Piecework

We stayed at the Hotel Majestic, whose entrance is on the street named Madero, after the martyred leader of the 1910 revolution; it was once called Calle Plateros — “Street of the Silversmiths” — and is still crowded with jewelry shops. All over this city of intense bargaining, shops selling similar goods are clustered together; there is a street of bookdealers, a street of goldsmiths, a street of musical instruments, another of bridal gowns, one of religious articles, a street that specializes in bathroom fixtures, streets devoted to boilers, TV sets, sexy underwear, old radios — even stolen car parts.

A few blocks north of the Zocalo is one of my favorite places in the city, under the arcades facing the Plaza de Santo Domingo. This is the street of the escribanos, the public writers who help illiterate people fill out government forms and tax returns, send notices to family members in distant parts of the republic, and write love letters. Most of them are old men now, clattering away at wonderfully preserved old Royals or working at antique hand-operated printing presses. Illiteracy in Mexico has been cut to 6 percent, but there are still many customers. I am always cheered on this block, knowing that no matter what might happen in my life, I can always retreat here to write for strangers.

“I like most of all writing the love letters,” one old escribano told me one afternoon. “That is the most creative work. The government documents are the worst.”

Not far away, the first printing shop was established in the New World in 1539 — twenty-five years before the birth of Shakespeare, eighty-one years before the Pilgrims glimpsed Plymouth Rock, eighty-seven years before the first Dutch settlers established what was to become New York City. Mexico also established the first university in the Americas (1553), and the first hospital, Jesus the Nazarene, where the bones of Cortés came to a final resting place after his death in Spain in 1547. People of the United States ethnocentrically call themselves Americans, but even the most superficial reading of Mexican history teaches us that “America” was a Spanish creation, an imposed mixture with the great civilizations that existed here before any European ever raised a lance in triumph.

The modern American city called Mexico is also an extraordinary accomplishment. It is brighter, more French, more given to wide boulevards than most of those in what Mexicans still call the Colossus of the North. The masterpiece is the Paseo de la Reforma, one of the great avenues of the world. Maximilian built it in 1864, supposedly at the urging of the adoring Carlota, who wanted to see him ride from Chapultepec Castle to work at the National Palace. He modeled it on the Champs-Elyseés, lined it with the bronze busts of various now-forgotten men, and called it the Paseo de los Hombres Ilustres (“Boulevard of Illustrious Men”). After the illustrious Maximilian was himself placed against a wall in Querétaro and shot, the name was changed to honor the reforms of Juarez, who had ordered the emperor’s execution. Today there are still some blasted office buildings standing on the Reforma as reminders of the 1985 earthquake, but it remains a wonderful street for walking, on days when the air is breathable.

At the far end of the Reforma (past the hotels, the fortress of the American embassy, the various branches of Sanborn’s) is Chapultepec Park. This urban glade covers about a thousand acres and has been called the lung of Mexico City (the singular is well-advised). On a Sunday afternoon, when Mexicans of all classes gambol on its lawns and kids watch in awe as the last charros move by on horseback, the park is a delight. The great Museum of Anthropology is here, as is the Rufino Tamayo Museum (not so great) and the erratic, sometimes surprising Museum of Modern Art, which owns collections of the splendid photography of the Mexican master, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and superb nineteénth-century landscapes by José Maria Velasco, whose gifts, in the opinion of some critics, were in a class with Lorrain or Constable.