Piecework

Days later my wife and I went to the parade, hoping to solve the riddle. At least thirty-five bands played “La Bamba,” that year’s unofficial anthem of Mexico. We watched drum majorettes twirling batons to “La Bamba.” We watched five motorcycle cops do amazing stunts to the strains of “La Bamba.” We saw charros do roping tricks to the rhythms of “La Bamba.” We watched great armies of bureaucrats trudge by, properly devoid of music, sending only one blunt message to the thinning crowds: Look How Many Jobs We Have Invented. We saw guys in Villista costumes waving from wooden railroad trains and singing “Yo no soy marinero. …” We watched the entire parade. Nobody played “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

At the end, as fathers took their sons by the hand and headed to the Metro, and traffic began to appear again on the blocked streets, and the many cops smoked in doorways, I glanced across the Re-forma and my eye stopped on the sign of the Kentucky Fried Chicken store. Suddenly he whirled: the Man with the Blanket. I was sure he could answer the question about the San Francisco song. But I’d avoided talking to him now, in all of his guises, for more than thirty years. I took my wife’s hand and we started walking back to the hotel. In the distance, we could hear the bells tolling in the cathedral.

CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER,

November 1989

CITY OF CALAMITY

For days, the sirens never stopped. The ambulances came screaming down the Paseo de la Reforma, the sound preceded by cars packed with young men waving red flags, honking horns, demanding passage. The ambulances went by in a rush. And then more came from the other direction, cutting across town on Insurgentes, grinding gears at the intersection. In the ambulances you could see doctors, nurses, tubes, bottles, a dusty face with an open mouth and urgent eyes. And then they were gone, heading for one of the hospitals in the great injured city of Mexico.

“Somos los chingados,” a man named Victor Presa said to me, standing in the crowd in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the district called Tlatelolco. We are the fucked. Presa, 41, a tinsmith, didn’t know if his wife and three children were alive or dead. He lived with them in the 13-story Nuevo Leon building of the Nonoalco-Tlatel-olco housing complex (one of 96 buildings erected in the ’60s to make up the largest public housing development in the country). When the terremoto hit at 7:19 on the morning of September 19, Victor Presa was coming home with friends. “We were up all of the night. Yes. I don’t have work, you understand? Still, no excuse. I was out, yes, we were drinking, yes …”

The residents of Nuevo Leon had been complaining for eight months to the project’s officials about the dampness of the concrete, seepage of water, unrepaired fractures, the feeling of instability. The housing bureaucrats ignored them. And at 7:19 a.m., when Victor Presa was still almost a mile from home and thick with pulque, the building seemed to rise up, swayed left, then right, then left again, and all 13 stories went over, reeling down, slab upon slab, concrete powdering upon impact, pipes and drains crumpling, steel rods twisting like chicken wire. Within the gigantic mass, smashed among beds and stoves, sinks and bathtubs, among couches and cribs, bookcases and tables and lamps, ground into fibrous pulp with the morning’s freshly purchased bread, boxes of breakfast cereal, pots of coffee, platters of eggs, bacon, tortillas, there were more than a thousand men, women, and children.

* * *

“Somos los chingados,” said Victor Presa, sore-eyed, his hands bloody, voice cracked, smoking a cigarette, staring at the ruins, as a small army of firemen, soldiers, and residents clawed at the rubble. A woman kept calling for a lost child: Ro-baiiiiiiir-to, Ro-baaaaaiiiii-irrrr-to. The scene seemed almost unreal; surely some director would now yell “cut” and everyone would relax, the calls to the dead and dying would cease, the special effects men would examine their masterpiece. But this was real all right, and Victor Presa stared at the building, summoning whatever strength he had left to join the others who had been smashed by what was being called El Gran Chingon. The Big Fucker.

“This was all we needed,” said an exhausted, hawk-nosed 24-year-old doctor named Raul Tirado. “Things were bad enough. Now this, the catdstrofe. Pobre Mexico …poor Mexico.”