Piecework

In Frida’s bedroom, her four-poster bed faces a wall adorned with portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, surely a grim and solemn quartet to ponder before sleep. But Herrera’s biography contains one final mention of Isamu Noguchi. In 1946, Frida traveled to New York for still another operation on her ruined spine. Among her visitors was Noguchi, who brought her a gift: a glass-cased box of butterflies. On my visit to the Blue House, I glanced at those pictures of old Communist icons and then squatted to see how Frida might have seen them from her pillow. Attached to the canopy above her bed was the box of butterflies.

Not far from the Kahlo residence is the house where Trotsky was murdered in 1940. He had come here the year before, after his break with Rivera (some say it was because of Trotsky’s own brief affair with Kahlo; others blame politics). Behind the high walls Trotsky is buried in the garden, and the house remains as it was when he was killed by a Stalinist agent named Ramón Mercader. The small doors are still covered with sheet iron; there are guard towers in the corners of the garden. This security was added after the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros and a group of other mad Stalinists tried to kill Trotsky with rifles and machine guns on May 24, 1940. Those bullet holes are still ugly gouges in the wall of Trotsky’s bedroom, where he and his wife, Natalya, escaped death by rolling onto the floor. And the study is just as it was three months later when Mercader stepped behind Trotsky’s desk and split his skull with an ice ax. There are books everywhere: Dos Passos’s The Big Money, D. H. Lawrence’s Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent, many Russian books, Trotsky’s own works, books on Stalin and Hitler in French and English, a copy of Dreiser Looks at Russia, stacks of yellowing ideological magazines, newspaper clippings, letters, a Dictaphone, a Russian typewriter. The air seems stale with old quarrels, made only more intense by the presence of murder.

But Mexico City is not a museum; it is a vibrant, pulsing organism, like any great city, and is always shifting. What is astonishing to me is how much of the city I knew still remains. So whenever I go back, I visit the two government-run handicraft shops on Avenida Juárez and buy masks, Michoacán altars, ceramic sculptures, or handmade toys. The prices are low and clearly marked; no bargaining is necessary, and the workmanship and imagination are extraordinary. On any given afternoon I might stop for coffee at the Opera Bar on Cinco de Mayo Street, where you can still view the bullet hole made in the ceiling by Pancho Villa to bring calm to an unruly meeting of his comrades in the Division of the North. I usually go at least once to the vast market at Lagunilla, behind the Plaza Garibaldi, where you can buy everything from VCRs to used toothbrushes and where years ago I actually saw a guy selling snake oil. “It’s the only thing for your nerves!” the man shouted to a small crowd. “Did you ever see a nervous snake?”

In the evenings I might dine on the roof of the Majestic, at the Fonda del Refugio in the Zona Rosa, or at the Café de Tacuba, where musicians, artists, and ordinary citizens feast together on the posol or the enchiladas in pipián sauce, in a long, bright room decorated with Puebla tiles. There are dozens of other good restaurants: Belling-hausen, Prendes, Suntory for Japanese food, the Rivoli, La Gondola, Delmonico’s — hell, I even like the huevos rancheros at Sanborn’s. I always go at least once to the Tenampa on Plaza Garibaldi to hear the mariachis sing and to look at the murals and watch people submit to toques (“electric shocks”) from a wizened old man who has been there, I think, since about the time of the sack of Tenochtitlán. Or I might go out to the Salon Margo, where some of the most beautiful women in Mexico show up on Saturday nights to dance to such visiting salsa bands as those of Ray Barretto, Celia Cruz, and Tito Puente.

And as a newspaper freak, I load up on the city’s papers. There are twenty-one dailies published in the capital, along with more than two hundred magazines, ranging from Vuelta (edited by Octavio Paz and Enrique Krauze) to a wide variety of porno rags. My favorite paper remains Esto, an all-sports tabloid that led its earthquake coverage with the headline: WORLD CUP SAFE! The best of the city’s morning broadsheets is El Universal; it’s well written, carefully edited, and allows some diversity of opinions. Excelsior waddles around like an aging clubman, calling itself the New York Times of Mexico; but it is atrociously edited, with some stories jumping through six or seven pages in the back, so that only the archaeological mind can track them to their finish.