Supposedly the young Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad), seeing a map of Africa, put his finger in its cartographically blank center, the void of an unmapped Congo, and said, “I want to go there.” An opposite of that map would be the Guía Roji, which evokes Borges’s map sliced and bound into an inexhaustible book. My spiral-bound large-format 2012 edition presents Mexico City’s streets and neighborhoods in 220 pages of zone-by-zone maps; at its front 178 additional pages of indexes list some 99,100 streets, and 6,400 colonias, or neighborhoods. The Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue told me that when he was a boy an aunt gave him a Guía Roji as a Christmas gift, inscribed, “This book contains all roads.” The Guía Roji also suggests a Borgesian metaphysical limitlessness, a bewildering chaos that is actually possessed of a mysterious order that even those who’ve spent a lifetime exploring the city can only dimly perceive. The Guía Roji may be every taxi driver’s bible but he or she needs a microbiologist’s eye, quick mind-hand coordination, and a strong, intuitive memory in order to use it effectively—i.e., find the way to an obscure destination—along with, probably, apt patience and interpersonal skills for engaging with querulous, frustrated, drunken, clueless, and otherwise unhelpful passengers. For instance, the first page of the index, under the letter A—which, like all the other index pages, has six vertical columns of street names in tiny bold print, each street’s colonia listed below each name in infinitesimal print, with map-page number and map quadrant (B-3, for example) to the right—reveals 82 different Mexico City streets named Abasolo. I didn’t recognize Abasolo as an iconic Mexican name, like, for example, Juárez or Morelos. I asked some of my friends why there were so many streets named for Abasolo, and no one had any idea, though it turns out Mariano Abasolo was a relatively minor revolutionist in the war of independence from Spain. In an exercise akin to counting grains of sand, I took the time to count 259 streets named Morelos in the Guía Roji index; Calle Morelos’s columns are followed by several more of Morelos variations: the numerous Morelos that are avenidas, cerradas (dead-end streets), calzadas (inner-city highways), privadas, and so on. Let’s not count all the streets named for Benito Juárez, far more numerous than even Morelos. As for Calle Abasolo, two separate colonias, both named San Miguel, have streets named Abasolo, one on map-page 246, the other on page 261; so do two distinct Colonia Carmens. There are numbered streets too. Over a hundred Calle 1s; nearly as many Calle 2s. The city has some 6,600 colonias, and fourteen of them are named La Palma and five are named Las Palmas. And so on. Buenas noches, señor, please take to me to Calle Benito Juárez in Colonia La Palma . . . now the fun begins.

  Whenever I flip through the minutely mapped pages of the Guía Roji, I like to put my finger down on a randomly chosen page, and then, lifting my fingertip, leaning close, and squinting, discover, in tiny print, the name of the street I’ve landed on—just now, Calle Metalúrgicos, on map-page 133, in a colonia called Trabajadores de Hierro (Ironworkers.) Never heard of it. Though Metallurgists is obviously appropriate for a colonia named Ironworkers, it still seems like a pretty weird name for a street. What’s it like to be a child, trying to incorporate the fact that you live on Calle Metalúrgicos into your sense of the world’s hidden meanings and magic and of your place at the very center of it all? That your street, your colonia, is a magnet, pulling the entire universe down toward you? Turning to the index I find that Mexico City has five different Calle Metalúrgicos, in five different colonias. I look at the gridded Mexico City map on the back cover of the Guía Roji and find the square numbered 133, situated almost in the middle, just within the yellow-shaded northern border of the DF. Green-shaded metropolitan Mexico City, in México State, lies just beyond.

  Calle Metalúrgicos, in Colonia Trabajadores de Hierro. What’s it like there? That was the driving game I’d come up with. To use the Guía Roji almost like the I Ching, open to any page, put my finger down, and try to drive wherever it landed. A game of chance and destination, if not destiny. Of course, first I had to learn to drive around Mexico City. Since, technically, I did know how to drive, it seemed redundant and embarrassing to enroll in a driving school, but doing so also seemed a good way to get used to being behind the wheel again while also learning the city’s traffic rules and layout under the instruction of a knowledgeable guide. I’d never learned to drive with a stick shift; I’d driven only with automatic. Learning to drive standard, I decided, would justify enrolling in a driving school, because then I would be overcoming two inhibitions at once. I looked up driving schools on the Internet. I went to the Guía Roji store on a gritty street in Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec, and bought the huge map of Mexico City that now hangs on my wall; my 2012 Guía Roji; and a small, rectangular illuminated magnifying glass that would surely prove crucial for reading those densely intricate map pages, especially if I found myself lost while driving in the dark. I went with my friend Brenda to Dr. York, a trendy Colonia Roma eyeglass shop that also sells secondhand English books. Brenda picked out for me a pair of eyeglass frames that I had outfitted with bifocal lenses, and I also bought a copy of Halldor Laxness’s Independent People, a book I’d been meaning to read for years.

  I procrastinated on the driving project, but I wore the eyeglasses all the time. Print was now magnified and clearer. By day the world lost its soft blur. My eyeglasses were a cinematographer who’d mastered the noirish expressionism of Mexico City’s nighttime streets, shadows starkly outlined; street lamps like glass flowers instead of spreading haze; the rediscovery of one-point linear perspective in long, receding double files of softly gleaming parked cars; the intermittently illuminated facades of old and sometimes very old buildings like glimpses into individual personalities that are hidden by day, revealing scars but not secrets, battered but proud endurance, psychotic earthquake cracks, the maternal curve of a concrete balcony holding out its row of darkened flowerpots.

  In the late spring and early summer of 2012 I had to travel a lot: to Poland; back to New York; then to Mexico to set up the new apartment in Colonia Roma that I was renting with my friend Jon Lee, a journalist who needed a base in Mexico; to Paris less than a week later; to Lyon, broiling with summer heat; back to Paris and from there directly to Buenos Aires to teach a workshop, arriving to snow flurries and a deep wet winter cold. Then I touched down for a few days in the DF, before having to fly to Aspen, Colorado, for a literary conference. Among my responsibilities at the conference was to teach a two-day morning-long seminar on Latin American and U.S. Latino fiction. Most of the students were adults, many retired. On the second morning we discussed Roberto Bolaño and a couple of his stories. This led to a long conversation about Mexico. The students wanted to talk about the so-called narco war, and many of them had grisly perceptions of life in Mexico, which were not inaccurate but were certainly incomplete. Yes, vast portions of Mexico were currently enmeshed in the nightmare and bloodbath of the narco war launched by President Felipe Calderón in 2006, when he’d made his disastrous decision, partly at the behest of the U.S. government, to send the military into the streets to fight the cartels, which were already doing battle with each other. But Mexico City, I told them, specifically the DF—which is what most people mean when they say Mexico City—was a different story. The DF had been largely spared the catastrophe of the murderous narco war; in fact its homicide rate was comparable to New York City’s, I told them, and lower than that of many other U.S. cities, such as Chicago and Miami. I’d lived there off and on for twenty years, and had witnessed how the city had evolved. A dozen years of fairly progressive and energetic political leadership in the DF, among other factors, I told them, had seen the city become a vibrant, relatively prosperous, uniquely tolerant place, however beset with poverty and other problems, a great world city though entirely idiosyncratic, comparable to no other. People say that Buenos Aires is like a European city, but what other city anywhere is the DF like? It doesn’t resemble any other city. In many ways, I told them, Bolaño’s depiction of 1970s Mexico City, especially in his novel The Savage Detectives, as an inexhaustible, gritty, dangerous, but darkly enchanting and sexy sort of urban paradise for youth, but not only for youth, seemed as true to me now as it must have to him when he’d lived there in his adolescence and early twenties. And I went on in this way, my voice swelling with homesick emotion.

  “Oh, come on, what a bunch of bullshit,” a student, a middle-aged physician, barked out angrily, cutting me off. “Everyone knows Mexico City is violent, corrupt, overpopulated, and polluted as hell! How can you be talking about it like that?”

  For nearly twenty years, since 1995, I’ve been living off and on in the DF. What living there means now is that I often spend day after day without leaving my block in Colonia Roma, or barely leaving it. In the morning I take the elevator from the sixth floor down to the lobby and say hello and sometimes stop to chat with the doorman, Davíd or Eugénio, and sometimes also the security agents, all drawn from the Mexico City police—that is, the few I’ve grown friendly with—who protect my downstairs neighbor Marcelo Ebrard, who a few months ago, in December, finished his six-year term as jefe de gobierno, or mayor, of the DF. Then I go out the door and cut diagonally across the Plaza Río de Janeiro to the Café Toscano, where I have breakfast—almost always the same, papaya with granola, juice, coffee, or, whenever I’m hungover, chilaquiles verdes—and then I stay to work there, often for many hours. Then I go back to my apartment and try to work some more, until evening, when I like to go to the gym. At night I often drop into a cantina, usually the Covadonga, just around the corner on Calle Puebla, though sometimes the nights extend well past the cantina’s closing hours, taking me to other places, usually within the neighborhood, or not that far from it. Before, when I lived in the Condesa, my life wasn’t so different: going to a café in the morning to start my workday, and then often moving from one café to another—I’m a restless person, too restless, I sometimes think, to have chosen a writing career—counterclockwise all the way around Parque México. Only during the four years that I lived with Aura in Colonia Escandón, where there were no cafés 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 blocks of old buildings, all drunkenly tilting, sinking unevenly into the soft earth. Aura grew up in the DF, in the city’s south, during the years of its pollution crisis, when nearly every winter day brought a thermal inversion emergency, and school was often canceled so that children wouldn’t have to go outside. It was the probable cause of Aura’s sinus problems. She remembered riding her bicycle in the parking lot of her housing complex and an asphyxiated bird dropping dead out of the sky, landing right in front of her wheel.

  That first time I ever lived in Mexico City for any considerable length of time was in 1992, with my then girlfriend, Tina. It was her idea that we move there for a while, and she went down ahead of me from New York to find a place for us to live, which turned out to be in the more or less genteel colonial neighborhood of Coyoacán (square 186 in the Guía Roji grid, in the south). Tina found us an inexpensive room in the Casa Fortaleza de Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, the fortress-mansion constructed by Mexico’s greatest Golden Age movie director, who was also an actor familiar to English-speaking audiences as Colonel Mapache in his friend Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Perhaps not even Cortés had dreamed himself such a grandly triumphant and martial conqueror’s palace as the one El Indio had built. Tina was initially charmed by the place because when she arrived there for the first time the massive wooden doors leading into the broad stone patio were open and a dead horse was being carried out in a wheelbarrow. When Fernández died there in 1986—on his deathbed he said, supposedly, “Heaven is a bar in the tropics full of whores and machos”—he was, or so his daughter Adela Fernández, a writer, has told interviewers, penniless, having depleted all his money to pay for and maintain his Xanadu. Adela had been estranged from her father after running away from home and the macho autocrat at fifteen; he wouldn’t let her have boyfriends, and pressured her to be a “genius.” She returned to live in the Casa Fortaleza with her two children only after his death, and began renting out rooms. The fortress-mansion has high walls built of ash-black-brown volcanic stone, the same stone cut into large bricks for the heavy, fortified-hacienda-style architecture inside, which included a massive watchtower with arched windows, topped by a crenellated mirador. To provide access during the fortress’s construction, El Indio had to carve out a new side street, which he named Dulce Olivia after the actress Olivia de Havilland, whom he had some kind of thing for.

  Three seemingly separate residences—did secret corridors or sliding bookcases connect them?—faced the main courtyard, which had a dry fountain in the middle. A broad stone staircase led back into the rest of the mansion, always permeated by the chill of cold stone, and filled with staircases and corridors and rooms and galleries and halls that had once held huge parties attended by Marilyn Monroe and other stars but that no longer seemed to serve any purpose. The whole place had the abandoned air of the ruined presidential palace where Gabriel García Márquez’s ancient monstrous dictator lives out his last days in Autumn of the Patriarch, stray cows chewing on the velvet curtains. The mansion-fort was a mess. There was always dog shit in those long empty corridors, at least that’s how I remember it. Our room was just off that main staircase. “Formerly a guest room,” Adela told us when she showed us in. On its walls were colorful murals of wasp-waisted, long-legged nude woman bullfighters with luscious, pointy breasts, painted by a friend of El Indio, Alberto Vargas, who was famous for his illustrations of pinup “Vargas girls” featured in Esquire magazine, back before Playboy introduced its centerfold. Our horsehair-stuffed mattress was ancient, dingy, really disgusting-looking, but when I said that I would buy 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.

 

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