The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle Read Free

on down there. (I reflexively think, as I have for years whenever flying into the city, that she’s down there somewhere, living her mysterious life beneath one of those tiny squares, her too, and also her, Chilangas, female residents of the DF, who over the past two decades I’ve met only once or twice but who left an impression, women who almost surely no longer remember me.) From the air, perhaps because it is such a predominately flat city and almost all the roofs are flat and because so much of it is brown, Mexico City looks like a map of itself, drawn on a scale of 1:1, as in the Borges story “The Exactitude of Science,” which refers to “a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.”
    Supposedly the young Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad), seeing a map of Africa, put his finger in its cartographically blank center, the void of an unmapped Congo, and said, “I want to go there.” An opposite of that map would be the Guía Roji , which evokes Borges’s map sliced and bound into an inexhaustible book. My spiral-bound large-format 2012 edition presents Mexico City’s streets and neighborhoods in 220 pages of zone-by-zone maps; at its front 178 additional pages of indexes list some 99,100 streets, and 6,400 colonias , or neighborhoods. The Mexican writer Alvaro Enrigue told me that when he was a boy an aunt gave him a Guía Roji as a Christmas gift, inscribed, “This book contains all roads.” The Guía Roji also suggests a Borgesian metaphysical limitlessness, a bewildering chaos that is actually possessed of a mysterious order that even those who’ve spent a lifetime exploring the city can only dimly perceive. The Guía Roji may be every taxi driver’s bible but he or she needs a microbiologist’s eye, quick mind-hand coordination, and a strong, intuitive memory in order to use it effectively—i.e., find the way to an obscure destination—along with, probably, apt patience and interpersonal skills for engaging with querulous, frustrated, drunken, clueless, and otherwise unhelpful passengers. For instance, the first page of the index, under the letter A—which, like all the other index pages, has six vertical columns of street names in tiny bold print, each street’s colonia listed below each name in infinitesimal print, with map-page number and map quadrant (B-3, for example) to the right—reveals 82 different Mexico City streets named Abasolo. I didn’t recognize Abasolo as an iconic Mexican name, like, for example, Juárez or Morelos. I asked some of my friends why there were so many streets named for Abasolo, and no one had any idea, though it turns out Mariano Abasolo was a relatively minor revolutionist in the war of independence from Spain. In an exercise akin to counting grains of sand, I took the time to count 259 streets named Morelos in the Guía Roji index; Calle Morelos’s columns are followed by several more of Morelos variations: the numerous Morelos that are avenidas, cerradas (dead-end streets), calzadas (inner-city highways), privadas , and so on. Let’s not count all the streets named for Benito Juárez, far more numerous than even Morelos. As for Calle Abasolo, two separate colonias, both named San Miguel, have streets named Abasolo, one on map-page 246, the other on page 261; so do two distinct Colonia Carmens. There are numbered streets too. Over a hundred Calle 1s; nearly as many Calle 2s. The city has some 6,600 colonias, and fourteen of them are named La Palma and five are named Las Palmas. And so on. Buenas noches, señor, please take to me to Calle Benito Juárez in Colonia La Palma . . . now the fun begins.
    Whenever I flip through the minutely mapped pages of the Guía Roji , I like to put my finger down on a randomly chosen page, and then, lifting my fingertip, leaning close, and squinting, discover, in tiny print, the name of the street I’ve landed on—just now, Calle Metalúrgicos, on