Reading Mexico City
Originally published in Cereal Volume 15
To see the world is to spell it.
Octavio Paz
To spell, to arrange into sense. In his poem ‘A draft of shadows’, the Mexican writer Octavio Paz attempts to secure a poem into shape. As he does so he finds his words lose their weight, reduced to pale shades of the world in which he writes. A world built on blood, bones and water. A world — a city — built on the foundations of a conquered civilization, in the shape of a lake long since dried up.
For no reason other than that I had passed through the Zócalo that morning and the wind had been strong, the poem brought to mind the sight of a man struggling with a map; folding it backwards, turning it sideways, South-North, West-East. A man reading a map with no point of origin, no fixed grid. I remember a fact, or a myth — that the Spanish city which replaced Tenochtitlan had been based on a drawing scratched on the earth with a stick.
As I attempt to layer my own language on the city, it resists; shaded squares refuse to be regimented into words or sentences, punctuation proves a poor substitute for busy intersections. The problem is one of writing; that lie of seeing as sense. There is life only for reading and misreading, crumpling the map of meaning underfoot.
And so, I write as I read and I walk. I watch the words slip the grid, into the ozone of a scratched, sprawling city.
***
The water is for reading, not drinking.
In the arid lake which is also a city, this is a reading which takes place on the street. It is a reading of billboards, and street signs, and faces. But it is also a reading which spills into libraries; structures designed less as temples of sense than expressions of verbal volatility.
My route starts at Buenavista, where the sidewalks are crowded, the gutters blocked with plastic and chewed corn-on-the-cob. Street art sprayed across doors and iron hoardings, Aztec robots with turquoise eyes. The sight of the steel and glass structure of the Biblioteca Vasconcelos is a promise of order in the midst of chaos; a building constructed by the Mexican architects Alberto Kalach and Juan Palomar in 2006, and named in honour of the leading philosopher of the Revolution, José Vasconcelos.
This is a library designed for a parallel Mexico City, a utopia of efficiency and progress, beauty and freedom, born with the ideals of the Revolution. The interior of the building is its own metropolis, an airborne grid of stacks and shelves which rise above the reader, invoking the giddy possibilities of infinite knowledge. And yet, as I navigate the staggered network of pathways and balconies, the space starts to feel less like an efficient machine than an eternal construction site — an image of the future trapped in a unfinished present. Lost in the long glass corridor between Vida sana (VS 370-400) and Mundo joven (MJ 600-650), I start to suspect that I’ve fallen out of time — from one end of the corridor to the next I am faced with two disparate chronologies: to the north, the concrete tower blocks of Cuauhtémoc, to the south, the domes and spires of what was once New Spain. Suddenly nauseous, I lean over the balcony and see the skeleton of a whale hanging in the atrium — a creature suspended as sculpture, an architectural metaphor in what once was water.
I had been looking for a copy of Carlos Fuentes’ Where the Air Is Clear, but instead pick a book of poetry, Agua del Desierto by Dante Salgado. I step outside into the botanical garden, and choose a page at random.
In the garden, a man in a dusty coat lies crumpled on the grass, close to two lovers who don’t seem to notice. Teenagers practice dance routines —
Garden turned to scrub:
its fever invents creatures
the mythologies later copy.
Traversing Mexico City’s libraries is a matter of breathing between gardens, moving from lung to lung, and if I leave now I can reach the next garden before dusk. The lawns of Biblioteca Central roll out like airport runways. The formal gardens of Fonoteca Nacional are full of pedigree cats. The local library at the edge of Parque España is closed today, so I sit on Leonora Carrington’s doorstep and read Down Below.
In Plaza de la Ciudadela next to Biblioteca de México, elderly couples are dancing to mariachi and rock n roll while children drive by in small plastic cars. At this stage in the afternoon the sun is low and the library a burnt-out red, but the building is only in its latest stage of life — it was formerly a tobacco factory, a political prison, an arms warehouse, a hospital, a laboratory — and there is still time to enter.
Inside it is cool and the granite walls are high. A white courtyard opens to a blue sky and an archway leads to a small interior garden. The atmosphere is clear but the silence is loud, and the city’s cult of the intellectual weighs heavy on the air. I walk through a vaulted hall where the windows are inlaid with illuminated images of Octavio Paz, and towards a colonnade of libraries once belonging to five of Mexico’s most prominent intellectuals: José Luis Martínez, Antonio Castro Leal, Jaime García Terrés, Alí Chumacero and Carlos Monsiváis.
Each library has a different scheme of décor and, while José Luis Martínez’ collection is by far the most wide-ranging, I appreciate Alí Chumacero’s taste for mid-century decadence. A iron spiral staircase leads to a mezzanine, where I find a gold-spined copy of The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley:
Into this flowing stream of love-orientated feeling, chance drops a variety of crystallizing agents…
Two shelves below, a collection of essays by the surrealist and diplomat Alfonso Reyes:
El problema. La historia que acaba de pasar es siempre la menos appreciada.
Hojas Sueltas by Alberto Rosas Benitez releases a cloud of fungal dust as I remove it from the shelf. Pages 60-61 present an ‘imaginary essay’ describing an imaginary landscape roamed by José Vasconcelos, itemising the imaginary qualities of the sky, the flowers and the architecture he passes.
***
blood is green, fire green,
green stars burn in the black grass
By now it’s long past closing time, but imagine the sky is the colour of jade, and the pavement volcanic rock, and I find myself in Centro. Streets for stationery, and streets for beads, and streets for smashed iphone screens. Burger chains in Belle Époque department stores, and 16th century libraries in college quads. Law libraries and music libraries and libraries hidden in the houses of long-dead revolutionaries. Silvestre Morena Cora for the mezzanine and Palacio de Minería for the ceilings, and Leona Vicario for Mexican literature. These are timely libraries with heavy security, but the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada used to be a theatre and I can see a light in the window.
Before it was a theatre it was a church, and the library’s façade is encrusted with the scrolls and scallop shells of the late baroque. Inside, old men in knitted waistcoats hold magnifying glasses to oversized books, and the walls are covered with psychedelic murals from the 1970s — an elephant climbs a ladder and a snake swallows a rope from the sky. In this church without an altar, the absurd is rendered deeply sincere. The artist Vladímir Kibálachich dedicated the murals to his Trotskyite parents, and the images depict the history of world revolution as part of a cosmology of all things cyclical. Coordinates and chronology became bourgeoise luxuries; Cromwell, Castro and John Lennon are comrades, and Stalin is wearing Napoleon’s hat.
Despite the façade and the murals, the space is relatively austere; one single gutted room, desks filling in for pews. The collection specialises in economics, but there’s also a surprisingly good art and architecture section accumulated through various bequests, and it seems that most of the readers come here for the archived newspapers — on closer inspection, most of the men in knitwear are reading sports pages from the 1950s. Flicking on a pair of white gloves, I haul down a volume of El Heraldo dated November 1971.
In the Coliseum this evening, a boxing match will be held between Rafael González and Juan RodrÍguez.
Today at Superama, 2 for 1 on MELON CHINO, POLLO FRESCO, UVA, PAPA FURORY —
It’s far too late, and the last readers have left. I’m ushered out by a security guard with a hat pulled low over his eyes, and I head over to a small tacqeria to plan my route,
***
Time is filtered light
Over blue corn tortillas with nopales and salsa verde, I review my options. I could go south to the modernist university libraries, or sit comfortably in the specialist art libraries in beautiful Roma. The Anglo Library would surely be the most sensible option, but the reading room at Archivo has better aesthetics. The map library in Observatorio was a possibility, but I had already settled my route and decided to head north.
It is neither light nor dark as I enter one of the antiquarian bookstores on Donceles, and buy a copy of Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. The last and first novel any visitor to Mexico should read. It is not a novel in which it is necessary to know if one is living or dead.
Two blocks west along República del Salvador, 4 blocks north up Callé López. Rest in the geometric gardens by Palacio del Bellas Artes.
And high overhead, the paper bird would tumble and somersault, trailing its rag tail, until it disappeared into the green earth.
Make a detour east along Avenue 5 de Mayo, 3 blocks north up Ignacio Allende. Under the awnings at Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris.
“What's taking you so long? What are you doing in there?"
"I'm thinking.”
Two blocks north to República de Peru. Here, unless you can run fast, it is advisable to get a taxi.
The church clock tolled the hours, hour after hour, hour after hour, as if time had been telescoped.
Near the Plaza del Tres Culturas there is a beautiful garden, the Jardin de Santiago. The box hedges are well trimmed, the topiary virtuosic. In the center of the garden is a neoclassical pagoda.
“This is death," he thought.
Pedro Paramo is a novel which takes place in multiple time zones, in a town of the living, and a town of the dead. And so it makes sense — too much sense — that I have come to the Plaza del Tres Culturas, where Aztec ruins, a Spanish colonial church, and 1960s social housing collide in one line of vision. This is a place of unspeakable histories and uncomfortable beauty. Street dogs play in the pits that used to be pools and behind a white wall is my last library.
Biblioteca José María Lafragua, A 16th century ecclesiastical library, perhaps the first public library in Mexico City. Lemon trees around a fountain in the courtyard. A very bitter orange. The library is accessed via the stone steps in the cloisters.
The books on the shelf now are embers
the sun stirs with its red hands.
I return to Octavio Paz, who told me that a city could not be written, no more than a cough, a sob, a burst of laughter. It is cold in the cloisters, and what little light there is, is outside.
The sun walks through the rubble of what I'm saying; the sun
razes the places as they dawn, hesitantly, on this page;
the sun opens my forehead
And so I stand, and start walking. There is much to read, and much to see.
Originally published in Cereal Volume 15