Down and Delirious in Mexico City (30 page)

12:48 PM PDT, April 27, 2009

MEXICO CITY—A strong earthquake struck central Mexico on Monday, swaying tall buildings in the capital and sending office workers into the
streets. The quake rattled nerves in a city already tense from a swine flu outbreak suspected of killing as many as 149 people nationwide.

“I'm scared,” said Sarai Luna Pajas, a 22-year-old social services worker standing outside her office building moments after it hit. “We Mexicans are not used to living with so much fear, but all that is happening—the economic crisis, the illnesses, and now this—it feels like the Apocalypse.”

Co-worker Harold Gutiérrez, 21, said the country was taking comfort from its religious faith, but he too was gripped by the sensation that the world might be coming to an end. “If it is, it is God's plan,” Gutiérrez said, speaking over a green mask he wore to ward off swine flu.

People are standing in rows around the center of the Zócalo, held back by an invisible line made by soldiers from the presidential guard, placed a few meters apart. The soldiers stand at attention, their boots gleaming in their white laces, their white gloves spotless, their green helmets covering faces marked by the severe glare shared by sentries guarding only the most solemn of totems. Around the plaza traffic moves as usual, people and cars and buses and trucks. But in the center something important is about to happen, the lowering of the enormous national flag that is hoisted to the top of a towering pole in Mexico's preeminent central square. Everyone, the soldiers, the people, stand silently, waiting for the drum detail to emerge from the National Palace.

It is not every day you stumble upon the flag ceremony at the Zócalo. When you do, for Mexicans and foreigners alike, it is important
that you wait and watch. The ritual is dazzling, and it has been a particularly significant week in the story of the nation's sense of self. Barack Obama has made his first visit to Mexico as head of state. It is spring 2009. The U.S. president's visit was intended as a display of solidarity with the southern neighbor at its most trying historical juncture in almost a century. The political class, the infrastructure, the entire social contract, were being held hostage by the threat of the stateless narco cartels. Could Mexico survive the orgy of drug-related violence? And if it could emerge intact, would Mexico ever be the same state again?

The two presidents met in an almost baroque welcoming ritual at Los Pinos, with bleachers full of rosy-cheeked schoolchildren from a few surrounding academies joyously waving tiny American and Mexican flags. Felipe Calderón spoke, Obama spoke, their words instantly translated between English and Spanish by unseen voices that sounded extravagantly worldly and well educated. The two nations would be friends,
compadres
against the threats that challenged them both: organized criminal syndicates, climate change, the global economic recession. Obama promised that undocumented immigrants would no longer be subjected to humiliating racial profiling in the United States. To be a Mexican in the United States, Obama assured, would now be A-OK. A year later, Arizona would pass a law that allows police officers to ask to see someone's immigration papers if “reasonable suspicion” exists they are in the country illegally, and Mexico's government goes up in arms. But at the moment, the salutations appear genuine.

“All across America, all across the United States, we have benefited from the culture, the language, the food, the insights, the literature, the energy, the ambitions of people who have migrated from our southern neighbor,” the American president declared.

Mexico, wounded but proud as ever, needed the reassurance. Mexico needed the gringo country's money to fight the cartels.

So how did Mexico articulate its needs to the U.S. executive and his delegation of diplomats and business leaders? By inviting them over for a drink. At the National Museum of Anthropology, the grand repository of Mexico's archaeological skeletons, Obama and Calderón and legions of dignitaries from both countries clinked glasses together in a toast of goodwill. It was tequila. They toasted twice.

Barack Obama spent less than twenty-four hours in Mexico City during his visit. One commentator in the United States warned—without any sense of satire—that sending Obama to D.F., even for less than a day, would be a matter of serious national risk. We wouldn't want the emissary of empire to get
too
infected with the toxicity of the Mexican way of doing things. Or infected literally, with the swine flu virus that had by then already been surfacing in the country, unknown to most of the population. Air Force One delivered Obama to the Benito Juárez International Airport and military helicopters shuttled him to the comforts of Polanco and Chapultepec Park. The Beast, the Cadillac-made fortress-on-wheels that Obama commutes in at home, drove him between meetings and the Presidente InterContinental hotel, although word eventually leaked that the president did not in fact ride in the Beast but in another less ostentatious vehicle hidden within his caravan. The presidential car had been flown from Washington, D.C., to be used simply as a decoy, an imperial extravagance. One local newspaper noted that the visiting president did not set foot upon a Mexican sidewalk during his twenty-hour visit.

Obama nonetheless promised to return. Both parties agreed to work together more closely in the future—just as every other president visiting Mexico has said since John F. Kennedy. Calderón
emphasized that Obama was most welcome. Warm salutations poured endlessly in both directions. To me, a sadness hung over the affair. Inviting Obama into the most intimate spaces of Mexican nationhood—Los Pinos, the anthropology museum—implied a kind of defeat, an indistinct lameness.

Yes, we're good enough to host and pamper the American president,
the pageant said.
He really likes us.

On the Friday after Barack Obama departed Mexico City, I am among the many faces of Mexican society who intersect daily on and around the Zócalo. We find ourselves facing an especially buoyant and proud Mexican flag. It really billows and flaps majestically, I think. Its enormous panels of white, green, and red are glowing in the neon-poison sunset. I sit against the municipal-government palace and watch as the drumming detail of the presidential guard march solemnly out from the Palacio Nacional. A tension rises from the ground, the
beat, ba-beat, ba-beat
, of the military drums. People stop and stare, then join others along the edges of the long rectangle made by the line of standing guards, ready to join in the salute.

The soldiers' white gloves give me a bit of the creeps. At Tlatelolco in 1968, white gloves were the signal of evil. Government agents donned them to identify themselves once the order was sent to fire upon the unarmed masses. White gloves, the clean, pure call of state control, now worn by the guardians of the most sacred national totem. As the soldiers lower the flag, the drumming intensifies. Above me I notice that Mexican flags flap at attention on all the surrounding palaces, including the Metropolitan Cathedral. More people who are passing through the plaza stop and gather in silence. Many raise their right arm straight across their chest, the right palm straight, facing downward. It is the salute Mexicans are taught since kindergarten.

The guards roll the enormous flag into a long tube, ensuring with a total religiosity that the fabric never once touches the brown floor of the Zócalo. They march back in lockstep to the Palacio Nacional, and the drumming ends. Silence, then activity once more. The people who had gathered seem to release a collective heave of fervor. They now spread apart, move along, crisscrossing one another on the Zócalo as if nothing had happened. Back to normal.

Across the way, near the open-wound ruins of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, a temporary digital-clock installation marks the time that remains until celebrations begin for the bicentennial of independence and the centennial of the Revolution. Its digits tick backward, more terminal than celebratory:
516 days, 05 hours, 54 minutes, 01 seconds.

Dropping into a cab on Victoria Street. We are soaked. Delirious and giddy from the rain. Too much rain. Pouring angrily, sloshing in pools and streams on the street. The driver can barely see through his windshield. He looks a little frightened. The rain seems
alive.

“This rain,” someone in the car says, as if speaking to it and not us. We sit in silence, listening to the downpour drum upon the roof of the car as we inch along. “What's up with the rain?” someone asks.

“It doesn't matter,” comes a reply inside the car. “In 2012, this will all become a lake again anyway.”

For days one July it won't stop raining. It rains all day. In the morning, during the lunch hour, during rush hour, all night. It is unusual summer rain for Mexico City because it is a cold rain, where the rain feels as if it is seeping under your skin, chilling your
marrow. Hustling around, people wear scarves and navy coats and buy easily breakable umbrellas at the entrances to metro stations. On Sunday nights, I sit in the cold living room of an empty apartment, covered in a blanket, shivering. I listen to the raindrops dance down the building's inner well. Its tiny splashes echo upward. Alone, I think, rain in the well of a building is one of the most depressing sounds there is.

You can't escape the rain even in the subway. Water drips in through the heavy layers of asphalt, concrete, and pipework above the tunnels and crowded passageways. Many of the metro lines go aboveground when they radiate away from the center, so trains return to the core dusted in raindrops. The seats nearest open windows are drenched. Nastily, the showers almost always hit during the afternoon and evening rush hour, spreading misery and respiratory bugs among millions. Whenever Mexico City experiences a rainier than usual streak in the rainy season, a curious urban legend resurfaces. So the saying goes, ever since the National Anthropology Museum obtained a massive pre-Hispanic statue of Tlaloc and placed it at the museum's entrance, it has rained more and more violently in the D.F. They say Tlaloc, the god who supervises rain, must be restless. One of the two sanctuaries that sat atop the Templo Mayor in the ceremonial heart of Tenochtitlan was dedicated to Tlaloc. The other was for Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and of war.

Who is to know? All I know is that rain here has its own personality. Sometimes it is hard and mean, making people slip and fall in the puddles or on steps, cruelly. Sometimes it is gentle and sad, pattering away on thirsty plants and cracking sidewalks. It rains and rains, yet Mexico City is officially running out of water. With too many people here, potable water must be imported from
surrounding regions to keep the thumping urban jungle alive and running. Reservoirs are drying up. Tensions over the water supply are growing between the D.F. and its neighboring states, between neighborhoods, and inevitably, between people. They're saying that soon the price of water will skyrocket in the Valley of Mexico. They're saying the lack of potable water in Mexico City could potentially, in the bleakest scenario, spark urban warfare. Jorge Legoretta, a prominent water expert and a former borough chief in Mexico City's Cuauhtémoc
delegación,
is predicting that within the next few years we could also have a “great flood,” as extreme and catastrophic as the flood of 1629, which nearly destroyed the city.

What does that do to the psyche, I've been wondering, living in an extremely rainy place that is at the same time running out of potable water? A place that was once an enormous lake? That could return to lake form someday, by the will of the gods? I can't wrap my brain around it. Is this the beginning of the spiral? The end of it?

Everything is thrilling in Mexico City because everything is out of whack. There is a sense of delirious rupture, everywhere. The video game arcades are packed. I'm looking at male stripper clubs for women in Iztapalapa, extremely open public displays of affection on the metro, between men and women, children, and men and men, at political propaganda calling for the death penalty for kidnappers. A man without legs is begging on the sidewalks, just a human stump riding on a skateboard. A little girl is stricken with panic, screaming in an indigenous language, as she gets off a metro car before her mother can reach the closing doors. On the platforms, the blind are walking the blind. How, I wonder, can we mediate the doom?

We forget to ask it. We are watching out for ourselves, like true
urban rats, wondering,
What is it that I want?
I fall into the same mind-frame, thinking lecherously,
I want it all.
I want clothes. I want the Hustle. I'm a Mexico City mutant eating sidewalk hamburgers for dinner under a pounding brown rain. I want cactus juice to flow through my veins. I want to dance upon the pyramids. I want to sweat droplets of jade. I want acid.

Will we make it to the harmonic convergence of 2012, when the Mayan calendar supposedly “ends”? What will Mexico City throw at us then? Sometimes I pass the bicentennial clock near the Zócalo and imagine it's a lift-off count. I imagine the moment when the clock reaches its row of zeros.
Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.
I imagine the Zócalo flagpole rumbling and breaking away from the ground, revealing a gargantuan Aztec spaceship that had been hidden inside the earth, shaped like an inverted pyramid. The spaceship is made of obsidian, jade, quetzal feathers, and volcanic
tezontle
stone. Its exhaust smells like burning sage. I imagine every person in Mexico City rushing to the noise and light of the plaza as the spaceship prepares to lift off. The people are peeling their clothes off and emitting primal human screams while fighting one another with their bare hands, each one of the many millions clamoring to get on board, desperate to leave the impossible city, to new uncharted planes. I march myself home, microwave some popcorn, and lie back on my bed, listless. I stare at the white ceiling and watch a neighborly cockroach scurry to his destination upside down, defying gravity. There is nothing left to do, I think, but rejoice in the thrill of the coming unknown.