Magdalena
Some geographical comparisons are more successful than others. I’m willing to concede the analogy between Italy and a boot, between Chile and a chili pepper, and even the one between Manhattan and a crooked phallus. But I don’t understand, for example, why people compare the outline of Venice to a fish. If one consults a detailed plan, the city could look like the skeleton of a Paleozoic mollusk. But even that requires a strong imagination. And neither is Boris Pasternak’s comparison with a sodden, stony pretzel quite right.
Any analogy involves trickery because it both includes the idea it attempts to explain and, at the same time, moves away from that idea to attain its goal. But certain things — a territory, a map — elude direct observation. Sometimes it’s necessary to create an analogy, a slanting light that illuminates the fugitive object, in order to momentarily fix the thing that escapes us. Having studied Venetian maps many times, it’s clear to me that, more than anything else, the city is like the pieces of a shattered knee. Venice — the map of Venice — and a knee: taken together, a certain clarity emerges. But what can modern Mexico City be compared to?
Chico de los Remedios
It’s a paradoxical fact that Mexico City, which — unlike Berlin, Paris, or New York — does have an exact city center, has not been organized around that central point and so has lost any possible sense of coherence. Or maybe it was the confidence generated by that center that allowed the city to expand indefinitely until it lost its outline, until it overflowed the basin of the Valley of Mexico, which originally contained it.
Perhaps that’s why writing about Mexico City is a task doomed to failure. Unaware of this, for a long time I thought that if I were to succeed in this task, I had to follow the traditional route: convert myself, à la Walter Benjamin, into a connoisseuse of benches, a botanist of the urban flora, an amateur archaeologist of the facades in the city center and the spectacular advertising hoardings of the Periférico — the six-lane expressway that once orbited the city but is now merely a deeply embedded inner ring of crawling traffic. With this in mind, I tried walking like a petite Baudelaire through that sickly appendage to the National University known as Copilco: impossible to squeeze out a single line about it. Could Copilco itself be to blame? The writer Fabrizio Mejía says the name comes from the Nahuatl word meaning “place of copies.” After repeated strolls through the area, I can assert — without fear of error — that, etymological facts aside, there is nothing to write about that truly ugly part of the city, where the books in university libraries undergo mass reproduction for ten centavos a page. Maybe it really is Copilco’s fault.
But neither does the bookish Calle Donceles, in the historical center, suggest anything more than the odd high school memory of first reading Carlos Fuentes’s Aura or some real-visceral, Bola-ñoesque ramble.
These lines by Francisco de Quevedo offer an explanation but they give no comfort:
You search for Rome in Rome, oh pilgrim!
And in Rome itself you do not find Rome.
Colmena
Most would accept that our capacity for abstraction exceeds our ability to imagine the concrete world in full detail. The average man is incapable of visualizing the image of an object with an infinite number of details, or one that undergoes constant transformation. But most people find it quite easy to draw a graph or sketch a two-dimensional plan of a house from memory. We need the abstract plane to move around easily, to ravel and unravel possible journeys, plan itineraries, sketch out routes. A map, like a toy, is an analogy of a portion of the world made to the measure of the eye and the hand. It is a fixed superimposition on a world in perpetual motion, made to the scale of the imagination: 1 cm = 1 km.
Piedad
In an essay on the river Spree in Berlin, Fabio Morábito writes: “A river tends to contain the city it crosses and to curb its ambitions, reminding it of its face; without a river, that is, without a face, a city is abandoned to itself and can become, like Mexico City, a blot.” Maybe Morábito is right: maybe it all comes down to a problem of hydrodynamics. Mexico City lost its lakes and rivers, one by one. Over time they were drained or piped underground by idiotic, megalomaniac governments who somehow thought it was a good idea to suck the city dry. What were once expanses of water became avenues, car parks, vacant lots, undefined cement-clad stretches.
The earliest maps of Mexico City are the 1524 Nuremberg Map and the Uppsala Plan from 1555 (how they got to Germany and Sweden, respectively, is a mystery). They consist of very few features — main streets, large rectangular areas, a few scattered houses, boats, and fish. It’s difficult to tell where is north and where south, but that’s not really important; the maps are honest in their way; simple, like haikus. On close inspection, the first maps of the city are nothing more than Cartesian reductions of space, diagrams imposed upon a territory that was, to a great extent, only water.
However, the city of that time did resemble something: “In the center of the salt lake sits the metropolis, like an immense flower of stone,” writes Alfonso Reyes in his Visión de Anahuac. In the Nuremberg map, the city looks like a perfect, semielliptical cranium submerged in a huge tub. In the Uppsala Plan, it’s clearly a human heart preserved in alcohol. It brings to mind some lines by Guillaume Apollinaire:
The pensive city, with its weathervanes
On the frozen chaos of the rooftops
Resembles the frozen but varied heart of the poet
With the shrill whirling of so much senselessness.
There are those who say that Mexico City is like a big pear — a bizarre sister of the Big Apple; the widest part of the fruit to the south and the stalk somewhere around the Basílica de Guadalupe, in the northernmost borough. But on more careful examination, the flesh of the fruit has, in fact, overflowed far beyond its skin. A contemporary artist — or a child — might represent the pear-city with a silhouette, like the ones drawn in chalk at the scene of a murder, the consequences of which exceed the supposed containment of the outline: pear splattered on tarmac.
The latest map we have of Mexico City (Guía Roji, 2013) doesn’t look like anything — anything except perhaps a stain, a trace, a distant memory of something else.
Mixcoac
No comprehensive idea of Mexico City can be formed by walking it. Rousseau’s solitary strolls, Walser’s or Baudelaire’s saunters, the image-walks of Kracauer, and Benjamin’s flâneries were all ways of understanding and portraying the new structure of modern cities. But the inhabitants of Mexico City don’t have a holistic sense of the place in which they pass their lives because they lack any point of reference. At some stage, the notion of a center, an axis, was lost.
An obvious inference of this would be that Mexico City has to be seen from above in order to be grasped in its totality. I’ve tried it. But the elevated section of the Periférico offers nothing more than a brief surfacing for air between our everyday clouts of suffocation. Flying over the city at night, one can perhaps, for a few minutes, see it anew. From far above, lights glimmer in the valley and it regains its liquid past: a lake overcrowded with fishing boats. And, on a clear day, from an airplane window, the city is almost comprehensible — a simpler representation of itself, to the scale of the human imagination. But as the airplane descends to earth, one discovers that the grid is floating on what seems to be an indeterminate stretch of gray water. The folds of the valley embody the threat of a wave of mercury that never quite breaks against the mountain range; the streets and avenues are petrified folds in an overflowing, ghostly lake.