Beggars appear from the gloom, their glazed eyes a reproach; they are called pordioseros after the imploring Spanish phrase meaning “for the love of God.” You turn from them to examine the famous Altar of the Kings, and the mind teems with images of what has happened in this injured country for the love of God. Designed in 1737 by Jeronimo de Balbas, the altar is an operatic extravaganza, at once a celebration of death and a vision of heaven, clearly designed by an agnostic who must have hoped somehow to cure his doubts. Everything is gold. The baroque swirl of twisted gold columns, gold angels, gold flowers, gold sculptures, the golden visions of pain and ecstasy, the two dark, gold-framed paintings incorporated into the design, the polychrome statues, the opulent golden glaze applied over the Christian images of suffering and death: All combine to demand submission.
The modern man flees.
And in the bright, hazy sunshine, among Pepsi stands and trinket shops, he wanders down a street on the right called Seminario into the remains of the world the Spanish destroyed.
There is the splendid new museum of the Templo Mayor. Part of it is an excavation of the Great Temple of the city the Aztecs called Tenochtitlán, part of it an exhibit that reconstructs life and culture here before Cortés. Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325 on some islands in the midst of Lake Texcoco. By the time Cortés arrived almost two hundred years later, it had grown into a city of 300,000 inhabitants; fifty thousand white buildings, palaces, and pyramids; exquisite gardens; even a zoo — and a dense, complex civilization that encompassed both astronomy and blood sacrifice. From this city, the Aztecs ruled over an empire of almost 6 million subjects.
The Spaniards were astounded: This city of heathens and barbarians was the size of Seville. Years later the tough old conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo would write: “And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.” No wonder that Cortés, after conquering the Aztecs with guile, courage, gunpowder, and luck, was capable of describing Tenochtitlán in his report to Carlos I of Spain as “the most beautiful city in the world” while determining to wipe it from the face of the earth.
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.
Again, strolling through Chapultepec, we are in a place that is at once used in the present and suffused with the past. The Aztec emperors repaired here during the rainy summer months (Chapultepec means “hill of the grasshoppers” in the old language), and Cortés lived for a while here with his Indian mistress, Doña Marina. In the clumsily designed castle you can still see the rooms where Maximilian and Carlota lived, the brocaded walls, the Sevres vases, petit point chairs, and crystal chandeliers; guides tell you that late at night you can still hear ghostly laughter, tinkly music playing a waltz, the murmur of foreign tongues. Carlota is said to have designed the lovely gardens, with their thousand-year-old ahuehuetes, bougainvillea, creeping myrtle, Spanish moss, and violets, and to have played here with her lovers while Maximilian was off trying in vain to convince the Mexicans of his decent intentions. The garden features a monument to Don Quixote, a perfectly apt symbol of the folly of their brief and bogus empire.
And it was from the ramparts of this castle that a group of young Mexican cadets chose to leap to their deaths rather than surrender to the conquering troops of General Winfield Scott at the end of the U.S. war against Mexico in 1847. At the park’s entrance, a monument to the boy heroes honors their sacrifice while reminding all Mexicans that long ago the United States took one-half of Mexico’s territory at gunpoint. I remember gazing at this monument one afternoon, wondering what sort of twentieth century both Mexico and the United States might have had if Mexico had retained the oil of Texas, California, and Oklahoma. Brooding on these cosmic matters, I turned and saw the Man with the Blanket. He stared at me as if the purchase of a blanket from Saltillo would be the only sensible act of reparation. I shook my head and walked away.