Pete Hamill - Piecework

In spite of the enormous problems, the city remains a vibrant and surprising metropolis. Whenever I go back I return to the same places. I walk the Reforma. I have my shoes shined in the Alameda Park and tip my hat to the splendid memory of Don Tomás Treviño de Sobremonte, who, while being burned here by the Inquisition in 1649, shouted: “Throw on more wood! I paid for it with my own money!” I have lunch at the San Angel Inn, where the food is adequate but the setting, in an old colonial hacienda, is simply beautiful. Then I stroll through the cobblestoned streets to the Plaza San Jacinto and lay a rose before the memorial to the Batallón de San Patricio — the St. Patrick’s Battalion — a group of Irishmen in the U.S. Army who swiftly decided that the American war against Mexico was unjust and switched sides. They fought alongside the Mexicans all the way to Mexico City, and after the defeat Winfield Scott ordered sixty of them executed for desertion. Mexico, of course, honors them as heroes.

On the last trip 1 drove out to the neighborhood called Coyoacán. The first stop was the house of Frida Kahlo, the powerful and disturbing Mexican painter who was married (twice) to Diego Rivera and whose brave and painful life was the subject of a 1986 film starring Ofelia Medina, Mexico’s finest actress. This was the famous “blue house” on Londres Street, where Kahlo grew up and where she lived off and on with Rivera from 1929 until her death in 1954. The excellent biography of Kahlo by Hayden Herrera tells most of the story. In this house, while Rivera worked at his studio in San Angel, Kahlo had an affair with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi; he once had to escape by way of an orange tree, missing a sock, when Rivera came marching on the house with a gun. Here, too, she and Rivera gave shelter to Trotsky when he arrived in Mexico in 1937. And here she painted her fierce, unsettling pictures.

Wandering through the first floor gallery (Kahlo’s best paintings are elsewhere), you can sense the crippled woman’s naive and desperate need for faith. Her spinal column, collarbone, and right leg and foot were broken in a bus accident when she was eighteen; a steel bar pierced her body at the pelvis. For the rest of her life she was in pain. She found no solace in religion; she sought it in Marx. One of her paintings here is called Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick. It shows Kahlo still wearing the corset that held her broken body together, but she is throwing away the crutches, holding a red book.

In Frida’s bedroom, her four-poster bed faces a wall adorned with portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, surely a grim and solemn quartet to ponder before sleep. But Herrera’s biography contains one final mention of Isamu Noguchi. In 1946, Frida traveled to New York for still another operation on her ruined spine. Among her visitors was Noguchi, who brought her a gift: a glass-cased box of butterflies. On my visit to the Blue House, I glanced at those pictures of old Communist icons and then squatted to see how Frida might have seen them from her pillow. Attached to the canopy above her bed was the box of butterflies.

Not far from the Kahlo residence is the house where Trotsky was murdered in 1940. He had come here the year before, after his break with Rivera (some say it was because of Trotsky’s own brief affair with Kahlo; others blame politics). Behind the high walls Trotsky is buried in the garden, and the house remains as it was when he was killed by a Stalinist agent named Ramón Mercader. The small doors are still covered with sheet iron; there are guard towers in the corners of the garden. This security was added after the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros and a group of other mad Stalinists tried to kill Trotsky with rifles and machine guns on May 24, 1940. Those bullet holes are still ugly gouges in the wall of Trotsky’s bedroom, where he and his wife, Natalya, escaped death by rolling onto the floor. And the study is just as it was three months later when Mercader stepped behind Trotsky’s desk and split his skull with an ice ax. There are books everywhere: Dos Passos’s The Big Money, D. H. Lawrence’s Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent, many Russian books, Trotsky’s own works, books on Stalin and Hitler in French and English, a copy of Dreiser Looks at Russia, stacks of yellowing ideological magazines, newspaper clippings, letters, a Dictaphone, a Russian typewriter. The air seems stale with old quarrels, made only more intense by the presence of murder.

But Mexico City is not a museum; it is a vibrant, pulsing organism, like any great city, and is always shifting. What is astonishing to me is how much of the city I knew still remains. So whenever I go back, I visit the two government-run handicraft shops on Avenida Juárez and buy masks, Michoacán altars, ceramic sculptures, or handmade toys. The prices are low and clearly marked; no bargaining is necessary, and the workmanship and imagination are extraordinary. On any given afternoon I might stop for coffee at the Opera Bar on Cinco de Mayo Street, where you can still view the bullet hole made in the ceiling by Pancho Villa to bring calm to an unruly meeting of his comrades in the Division of the North. I usually go at least once to the vast market at Lagunilla, behind the Plaza Garibaldi, where you can buy everything from VCRs to used toothbrushes and where years ago I actually saw a guy selling snake oil. “It’s the only thing for your nerves!” the man shouted to a small crowd. “Did you ever see a nervous snake?”

In the evenings I might dine on the roof of the Majestic, at the Fonda del Refugio in the Zona Rosa, or at the Café de Tacuba, where musicians, artists, and ordinary citizens feast together on the posol or the enchiladas in pipián sauce, in a long, bright room decorated with Puebla tiles. There are dozens of other good restaurants: Belling-hausen, Prendes, Suntory for Japanese food, the Rivoli, La Gondola, Delmonico’s — hell, I even like the huevos rancheros at Sanborn’s. I always go at least once to the Tenampa on Plaza Garibaldi to hear the mariachis sing and to look at the murals and watch people submit to toques (“electric shocks”) from a wizened old man who has been there, I think, since about the time of the sack of Tenochtitlán. Or I might go out to the Salon Margo, where some of the most beautiful women in Mexico show up on Saturday nights to dance to such visiting salsa bands as those of Ray Barretto, Celia Cruz, and Tito Puente.

And as a newspaper freak, I load up on the city’s papers. There are twenty-one dailies published in the capital, along with more than two hundred magazines, ranging from Vuelta (edited by Octavio Paz and Enrique Krauze) to a wide variety of porno rags. My favorite paper remains Esto, an all-sports tabloid that led its earthquake coverage with the headline: WORLD CUP SAFE! The best of the city’s morning broadsheets is El Universal; it’s well written, carefully edited, and allows some diversity of opinions. Excelsior waddles around like an aging clubman, calling itself the New York Times of Mexico; but it is atrociously edited, with some stories jumping through six or seven pages in the back, so that only the archaeological mind can track them to their finish.

Many Mexican newspapermen still take money (embutes) from the people they cover and are expected to solicit advertising from the various government agencies, for which service they are paid a commission. The best newspaper of all is a left-wing morning tabloid called La Jornada; it resists the Mexican penchant for running oratory as news, draws on the best international news services, does the most sustained reporting on the horrors of life in the Mexican countryside, and has the hippest cartoonists. The staff is known as the least corrupt in the city. There is an English-language newspaper called the Mexico City News; I can’t be objective about it, because I once spent some months unhappily trying to make it into a good newspaper. It does carry Doonesbury.