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  MEXICAN MANIFESTO

  Laura and I did not make love that afternoon. In truth, we gave it a shot, but it just didn’t happen. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love. That’s what Laura said and while we were at it she introduced me to the world of public baths, which from then on and for a very long time I would associate with pleasure and play. The first one was, without a doubt, the best. It was called Montezuma’s Gym, and in the foyer some unknown artist had done a mural where you could see the Aztec emperor neck-deep in a pool. Around the edges, close to the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women bathe. Everyone seems carefree except for the king who looks fixedly out of the mural, as if searching for the improbable spectator, with dark wide-open eyes in which I often thought I glimpsed terror. The water in the pool was green. The stones were gray. In the background you could see mountains and storm clouds. The boy who worked at Montezuma’s Gym was an orphan and that was his primary topic of conversation. On the third visit we became friends. He was only 18, wanted to buy a car so he was saving everything he could: tips were scant. According to Laura he was a little slow. I thought he was nice. In every public bath there tends to be a fight from time to time. We never saw or heard any there. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, respected and obeyed every word of the orphan’s instructions. Also, to be fair, there weren’t very many people, and that’s something I’ll never be able to explain since it was a clean place, relatively modern, with individual saunas for taking steam baths, bar service in the saunas and, above all, cheap. There in sauna 10 I saw Laura naked for the first time and all I could do was smile and touch her shoulder and say I didn’t know which key to turn to make the steam come out. The saunas, though it might be more precise to call them private rooms, were a set of two tiny chambers connected by a glass door; in the first there was usually a divan, an old divan reminiscent of psychoanalysis and bordellos, a folding table and a coat rack; the second chamber was the actual steam bath, with a hot and cold shower and a bench of azulejo tiles against the wall, beneath which were hidden the tubes that released the steam. Moving from one vestibule to the next was extraordinary, especially if the steam in one was already so thick we couldn’t see each other. Then we would open the door and head into the chamber with the divan where everything was clear, and behind us, like the filaments of a dream, clouds of steam slipped by and quickly disappeared. Lying there, holding hands, we would listen or try to listen to the barely perceptible sounds of the Gym while our bodies cooled. Practically freezing, submerged in silence, we could finally hear the purr welling through the floor and walls, the catlike whir of hot pipes and boilers that stoked the business from some secret place in the building. One day I’ll wander around in here, said Laura. Her experience raiding public baths was greater than mine, which was pretty easy considering I’d never before crossed the threshold of such an establishment. Nevertheless she said she knew nothing of baths. Not enough. She’d gone a couple times with X and before X with a guy who was twice her age and who she always referred to with mysterious phrases. In total she hadn’t been more than ten times, always to the same place, Montezuma’s Gym. Together, riding the Benelli, which were everywhere then, we attempted to visit all the baths in Mexico City, guided by an absolute eagerness which was a combination of love and play. We never succeeded. On the contrary, as we advanced the abyss opened up around us, the great black scenography of public baths. Just as the hidden face of other cities is in theatres, parks, docks, beaches, labyrinths, churches, brothels, bars, cheap cinemas, old buildings, even supermarkets, the hidden face of Mexico City could be found in the enormous web of public baths, legal, semilegal and clandestine. Setting our course was simple at first: I asked the boy at Montezuma’s Gym to point me in the direction of some cheap baths. I got five cards and wrote the addresses of a dozen establishments on a piece of paper. These were the first. From each of them our search branched off countless times. The schedules varied as much as the buildings. We arrived to some at 10 a.m. and left at lunchtime. These, as a general rule, were bright places with flaking walls, where we could sometimes hear the laughter of teenagers and the coughing of lost and lonely men, the same men who, in just a little while, having collected themselves, would get up and sing boleros. The essence of those places seemed to be limbo, a dead child’s closed eyes. They weren’t very clean or maybe they did the cleaning later in the day. At others we’d make our appearance at 4 or 5 in the afternoon and wouldn’t leave until dark. That was our most common schedule. The baths at that hour seemed to enjoy, or suffer from, a permanent shadow. That is, a trick shadow, a dome or palm tree, the closest thing to a marsupial’s pouch: at first you’re grateful for it, but it ends up weighing more than a gravestone. The baths were most crowded at 7 in the evening, 7:30, 8 at night. On the sidewalk next to the door, teenagers stood guard talking about baseball and pop songs. The hallways echoed with the sinister jokes of workers who’d just come from factories and workshops. In the foyer, old fags, birds of passage, would greet the receptionists and those killing time in the armchairs by first name or nom de guerre. Getting lost in the hallways, nourishing a kind of indiscretion in small doses, like pinches, never ceased to be highly informative. Open or half open doors, like landslides, like cracks in the earth, usually offered live paintings to the happy observer: groups of naked men who left all movement and action entirely to the steam; teenagers lost like jaguars in a labyrinth of showers; small but terrifying gestures of athletes, bodybuilders and loners; a leper’s clothes hanging; little old men drinking Lulú and smiling as they lean against the wooden door of the Turkish bath. It was easy to make friends and we did make some. Couples, after passing each other a few times in the hallways, felt obliged to greet one another. This was due to a kind of heterosexual solidarity; women, in many public baths, were an absolute minority and it wasn’t uncommon to hear extravagant stories of attacks and harassment even though, truth is, those tales weren’t very credible. These kinds of friendships never went beyond a beer or drink in the bar. We’d say hi to each other in the baths and at most we’d take neighboring saunas. After a while the first to finish would knock on their couple friends’ door and, without waiting for an answer, would holler they’d be in such and such restaurant, waiting. Then the others would leave, they’d go to the restaurant, have a drink or two and say goodbye until next time. Sometimes the couple would take you into their confidence, the woman or the man, especially when they were married but not to each other, they’d tell about their lives and you’d have to nod, say that’s love, that’s a shame, that’s destiny, that’s children. Tender but bored. The other friendships, which were a bit more turbulent, were the ones where they’d visit your private room. These could get to be just as boring as the former, but were much more dangerous. They’d show up without prelude, just knock on the door, a strange quick knock, and say let me in. They were rarely alone, almost always in threes, two men and a woman or three men; the motives they put forth for such visits tended to be stupid or not too believable: to smoke a little weed, which they couldn’t do in the group showers, or to sell us something or other. Laura always let them in. The first few times it made me tense, ready to fight and fall blood-soaked on the tiles of the private room. I figured the most logical thing was they were coming to rob us or to rape Laura, or even to rape me, and my nerves had me on edge. The visitors knew this somehow and they only addressed me when necessity or good manners made it impossible to avoid. All the propositions, deals and whispers were addressed to Laura. She was the one who let them in, she was the one who asked what the fuck she could offer them, she was the one who let them pass through to the room with the divan (I would listen, from the steam, to how they sat down, first one, then another, then the next, and Laura’s back, unmoving, could be seen through the frosted glass door separating the steam from that antechamber which had suddenly been transformed into a mystery). Finally, I’d get up, put a towel around my waist
, and go in. The visitors were usually two men and a woman. Or a man, a boy and a girl, who would wave hesitantly when they saw me as if all along, against all reason, they’d come for Laura and not for the two of us; as if they’d only expected to find her. Seated on the divan, their dark eyes never missed a single one of her gestures, while their hands independently rolled the weed. The conversations seemed coded in a language I didn’t know, certainly not in the teenage slang prevalent at that time of which I now barely remember a couple of expressions, but in a much more ominous slang where each verb and each sentence had a touch of funeral and of holes. Maybe the Air Hole. Maybe one of the deformed faces of the Immaculate Grave. Maybe. Maybe not. In any case I too joined the conversation or tried to. It wasn’t easy, but I tried. Sometimes, along with the pot, they’d pull out bottles of alcohol. The bottles weren’t free, but we still never paid. The visitors’ business was selling marijuana, whiskey, turtle eggs in the saunas, rarely with the approval of the receptionist or janitorial staff, who relentlessly pursued them; that’s why it was of utmost importance that somebody shelter them; they also sold theatre, which is really where they made their dough, or arranged private performances in the bachelor pads of contracting parties. The repertoire of these traveling companies could be paltry or multifarious, but the dramatic crux of their mise en scène was always the same: the older man stayed on the divan (thinking, I suppose) while the boy and girl, or the two boys, followed the spectators into the steam chamber. The performance, as a general rule, didn’t last more than half an hour or three quarters of an hour, with or without the participation of the spectators. When time was up, the man on the divan would open the door and announce to the respected public, between coughs brought on by the steam which immediately tried to slip into the other room, the end of the show. The encores were very expensive, though they only lasted ten minutes. The boys would shower quickly, then take their clothes from the man’s hands. I remember they’d get dressed while they were still wet. The downcast but enterprising artistic director would take advantage of the last few minutes to offer the satisfied viewers the delicacies in his basket or suitcase: whiskey served in paper cups, joints rolled by expert hands, and turtle eggs he’d open with his enormous thumbnail and which he’d sprinkle with lemon and chili when they were in the glass. In our private room things were different. They’d talk softly. They’d smoke marijuana. They’d let time pass, checking their watches now and again while their faces became covered with beads of sweat. Sometimes they’d touch each other, touch us, something that was inevitable, regardless, if we were all sitting on the divan, and the brushing of legs, or arms, could get to be painful. Not the pain of sex but of the unpardonably lost or of the last shred of hope roaming the Impossible country. If they were acquaintances, Laura would invite them to undress and join us in the steam. They rarely accepted. They preferred to smoke and drink and listen to stories. To relax. After a while they’d close the suitcase and take off. Then, two or three times in the same afternoon, they’d come back and the routine was the same. If she was in a good mood, Laura would let them in, if not she wouldn’t even bother to tell them through the door to quit bugging us. The relationships, with the exception of one or two isolated quarrels, were always harmonious. Sometimes I think they treasured Laura long before they’d even met her. One night, the old man who brought them (there were three of them that time, an old man and two boys) offered us a show. We’d never seen one. How much does it cost? I said. Nothing. Laura told them to come in. The steam room was cold. Laura took off her towel and turned the valve: steam started rising from the floor. I felt like we were in a Nazi shower and they were going to gas us; the feeling grew more intense when I saw the two boys come in, very skinny and dark, and behind them the old procurer covered only by some indescribably dirty underpants. Laura laughed. The boys looked at her, a little shy, standing in the middle of the room. Then they too laughed. Without removing his horrific undergarment, the old man sat between Laura and me. Do you just want to watch or watch and participate? Watch, I said. We’ll see, said Laura, very given to this sort of risk. The boys, then, as if they’d heard a commanding voice, kneeled down and started to lather each other’s privates with soap. In their gestures, learned and mechanical, you could see how tired they were and glimpse a series of tremors which could easily be related to Laura’s presence. Time passed. The room recovered its density of steam. The actors, however, motionless in their starting pose, seemed frozen: kneeling down face to face, but kneeling in a grotesquely artistic way, masturbating each other with the left hand while keeping balance with the right. They looked like birds. Metal engravings of birds. They must be tired, they aren’t getting it up, said the old man. Indeed, the soapy cocks only pointed timidly upward. Don’t lose her, boys, said the old man. Laura started to laugh again. How do you expect us to concentrate if you keep laughing all the time? said one of the boys. Laura got up, passed by them and leaned against the wall. Now the two tired performers were between us. I felt like time was tearing apart inside me. The old man mumbled something. I looked at him. He had his eyes closed and appeared to be sleeping. We haven’t slept in such a long time, said one of the boys, letting go of his partner’s penis. Laura smiled at him. Next to me the old man started to snore. The boys smiled, relieved, and adopted a more comfortable posture. I heard their bones crack. Laura let herself slide down the wall until her butt was on the tile. You’re very skinny, she said to one of them. Me? He is too, the boy responded, and you. In fact, we were all skinny. The whistle of the steam, on occasion, made it hard to distinguish the voices, which were too quiet. Laura’s body, back against the wall, knees lifted, was covered in sweat: the drops slid down her nose, down her neck, made grooves between her breasts and even hung from her pubic hair before falling on the hot tiles. We’re melting, I mumbled, and suddenly felt sad. Laura nodded. She seemed so sweet in that moment. Where are we? I thought. With the back of my hand I wiped away drops that slid from my eyebrows to my eyes and kept me from seeing. One of the boys sighed. I’m so tired, he said. Sleep, Laura recommended. It was strange: I felt like the lights were dimming, losing intensity; I was afraid I might faint; then I figured it must be the excess of steam changing the colors and tones, so much darker now. As if we were seeing the sunset, here, inside, without windows, I thought. Whiskey and Mary Jane are not good company. As if reading my mind Laura said, don’t worry, everything’s fine. And then she started smiling again, not a mocking smile, not as if she were enjoying herself, but a terminal smile, a knotted smile somewhere between a sensation of beauty and misery, though not even beauty and misery per se, but Little Beauty and Little Misery, paradoxical dwarves, traveling and inapprehensible dwarves. Relax, it’s just steam, Laura said. The boys, ready to take everything Laura said as irrefutable, nodded over and over. Then one of them let himself drop to the tiles, head propped on his arm, and fell asleep. I got up, careful not to wake the old man, and moved closer to Laura; squatting next to her I buried my face in her humid and fragrant hair. I felt Laura’s fingers caress my shoulder. In a little while I realized Laura was playing, very gently, but it was a game: her pinky was sunbathing on my shoulder, then her ring finger would pass and they’d greet one another with a kiss, then the thumb would appear and both, pinky and ring finger, would flee down the arm. The thumb was then king of the shoulder and would lie down to sleep, it seemed to me he even ate some vegetable that grew up there, for the fingernail dug in my flesh, until the pinky and ring finger returned accompanied by the middle and index fingers and all together they would frighten the thumb who hid behind an ear and spied on the other fingers from there, without understanding why they’d thrown him out, while the others danced on the shoulder and drank and made love and, out of sheer drunkenness, lost their balance and fell off the cliff and down the back, an accident Laura would take advantage of in order to hug me and lightly touch her lips to mine, in the meantime the four fingers, terribly bruised, would climb up again clinging to my vertebrae, and the
thumb would observe them without ever thinking to leave his ear. Your face is glistening, I whispered. Your eyes. The tips of your nipples. You, too, said Laura, a little pale, I guess, but you’re glistening. It’s steam mixed with sweat. One of the boys was watching us in silence. Do you really love him? he asked Laura. His eyes were enormous and black. I sat on the floor. Yes, Laura said. He must be madly in love with you, said the boy. Laura laughed like a housewife. Yes, Laura said. With good reason, said the boy. Yeah, I said, with good reason. Do you know what steam mixed with sweat tastes like? It depends on the particular flavor of each person. The boy lay down next to his partner, on his side, his temple pressed right against the tiles, without closing his eyes. His cock was hard now. He touched Laura’s legs with his knees. He blinked a few times before speaking. Let’s fuck a little, he said. Laura didn’t answer. The boy appeared to be speaking for his own benefit. Do you know what a little steam mixed with a little sweat tastes like? What it would really taste like? What the flavor would be? The heat was putting us to sleep. The old man slipped until he was lying down completely on the bench. The sleeping boy’s body had curled into a ball, his arm wrapped around the waist of the one who was awake. Laura stood and watched us at length from above. I thought she was going to turn on the shower, which would have had fatal effects on those who were sleeping. It’s hot, she said. It’s unbearably hot. If they weren’t here (she referred to the trio) I’d ask the bar to bring me a soda. You still can, I said, no one’s going to come all the way in here. No, Laura said, it’s not that. Should I turn off the steam? No, Laura said. The boy, head slanted, stared fixedly at my feet. Maybe he wants to make love to you. Before I could answer, the boy, almost without moving his lips, pronounced a laconic no. I was kidding, said Laura. Then she kneeled down beside him and with one hand caressed his buttocks. I saw, in a fleeting and disturbing vision, how the drops of sweat moved from the boy’s body to Laura’s and vice versa. The long fingers on my friend’s hand and the boy’s buttocks glistened humid and identical. You must be tired, said Laura, that old man is crazy, how can he expect you to fuck each other here. Her hand slid over the boy’s buttocks. It’s not his fault, he whispered, the poor guy has forgotten what a bed is. And what clean underwear is, added Laura. He’d be better off wearing nothing. Yeah, I said, it’s more comfortable. Less awkward, said the boy, but wouldn’t it be great to put on clean white underpants. Tight ones, but not too tight. Laura and I laughed. The boy scolded us calmly: don’t laugh, this is serious. His eyes seemed erased, gray eyes like cement beneath the rain. Laura grabbed his cock with both hands and yanked it. I heard myself saying, should I turn off the steam? but the voice was weak and far away. Where the fuck does your manager sleep? said Laura. The boy shrugged; you’re kind of hurting me, he whispered. I held onto Laura’s ankle, with the other hand I wiped away the sweat getting into my eyes. The boy straightened until he was sitting up, with restrained gestures, trying not to wake his partner, and kissed Laura. I bowed my head to see them better: the boy’s lips, thick, sucked on Laura’s lips, closed, where you could just barely make out a smile. I squinted. I’d never seen her smile so peacefully. Suddenly the steam hid her. I felt a kind of detached terror. Fear the steam would kill Laura? When their lips separated, the boy said he didn’t know where the old man slept. He put one hand to his neck and made a slicing gesture. Then he caressed Laura’s neck and pulled her even closer. Laura’s body, elastic, adapted to the new posture. Her gaze was fixed on the wall, on what the steam allowed her to see of the wall, her torso forward, breasts grazing the boy’s chest or pressed against him with gentle strength. The steam, at times, made them invisible, or half covered them, or silvered them, or plunged them into something like a dream. Finally it was impossible for me to see her. First one shadow on top of another shadow. Then nothing. The chamber seemed about to explode. I waited a few seconds but nothing changed, on the contrary, I got the impression the steam was thickening more and more. I reached out a hand and touched Laura’s back, arched on top of what I assumed was the boy’s body. I stood and took two steps along the wall. I heard Laura calling me. A Laura with her mouth full. What do you want? I said. I’m suffocating. I went back, less carefully than before, and bent down, feeling my way around the place where I figured they must be. I only touched hot tiles. I thought I was dreaming or going crazy. I bit my hand so I wouldn’t scream. Laura? I moaned. Beside me the boy’s voice sounded like a distant thunder: the boy according to whom steam mixed with sweat tastes distinctly. I stood up again, this time ready to start kicking blindly, but I checked myself. Turn off the steam, said Laura from somewhere. In fits and starts I was able to get to the bench. While ducking to look for the main valves, I heard the old man’s snores practically in my ear. He’s still alive, I thought, and turned off the steam. At first nothing happened. Then, before the silhouettes recovered their visibility, someone opened the door and exited the steam chamber. I waited, whoever it was was in the other room and making quite a bit of noise. Laura, I called quietly. No one answered. Finally I could see the old man, still sleeping. On the floor, one in fetal position and the other stretched out, the two actors. The insomniac appeared to really be sleeping. I jumped over them. In the room with the divan Laura was already dressed. She threw me my clothes without saying a word. What happened? I said. Let’s go, said Laura. We saw this trio again a couple times, once at those same baths, the other time at some in Azcapotzalco, the baths of hell, as Laura called them, but things were never the same. At most we smoked a cigarette, then adios. We kept visiting those places for a long time. We could have made love elsewhere, but there was something about the route of public baths that attracted us like a magnet. Obviously, there was no shortage of other incidents, desperate guys racing down hallways, an attempt at statutory rape, a raid we were able to avoid by luck and cunning; cunning, Laura’s; luck, the bronze solidarity of bathers. From the sum total of all the establishments, now just an amalgam that gets confused with Laura’s face smiling, we mined the certainty of our love. The best of all, maybe because that’s where we did it the first time, was Montezuma’s Gym, which we always went back to. The worst, a place a place in Casas in Casas Alemán conveniently called The Flying Dutchman, which was the one that looked most like a morgue. Triple morgue: of hygiene, of the proletariat, and of bodies. Not of desire. Two memories I still have from back then are the most ingrained. The first is a succession of images of Laura naked (sitting on the bench, in my arms, under the shower, stretched on the divan, thinking) until the steam, gradually increasing, makes her disappear completely. The end. Blank image. The second is the mural at Montezuma’s Gym. Montezuma’s eyes, bottomless. Montezuma’s neck suspended over the surface of the pool. The courtiers (or maybe they weren’t courtiers) who laugh and converse, trying with all their might to ignore whatever it is the emperor sees. The flocks of birds and clouds that mix together in the background. The color of the pool’s rocks, doubtless the saddest color I saw over the course of our expeditions, only comparable to the color of some faces, workers in the hallways, who I no longer remember, but were certainly there.