V
In these last few years, the winds of change have blown through Mexico-citizens have more power, protests have managed to kick out the old administration. But they have only been able to improve relations with the cop on the corner, not defeat the march of crime.
The madness comes back with new variations. Now we have a killer of old women, a cannibal who eats his girlfriends.
VI
A cop stops me. My motorcycle is missing a mirror. I’m not willing to pay a bribe. We both laugh at how forthright I am. He tells me he has to pay for that corner. His supervisor charges him a weekly sum. If he doesn’t pay, they send him to a worse corner, without traffic. Plus, he has to pay for whatever goes wrong with his motorcycle, and he has to do it at a private garage-in the police shop they steal the new parts and replace them with used ones. He also says that he goes out every day with only half a tank of gas, though he has to sign a receipt that says he received a full one. I tell him I’m not going to pay a bribe. He refuses to give me his name. I refuse to give him mine. We wait, it starts to rain. He gets tired of me. With a wave, he tells me to go. He smiles. There’s not even ill will, it’s all routine.
VII
Paloma, my wife, comes home in a fury and tells me a story about two guys she overheard reading headlines from a magazine in front of a newsstand.
The conversation goes like this:
Man #1: He stabbed his wife forty-two times. Forty-two times, bro.
Man #2: Can you imagine? She must have been driving him nuts…
My wife is indignant. She adds that, to top it off, the men didn’t even buy the magazine.
VIII
A couple of undercover cops come to your door to tell you they’ve found your car but wonder why you haven’t reported the theft. In fact, you didn’t even know your car was missing. You peer out the window to check if it’s true, that your car has vanished from where you parked it the night before. They tell you again that they’ve found the car. And where is it? you inquire. They give you the runaround. They finally ask for 10 percent of the car’s value (marvelously, there are fixed rates)-that is, if you want the car back; if not, they’ll drive it out of the city… and that’s that. If you have insurance you tell them to go ahead; but if not, you’re caught in the trap. Your car is worth 90,000 pesos and you’ve got to put 9,000 on the table. You’re now certain that these two characters sitting in your living room and drinking your coffee have stolen your car, checked the papers, and are here to do a little business. You assume that this type of transaction is a daily occurrence for them.
IX
There was once a marijuana trade here. Domestic product. Mexican names for unregistered brands: Acapulco Gold, Tijuana Black, Oaxaca Small. I sense that it’s gone now and that more alcoholic traditions have taken over. The narcotic seemed to disappear when hippies became bureaucrats during the economic crisis, and it’s only occasionally at a rock concert that you smell weed in the air. Heroin never got much of a foothold in Mexican society. Every once in a while you hear about a case, but it’s rare, and people talk about it as if it were something out of Hollywood, an extraterrestrial that no one entirely believes in. Cocaine, the yuppie and executive drug, provokes gossip and nothing more. The rumors sometimes become isolated newspaper articles. Here and there they say the white stuff floats around in Televisa bathrooms. There’s a story about a movie star who needed surgery to reconstruct her nasal passages, and another one about the comedian who hosts children’s programs and has to snort a little before facing the cameras to tell his jokes. But hard drugs aren’t a part of everyday life-although they’re available in just about all of the middle-class nightclubs. Here, the word “drug” is more associated with trafficking than usage.
We’re the great airplane hangar, the way station to the United States for tons of marijuana, kilos of cocaine. Local and South American product crosses the border on ghost trucks, right past blind customs officials.
Narcotraffickers in Mexico City find themselves persecuted and uncomfortable, but powerful. They show off their gold bracelets and sip cognac in the company of cops. The trained dogs at Mexico City’s airports usually can’t get past the smell of Loewe cologne.
On other corners of the city, human throwaways roam the streets for everyone to see, stuttering kids only five, eight years old, with glassy eyes, hands and faces smudged with dirt. There are thousands of them. They’re called “chemos”-they inhale chemical solvents like paint thinner and turpentine, they get high from sniffing glue in plastic bags. It’s the drug of the lowlife, of misery. For a few pesos they sleep forever. The neurons die. Life is shortened.
X
Violence isn’t usually part of humanity’s social fabric. The economic crisis pushes more of the neighborhood waste to the city’s center. On Zaragoza Street, in the eastern part of town, assaults on buses by kids with knives became quite common in the ’90s. They robbed workers coming home from their jobs, maids, folks who worked in the markets. Hordes of desperate adolescents would descend on Santa Fe, one of the city’s poorest areas, and steal from beverage trucks. But the neighborhood has changed: today it headquarters the new bourgeoisie. In the grocery stores around Lomas de Chapultepec, right in the heart of Mexico City’s millionaire’s row, a different style of robbery emerged over the last decade. Men would steal from women returning home from shopping; they would confront them in the underground parking lots, armed with the tools of their trade-screwdrivers, picks, scissors-and they’d ask the women for the bags of food. But they rarely took the car, or money. It was theft caused by hunger. In the last few years, there have been fewer of these; social programs have been slowly having an effect.
XI
I’ve said many times that statistics reveal a surprising city: one that has more movie theaters than Paris, more abortions than London, more universities than New York. Where nighttime has become sparse, desolate, the kingdom of only a few. Where violence rules, corners us, silences us into a kind of autism. Shuts us in our bedrooms with the TV on, creates that terrible circle of solitude where no one can depend on anyone but themselves.
XII
The writers in this volume aren’t afraid of trying to exorcise the demons. Though using very different narrative styles, what they have in common is that they speak to, and about, a city they love. They understand that the only way to stop the violence and abuse that surrounds us is to talk about it. They are all professional writers but they are also professional survivors of life in Mexico City. Almost all of them, of us, take refuge in humor, a very dark humor, acidic, which allows us enough distance to laugh at Lucifer.
Another shared element in the stories that follow is an interest in experimentation, in crossing narrative planes, points of view. The neodetective story born in Mexico is not only a social literature but also one with an appetite for moving outside the traditional boundaries of genre.
Mexico City Noir may not be sponsored by the city’s department of tourism, but if anyone, from anywhere on earth, were to ask whether the writers recommend visiting Mexico City, the response would be both firm and passionate: “Yes, of course.”
Because this is the best city on the planet, in spite of itself.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Mexico City
October 2009