The White Notebooks #16 ]

tales from the late anthropocene [ the white notebooks #16 ] Thirteen Journeys Around Mexico City IN JUNE I MADE A SPECIAL EFFORT to see the film Roma, time always goes too fast while I try to map the city. A little because its setting has long been of special interest to me: tourism (the Pyramid of the Sun is a must-see), a little Mexico City. After being suitably impressed and moved by hanging out in small city cafés, a little wandering the the movie, I felt the need to augment a particular reading various streets of the Centro Histórico. Given that it’s the habit I’ve developed over the last thirty years, which is to splashes of history that I find attractive, I’d understand seek out fiction set in this, the most populous place on suggestions of a few other movies set here such as Luis Earth. What might I have missed out on, in the last few Buñuel’s The Young and the Damned from 1950, but no, the years? books have always been my preference. I found web pages at two sites, ELECTRIC LIT and By no means does Mexican fiction that’s been CULTURE TRIP, which were recommending seven and translated into English always feature the capital city. Juan eleven books respectively as further reading on Mexico Rulfo, for example, one of the most important figures in City, with a total of just ten translated fiction titles between twentieth century Mexican literature, only completed two them (there was some overlap) plus a smattering of non- books – a novel and a short story collection, and both of fiction, one graphic novel and a film. There were only three these look mostly at the Mexico that’s found a long way books I was not familiar with so made a point of buying from the capital. Of even more importance is Nobel them and have now read them all. laureate Octavio Paz, who also looked far wider than the I also realised I could do better than these two capital for his subject matter. But there seems to be no websites in one fell swoop. So, because this is a proper translated books readily available in English written by fanzine and not a clickbait-driven website offering just natives of Mexico City that precede Carlos Fuentes’s capsule reviews (Okay, I know, I know…) I here Where the Air Is Clear, which I found to be a present the majority of what I’ve read about hard read when I read it in an English edition Mexico City in fiction. some time around 1987. It focuses on Mexico I have no definitive answer as to why I City’s upper classes and contrasts them with should be so enamoured with Mexico City in the situations of the city’s poor. Being his first fiction, although it probably began in the late novel and written when Fuentes was 29, the ’80s, plus my reading of the Beats in the 1990s, story centres around Federico Robles, a man with their frequent excursions south of the who has abandoned the revolutionary ideals of border. his youth to become a powerful and influential I don’t know Mexico City nearly as financier. Fuentes’s prose is dense, and he takes well as I would like because I visit it so rarely: a kaleidoscopic look at the city itself with a I’ve made only four visits over the last twenty series of vignettes in adjunct to the more years, and my regular day-and-a-half stay each personal stories he tells, all embellished with tales from the late anthropocene. [ the white notebooks #16 ] December 2562/2019 a perzine for limited distribution, available for ‘the usual’ also at efanzines.com. email: [email protected] 136/200 Emerald Hill Village, Soi 6, Hua Hin, Prachuap Khiri Khan 77110, Thailand set in 9/12 Didot and Letter Gothic [ 1 ] internal monologues and subconscious explor- Mexico was basically an Oriental culture that ations. The book is multi-faceted and I received reflected two thousand years of disease and the strong impression that the ambitious poverty and degradation and stupidity and Fuentes was trying to write ‘the great Mexico slavery and brutality and psychic and physical City novel’ – possibly because no one before terrorism. It was sinister and gloomy and had ever attempted that? – and with this book chaotic, with the special chaos of a dream. … he also triggered the ‘Boom’ in Latin American …and so on. To put these kinds of observations literature of the 1960s. For anyone wanting to into the text of the novel itself might have explore Mexican literature this novel is pivotal, provided a more contextualised book, but I also but Fuentes also required a tolerant and at think it would have been irrelevant to times forgiving approach from this particular Burroughs’s purpose. reader: he provided me with irritation and Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s experience of charm in equal measure. Mexico City only provides a patchy intro- Another of my earliest reads in which duction to how the city is portrayed in fiction, I was made to feel conscious of the intensity of and by definition their viewpoint is that of the life in Mexico City was Jack Kerouac’s Tristessa visitor. An earlier book that also takes this (1960), which I also read in the late 1980s. This perspective is D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed short narrative involves two trips into the Serpent (1926), about a female Irish visitor who junkie houses of Mexico City in pursuit of a becomes entangled in the political revival of a beautiful Mexican morphine addict, and this pre-Christian religion. The novel begins at a make it one of Kerouac’s most uncomfortable bullfight in Mexico City but heads out into the and tragic books. His ‘kick-writing’ occasionally country, and becomes either more fascist, white goes into overdrive and Kerouac often risks supremacist or misogynist along the way, losing the reader, who needs to keep apace. The depending on what your sensitivities are. I novella is simply a long meditation on a slow doubt that a book like this has much that is loss and one, as usual with the Beats, fuelled by useful to say to leftie readers of today, but I plenty of drink and drugs. suppose the only way to find out would be to I can’t remember what made me pick read it for yourself. up William Burroughs’s Queer (1985) when I All the above formed what I’d call my read it in the mid-1990s – probably because it’s early reading on Mexico City fiction so, short and offered a cryptic crash-course on ignoring the random order in which they were Burroughs himself – but the edition I read read, from here on in it would make more then could certainly have provided more sense to present the books mostly as they context which Penguin’s 2010 edition now does appeared chronologically, although some didn’t handsomely, hence the re-read. Queer was receive their English translation until many originally begun as a sequel to Junkie, written years later. between 1951 and 1953 but then abandoned Such a book is Calling All Heroes (1982, for three decades before Burroughs eventually trans. 2010) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, which is centred on agreed to its publication after some very belated revisions. the failed student demonstrations of 1968 that were a There was some earlier interchange between the two texts pivotal point in Mexican history. Taibo is best known in the with some cuts from Queer to add to Ace’s word count English-speaking world for penning a definitive biography requirement for Junkie. Oliver Harris’s introduction tells on Che Guevara, and he imbues his left-wing politics into me everything I could possibly want to know about the all his fiction. But Calling All Heroes also heads bravely – book, including his observation that “the Mexico City of we might even say recklessly – into speculative territory Queer is not a “realist” city at all”. Burroughs’s character with its tongue-in-cheek plot of a Mexican journalist, lying Lee is simply in amorous pursuit of Eugene Allerton, all in hospital from a knife wound, summoning his favourite the way to Panama and Ecuador while he searches for the fictional and historical heroes from around the world to herb Yage that reportedly induces telepathy. Descriptions rescue Mexico City from right-wing forces. Mexico City is of Mexico City itself are non-existent, with the city the playground here and also the source and identity of all becoming a silent background to Lee’s obsessions. social unity, as the invited heroes bring retribution and However Burroughs’s does provide a few colourful anarchy to the city. paragraphs of his impressions of the city in his 1985 Roberto Bolaño was Chilean, but having lived in introduction to the book: Mexico City for a long period he set a fair amount of his … The slum areas compared favourably with anything in fiction there, and Amulet (1999) is especially enjoyable. This Asia for sheer filth and poverty. People would shit all over was the first title to hit the shelves after publication of his the street, then lie down and sleep in it with the flies posthumous magnum opus 2666, and there is a link crawling in and out of their mouths. Entrepreneurs, not between the two books: the year 2666 gets a mention infrequently lepers, built fires on street corners and cooked among the many ramblings of Bolaño’s wonderful creation up hideous, stinking, nameless messes of food, which they Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan immigrant and the self- dispensed to passers-by.

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