Down and Delirious in Mexico City (31 page)

No one can know what's going to happen near the end of 2012, the end of the Fifth Sun in Mayan cosmology. Astronomers tell us there is nothing to worry about. The planet will not shift its poles
and send us into oblivion, the experts say. Wild theories, however, are abundant. Neo-indigenist mystics believe there will be a massive realignment of time and space, that the world as we know it will cease to exist. Others believe we will have a “rebirth” that is unimaginable to us until we see it. I know with certainty that there will be an election in the United States, an election in Mexico, and a lot more anxiety and madness than we've ever seen—and we've seen plenty of both already.

One night in Condesa, I meet two travelers from Norway who are living in some kind of commune a couple of hours outside D.F. They looked like magical Burning Man graduates, but a little more hard-core about it, with dreads and garments in muted browns and pastel blues and greens, and weird piercings. We are talking about a “light show” being planned at the Mayan ruins in Palenque. A notable trend among regional governments in Mexico is the mounting of concerts and “light shows” at pre-Hispanic archaeological sites. The spectacles are intended above all to generate tourist revenue but are seen by archaeologists and their admirers as desecrations. The pyramids of Mexico may be unknown to us in so many ways, yet we are deeply aware that, as Paz wrote, they are our “geometric metaphor for the cosmos,” “the point of convergence of the human world and the divine.” The Norwegian women and I sit together and bemoan the phenomenon. I ask one of them what she thinks will happen in 2012. Something
big
will happen, she replies, but not in the form of a cataclysmic end to the world, more like a “shift in consciousness.”

“It's already happening,” the Norwegian girl says excitedly. “It's already started.”

I never know when Denise is going to call. Sometimes she falls off from the busy grids of modern communication for weeks at a time.
Sometimes she is in Guadalajara, where she is from, but sometimes she is in Puerto Vallarta or Los Angeles, where she was born. When Denise is in D.F., sometimes I see her, sometimes I don't. One day I spot her on her bike in Centro. She is pedaling in wildly high heels. We stop for some quality street-stall seafood near my apartment and a scoop of ice cream, Denise's idea. She has little impulses, expressing them by starting off with a lulling “I don't know why, but I feel like a . . .” and then going for what she feels like. This day it is ice cream. She doesn't know why. We sit in the Michoacana shop and watch the Centro
chaka
teens playing the arcade games and the large Great Dane, the mascot of the block, lounge on her favorite corner. I ask Denise, trained as a fashion designer, for an interview. It starts with her birthplace.

“
Nacί en
Monterey Park in Los Angeles, California,
y crecί
in Hollywood,” Denise says, speaking Spanglish. She often mixes her prepositions, switching an
at
or an
on
for an
in.
“Where the Chinese Theater is . . . like, five blocks . . . in Sunset. I went to elementary in Blessed Sacrament.”

Denise left L.A. early on. She was ten when her mother moved them back to Guadalajara. That's where Denise went to middle school and high school. “I had no choice to go back to Mexico. I just felt weird, a little bit paranoid, because of my way of dressing . . . and going to Guadalajara. . . . Even though I was ten, I was wearing Doc Martens and little booty shorts. I was hard-core at, like, ten, eleven. Actually, I think I'm very timid. I don't know. And I think clothes had an effect for me . . . to express myself.”

Denise has yellow and orange shoulder-length hair, a wide, sensual mouth, and spacey green eyes. Her legs are long and lean. She is not a daughter of privilege. In her late twenties, she still dresses “hard-core.” Fashionable, but fashionably punk, with touches of
Party Monster
glam. One day it might be tiny jean shorts not
worth more than twenty pesos and barely even there, paired with shiny gold designer heels worth ten times that. Before going out at night, she might draw white squares around her eyes and mouth with makeup, or do her eyes to recall the classic manner of women cholas in Southern California. The clothes she designs reflect her personal style: sexy, eccentric, a kind of classic barrio futurism. In the four years I've known Denise, I have never looked at her and not instinctually thought,
Denise is gorgeous.
No matter where she walks, heads turn. It doesn't matter what she is wearing or what time of day it is, she radiates a quality that is both welcoming and intimidating, an almost awkwardly pure grace. She oozes natural style, one of those rare alchemical arts, handed down from muse to muse. Denise Marchebout, to me, is one of the city's muses.

She was eager to get out of Mexico after her mother passed away, a victim of a long illness. At just twenty-one years old, Denise had no other family in her life but her maternal grandparents. She was aware of her father but only as a distant figure, unavailable, in another city. And she had her friend Enrique González, another style misfit from Guadalajara. Restless after high school, they decided to check out London. Denise worked odd jobs and submerged herself into the underground nightlife of the turn-of-the-century city. She was living, it sounds like, just as I was living in Mexico City at the same moment, one unknown to the other. Day to day, led by instinct and the will to survive, led by inspiration.

“You meet people there that you'd never imagine,” Denise says, now in Spanish. “There are English people, but mostly you meet people from other places. What I loved was that all those people
who have that restlessness, from every country, make it to London. So if you are a restless person, London is the city for you. The honey for the bees.”

London life was not easy, though. “I was a squatter, we went from place to place,” Denise goes on, back in English. “We didn't have that much money, actually, to live in one place. I met someone, I'd go, ‘Look, I don't have a place to stay, can I live with you for a week?' At first, I stayed in one place for two months, then a month here, a week there, with my luggage. With all my luggage.”

She found work tending bar.

“I remember the images of myself, walking at five in the morning, walking the Thames at five in the morning, with my huge coat and just looking at the river, for minutes, going . . . ‘I'm tired.' ”

We laugh.

“Once I slept in the bus and woke up in the end, at the end of the bus. The driver was like, ‘Miss, this is the last stop.' I go, ‘Where am I?' I was so tired.”

Denise studied fashion design at St. Martins. Then, after her journey in London, she and Enrique brought all the influences of the contemporary club scene in the U.K. back to Mexico. It was 2005. They started an electroclash night in Mexico City. “That period was when Quetzal got here, all the fashion kids,” Denise said, switching back and forth now between English and Spanish. “It was the first time this was happening in Mexico. There were parties, but not electro like this, from London. We wanted to push people to dress up and go out. There weren't any blogs back then. Nothing of what we have now.”

Denise speaks in an esoteric and liberating way about style. The alchemy of fashion, you might say.

“I think people should be themselves, you should love it, if you love it, it's something that's in it,” she says, pressing her hand into
her chest and heart. “But to be authentic, that's the key. And be legendary a little bit, to have your own look is being legendary.”

We find our way to a Starbucks. Denise wants a latte and carrot cake—she doesn't “know why.” It is raining again. Enrique and Denise decided to open a boutique in Mexico City for their budding fashion lines. They called it Clinica. They were among the first to bring a globalized, underground style sense to D.F., just as they had planned. “I think money should never be a limitation for what you want to do,” Denise explains passionately now. “You can never limit yourself. Do it.
Do it. . . . Find a way
. . . . If you really want it, you'll find a way.”

“Do you like living in Mexico?” I ask.

“I'm always inspired by Mexico, more than Europe. When I was in St. Martins, and they'd send me to the library, I'd take out books about Orozco. I'm from Guadalajara, and I had never seen an Orozco. But you look at the paintings, the colors, and you could do a whole collection inspired by Orozco. So I was drawn to the Latino, the Latin American. It's going back to your roots, going back to basics.”

What about the decadence?

“That's what can happen in a big city. So often we feel alone. You're looking for fame, you're looking for everything, and there is access to drugs there, too. Some people say, ‘I need to be high to be creative.' But I don't. I think about a person like Quetzal, who I think was . . . naturally insane.”

We both laugh.

“Like, naturally insane,” Denise goes on. “When you're naturally insane, I don't think you need all that, because I think it clutters your vision and ideas. And that's what I think was interesting about him, he was one of those special human beings that . . . you know . . . they have something.”

We pause for a moment, remembering.

“And I think it's just a loss, what happened to him. People should do less drugs and be more creative, or . . . do more than drugs. Because in the end, you die, you wanna leave something. You wanna be remembered. ‘Oh, she did this,' you know? That's what I think. You want to leave your grain of sand. Lots of people have kids. But some people don't have ambition to have kids. Some people have more ambition to show their work, or their own personal thinking. It's like leaving their grain of sand to another person. It's passing on their own restlessness.”

We are having tall glasses of white sangria at a bistro sort of place in the Centro. Two other appointments come and go. I am not looking at my watch. Around Denise, time becomes a playground for inspired indecision. Eventually she decides she needs to get somewhere she should have been three hours ago, and I walk out with Denise to frenetic Madero Street. She asks if I can hail a cab for her. I spring into action. We meet our cheeks in good-byes. I stick my head inside the taxi and tell the driver, “Take care of this one.”

I walk home, refreshed, almost high. Denise is one of those figures a life in Mexico City so often breeds, a woman walking with pure creative force, an agent of energy not just a figure to be admired, channeling in every word and deed the four continents and five centuries that form the base of Mexico's invisible cosmic pyramid. A few, I think, making my way through the multitudes, become internationally famous or historicized, such as Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, or Leonora Carrington. For each of those, however, many other muses in Mexico City reveal themselves only to a few.

I think about this some more, until the idea spawns its own vision. It is evening. I am wrapped in foreboding and loneliness when, peering out to the street from my study, through the smog
and rain, peering into the future, I see the Seven Muses of Mexico City walking among us.

We do not locate them but instead they find one another. It is a December in the distance of the new century. The scheduled harmonic convergence has passed. For the past year everyone has been talking about pyramids, potentiality, and a pyramid-shaped Aztec spaceship that never comes. The city is drowning in water it cannot drink. There are three self-declared presidents and four “autonomous” regions governed peacefully by new drug cartels that are named after saints. Cocaine is sold clean and fresh on street corners and sprinkled over coffee and tea. Marijuana fumes are pumped into the metro in the morning, hashish during the evening commute. The twin volcanoes overlooking the Valley of Mexico have been glowing mysteriously in the color orange, pulsating with an inner anger. The sky is either pink or purple, never blue. We speak in tongues—Spanish, English, Spanglish, Náhuatl, Korean, emoticons.

The Seven Muses bump into each other on the street. One is a striking young designer with long legs and yellow hair. One is a powerful but inconspicuous old medicine woman from Oaxaca. One is a graffiti artist with dreadlocks to her knees and green fingernails. Another has black skin, a billowing orange Afro, and sings in four languages. One is a transgendered kabbalist and neo-indigenist with Asian features, slanting eyes and arching cheekbones. The other is a sign-language interpreter with no arms and purple plastic hair who draws comic books out of brain waves. The last of the Seven Muses is a gothic queen, in black leather and black lace from head to toe, and a trench coat long enough to hide an obsidian sword. She reads the Torah, Koran, New Testament, Popol Vuh, Bhagavad Gita, Bataille, Artaud,
The Catcher in the Rye,
and June Singer.

The muses bump into each other on the Zócalo and freeze and stare. They begin weeping in joy. They join hands. There is chaos everywhere. Thunder and lightning, sheets of rain. Pulque—the maguey-plant “drink of the gods”—begins spouting from the city's fountains and cracks in the concrete. The valley is returning to its lake form, restoring the equilibrium. We climb to our rooftops. Buildings crumble, revealing buried pyramids. Joined together, the Seven Muses of Mexico City sing and dance awash in a divine light, lifting into the sky, the
boom ka-chi ka-chi boom
of a
cumbia
rhythm echoing down from the heavens. The Seven Muses are levitating. A shimmering red egg appears before them. They bow in unison and prepare to herald our rebirth.

A
s I wrote
Down and Delirious in Mexico City
I practiced what might be called incidental research. I looked at sources sent to me, books or films recommended, stuff passed my way, and in many cases I picked up books or magazines from markets or temporary stalls on the street. The following is a selective and subjective compilation of notes on sources and inspirations.