The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle Read Free Page A

map-page 133, in a colonia called Trabajadores de Hierro (Ironworkers.) Never heard of it. Though Metallurgists is obviously appropriate for a colonia named Ironworkers, it still seems like a pretty weird name for a street. What’s it like to be a child, trying to incorporate the fact that you live on Calle Metalúrgicos into your sense of the world’s hidden meanings and magic and of your place at the very center of it all? That your street, your colonia , is a magnet, pulling the entire universe down toward you? Turning to the index I find that Mexico City has five different Calle Metalúrgicos, in five different colonias. I look at the gridded Mexico City map on the back cover of the Guía Roji and find the square numbered 133, situated almost in the middle, just within the yellow-shaded northern border of the DF. Green-shaded metropolitan Mexico City, in México State, lies just beyond.
    Calle Metalúrgicos, in Colonia Trabajadores de Hierro. What’s it like there? That was the driving game I’d come up with. To use the Guía Roji almost like the I Ching, open to any page, put my finger down, and try to drive wherever it landed. A game of chance and destination, if not destiny. Of course, first I had to learn to drive around Mexico City. Since, technically, I did know how to drive, it seemed redundant and embarrassing to enroll in a driving school, but doing so also seemed a good way to get used to being behind the wheel again while also learning the city’s traffic rules and layout under the instruction of a knowledgeable guide. I’d never learned to drive with a stick shift; I’d driven only with automatic. Learning to drive standard, I decided, would justify enrolling in a driving school, because then I would be overcoming two inhibitions at once. I looked up driving schools on the Internet. I went to the Guía Roji store on a gritty street in Colonia San Miguel Chapultepec, and bought the huge map of Mexico City that now hangs on my wall; my 2012 Guía Roji; and a small, rectangular illuminated magnifying glass that would surely prove crucial for reading those densely intricate map pages, especially if I found myself lost while driving in the dark. I went with my friend Brenda to Dr. York, a trendy Colonia Roma eyeglass shop that also sells secondhand English books. Brenda picked out for me a pair of eyeglass frames that I had outfitted with bifocal lenses, and I also bought a copy of Halldor Laxness’s Independent People , a book I’d been meaning to read for years.
    I procrastinated on the driving project, but I wore the eyeglasses all the time. Print was now magnified and clearer. By day the world lost its soft blur. My eyeglasses were a cinematographer who’d mastered the noirish expressionism of Mexico City’s nighttime streets, shadows starkly outlined; street lamps like glass flowers instead of spreading haze; the rediscovery of one-point linear perspective in long, receding double files of softly gleaming parked cars; the intermittently illuminated facades of old and sometimes very old buildings like glimpses into individual personalities that are hidden by day, revealing scars but not secrets, battered but proud endurance, psychotic earthquake cracks, the maternal curve of a concrete balcony holding out its row of darkened flowerpots.
    In the late spring and early summer of 2012 I had to travel a lot: to Poland; back to New York; then to Mexico to set up the new apartment in Colonia Roma that I was renting with my friend Jon Lee, a journalist who needed a base in Mexico; to Paris less than a week later; to Lyon, broiling with summer heat; back to Paris and from there directly to Buenos Aires to teach a workshop, arriving to snow flurries and a deep wet winter cold. Then I touched down for a few days in the DF, before having to fly to Aspen, Colorado, for a literary conference. Among my responsibilities at the conference was to teach a two-day morning-long seminar on Latin American and U.S. Latino