The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, page 10
part #694 of Travel Series
4
Driving Lessons
IF RICARDO TORRES HAD GRADED me for my class in learning to drive with a standard transmission in Mexico City, maybe I could have pulled a D. Maybe I would have passed by just that much, because I did manage to complete the route around the long, anvil-shaped housing project several times, Calle Huatabampo to Orizaba, a left onto Coahuila, through an intersection of five converging streets and whizzing traffic for another left onto Tonalá, and back onto Jalapa. But I stalled a couple of times, jamming the gears, bringing time itself to an explosively jolted and humiliating halt, and putting an incredulous snarl on the wearied face of my driving teacher. The diagram of the gears on the shift’s knob had completely worn off, so that sometimes, when I meant to slide the shift into fourth, I dropped it into reverse. Maybe if I practiced just about forever, I’d one day be ready to head out into Mexico City traffic. But how could I do that now, if I’d be constantly looking down at the stick shift, not even trusting myself to divine fourth from reverse, and stalling? How might I do, driving stick shift, nervous in aggressive and impatient traffic, never knowing where to go? Ricardo didn’t want to find out. If my intention was still to learn and practice driving in the city under his tutelage, he suggested we do that with an automatic transmission. With so much stop and go, said Ricardo, automatic was more practical for city driving anyway. With a secret sigh of relief I let go of my dream of dexterous road mastery, car synced to hand, engine purring at my touch, darting in and out of traffic as I traversed the complex arteries of the Guía Roji. Sometimes it really is just too late for some things. How would I do now if I tried to learn Mandarin? That’s been a daydream ambition of mine ever since, maybe a decade ago, I’d read a piece in the New York Times about a woman who for years met with her Mandarin teacher in a teahouse-restaurant in Chinatown, sitting with her tutor for hours, sipping tea and slurping delicious dumplings, pronouncing and drawing Mandarin characters, until she finally became fairly fluent. But where would I ever find the time to do that, and, supposing my brain was even up to the task, how many years would it take me to learn? For now I would have to settle, hopefully, for being an adequate automatic transmission driver in Mexico City traffic.
The next morning, Ricardo collected me in front of my apartment in a different driving school car, just as dumpy and grime-coated as the previous one. I drove from the start, around the plaza in front of my building, and out, after a few turns, onto busy Avenida Cuahtémoc. You see? I know how to drive. Still, Ricardo had his hectoring criticisms. He kept lifting his hand to my steering wheel and pulling, trying to make me take corners more closely; and if I resisted by pulling almost unconsciously against him, taking my turns more widely, at a sharper angle, as I even recalled having been taught as a teenage student driver in suburban Massachusetts, Ricardo would bleat, “Frannn, Frannn, qué haces? Why do you resist when I turn the wheel?” What did we call that teacher in high school, a large, fat, very pale, laconic man with the air of a washed-up Vegas gangster who never removed his dark glasses? Mr. Dick, something like that. I specifically remember Mr. Dick praising a crisp ninety-degree turn I’d made off Highland Avenue. But in Mexico City, I deduced, it’s smart to take turns more tightly, it leaves you less exposed out there in the middle of an intersection, less likely to be swarmed inside by traffic, cut off from making your turn. I could see how it fitted into the Metropolitan Driving School’s theory of defensive driving. Traffic comes at you from the most unexpected angles, the dreaded peseros pulling into or out of quick stops at almost ninety degrees too, nearly shearing off your fender, every driver seizing any possible opening. “Mexico City drivers are really decisive,” a friend visiting from Guadalajara had observed that summer as we’d sat at a bar table on Alvaro Obregón watching the traffic, and the friend from Oaxaca had concurred; and they’d both agreed that the drivers in their cities are anything but, and what amazed them both, and also me, is that in Mexico City you never seem to see a traffic accident. You have to be especially careful whenever you nudge your car to the left or to the right, with so many motorcycles zipping through the tight spaces between cars on both sides. I remember what a friend, the first in her family to attend a university, told me about that first morning when she took a pesero to the UAM for the start of classes: just as she stepped off the pesero a passing motorcyclist, without slowing, reached out and grabbed off her shoulder the backpack that held her new laptop and sped away with it; also, about the time, again on her way to class, she got off a crowded pesero and discovered that the back of her jacket was splattered with semen. Everywhere, you have to watch out for people wheeling their laden vendors’ or delivery carts out from in front of an idling bus, or coming sharply around a blind corner on a bicycle with a large tray in front filled with wrapped tortas, cigarettes, candy, bottled water, and trinkets; or old women carrying groceries stepping out into traffic from between parked cars; or office workers in a hurry to reach the taco or comida corriente stand across the street. Mexico City drivers are decisive. I began to get the hang of it, charging forward, seizing any brief opening, breaking into the next lane. Ricardo didn’t criticize me too much, mostly ordering me not to accelerate so heavily, to break more gently.
Of course there were things that other drivers did that I wouldn’t do. Ahead of us, cars taking advantage of a brief lull in traffic coming from the left, spurted ahead through a red light, one after the other, and Ricardo crowed, “Everybody wants to go through the Arc de Triomphe!” Later we were on one of the six-lane eje viales, and Ricardo told me to get into the fourth lane, the second from the left. Why, specifically, the fourth lane? I wondered. “How do you know which lane to get into?” I asked, and Ricardo matter-of-factly answered, “Well, you have to know where you’re going.” He was anticipating an exit on the left still some way ahead. You have to know where you’re going. I could see how that was going to be a problem. The lanes themselves, on this vial, were problematic, as Ricardo delighted in pointing out. They looked as if a squad of drunkards or abstract expressionists had painted them, the faded lane lines in the pavement wobbling, swerving, and merging into each other, more recent sets of lines painted in indiscernible relation to older but still visible ones. The summer’s heavy rains, along with the daily pounding of traffic, had left the pavement badly cratered. The guard line of bright yellow knobs warning drivers away from the perimeters of the vial were missing in many spots, including a stretch where rains had collapsed a big chunk of the road’s shoulder, opening a gaping drop into a steep abyss. Only the most alert and quick-to-react driver, hewing to the left side of that lane at night or in a heavy rain, it seemed to me, would be able to evade it.
Ricardo treated me like a beginning driver most especially when he hadn’t slept well the night before—he suffered from insomnia—and was in a testy or sullen mood. We left a major thoroughfare and entered a neighborhood whose name I don’t recall, and it was like dropping into a peaceful small town, or even a village. The point of this exercise was to drive around the tree-shaded blocks, practicing stop signs, and how to proceed through street crossings where there are no stop signs, and taking speed bumps. I snuck glances out the window at the sidewalks, trying to catch an impression of life there. The neighborhood seemed lower middle class, or solidly working class, probably a mix. A smattering of the usual food and juice stands and carts. A little music school. Recently, whether I was in a driving class or not, I’d noticed in every neighborhood I passed through signs, often affixed to telephone poles, guaranteeing one-minute mole and wart removal. An announcement for Friday night dances for singles over forty, painted in black on a white wall. The most heavily trafficked street in this particular colonia led past a high school, and a man was walking up and down holding a cardboard sign offering his services as a math tutor.
Later, headed toward the south, we cut through a much poorer neighborhood, where some of the streets were unpaved. Cracked, heavy-looking concrete and adobe walls, painted in primary colors, or else in smog-and-rain-dirtied white. Here there were few trees, and few people out on the streets. Ricardo had me pull over and park next to a two-story house, painted white and blue, and he got out of the car and went into the house. After he’d returned and I asked, he said that it wasn’t his house, but didn’t tell me why we’d stopped there. Then Ricardo reached impulsively into the side pocket of the passenger door and brought out two little plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner, of the kind supplied in hotels. He stared down at them, chortled, and spoke the name of another man, another driving instructor, it turned out, who also used this car. It was obvious, said Ricardo. His colleague had seduced one of his students, or had been seduced by her, and they’d gone to a hotel. That happened all the time, he explained; it came with being a driving instructor. I asked if it had happened to him and he said of course, but after I’d listened to him awhile, I thought that if it actually had, it hadn’t been recently. Ricardo grew animated. Women who take driving classes, he told me, are muy aventada, meaning, in Mexico at least, daring, or eager to air their problems, or both. Women students often told him about their bad marriages, he said, their loneliness, and their cheating husbands. The women wanted to be listened to, he said; they craved attention, and I could see what that often led to, couldn’t I? He went into a long story about an adolescent girl he’d had as a student. I steeled myself, listening nearly in disbelief. She came from a rich family, he told me, and her boyfriend was the son of a TV Azteca magnate. During her driving lessons, they were trailed by an SUV filled with bodyguards supplied by her boyfriend’s family. Ricardo had a picture of the girl in his wallet. We were stopped at a red light. He took the picture out and showed it to me. It was tiny, and looked like a school portrait. She was fair-skinned, dark blond, with a pretty smile. He put the picture back into his wallet. That was the story.
He told me about another wealthy family who’d hired him to teach their teenage son to drive. When Ricardo arrived for the first class, the boy’s mother rudely interrogated him, demanding that he produce identification papers and driving instructor credentials. She was worried that he could be part of a kidnapping gang, impersonating a driving teacher. Insulted by her disrespectful manner even more than by her words, Ricardo had refused to teach her son to drive. He’d just turned and left the house. As he told me about the incident now, his anger and indignation, his injured pride, were reignited; he spoke as if it had happened only a few hours ago.
Today Ricardo was tired; he hadn’t slept. We were in the city’s south, near University City and the Olympic stadium. It was a Saturday, and the Pumas were playing, the streets crowded with people walking to the stadium and souvenir and food vendors, and whatever route Ricardo had intended to take, through the UNAM perhaps, had been blocked off. It was my last day of classes. We ended up on a long tree-lined avenue with a median, in the sparsely populated outskirts of upper-class Pedregal, practicing, over and over, speed bumps, U-turns, and how to drive through the wide, deep puddles left by the previous day’s heavy rain without damaging the brakes. The only other cars on that avenue also belonged to driving schools, and clearly all the drivers were beginners. I was kind of annoyed. I wanted Ricardo to show me how to drive on the Circuito Interior. It was a beautiful sunny day, though, and the avenue reminded me of one of those poplar-lined roads through the French countryside. Up and down we went, practicing U-turns every time we reached the end of that stretch of avenue. Ricardo found plenty to criticize, I don’t even remember what anymore, by then I’d pretty much stopped listening. Then I drove us all the way back to Colonia Roma and my apartment. We took Avenida Insurgentes Sur, the same avenue I’d charged down so confidently, though drunkenly, more than a decade before in my Cuban friend’s commandeered car. Who was the person who’d driven that night? He seemed remote from me now. Would I ever drive like that again? I couldn’t imagine even trying to.
But I’d stuck to my plan. I’d taken a week of classes in preparation for my “driving project,” including the lost days of learning to drive with a stick shift. Ricardo thought I still needed a few more days of practice. We hadn’t gone onto the Anillo Periférico or the Circuito Interior, or taken on the challenge of a major rotary, but I didn’t want more classes. Was I really ready to venture out on my own into the city’s traffic, trying to reach whatever street and neighborhood my finger had landed on in a randomly opened page of the Guía Roji? Now or never—it was already mid-August, and I had to be back in New York for the start of a new teaching semester at the beginning of September. My life had taken a surprising turn in the three weeks since the fifth anniversary of Aura’s death. The “new start” that I’d originally hoped my driving project would somehow instigate had, most unexpectedly, even absurdly, already come to me. I’d done nothing to earn it other than enduring, not always admirably, what I’d endured. If I was in a better place in my own circuito interior than I’d expected to be earlier that summer, this was no time to take a dishonorable early exit from the route I’d planned through it. It all might even become undone, I felt, if I failed to complete that route, and didn’t honor what I’d initially meant to honor.
That evening I sat down with my Guía Roji, prepared to reveal my first destination. I had a witness. My apartment mate, Jon Lee, was there on one of his rare visits. I closed my eyes, opened the Guía Roji on my lap, and put my finger down on the page. My finger landed directly on Calle Begonias, inside map-page 113. I turned to the index. Mexico City has ten Calle Begonias (and almost twice as many named Calle Begonia). Mine was in a neighborhood called Fraccionamiento Las Margaritas. Margaritas, Spanish for daisies; a fraccionamiento is a housing subdivision. It was outside the DF, in Tlalnepantla, a municipality that a friend later described to me as an industrial wasteland, with the only slaughterhouse in the Mexico City metropolitan area. He’d gone there once because there was nowhere else where he could purchase and drink a glass of bull’s blood, prescribed by a Mexico City shaman who was trying to cure him of his allergies to cat and dog hair (it didn’t work). After about a fifteen-minute search, I found Calle Begonias and Fraccionamiento Las Margaritas on my giant wall map, a bit north of its center. Not all that far away, but it still looked pretty hard to get to.
Flowers—daisies and begonias. Mexico City neighborhoods often have thematically named streets. Polanco has streets named for writers and philosophers, Homer, Schiller, Tolstoy, Lope de Vega, and so on. Monte Everest; Mont Blanc; Cerrada de Monte Libano, where Nelly Glatt has her office, in Las Lomas. Colonia Napoles’ streets are named for cities and states in the United States: Chicago; Vermont, which Mexicans pronounce vearrr-mont, accent on the first syllable. Neighborhoods with streets named for rivers, famous bays, pre-Hispanic nations and tribes, European painters, the metalworking occupations, of course, and so on. Colonia Doctores evokes a melancholy roll call of long-forgotten medical eminences, or a neighborhood of Pessoa homonyms: Calle Dr. Velez, Calle Dr. Jimenez, Calle Dr. Miguel Selva, Avenida Dr. José María Vertiz, Cerrada Dr. Norma, Calle Dr. Ricardo Reis. Aura and I had invented a neighborhood of our own, in which all the streets were named for Mexican food. In what was like a children’s nonsense game for passing the time on long car rides, we were forever adding new streets to our Colonia Culinária Mexicana: Calle Torta (I want to live there!), Calle Pozole. Calle Pozole Estilo Jalisco. Avenida Enchilades Verdes. Callejón Enchilades Mineras. Calle Chiles en Nogada, Calle Salsa de Jumiles . . . Jumiles are a pale-green beetle. Eating protein-rich insects has been a locavore custom in Mexico since pre-Hispanic times, and the menus of even the trendiest DF restaurants often feature maguey worms, usually comal-roasted; chapulines, fried grasshoppers; and escamoles, ant eggs, called “Aztec caviar.” In Taxco, jumiles are traditionally eaten alive. “Eat one,” Aura whispered in my ear, so that I wouldn’t seem like a squeamish gringo in front of her Taxco relatives. Jumiles are not quite M&M crunchy, and their insides are like a pine resin jelly, owing to their mountain forest habitat. You buy a small plastic bag filled with live jumiles clinging to a pine sprig and each other, and pop the insects into your mouth one at a time. They can also be mashed into a paste in a molcajete with tomatoes, onions, and chiles to make a salsa. Because Aura had fond girlhood memories of having salsa de jumiles with her quesadillas at her grandmother’s home in Taxco, when we returned to my Avenida Amsterdam apartment with our bag of jumiles, she asked me to make it for her. Our jumiles seemed moribund after their long drive from Taxco, so I just poured them into the volcanic stone bowl of the molcajete and brought the stone pestle down, not very lustily, maybe crushing one or two pale green bugs while the others came to frenetic insect-zombie life, climbing over the rim, dropping onto the counter, scurrying, and dropping to the floor. Aura screamed and ran out of the kitchen, and I screamed too.
I always tell people that Aura was the funniest person I’ve ever known. It’s the truth that I’ve never laughed so much, or so constantly, with anybody else, and she was committed to humor itself like a great comedian who thoroughly enjoys and develops her gift. Eventually Aura formed the conviction that we’d evolved (or devolved) our own sense of humor, one that no one else would find funny or understand, that was roll-on-the-floor hilarious only to us. This could be another way of saying that because only I got her quirkiest jokes, I was the only one she shared them with. One quiet spring evening soon before we left New York for that last summer in Mexico, when we had nothing else to do and were just sitting at our long dining table, Aura, really just like that, came up with a game of inventing anonymous messages that we could mail to people, and it consumed us for the next half hour or so. A cardboard fish in an envelope, with the message, “Hello, this fish is your cousin. Take good care of him.” An envelope mailed to a friend who was always borrowing money, containing a pair of dollar bills and the message, “Hello, here is two dollars for your cigarettes in jail.” I guess you had to hear the way she pronounced “Hello” in English, lowering her already chesty voice, “Hellooo,” and that adorable grammatical slip, “is,” and see her wide-eyed deadpan expression. Giggles igniting into laughter, practically quaking, as we imagined our friend’s nervous bewilderment when he opened the envelope, it just grew and grew, hahaha, two dollars for your cigarettes in jail! Well, it really was only supposed to be funny to us. Aura said it was my turn. I said that I thought it would be funny to mail somebody an envelope with only some toothpicks inside.
