Again, strolling through Chapultepec, we are in a place that is at once used in the present and suffused with the past. The Aztec emperors repaired here during the rainy summer months (Chapultepec means “hill of the grasshoppers” in the old language), and Cortés lived for a while here with his Indian mistress, Doña Marina. In the clumsily designed castle you can still see the rooms where Maximilian and Carlota lived, the brocaded walls, the Sevres vases, petit point chairs, and crystal chandeliers; guides tell you that late at night you can still hear ghostly laughter, tinkly music playing a waltz, the murmur of foreign tongues. Carlota is said to have designed the lovely gardens, with their thousand-year-old ahuehuetes, bougainvillea, creeping myrtle, Spanish moss, and violets, and to have played here with her lovers while Maximilian was off trying in vain to convince the Mexicans of his decent intentions. The garden features a monument to Don Quixote, a perfectly apt symbol of the folly of their brief and bogus empire.
And it was from the ramparts of this castle that a group of young Mexican cadets chose to leap to their deaths rather than surrender to the conquering troops of General Winfield Scott at the end of the U.S. war against Mexico in 1847. At the park’s entrance, a monument to the boy heroes honors their sacrifice while reminding all Mexicans that long ago the United States took one-half of Mexico’s territory at gunpoint. I remember gazing at this monument one afternoon, wondering what sort of twentieth century both Mexico and the United States might have had if Mexico had retained the oil of Texas, California, and Oklahoma. Brooding on these cosmic matters, I turned and saw the Man with the Blanket. He stared at me as if the purchase of a blanket from Saltillo would be the only sensible act of reparation. I shook my head and walked away.
When the Reforma moves through the park it climbs into the Lomas of Chapultepec, where many rich Mexicans and foreign diplomats live in superb modern houses. There is a belief that the Lomas is above the smog line; on most days its air is as vile as that of El Centro. Many of the older trees are brown around the edges, withering in the pollution. And the automobile traffic is horrendous. Among other things, the traffic of Mexico City has virtually ended that most intelligent of ancient rituals, the siesta. In the old days (just twenty years ago), men would leave their shops or offices and lunch at home, or in the
In the 1985 earthquake there was almost no damage in the Lomas; the same could not be said for the other end of the Reforma, the area called Tlatelolco. In the heady days of the 1960s, a vast development of state-financed high rises was built here. But even the most modern architecture could not hold back the ancient Mexican gift for the tragic. In 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where a small Aztec pyramid, a colonial church, and a modern building symbolically shared a space, the government chose to save the Olympics by killing more than five hundred protesting students. I remember interviewing some of the survivors; they were in flight, hiding in safe houses, trying to leave the country. Many of their friends were dead, others in prison. Suddenly they had grown up. But if the massacre was bad, nobody in Tlatelolco was prepared for the utter destruction caused by the 1985 earthquake. This is where that fourteen-story building fell over on its side. When I arrived two days later, an army of human beings was digging in the dust of broken plaster and twisted beams. One of them, without announcement, was Placido Domingo. Members of his family lived in the building. Today there are blank spaces where the buildings were.
“Life goes on,” an old Mexican woman shrugged, when I went by the project. “You can do nothing about some things.”
