hungover, sporting traces of blue eye shadow and lavishly long dirty fingernails, had been character actors in her father’s films. There was an almost handsome, jug-eared young man who seemed to be a sort of houseboy. He was obviously mentally handicapped, his dramatic eyes perpetually fixed in a silent movie stare, his garbled speech almost unintelligible. Every now and then a man dressed in charro gear—tight seamed pants, short matching jacket, and sombrero—would call at the door and sit with Adela on the rim of the fountain in the patio, holding her hand as they