1: Santa Fe, Santa Muerte
The cricket shirr goes electric when I see her. Could be it’s the electric wires overhead are frayed almost gone, or that I’m scared, or else it’s just the crickets, I can’t be 100% on this: I’m too occupied with clipping this Evil Eye necklace around her bone ankle to check.
The alley fumes: smoke of various kinds, cooking hiss, petrol. Behind her Quonset shacks teeter up in the smog blur. The guy heating his pipe in the Sol chair grins and backward-nods. He reckons I’m big in to this Santa Muerte thing and not merely trying to save myself from her black eyes, her teeth clamped in their bone grin. What remains of us is want, says her blank stare at nowhere, even once you’ve left that machine for wanting in.
Her face makes you think smiles don’t really mean smiles: they just look that way, like a dog’s face does.
Stiff dead flowers poke up out of a Coke bottle. Next to it: a jar of rice and grains in packed-tight strata. Beer and tequila like glasses of cloudy light. The sill of her alcove is a vermicular spackle from last week’s volcanic ash. The electric wire-sound buzz-saws and so do my neurons. She is better dressed than the Virgin down the road. It was Holy Week this month, so she is cowled in a white robe trimmed purple. The robe gets changed and washed on the 19th of every month. Amber if you’re trying to get clean, red for love problems, green for legal help. In November, they doll her up, call her Catrina, and take her on the town for the Day of the Dead. Some people say Santa Muerte isn’t a saint or an archangel: she is a lost soul in Purgatory trying to pave her way out with favours. So she’s better than a saint: she’s one of us.
Santa Muerte is a hungry saint. She’ll give you what you want, right enough, but only if it’s proportional to what she’s getting – and if you’re prompt with the payment. Santa Muerte has a murky rep. Last year police arrested eight over human sacrifices they say relate to the cult. Her associations with the narcotraficantes are often talked about, and, at her shrine in Colonia Doctores, her statue appears beside the ‘patron saint of narcos’, Jesus Malverde.
But pry back the surface. Since the 1994 devaluation of the peso, Mexico has been on a relentless course of privatisation. 1994 was a year of financial and political quakes to match the actual quake of 1985. The Zapatistas seized territory in Chiapas, the ruling PRI’s presidential candidate was assassinated, and the Sinaloa drug cartel’s shaky truce with its business rivals fell apart. Much of the violence spilled across the tabloids here dates from the drug economy’s ‘free market’ moment. New cartels, new competition, and new and eye-catching means of gaining publicity.
In 1997, Enriqueta Romero Romero took her statue of Santa Muerte from her home to the centre of Tepito – historically the toughest neighbourhood in the city. On the first of every month, she leads a rosary devotion to Santa Muerte. The turnout is about 5,000 – and it’s not all narcos. Santa Muerte is the patron saint of outcasts, of people who work at night, of anyone whose life’s been left milled by Mexico’s speedy modernisation.
Santa Muerte is a hungry saint. Pay her promptly, pay her well, risk a trip to the altar, and you’ll get what you need. Substitute Citibank or Sinaloa and the sentence still works.
The shrine I’m at is in Santa Fe, and both the shrine and the town spring from this same total unleashing of capital.
Santa Fe, one of Mexico’s newest satellite cities, piles up on the sand dunes of ex-volcanoes. The hills are painted for local pride and hedgehogged all over with drain-spouts from building sites. New ziggurats rear against a horizon that shimmers like mercury. Their shapes are impossible: a glass bar jammed odd-angled to join two towers. Another looks like a triangle of glass and steel has been shot down through it like a bolt out of nowhere. A glass ramp to the sky lodges between two more. These brash, nonchalant architectural dares. Just because. Just to show that no shape or weight is of any moment to capital’s mustering force. The reflections give you back the world as it is, chopped and squared and faceted. At night, its glittering cataracts make all seem light and water: nothing solid anywhere. There is no force, only motion, as natural as light or water or God.
Cities have an aura, just like artworks. Their hub is fugitive, mirage, best seen as a glitter, best felt from afar. It is better not to approach. Whatever you look for won’t be there. It’s in a place you saw from home, ‘glimmering’, as Lars Iyer says, ‘like utopia’.
Places like Santa Fe are all aura and no place, but, if Mexico collapses, these piled towers will be all that’s left: the ones here on the old volcanic cones, and the ones rooted in the southern basalt zones. Mexico grew from an island in Lake Texcoco, in a volcanic bowl. As the lake drained, moist, soft clay remained. This accounts for the city’s astonishing fertility. It also accounts for the city’s vulnerability to earthquakes, despite being miles from a faultline. The downtown area’s high-rise bulk rests on silt and volcanic clay. The city weighs heavier and heavier by the year on he lakebed ash, compressing it brittle and hard. Though we’re miles from a fault-line, high-rise buildings act like tuning forks for quakes because they take so long to vibrate: which makes aftershocks just as deadly as the initial shunt and rumble.
From this height, it’s easy to imagine Tenochtitlan, the Aztec Troy Cortés tumbled in to his coffers like a some sham Ulysses. In place of the choked boulevards and their peristalsis of traffic, picture its canals as a maze of dazzle. The Spanish drained the canal-lattice, filled in Lake Texcoco, and sank boreholes to mine the lakebed’s stores of water. It’s difficult to know why, when Tenochtitlan made the Venice of the period look like a typhus puddle. Mineral water drained up through porous rock. People washed their clothes at herbal laundries and bathed twice a day. Europeans scoffed at the Aztecs’ non-use of wheels or beasts of burden, but there was no need to: Tenochtitlan was a walkers’ city.
The consequences of the Spanish drain do not just mean that a quake could tumble it flat. Under the streets brims a black tide. Once upon a time, the city’s waste drained away into the Gulf of Mexico. Now Mexico City sinks in to it. Signs in the Metro warn people not to litter, because about half the floods are caused by caught trash blocking the sewers. Divers trawl the glar for blockages. It’s as cosmetic a measure as any save-the-environment policy in this city. However long it takes, history always comes out at the sump end. The earth’s been mined hollow ,and now it’s fixing to swallow us all.
Look down from Santa Fe through the mercury shimmer, at the Citibank lights like ziggurats and ancient tombs, cenotaphs to dead labour. Look down at a land trying to pile itself in to silver towers of money before it sinks out of sight. A hungry skeleton ferociously trying to fatten itself: suddenly it doesn’t seem so much like just a narcos’ game.
2: The Invention of Elsewhere
‘My advice to you is watch out for those foreign places. No question but that you have to go to them. No question but that it will come up in your experience that you will have to sometimes go to them. But don’t go acting like there’s a story in them just because they’re foreign. There’s no story in them. Why should there be a story in them? They didn’t get to come into being, any of those places like that, just for you to come along and take a story out of them. You want a good story? Stick close to home.’
– Gordon Lish, ‘The Hotel He’s In’
Thomas More’s Utopia was published in 1516, the same year as Charles V ascended to the throne of Spain and presided over the massive expeditions which forged America and the modern world: Pisarro in the South, Magellan across the world – and Cortés in Mexico. There’s a monument to Charles V in the city centre here, but you won’t find many people visiting it.
Utopia came at a time when Europe overbrimmed with surplus capital and labour. There wasn’t enough room for all that want. It had to vent itself, and did: eastwards into wars with Turkey, westwards into nowhere.
Marx reminds us that capital needs to invent new objects with which to placate our want, to the point where capital’s first invention is new kinds of desire. With the great move west, capital entered a new phase: the invention of elsewhere, of new places in which desire could enact itself.
Utopia must have seemed a pretty clever joke at the time. More’s ludicrous ideal chimed perfectly with the reports filtering back from the ‘New World’. These beautiful places, all so far away, say Thomas More and the conquistadors’ stories, initiating one of modernity’s most resounding themes: the right place to be is always somewhere else. There’s a small rhyme with this in our wish always to be elsewhere. It’s all about movement, about being as free and mobile and liquid as money. The next stop on the backpackers’ trail, the next rung on the property ladder. To be here is not enough: you must be ready to trade it up the second it’s possible.
The trick is to figure out how to be nowhere.
The Metro cannons in to the station. Limbs up out of the drown all-angled. The gap between left and right on one person’s body, that’s actually three different people’s worth of arms. The Hindu god look of our fanned arms.
This tiny daily all-against-all thing makes us dyspeptic and chippy. The ads aim right at eye-height. Private colleges and job ads which promise you a happier elsewhere, off this fucking Metro. Zonked girls with prayer-mats and ponytails: spaghetti-top Zen, blissed nowhere one weekend at a time. A trip to Acapulco, just for you and everyone else.
The city is hungry, and we’re its digestive mulch of labour. We don’t grab our bags hard because we’ll get robbed: the things bagged inside are a talisman from upstairs, remind you who you were until you stepped in to the cram. Don’t take it personally, because for the next fifteen minutes you’re not a person.
The Metro says we are all Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase: meat on bone-frames, chopped and choppy flickers there and then gone, hard cold light, gulfing tubes of dark. The warren is an update of the mines on which Spain built America.
On the TVs in the stations kids twitch to the soundtracks of chemical raptures: MDMA, pheromones.
Mexico City’s new pyramids are underground. The steps are long and deep and wide: we climb them together up in to the red light.
Upstairs, outside, kids flood out of the National Auditorium. Balloons pelt upwards. On the big screens Banamex logos spread in animated flowers. At the centre of the spreading ring celebrities peer down at you and no-one else. They wave, they care, they talk in heavy-bass vowels.
Eels of lit rain unthread from umbrella rims. Milky tints roil kerbside and streels of vapour chase cars through the drench. Little frost-beads of hung rain deck the chickenwire backing market-stalls: these tiny no-worth pearls. Steam unfurls in crisp layers from hot-plates, and ruby lights vie and shimmy all down the slow lane on Reforma.
Whatever’s happened with the smog tonight, the clouds are a tall red funnel clamped under grey. It’s not a sky: it’s a cauldron lid. The furls of smoke and bad air go nowhere. The sunset is an octopus mouth, it is a man-o’-war, it is a fat bulge, it is lurid creepers in the gapped grey. It is the colour of blood, or fire or blood in a fire. The air wants to kill us, and the water too: cracked since the ’85 quake, the city’s plumbing is a bashed-up buried scaffolding leaking in to itself. E.coli skites out of the pipes and taps.
History seeps upwards. What you think you’ve sent in to nowhere is really just out of sight. What you try to forget remembers you.
You stand there under the clouds’ fiery, storeys-tall roar, amid markets and kids and celebrity promises, and you can’t help it, you think that all of history is one big furnace, a dialectic of combustion whose gradations we mistake for centuries. The sky show us the burn we call progress.
I need to get out of here.
We all do.
3: Leon 4 Frida
‘Head again into space so you can carry on,
And carry on – and fall all over the place.
[…]
This is the trick: forget a terrible year.’
– LCD Soundsystem, ‘Home’
Coyoacán is a colonial town subsumed by the southern sprawl of Mexico. A colonial paradise of candy-tone lava-rock houses and cake-icing lattice-facades, this is where Hernan Cortés pitched up once everyone was dead and tortured, to count his cash and, it has been alleged, to kill his first wife. The house which stands on the site is frowning eaves, bars like arms fastening possessions against the chest. It is one big, growled mine. Opposite, the church he founded crumbles in to the hungry ground. Its towers tug away from each other: the plasterwork between is a veinwork of cracks.
Leon Trotsky found home here. Stateless since 1932, and with Stalin turning his utopia to hell, he fled, and fled, and fled: Kazakhstan, Istanbul, France, Norway – until, finally, Mexico, among the failed stars and Hollywood blacklistees. Politics finds strange bedfellows, says James Ellroy.
Here he watched Stalin tell his family history for him in the telegram language of the kill-list: shot, disappeared, prison camp, shot. Here he watched the list of his comrades become victim-mugshots. There could be no deliverance: only respite. Frida Kahlo, the woman who got him to Mexico, took him in to the Casa Azul, and then in to her bed.
It must have felt like a brief holiday spell of home, there under her tiny private sky of butterflies, under that mirror she made a window in to nowhere for her bedridden self-portraits, around the corner from her copy of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.
After their breakup, he moved one street over, to Calle Viena: named for the place he spent his second exile, 1907-12. A return too perfect to be anything but an ending: he had been living under a death-sentence since the 1936 show trials, and his blood pressure was rising. In the office where he was stabbed is the low camp-bed where he would lie down for hours, in between long spells behind the barricade of scorched encyclopedias and piled notes, that barricade from behind which he fired his last, name-clearing salvos back at Russia and Spain.
In his last days, he becomes Marx’s all-round man incarnate. Trotsky busying himself with his garden. Trotsky fishing, chilling out with dogs. Trotsky toting a fat cactus down out of the mountains, having dinner at yellow-painted straw-seat chairs with his ‘family’ of fellow conspirators. His essay with Breton on the freedom of art, his French translations of Kafka. His dream of a day when there was no more need for art: only strolls through the arcades of what has been made before us – when man would ‘criticise in the evening’, and let that be enough.
Trotsky in his bivouac utopia, in the shadow of bank-vault doors and brick watchtowers, knowing it couldn’t last: the first attempt on his life, in May 1940, which left his grandson wounded and a bodyguard dead and dragged behind a jeep, made that much clear.
But for the man who believed psychotherapy was a revolutionary right, home meant knowing you’ll be gone gone someday, and being okay with it. Home is being here, and only here, for now, and only for now, and somehow letting that be enough.
Home is as close to nowhere as we ever get.
Until August 1940 and an icepick’s raised lightning. A strike down out of nowhere. And Ramon Mercader, enter stage right.
Trotsky lies in his last garden with his cactuses and roses: ‘a silent, plant-like minority,’ says Hassan Blasim, who ‘communicate by gestures’. Their shadows cross on his grave like waterlights.
In his last testament, dated February 1940, Trotsky writes:
‘My wife Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful.’
I go to stand where she did. Overhead leaves shift: a broken ceiling. Each break is a window on to nowhere. I stand there, and there, for one, slow instant, I am home, I am gone – nowhere.
