Valeria Luiselli - Sidewalks

No invention has been more contrary to the spirit of cartography than these airplane maps. A map is a spatial abstraction; the imposition of a temporal dimension — whether in the form of a chronometer or a miniature plane that advances in a straight line across space — is in contradiction to its very purpose. As surfaces that by nature are immobile and frozen in time, maps don’t impose any limitations on the imagination of the person studying them. Only on a static, timeless surface can the mind roam freely.

Hondo

Dust attracts dust. There must be a scientific explanation for this, but I’ve no idea what it is. All the dust in the Valley of Mexico City accumulates in the Map Library, as if this were its fate, its natural destination. This library has, for several years, and for some unfathomable reason, been housed in the National Meteorological Service building.

One would think that a place that treasures maps, or at least classifies and repairs them, would have a more or less ordered distribution of space. But this is not the case here. It’s difficult to navigate your way around the Map Library and — although the space is limited — it’s impossible not to lose track of where you are in relation to the entrance or, if there were one, some precise center. If you go into the room where the restoration work used to be undertaken, you no longer know where the corridor with cartographic instruments is; if you’re in the small section of maps from the early nineteenth century, you completely lose any sense of the location of the modern North American ones.

In a series of long, narrow corridors, maps hang like perennially damp sheets. To study them you have to put on a surgical mask and gloves. The assistants — students of history or geography, anxious to finish their 480 hours of compulsory community service — help visitors to take the maps down and lay them on one of the large tables near the entrance. Two hands are not enough to carry the sheets — the years weigh down the paper.

The corridors in the Map Library lead to small rooms in which the exhibits are grouped according to geographical region and historical period. The section dealing with the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876–1910) is, naturally, the most organized and best classified (Positivism did perhaps leave Mexicans some legacy). There, the curator showed me two books of Gulliverian proportions — at least a meter and a half by a meter — tracing the line of the frontier between Mexico and Guatemala in minute detail. My excitement was proportionate to the size of the books when the curator first took them from their heavy chests — mahogany sarcophagi in which they are usually kept, protected from the dust and light.

But, after a brief perusal, the two volumes testifying to the delimitation of the Mexico-Guatemala border turn out to be sadly repetitive: pages and pages of blank paper crossed by a narrow blue strip, now representing the Suchiate River, now the Usumacinta River, with a few incomprehensible annotations that most probably indicate the number of steps taken along the bank in 1882 by one of the members of the Mexican Commission on Limits (never has there been a better name for a commission). This great empty book is, then, the only existing testimony to the line dividing one country from another.

What really grabs the attention are the photos of the members of the Commission on Limits, pasted onto the frontispiece of the first volume. In the individual portraits, they all seem like versions of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, some shorter, others less spruce, but all serious, perhaps conscious of the gravity of their assignment: the definition of the boundaries of a country. Only one photograph gives away what one might imagine to be the true spirit of cartographers. In this image, eight members of the Commission, like the eight doctors in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp , are standing around a long table — not so different from those on which pathologists cut up cadavers — scrutinizing a map, and holding cartographic dissection instruments. The photo is an almost exact copy of the Rembrandt painting: the head surgeon, with the authority conferred by the scalpel, poised above the patient; the patient, dead, irremediably passive, at the mercy of the specialist’s diagnosis; the apprentices, who are looking in any and every direction except toward the patient, listening — some in stupefaction, others in consternation, and others absentmindedly — to the master’s pronouncements. And so too are the cartographers leaning over the map; the country, like the cadaver, awaits a postmortem diagnosis.

In essence, an anatomist and a cartographer do the same thing: trace vaguely arbitrary frontiers on a body whose nature it is to resist determined borders, definitions, and precise limits. How does the doctor know where the tongue finishes and the pharynx really begins? How does the cartographer plot the boundary between one country and another? In the photo, two members of the Commission are lying on the table. One of them is half smiling, complicit in a discovery or an irrevocable judgment: here Mexico — over there Guatemala.

When I asked about the maps showing the original plans of Mexico City, the curator apologized and told me they didn’t exist. Legend has it that a Spanish soldier, a certain Alonso García Bravo, traced the design directly onto the ground. There are maps of the city from the sixteenth century, of course, but none precedes the grid plan of the historic center. García Bravo made a few scratches in the damp earth somewhere around 1522 and became the first urban planner of the great capital of New Spain. It’s no surprise that it happened that way. Every inhabitant of Mexico City suspects it: if a sketch of the city has ever been made, the pencil scarcely touched the paper, and what is now called “urban planning” is pure nostalgia for the future.

Magdalena

In an airplane, few people are conscious of the physical, absolutely concrete fact of flight. Commercial aircraft — with their minute windows and seats that recline just a few stingy degrees — bear no relationship to the essential nature of what man first glimpsed in the flight of birds. Everyone on board — the fat, the sleepless, the children with short attention spans and bursting eardrums, the hysterical, the Xanax addicts — attempts to ignore the fact, at once beautiful and terrifying, that their bodies are suspended in midair. The food is served, the film begins, and the air hostess asks for the plastic blinds to be lowered. Only if we open the blind in an act of rebellion against the dictatorship of the cabin crew, can we see the world there below and, for an instant, comprehend where we are. Viewed from above, that world is immense but attainable, as if it were a map of itself, a lighter and more easily apprehended analogy.

Ameca

In the past, Mexico City was often compared to Venice. The city was once an island crisscrossed by canals and surrounded by great lakes fed by the rivers that flowed down from the steep mountain range enclosing the valley. But it’s impossible now to imagine what the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo observed in 1519 when the Spanish army marched along the old Iztapalapa road toward the island of Tenochtitlan, which is today in the center of a waterless city: “[seeing] that paved road, as it ran so straight and flat toward Mexico, we were lost in wonder and said that it was like the enchanted things that are spoken of in Amadis of Gaul, because of the great towers and temples and buildings there in the water, and all made of stone and mortar.” No one could now compare the city to something so literary — or so wet.

Magdalena

Some geographical comparisons are more successful than others. I’m willing to concede the analogy between Italy and a boot, between Chile and a chili pepper, and even the one between Manhattan and a crooked phallus. But I don’t understand, for example, why people compare the outline of Venice to a fish. If one consults a detailed plan, the city could look like the skeleton of a Paleozoic mollusk. But even that requires a strong imagination. And neither is Boris Pasternak’s comparison with a sodden, stony pretzel quite right.