Many Mexican newspapermen still take money
The city contains some enduring mysteries. Over the past few years I’ve visited the bookshop of the Palacio de las Bellas Artes seven times. It has been closed each time “for inventory.” I think I have personally counted the books at least three times through the locked glass doors. Over the past thirty years I’ve gone to the San Carlos Academy a dozen times. It is said to contain a superb El Greco and some fine paintings by Cranach, Titian, Tintoretto, and Zurbarán. It has never been open. Not once. The last person I know to have ever been inside was Diego Rivera, who was thrown out of the art school in 1902.
I did solve one mystery for myself. For years the circular
“Where is El Caballito?” I would ask a cabdriver.
“It moved.”
“Where?”
Who knew? The statue was hardly worth a search, but sometimes I would drive through the intersection and its memory would become another part of the Mexico that was lost. I imagined it being crated and shipped north, to help pay off the foreign debt. Or saw it coming to rest in some squalid and forgotten warehouse. And then one afternoon, coming out of the main post office, I looked to my right. And there was El Caballito. It was standing before the Palace of Mining in a small, gloomy square. I spoke to a young guard with a flat Indian face; he had no knowledge of how the statue had arrived in its final neighborhood.
“I’m from Oaxaca,” he said and shrugged.
Later I learned that the mining building was designed by Manuel Tolsá, who was also the sculptor of El Caballito. So the man’s major works are joined at last. But I no longer see girls standing beside the great beast, wearing starchy dresses, eating ice-cream cones, and waiting for their boyfriends.
Every morning during our most recent stay in Mexico, the bells of the Metropolitan Cathedral would begin to ring. The two towers of the cathedral house a great variety of bells, ranging in size from the 27,000-pound giant in the west tower to a variety of smaller ones that sound almost like jingle bells. On the first morning the sound had a certain charm. But every morning after that, the bells played without any relationship to the time. One morning they rang at 6:42, on another at 7:20. Sometimes a bell was struck nine times, the following morning three times, the next eleven times. On the one morning when I decided to get up early and defeat the bells, they didn’t ring at all. Here mysteries abide.
One final mystery also eluded solution. At about six one morning a few years ago, I awoke to the sound of a band playing the brass parts of that traditional Mexican tune “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” I gazed out the window, but my view was blocked by the great stage. The band stopped. Then started again, played two-thirds of the tune, stopped, then began again. They were going to play this thing until they got it right. My mind teemed with explanations. The parade marking the Day of the Revolution was to have a sports theme; the baseball players Fernando Valenzuela and Teddy Higuera were honored guests. But neither played for San Francisco. Was Roger Craig a Mexican? Or was Tony Bennett staying in our hotel? I asked at the front desk. Nobody had an answer.