I had only been to the capital once, twenty years before, and that for a brief interview of an American heiress who had holed up in a hotel there to drink herself to death. I had talked her out of it, gone for a stroll around the Pyramid of the Sun, and come home to LA. No business had ever called me back and I already knew that the city of 1968 had disappeared, never to return. In those days, it had been the most beautiful city in the Americas. But decay is written into the genes of cities. I saw it now as we came into the suburbs north of Tenayuca. The stagnant rivers and the shantytowns filled with naked, winter-like trees. There were great expanses of musty scrub fringed with refrigerator shops and the skeletal frames of unfinished buildings. The rooftops were cluttered with bent crucifixes and pink and magnolia water tanks baked in the heat. I felt that I had seen them before. Perhaps I’d dreamed about them years before and they had come out of my own unconscious to meet me on the road.
I was sure, too, that I’d already seen the drab cement motels, those multitudes of pale-green and rose shacks smothered with smoke and the power stations bristling with steel pipes and thrown into a sea of lean-tos: I had seen them in nightmares. In the depths of a blasted tenement, its side ripped out, an ancient Christmas tree sat with its red baubles in a child’s bedroom, the angel on the top sparkling in the midday light. Even if you thought of hell, you wouldn’t be able to picture a landscape dominated by the proud banners of Union Carbide and Firestone. On the soiled streetlamps the Communist counterbanners made no difference; only the shrines glimmering under the power lines were beautiful. Herds of cows flashed past in bronze-tinted fields. We came to the Autobuses del Norte at three o’clock and I walked out into the street to hail a taxi to Calle Uruguay and the hotel of the same name. It was an old place from the time of D. H. Lawrence, dark and vertical, with a room free right at the top on the roof, and from there I could almost see the Gran Hotel Ciudad de México.
When I arrived I asked them to send up an iron and pressed my suits myself. Then I sat on the roof until nightfall watching some fireworks that had been set in motion in the main square. The day had been clear and the tip of Popo was visible against a pale sky well into the dusk. The streets were calm and almost silent except for the clacking of mechanical toy birds that the hawkers sold to tourists at the corners. I then called the Gran Hotel and asked them if I could speak to a Mrs. Linder.
The girl said, “She’s out right now. Can I leave a message?”
“Did she make a reservation at the hotel restaurant?”
“No, sir.”
“Is she with her husband, if I may ask?”
The girl hesitated and I saw at once that she suspected that the man Mrs. Linder was with was certainly not likely to be her husband. She said she wasn’t sure, and our respective silences met in a moment of humor.
“Do you know when she’s coming back to the hotel?”
The voice became sarcastic.
“We don’t ask guests when they are returning to the hotel, sir.”
I hung up and went back to the roof.
At that point I decided the best thing to do was walk over to the Gran Hotel and see what I could see.
It stood in one corner of the zócalo where the cathedral stood, and it was one of those Porfirian piles that old men love. It was such a popular spot, with its art deco interior and stained glass, that I went straight up to the terrace bar on the roof and decided to wait here for a while in the hope that my lady decided to do the same. On the square below, people were scattered over such distances that individually they looked like little flies, flies with no wings and no malicious vitality, and among them were men playing flutes while men in Mixtec feathers performed dances. It felt like a scene that I should have seen when I was a child but never did. Seven thousand feet up, the air was thin and everything in it shone with a different light. I waited there a fair while, but still Dolores didn’t show up. In a city of many millions, there was little point in looking for her when I already knew she wouldn’t show. I felt that there was now a connection between us, such that she might well sense that I was on her tail and could maneuver herself accordingly.
But hotels have ears. The ears are called waiters and bellboys.
The boy serving tables on the terrace, for a quiet tip, advised me that Mrs. Linder came up there for breakfast very early, when no one was around.
“How long has she been here?”
“She arrived two days ago. This morning she called for a cab to take her to Tepeyac. That’s what the guys downstairs said.”
He explained that it was a suburb with a famous church. It was in fact the great Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
“Why would an American want to go there?” he said.
It was a good question, I said. Perhaps she was a devout Catholic. And what time had she taken her breakfast? At six thirty. I told them I’d come there the following morning at the same time.
For a moment he looked nervous, but he had taken the money. He nodded and I told him not to worry; she was an old friend.
Eventually I went for dinner back on Calle Uruguay—one of those old dusty eateries with white-sauce enchiladas suizas near the hotel—and then walked up to Garibaldi using a map that the hotel had given me. The cantinas were in full swing, the mariachi strolling the plaza for tourist coin, and in one of those dens I soon found yet another Electrucador dispensing free shots for a free shock. So I went for it—it gave me a thrill. And afterward I went amok at a place where only men were drinking upright at the bar. Tequila, not a bad drink, and a few beers thrown in between. I grow old, I grow old, I will take my tequila bold. When dawn broke, however, I was already awake and dressed for a wedding.
I walked back to the Gran Hotel and stopped first at the reception desk to inquire whether Mrs. Linder had had her breakfast yet. The girl looked up with eyes that held their own suspicions in check and deferred to a dapper old man with a cane.
“Yes, sir. She already left.”
“Damn, I missed her again. Did she go to Tepeyac?”
She was surprised and her glance went to the door, where the boys stood waiting to hail taxis.
“As a matter of fact, she did. Can we call you a taxi to go there as well?”
“Why, that would be very kind of you.”
“Para servirle. It takes about forty minutes to get there.”
When I got to the door I asked them if they might happen to know where Mrs. Linder had asked to be taken in Tepeyac. It had been a religious goods store on a street called Calvario that catered to pilgrims visiting the basilica: unusual enough for the boys to remember without any hesitation at all.