I once said in an interview, “Almost the only memory left to me of Mexico City, where I have so many beloved friends, is the incredible afternoon when the sun was shining and rain was falling in Chapultepec Forest, and I was so fascinated by that prodigious weather that my sense of direction was disturbed and I walked around and around in the rain, without finding a way out.”
Ten years after that declaration I have returned to look for that enchanted forest and I found it rotten from the air pollution and looking like it hasn’t rained on those wilted trees since that day. This experience revealed to me how much of my life and that of my family has been spent in this Luciferian city, which is today one of the most extensive and populous in the world, and how much we have changed together, we and the city, since we arrived without an address or a dime in our pockets, on July 2, 1961, at the dusty central railway station.
I’ll never forget the date, even if it wasn’t stamped on a useless passport, because the next day a friend woke me up very early in the morning by phoning to tell me that Hemingway had died. Sure enough, he had blown his head off with a rifle shot through the roof of his mouth, and that atrocity remained forever in my mind as the start of a new era. Mercedes and I, who had been married for two years, and Rodrigo, who wasn’t yet a year old, had been living for the previous months in a hotel room in Manhattan. I was working as a correspondent for a Cuban news agency in New York, and I’d never known a more suitable place to be murdered. It was a sordid and solitary office, in an old building of the Rockefeller Center, with a room full of teletypes and an editorial room with a single window that looked out over an abysmal courtyard, always sad and smelling of frozen soot, and from the bottom of which rose the din at all hours of rats fighting over leftovers in the garbage cans. When that place became unbearable, we put Rodrigo in a basket and left on the first bus going south. All our capital in the world amounted to three hundred dollars, and another hundred that Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza sent us from Bogotá to the Colombian consulate in New Orleans. It was a lovely bit of madness: we were trying to get to Colombia through the cotton plantations and black towns of the United States, the only guide we brought being my recent memory of the novels of William Faulkner.
As a literary experience, all that was fascinating, but in real life—even being so young—it was crazy. Twelve days on buses along secondary, sweltering, and sad roads, eating in grotty diners and sleeping in even worse hotels. In department stores in the cities of the south we encountered the ignominy of discrimination for the first time: there were two separate public water fountains, one for whites and the other for negros, with a sign marking each one. In Alabama we spent a whole night looking for a hotel room, and in every one they told us they were full, until one night porter discovered by chance that we weren’t Mexican. However, as usual, what most tired us were not the interminable days under the burning June heat or the bad nights in cheap hotels, but the bad food. Tired of cardboard hamburgers and malted milks, we ended up sharing the baby’s jars of stewed fruit and vegetables. At the end of that heroic voyage we had managed once more to confront reality and fiction. The immaculate parthenons in the middle of the cotton fields, farmers taking siestas under the eaves of roadside stalls, the shacks of black workers surviving in misery, the white heirs to Uncle Gavin Stevens, who walked to church on Sunday with their languid wives dressed in muslin: the terrible life of Yoknapatawpha County had paraded before our eyes through the window of a bus, and was as true and as human as in the novels of the old master.
However, all the emotion of that experience went all to hell when we reached the Mexican border, dusty and dirty Laredo that was already familiar from so many movies about smugglers. The first thing we did was go into a cheap restaurant for a hot meal. The first thing they served, instead of soup, was a dish of tender, yellow rice, prepared in a different way from on the Caribbean coast. “Praise the Lord,” Mercedes exclaimed. “I’d stay here forever, if only to keep eating this rice.” She could never have imagined to what extent her desire to stay would be fulfilled. Not for that plate of fried rice, though, because destiny would play a very funny joke on us: the rice we eat at home we have brought from Colombia, almost as contraband, in the suitcases of friends who come to visit, because we’ve learned to survive without our childhood foods, except for that patriotic rice the snowy grains of which can be counted one by one on the plate.
We arrived in Mexico City on a mauve evening, with our last twenty dollars and nothing in the future. We only had four friends here. One of them was the poet Álvaro Mutis, who had already had some hard years in Mexico, but hadn’t yet reached his soft ones. Another was Luis Vicens, one of the great Catalans who had come from Colombia a short while before us, fascinated by Mexican cultural life. Another was the sculptor Rodrigo Arenas Betancur, who was planting monumental heads all across this interminable country. The fourth was the writer Juan García Ponce, who had been to Colombia as a jury member for a painting prize, but we barely remembered each other, due to the dense state of intoxication we’d both been in the night we met for the first time. He was the one who phoned me as soon as he heard of my arrival, and shouted with his florid way with words, “That bastard Hemingway blew his fucking brains out with a shotgun.” That was the exact moment—and not at six o’clock the previous evening—that I truly arrived in Mexico City, without really knowing why, or how, or for how long. That was twenty-one years ago now and I still don’t know, but here we are. As I said on a recent memorable occasion, I’ve written my books here, I’ve raised my children here, and I’ve planted my trees here.
I’ve revived this past—rarified by nostalgia, it’s true—now that I’ve returned to Mexico like so many times before, and for the first time I’ve found myself in a different city. There are no courting couples left in the Chapultepec Forest, and nobody seems to believe in the radiant sun of January, because it’s such a rarity these days. Never, ever, have I found so much uncertainty in the hearts of my friends. Can this be possible?
January 26, 1983, El País, Madrid