For three of my first four years in the DF after Aura’s death, I rented a room in the four-story art deco building owned by my friend Yoshua Okón, at the corner of Amsterdam and Ozualuma, a block away from the Glorieta Citlaltépetl. Yoshua lived on that top floor with his wife, Gabriela Jauregui, a friend of Aura’s. My little room was on the floor below, where Yoshua had his art studio and offices. During the years when I had my own apartment on Calle Amsterdam, the ground floor of Yoshua’s building housed an art gallery that he’d founded with friends, La Panadería, named in honor of an old Eastern European bakery that used to be there. The gallery opened in 1994, and before it closed in 2002 it had become one of the “new” Condesa’s most emblematic places. Stark and punk, it was where a generation of now internationally prominent Mexican artists born in the 1970s—including Miguel Cabrera; Julieta Arranda; the artist known as Artemio; and, of course, Yoshua, among others—began their careers. There always seemed to be something going on at La Panadería. I remember walking past one night and looking in the window and seeing the place packed with nerdy-looking teenagers watching some kitschy B movie. Parties on the nights of openings, sometimes with live music, spilled out onto the sidewalks, and usually I’d spot someone I knew, and I’d stop by and have some beers. All this took place several years before I met Aura, but it’s possible that we coincided at a few of those Panadería parties because for a while she briefly went out with an artist who belonged to a clique of gueyes (dudes) who hung out there. Like so many of the young Mexican women I’ve known, Aura was guarded about her private life and fairly secretive about her past. I’m often struck by how fearful many Mexican women are of the judgment of others, especially of being judged for behaving even somewhat as any Mexican male is allowed and even expected to behave; plenty of Chilangas cheat, lie, carelessly seduce, leave without any warning, and so on, but from the start their involvements often include an exaggerated element of secrecy, or at least a very high value placed on discretion. “Don’t tell anybody about us. . . . Don’t tell anybody . . . until . . .” Partly, I think, they instinctually protect themselves against a fundamental Mexican misogyny that they’ve known all their lives, that may not be as prevalent as it was in their mothers’ time but is definitely still there. I mean less prevalent now in the DF, for in Ciudad Juárez, notorious for its hundreds of femicides in past decades, in México State, and elsewhere in the narco zones—which is to say in much of Mexico—that misogyny has grown more overt and deadlier than ever, and may be the most intractable, flammable, and depressing of Mexican pathologies. Social commentators and the like are always going on about how radically Mexican culture, especially in Mexico City, has changed over the last forty years; about a supposed breakdown of the Mexican family; and about how traditional mores have been replaced by the laxer, more tolerant freedoms of the developed West, the effects of feminism, and so on. While young women nowadays may seem to live a lot like even their wildest contemporaries in New York or Paris, beneath those apparently liberal surfaces, many women have told me, they can still feel caught between shifting paradigms, between modern freedoms and traditional expectations about how a woman is supposed to behave. “If a woman here says, ‘Look at that guy over there, I want to fuck him,’” a friend, a twenty-nine-year-old newspaper editor, recently told me, “people still act shocked. There are exceptions, of course, but even with your girlfriends, they’ll say things like, ‘But you should wait until you’re in a serious relationship.’ More and more, I feel like I can’t just say what I mean.” I really didn’t care who Aura had gone out with back whenever or what had happened, but sometimes she went to almost comical lengths to keep me from finding out. In the years we were together she was always a little paranoid about running into those particular Panadería guys. I had no idea which one she’d gone out with or if he was even around anymore, but she did occasionally indicate one or another of them to say that he’d been her friend in the Panadería days and that he now shunned her, wouldn’t even say hello. It’s a big deal in Mexico when someone who used to routinely say hello and exchange kisses on the cheek no longer does; it’s called quitando el saludo, taking away the greeting, and it’s meant to be cruel, in this case apparently quitado by manly art buddies banded together against the woman who’d dissed their boy years before. I could see that it was true, that this one and that one wouldn’t say hello to Aura, including one flashy art world star who I wouldn’t say hello to either, not just because he wasn’t nice to Aura but because I detest his phony punk demeanor and conceited Rodent King smirk. But the hulking, extremely shaggy, extremely tattooed Artemio was always happy to see Aura, and he did say something to me once about a friend of his having been hopelessly in love with her, or maybe he said totally fucked up by her. Artemio told me, after Aura was gone, that when he read The Savage Detectives, two of the young main characters, the Font sisters—both poets; both, in different ways, at least early in the novel, young heartbreakers and roamers of the city—had reminded him of the Aura he’d known in the Panadería days. Back then, when she was still a student at the UNAM, people knew Aura as a poet, Artemio told me, a girl who was always giving poetry readings and turning up at readings and founding and participating in ephemeral poetry magazines. That was how he would always remember her, he told me, as being like a Font sister.

  Aura, the teenage and early-twenties poet, had barely figured in my sense of her. That’s become a part of living in Mexico City too; every now and then someone tells me something about the Aura she or he knew before I met her. Or a message arrives from a stranger on Facebook, like the one sent by the young woman from Irapuato, in the state of Guanajuato, now living in Belgium, who shared some of her parents’ memories of Aura’s parents back when Aura’s father was Irapuato’s presidente municipal, its PRI-appointed mayor, during the first four years of Aura’s life, before her parents split up and her mother brought her to the DF, where they lived, at first, in near poverty. Aura almost never heard from her father again after that and saw him only twice more in her life, when she was in her twenties, the last time by accident. A prime example of the “break-up of the Mexican family” that Aura tortured herself over, because she really never understood what had happened to her family, why her mother had essentially fled with her to Mexico City, or why her father wouldn’t answer the yearning letters she wrote to him during those first years after or even phone on her birthday. Now, at least, thanks to that message, I knew that her father, when Aura was a baby, used to drive around Irapuato, Mexico’s “Strawberry Capital,” in a shiny white Mercedes Benz. Years later, by the time that her mother was established as a respected administrator and researcher at the UNAM, it was her father who’d fallen into relative poverty; that’s something I’d found out on my own, when I went to visit him, in León, Guanajuato, weeks after Aura’s death. Aura’s father has since died too, in 2009. I didn’t know that until I received another surprise message from a stranger—this a long, moving message from Aura’s half sister, also an only child. Aura had not even been certain of her existence; in fact she’d told me that she thought she might have two half siblings, and didn’t know whether they were male or female. But the sole half sibling had known that Aura existed and wrote that all her life she’d yearned to meet her, but that it was taboo in her house to even mention Aura, or her father’s first wife. Undoubtedly Aura and Adriana, her half sibling, would finally have met, probably after their father’s death. The mysteries of Aura’s childhood and family history, which so preoccupied her, persist and go on being puzzled out in this phantom way, through me.

  One late afternoon in the summer of 2008, during my first year living in Yoshua Okón’s building, I was walking on Amsterdam, and had gone only about a block and a half when I came upon a commotion on the sidewalk, police cars and vans, yellow tape, a milling crowd, and a small cluster of women sobbing and wailing. Inside the tape, on the sidewalk, was a large pool of blood. A young man who’d come outside to walk his dog had been shot in the back of the head and killed by a man with a pistol, who’d run away. The corpse had already been taken to a morgue. The women, grouped outside the doors of a dingy-looking apartment building, one bypassed by the neighborhood’s renaissance, were the victim’s mother and sisters, an aunt perhaps, whom he had lived with. I felt waves of adrenaline surging through me, chilled ripples over my skin, and I began to cry too. When I went on walking, I was unable to stop crying. The next morning when I woke I heard newspaper vendors outside my window, down on the corners at the intersection of Ozualama and Amsterdam, baying in the same morose singsong voice as the evening bicycle tamale vendors:

  Salio a caminar su perro y lo mataron. Salio a caminar su perro y lo mataron . . . He went out to walk his dog and he was killed . . .

  The vendors were selling tabloid newspapers with the outside pages torn away so that the story of our slain neighbor would be the front page. They sold a lot of newspapers. I bought a copy, though it turned out not to provide any information that the neighborhood didn’t already know. He’d stepped outside to walk his dog and was shot in the back of the head by a man who was probably waiting for him, and who ran away. Why? Over a woman? A debt? Maybe even his surviving family would never find out. Probably the shooter would never be arrested or brought to justice. Every morning, I realized, these morbid vendors must turn up in other neighborhoods in the city where tragedies have occurred the previous day, so long as they’ve been reported in the tabloid press. You never stop being surprised by the human ecology of improvisation, all the innovative, opportunistic, scamming, and desperate professions, some legal and many others not, that blossom endlessly in Mexico City’s underground, or informal, economy.

  For the next several days, I made myself walk by the spot where our neighbor had been murdered, always pausing to put my foot down on the fading bloodstain left on the sidewalk, mostly scrubbed away but still visible, and I’d feel those adrenaline waves and chills again, fainter now but still forcing me to take deep breaths, and my eyes stinging. I felt powerfully drawn to that stretch of sidewalk, and thought of the bloodstain as a secret door into my own world—a door to the Pedro Páramo world, where only the dead are alive—one now shared with the weeping women I’d seen on the afternoon of the murder.

  In that year and every year since, there have been tens of thousands of murders in Mexico, 100,000 or so during the six-year presidency of Felipe Calderón, of the PAN party; tens of thousands have been abducted, many turning up in mass graves in desolate borderland deserts and ranchlands. Most are victims of the so-called narco war, including the violence, far from only directly narco-related, engendered by organized crime’s grip on an estimated two-thirds of the country. In a 2012 report ranking the world’s fifty most violent cities, nine were Mexican: Acapulco, with 143 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, was ranked number two, second only to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and was followed by Torreón (5), Nuevo Laredo (8), Culiacán (15), Cuernavaca (18), Ciudad Juárez (19), Chihuahua (32), Ciudad Victoria (36), and Monterrey (46). (The good news in the report was Ciudad Juárez, which had been ranked number two the previous year, and number one the three years before that.) The DF’s 2010 murder rate, 7.36 per 100,000 people, was nearly the same as New York City’s, 7.3; Mexico’s national murder rate was 19.4. The impunity rate for crimes committed throughout Mexico has been estimated at an astounding 99 percent, though in the DF the police capture rate for homicides has improved over these last few years to, in 2012, 52 percent. In the many Mexican cities and municipalities where the cartels constitute the de facto local government and police, reporting on the narco war’s violence and its victims is usually prohibited through censorship enforced with murder. In some places, news editors actually submit their copy before publication to the equivalent of cartel censorship offices. In one case I heard that the censor, in a city in Tamaulipas state, was a local journalist employed by a cartel who sat at a desk in a newspaper office making the final decisions about what that paper could publish and what it couldn’t. Mexico is among the world’s most dangerous countries to be a journalist in. At least forty-eight Mexican journalists were murdered during Calderón’s recently ended sexenio, though some put the number of journalists—counting those who provide information anonymously via blogs and tweets—killed during the narco war at well over a hundred. Even obscure bloggers and tuiteros who’ve reported the violent incidents in their localities have been hunted down and murdered, their supposedly anonymous online identities deciphered by the cartels, often by sophisticated computer specialists and hackers kidnapped by the cartels for that purpose.

  Scenes like the one on Avenida Amsterdam that afternoon, of women, of mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, weeping over the sudden and violent death or disappearance of a loved one, who perhaps only moments or hours before they’d seen alive and will never see alive again, are repeated all over Mexico, all over Latin America, all over so much of the world, of course, every day. Most family survivors weep alike whether the victim was a cartel assassin or an innocent. And most are entering, with those first sobs of shock and terror, the lonely realm of grief, of an absence for which nothing has prepared them, many into a shattering of all that had made their lives reliably routine, seemingly secure, and even much happier than that, and into an aftermath, often, of trauma, hallucinations, nightmares, and enduring depression, among other symptoms, and even psychosis. They’re propelled through the portal of sudden loss into a world where the past is more vivid, more alive, than the present, which will seem to be an abyss that can swallow them if they allow it to. Most of these people, to say the least, don’t have access to tanatologas like Nelly Glatt. The people going about their days and nights carrying the often silently riotous inner atmosphere of traumatic grief have by now filled much of Mexico, and Central America too, with an army of exhausted, lonely ghosts. They give pertinent new meaning to Bolaño’s phrase about Latin America being a giant manicomio, a lunatic asylum. Little by little the ghosts may again be reconciled to life, in some cases they will even thrive, but many never will.

  2 Adela Fernandez died on August 18, 2013. She was cremated and her ashes were deposited in a mausoleum alongside her father’s in the Casa Fortaleza.

  3 “And the flames would write your name in the belly of the clouds/ red Palomita.”

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  #YoSoy132

  THE UNIVERSIDAD IBEROAMERICANA is an elite private Jesuit-sponsored university in Mexico City. It educates the children of the economically privileged, and has never had a reputation for political activism. “La Ibero” is a school where Enrique Peña Nieto, who looks like a Ken doll and was the PRI’s candidate in the presidential election during the summer of 2012, might send his daughter. During his campaign, Peña Nieto never dared to visit the public UNAM, nor has he since becoming president. The UNAM, always a politicized campus even in an era like this when widespread political apathy and disillusionment were said to have taken hold even among its students, was considered a bastion of support for the left-leaning PRD’s presidential candidate, a former Mexico City mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But Peña Nieto certainly would have believed, when he came to speak at La Ibero, on May 11, that he was in friendly territory. The PRI, having ruled Mexico for seventy-one years—“the perfect dictatorship,” as Mario Vargas Llosa famously called it—had been out of power since 2000. But the transformation of Mexican politics and society that Vicente Fox’s historic presidential victory seemed to presage never occurred. For two successive presidencies, first under Fox and then under his elected successor Felipe Calderón, the conservative PAN had governed Mexico, mostly ineffectually or worse, and the political establishment had remained essentially unshaken. For years many Mexicans had believed that the PRI—institutionally corrupt, murderously repressive—deserved to fade into irrelevancy. But according to polls published throughout 2012, Peña Nieto was going to win the elections easily. He promised a new PRI. What happened at La Ibero on what came to be called “Black Friday” opened people’s eyes.

  At La Ibero, the auditorium overflowed with students in noisy repudiation of the perfectly coiffed PRI candidate, who so resembles a Televisa telenovela star, and is in fact married to a Televisa telenovela actress. Furthermore, Televisa, Mexico’s media monolith, was supporting Peña Nieto. Televisa controls 70 percent of the Mexican television viewing market, and TV Azteca controls nearly all the rest. Later that summer it was revealed in the non-Televisa media that Peña Nieto’s campaign had been bribing the most influential Televisa news journalist for positive coverage. That seemed a superfluous expense. Televisa appeared to be as firmly behind the PRI as FOX News in the United States is behind the Republican Party. Many of the Ibero students that day were wearing Carlos Salinas face masks. The despised if brilliant Carlos Salinas de Gortari, considered among the most corrupt and influential PRI presidents of the latter twentieth century, was reputed to still be the power behind the PRI, and behind Peña Nieto. The call to greet Peña Nieto with a sea of Salinas masks had been posted on a student Facebook page just that morning, an Ibero professor told me later; rejecting the common perception that this generation of Mexican students was more apolitical than previous ones, she said that students now simply organized and communicated in ways that their elders didn’t necessarily notice. At La Ibero that day, students chanted “Atenco,” and that Atenco would not be forgotten. This municipality, in México State, was where one of the most squalid instances of government brutality in recent years occurred, in 2006, when Peña Nieto was governor of the state. During his term as governor, México State not only was beset by organized crime but saw a 106 percent rise in femicides. The notorious gang rapes, sexual torture, and murders of women in Ciudad Juárez were carried out as deeply depraved sport by members of drug cartels and other wealthy, powerful men whose total impunity for any crimes was institutionally protected by government and police authorities, locally and nationally, authorities long corrupted by money and intimidation. That is the conclusion of those who’ve studied the Ciudad Juárez femicides most thoroughly, such as the journalist and writer Sergio González Rodríguez; human rights groups; and international and national experts, including from the FBI and Mexican intelligence. “Why were they murdered?” wrote González Rodríguez in his searingly lucid book The Femicide Machine. “For the pleasure of killing women who were poor and defenseless.”

 

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