Joyce Gregory Wyels

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SPECIALTIES: Cross-cultural topics; historic and literary travel; environmental issues; arts and culture; Latin American destinations.

AWARDS: Lowell Thomas gold: Best Environmental Tourism Article, 2005

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Walking with Mexico City's Private Eye

by Joyce Gregory Wyels

“Man, I love this city,” says Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, independent detective. 

Yeah, me too,” echoes his creator, Paco Ignacio Taibo II. “It’s a relation of love and hate, like every good relation--full of passion, and ethical.” Mexico’s most celebrated mystery writer takes a long drag from a cigarette. “I‘ve had this love-hate relationship from the sixties up to now. Forty years loving and hating Mexico City. Not bad.”

Even more than other big cities, the Mexican capital inspires this fervent double reaction. Its vitality and concentration of history are palpable, its museums and monuments world-class. But the city tries the patience of its most devoted admirers with its congestion, pollution, and poverty. Capitalinos have their own complaints of crime and corruption.

“The city is a character for a mystery writer,” says Taibo. “It’s a very important character. You have to play it carefully, because cities don’t produce dialogs, so the appearance of the city is mainly atmosphere.” He calls Mexico City “full of contradictions”—very beautiful, very dark—in short, the perfect milieu for Taibo’s introspective detective.

One of the most vivid characters ever to unravel a plot, Héctor Belascoarán Shayne is a charmingly improbable Mexican detective who earned his credentials from a correspondence school. A former industrial engineer, he ditched his bourgeois wife and job to embark on a shaky career as private—or, as he prefers, “independent”--detective. Belascoarán Shayne is the antithesis of the brash private eye: “He didn’t know what to say, or how to begin,” writes Taibo in An Easy Thing, “and it occurred to him that what he liked to call his professional demeanor was no more than a reflection of the confused state of his own life.”

If Belascoarán Shayne is an intriguing personality, his originator may be even more so. Bushy moustache, unruly hair, and intense eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses top a frame that ingests copious amounts of Coca Cola during late-night writing stints. Irreverent, exuberant, with an expressive face that’s thoughtful one moment and full of mischief the next, Taibo is also friendly and accessible.

 “You have to come to Mexico City and arrive by night,” he tells me. “That’s essential. If you arrive by night when you reach the valley you discover a kind of huge, immense Christmas tree. You think: gosh what is this? Tungsten, aluminium, and normal electric light produce green, white, and orange--they’re composed of these three colors, the lights of the night of the city. This is the beginning; this is Mexico City.  By day you only see the smog and then you jump into the smog and then you collapse with the smog--no, no, no--travel by night, travel in the window seats. That’s the entrance to Mexico City.”

Well, maybe next time. On this trip I had landed at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez Airport in the late afternoon. Now I’m ensconced in Taibo’s living room, in Colonia Condesa, a mostly residential neighborhood that’s centrally located but happily removed from major tourist venues. The comfortable room sits at the top of a long staircase, adjoining a study that’s lined, its owner tells me, with 400 books. 

 “Then you can do two things,” adds Taibo, continuing his insider advice. “Go to the borders or go to the center. The peripherical approach to Mexico City is the borders. That means Chalco and the ciudades perdidas, the poor neighborhoods with one million people in the east; it means the industrial zone after Indios Verdes in the north; it means the middle-class neighborhoods, Ciudad Satélite, on the west; and it means Zapatista territory--the peasant Mexico City, Xochimilco--on the south.”

Instinctively, I had followed Taibo’s second option, heading directly for the city center. “At the center has always been the Zócalo,” he says.  “Moving around the bandera (flag), you have the cathedral, the Mexico City government, the National Palace, which is abandoned by the president, who goes to Los Pinos.” Taibo sometimes has Héctor Belascoarán Shayne prowl the “cold, lonely flagstones of the Zócalo” by night.

The Zócalo looks anything but lonely my first morning peering down from the balcony of La Terraza Restaurant at the Majestic Hotel. The treeless Plaza de la Constitución (its official name) stretches interminably in all directions, flanked by the presidential palace opposite, the cathedral to my left, and arcaded colonial buildings to the south and west. In the middle is that huge Mexican flag—with the eagle sitting on a cactus devouring a snake, re-creating the Aztec legend surrounding the founding of the capital. 

As the waiter and I discuss the optimum cooking time for a soft-boiled egg at this altitude, people emerge, yawning, bundled against the cold, from more than a dozen buses parked on the square, to line up at a long yellow tent for food. They’re rural residents, in from the countryside to join in a national protest. A solitary man dressed in the indigenous clothing of the Totonacas thrusts handbills toward indifferent passers-by.

Later in the day the sounds of Mexico City traffic—horns, whistles, sirens, screeching tires, vehicles wheezing with age—will come to a crescendo at the Zócalo, where endless waves of green VW taxis will circle counterclockwise, joined by a red and green tourist trolley, lumbering buses, the occasional ambulance, bicycle cabs, and khaki monster trucks carrying troops for the ceremonial lowering of the flag.

A morning walk takes me past the Cathedral to the Templo Mayor—a poor remnant of the temple that initially dazzled the Spanish conquistadors before they laid waste to this Aztec city. Long lines of schoolchildren await the chance to explore their heritage in its subterranean labyrinths. Even before I reach the ruins, I skirt squares of cloth neatly laid out on the pavement, bearing the inventory of the person who kneels at one edge or stands nearby. 

This practice, too, pre-dates the conquest. The Spaniards had praised the Aztecs’ tianguis, the thriving marketplace that operated in Tenochtitlán before the Aztec city became the capital of New Spain. “That’s one of the essences of Mexico City,” says Taibo. “The city is a tianguis, mercado popular, popular flea market. You can buy everything in the streets without taxes.”

Along the much-trafficked streets between the Zócalo and the Alameda, sidewalk sellers of toys, ties, tee-shirts, electronic goods, and less recognizable objects force pedestrians to squeeze past their ad hoc marketplaces.

 “I know Mexico City pretty well,” declares Taibo in a burst of understatement. In fact, his encyclopedic knowledge of the city makes it easy to follow in the footsteps of Belascoarán Shayne: Wherever I go, the detective has preceded me. Street signs—San Juan de Letrán, Juárez, Calle Madero—echo settings from No Happy Ending or Some Clouds, or more likely from several of Taibo’s books. Then there’s the Alameda, the tree-filled park that looms large in Belascoarán lore because it’s close to his fictional office and it’s good for strolling. Taibo’s detective has a penchant for puzzling out convoluted clues while walking the streets, usually after dark. 

The next time I resume my vantage point at the Majestic, the yellow tent and the buses have disappeared, but the Zócalo is even more densely packed with protesters. Youths kick a soccer ball, scattering the pigeons, while a brass band plays, seemingly in competition with the leaders of the rally. “Hermanos! (Brothers!)” rings out over the distortion of the loudspeakers, but I can’t make out what this protest is about, any more than the earlier one. When I tell Taibo there was a protest at the Zócalo two days in a row, he nods approvingly. “Every day. Every day. These reactions are the opposite thing to immobility. Peaceful? Who wants it peaceful? In Mexico City nobody likes that kind of thing. Here is the action. At the same time here is the strength, the power.” 

More rambles around the city center bring me to assorted icons of the Mexican capital. I detour through the Casa de Los Azulejos (House of Tiles), occupied by Sanborn’s, the department store and restaurant installed in a former mansion. Taibo mentions the venerable enterprise in Shadow of the Shadow, which takes place in 1922. Opposite Sanborn’s, I duck through a portal to the sunken courtyard of Iglesia San Francisco, where a sign informs me that Hernán Cortés himself had a hand in starting this church shortly after the conquest. The church offers a sanctuary from the clamor of the streets, the only sound the creaking of a kneeler as an occasional worshipper slips into a pew to pray.

A short distance to the west, the forty-four-story Latin American Tower looms over colonial-era buildings. A few years ago tourists favored it for panoramic views of the city, but now the smog limits visibility. Belascoarán gloomily estimates that a suicide plunge from the top would take only ten seconds.

I cross the street to the opulent Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Art-Nouveau confection that looks as though it was airlifted from Paris and set down overlooking the Alameda. Actually, the marble is from Italy, imported during the reign of Porfirio Díaz, the dictator who looked to Europe for his model of civilization. At the start of the Mexican Revolution the long-time ruler was exiled to France. A proposal to bring back his remains set off one of the political-cultural debates that frequently roil Mexico City. “You can keep the bones,” Taibo quotes from his own article in the newspaper La Jornada. “Dictators should be buried in exile so people remember why they’re there.”

At the Palacio de Bellas Artes I spiral upward to the third floor, intent on viewing the mural that Diego Rivera first painted at New York’s Rockefeller Center in 1933. The Rockefeller family, incensed at Rivera’s inclusion of a portrait of Lenin, had the mural destroyed. The following year Rivera reproduced “Man at the Crossroads” here, embellished with portraits of Marx, Engels, and Trotsky--and John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Just around the corner from the Palacio de Bellas Artes, on Plaza Manuel Tolsá, stands the two-century-old Palacio de Minería, site of the first mining school in the Americas, complete with meteorites just inside the entrance.

Taibo had first proposed taking the subway to the Palacio de Minería, where he was due to give a talk. “I’ve been up and underground the city many, many times,” he says, referring to the subway, then he adds slyly, “politically, too.” But at the corner of Atlixco and Afonzo Reyes, he hails a taxi to save time. We squeeze into the back of the VW beetle. Taibo offers the driver a cigarette, then launches into an impromptu tour, extolling the advantages of his neighborhood: people of all classes mingle, walking the streets day and night. “I have a very democratic view of the city,” he says. “I like it from the bottom. I like small people, small stories; I like common people very much. I really believe they’re the salt of the earth.”

We turn onto the Reforma, the grand boulevard purportedly built to connect Emperor Maximilian’s Chapultepec Castle with the Presidential Palace at the Zócalo-- “but it doesn’t,” Taibo corrects. “You have to turn on Juárez.” Along the way he points out enormous construction sites where newer, grander hotels are replacing the ones lost to the devastating 1985 earthquake. He gestures to the right at Bucareli, indicating the city’s newspaper offices, where his father first brought distinction to the family name. Paco Ignacio Taibo I, journalist and author, added the “I” after his son began to write books.

The Belascoarán family home is in Coyoacán, a pleasant suburb that invites strolls through cobblestone streets. In a passage from No Happy Ending, that’s where our hero almost gets married. Héctor finds a judge who’s willing to bypass the usual red tape for 500 pesos, obtains forged blood tests in a nearby store, then recruits witnesses from a busload of tourists. But it doesn’t happen, Taibo deadpans: “Despite all his preparations, she never showed up.”   

Taking a page from Return to the Same City, my friend Angela and I walk to the Reforma and flag down a taxi, asking the driver to drop us off at the main square in Coyoacán. There, on a Sunday afternoon, mimes engage the crowds, children brandish puffs of cotton candy, itinerant vendors peddle new-age crystals and pottery. We head to the Trotsky Museum, once the home of the Russian exile. There’s no evidence that Trotsky ever started to write a crime novel (as Taibo conjures in Four Hands), but bullet-riddled walls and armored doors testify to the assaults on his own life—including the final, successful attack in which an assassin plunged an icepick into his head. A skull with a red gash recalls the macabre act.

The next day Angela and I walk south from the Alameda on Dolores Street, to the site of Mexico City’s minuscule Chinatown. Not only is this Belascoarán Shayne’s favorite noshing spot, it figures heavily in Shadow of the Shadow, in which Chinese-Mexican Tomás Wong organizes union members while his domino-playing pals try to fathom the conspiracy that swirls around them. We wander into “Hong King,” a dead ringer for Cantonese restaurants around the world, and dig into “No. 1,” a comforting combo of the usual noodle soup, ribs, chicken wings, fried rice, and spring roll, complete with almond cookie and tea.

Then we browse the tidy market at La Ciudadela and make our way back to Artículo 123. Heading toward Bucareli, we pass a couple of blocks of plumbing supplies, where I half expect to see a sign advertising the services of Belascoarán’s office mate: Gómez Letras, Plomero. As we approach the modern buildings that house the newpaper publishers, I keep an eye out for the detective’s office “with its view of the teeming and clamorous downtown streets, that Héctor was hopelessly in love with.”

Angela reminds me that Héctor and his friends are, after all, fictional. Maybe so. But that other main character, Mexico City, is alive and real and capable of sustaining limitless story lines. “As always,” Taibo tells his readers in Return to the Same City, “it must be said that the story told here belongs to the terrain of absolute fiction, although Mexico is the same and belongs to the terrain of surprising reality.”