In the year 1900, Aleister Crowley, a scholar of religion, amateur mountaineer, and apprentice sorcerer, arrived in Mexico City from New York after a three-day train journey. His plan was to study Mexican culture, or what he imagined Mexican culture to be, and soak up a little exoticism for a few months. It was Crowley’s first trip outside Europe. He had yet to found a religion or discover, in a burst of mystic enlightenment in Egypt, that he was the prophet of a new era. He had a long way to go before becoming a magus, a friend of or guide to such a diverse range of people as the Argentinian artist Xul Solar and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Crowley was, at that time, simply an Englishman with slightly more curiosity than was the norm.

His itinerary included a secondary aim. Toward the end of the year he planned to meet his friend and fellow mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein, with whom he was going to climb a number of Mexican peaks.

In the beginning, Crowley found Mexico deeply irritating. What little tea available was of abysmal quality. He thought the food was awful and spent several days systematically refusing to drink pulque, mezcal, or tequila (Mexicans found the concept of abstinence inconceivable). Despite all this, he rented part of a house overlooking the Alameda, in the historic center of the capital, with large rooms and exposed beams, and he soon fell in love with a Mexican woman who acted as his guide and introduced him to people. In addition, Crowley began to frequent the city’s Masonic lodges.

One day, in a lodge of the “Scottish Rite,” Crowley was officially initiated into Freemasonry (in a ceremony that has since been questioned). But he soon became aware that his quest required greater freedom and founded his own sect in the center of Mexico City: the Lamp of Invisible Light. To term it a sect is a slight exaggeration; in addition to Crowley, there was only one other member: a Mexican man named Jesús Medina. (Medina later moved north and, before the Revolution, took part in spiritism sessions with Francisco I. Madero.)

When Eckenstein arrived in Mexico, the first thing he did was to mock Crowley for wasting his time on frauds and Freemasons. The mountaineer respected his friend only for his climbing skills and couldn’t understand his hermetic passions. Together, they ascended Iztaccíhuatl, the Volcán de Colima, the Nevado de Toluca, and, finally, Popocatépetl—where Crowley almost succumbed to altitude sickness and asked his friend to slap him repeatedly to wipe from his eyes the unspeakable visions brought on by vertigo.

I’m not certain if it was with Eckenstein or when he was traveling with his Mexican lover that Crowley made an expedition to Tepoztlán, a town that, even in those days, had a degree of fame among those interested in the paranormal, and where, eighty-seven years later, after seventeen hours in labor, my mother expelled me from her vagina.

When my father—an amateur enthusiast of the great English magus—decided family life was a middle-class imposition that didn’t sit easily with his expectations of marginality, he stole my mom’s savings and disappeared without a word. That was in 1989. In exchange, he left us around one hundred and fifty books. They were mainly play scripts—Beckett, Artaud, A Doll’s House, Spring Awakening—plus guides to acting—two by Stanislavski and one by Grotowski—some novels from the Latin American Boom, a biography of Aleister Crowley, and various classics in those horrible two-column editions from Porrúa. I was eighteen months old when he left. By the time I reached fourteen and Mom and I had moved to Cuernavaca, the only physical souvenir I had of my father was a dozen of those books. All the others had been sold by my mother to pay off the occasional debt or were stolen by the boyfriend of the moment.

Among those remaining dozen books (I now have only the biography of Crowley, which I sometimes read aloud in that tiresome voice used by poets) there was one that I frequently perused during my teenage years, without really understanding it. It was a compilation of essays about urbanism titled The Future City. Some of the authors proposed fictitious cities onto which they projected their utopias (a labyrinth of small suspension bridges, a bristling esplanade of obelisks), while others chose more abstract, theoretical terrain. One of the texts was by a Dutch architect who spoke of the future city as a machine with no use. A machine whose aim would be chance, the production of accidents, anomaly. In contrast to the machines of capitalism, articulated around the notion of efficiency, the future city would have to be a poetic machine, based on notions of waste and excess, what Georges Bataille called “the accursed share.” The author of that essay dedicated a section to the movement of bodies in that future city. He cited Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Chaplin’s Modern Times as examples of how bodies could be moved in a machine-city programmed in function of chance and playful waste.

During my senior year of high school, I wrote an assignment for my Spanish class that was, in fact, a very thinly disguised crib of the Dutch architect’s essay. Without citing my sources, I read it aloud to Mom the day before handing it in. She was moved, exclaimed how well I wrote, what original ideas I had (I thought I detected a certain tone of concern in her voice as she made the latter comment). My teacher, on the other hand, was less enthusiastic. He said my work was interesting, but it didn’t fulfill the task: he’d asked us to write an “argumentative essay” with a specific structure. He gave me 75 percent, an unusually low grade for me. After class that Monday, I burned the essay. (I used to burn a lot of things in those days: it seemed the most appropriate way of getting rid of something. Now that the wildfires have besieged the city and the smoke tinges the sky a different shade each dawn, it seems to me that we should throw everything into the flames, end this farce once and for all. I guess I’ve always been a little melodramatic.)

I don’t know what has happened to the book about the city of the future. Since I left home, Mom has dated four more men; it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one of them has taken it, or that it’s gotten lost in some move, as everything does. A while back, I went to Mexico City and made inquiries about it in seven different bookstores, but none of them was willing to admit to its existence. And I haven’t found anything on the internet either, so I’m starting to think that maybe it never actually existed, that I dreamed the essay about the machine-city, and dreamed the Dutch architect and his silent-movie references. But the truth is that my dreams never achieve that level of detail. In general, I dream atmospheres, colors, moving forms; at night, I free myself from plot.

Whatever the case, I’d need to find or reinvent that text about the future city for the piece I want to do in the Jardín Borda. But how?