Approaching the Cosmos Hotel: Travels in the World

CHAPTER 1

THE FERROCARRIL DEL PACÍFICO

It was one hundred fifteen degrees that afternoon and, just minutes before, I had made arrangements with the viejo to safeguard my dinosaur of a 1958 Volvo sedan for the next month. At the Mexicali station I joined a massive crowd now surging desperately toward the lone ticket booth, clambering up for one of the prized boletos. One coolly mechanical clerk dispensed the precious passages as he assayed each traveler’s request. Or, it seemed, because the process was so drawn out, his life story.

The ticket-seller listened to each applicant’s request, conveyed its price, then exchanged the valuable little paper for the requisite pesos before turning to the next person in line and ritually repeating the toiling business. Tariffs on the Ferrocarril del Pacífico were unbelievably cheap. Guadalajara was fifteen hundred miles away, but the price for a hard class seat on the old train defied credibility. Three dollars!

This was 1966, and the unattractive border enclave of Mexicali, actually a big, populous farming town and hardly a real city, served as the main rail exit for braceros. These temporary farmhands were returning to their Mexican villages after months tending the produce of California. My travel companions were two undergrads from the University of Oregon. Mike and Gary had just arrived by Greyhound. They intended their journey into Mexico to take them wherever their funds would stretch that summer. The three of us had met earlier in the afternoon at the end of a monstrous queue leading to the billeting guichét. And while it would have been impossible for anyone to find comfort in the oppressive heat, a certain consolatory relief lay in knowing we would make a long journey at a very small cost. We plumped for third class, the cheapest seats. After all, it was to be an adventure.

The old iron cars, castoffs from the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific, lumbered along the tracks lazily southward through the scorching Sonora desert heat. Soon enough, the lack of air conditioning in the sweltering cabin would attenuate our initial enthusiasm. We had, after all, been suffering from a collective delusion of Going Native on this rail adventure we had embarked upon with such high hopes. We would quickly see that doing such a trip on the cheap in such terrific heat was unwise in the extreme. The conductor now came through the car and, noting our misery, our sweat-streaked, unhappy faces, offered us upgraded seating for but a few additional pesos in second class. And aire acondicionado. Our spirits were much uplifted.

The cooler air palpably relieved our discomfort. The new seats were padded and roomier and we continued the trip in much-improved comfort. By the time we pulled into the big farm town of Hermosillo, Sonora’s capital, I had grown used to this variation on train travel which was quite different from the rail experiences I had had in the U.S., or would one day come to know in Europe. Not least of the many features setting this voyage apart from American or European rail journeys was the steady connoitering made between the train and the endless stands of mango, papaya, orange juice, peanut, dulce, and trinket vendors that awaited our every slowing at the tiniest hamlet or poblacion along the track. People of every age, even toddlers, had something on offer as we glided alongside the wobbly mercaditos. The purveyers stretched out their arms and sold us snacks or elixers, and proffered serapes, rebozos, jugos. "¡Compren!" And indeed the passengers snapped up the shawls, the hats, the juices.

Gringos wisely restrained the impulse to eat or drink anything that might have had contact with water. Contaminated water. The fear of contracting dysentery was not irrational. When I was eventually to settle into a hotel room in Guadalajara, I began to pay for my cavalier lapses of restraint with the illness I acquired on the Ferrocarril del Pacífico. Though my plan had been to stick scrupulously to just the cooked items from the train’s kitchen, avoiding salads and fresh fruit, my imperfect dedication to self-preservation resulted in sickness.

As the first day ended, the Oregon collegians and I had again made an upward move through the comfort classes, finding we would spend a total of twelve dollars apiece for the privilege of riding the remaining thousand miles to Guadalajara in the refrigerated relief of primera clase. The first class seats were softer too, and although the passenger atmosphere became somewhat stuffier, the lighter air made the passage across the socioeconomic strata well worth the move.

Hundreds of miles further south, with the train pulling away from Tequila, the town that gave its name to Mexico’s unique eau de vie, we encountered the M-1 rifles of a green-uniformed squadron of soldiers. A small contingent had entered our car looking, we concluded, for either contraband substances or a refugee from justice. To be sure, a great effort appeared to have been put into rifling through the equipage of passengers. As a young soldier got to our compartment, which it had been our good fortune to be sharing with an older, anglophone woman, we were informed that we would be spared the baggage search. Our elegant new friend had urged the soldier to "respect the dignity of the norteamericano boys." We could not possibly have packed anything of concern to the army, she insisted. She implored the soldier and his confederates to ignore us. Being innocent sojourners, we were carrying only the most basic items required of travelers, and that to invade our privacy could serve no end other than to insult us. They took her advice and passed us foreign guests by.

However, the self-important commandos did, as it happened, find their culprit. An old lady who had pinched a case of, what else?—tequila! How bizarre it was to behold the spectacle of this hoary, incongruous little figure being pulled off the train. I was troubled by the memory of it for years.

A rogue police and military have historically underpinned Mexican sociopolitical culture. Were the presence of this pervasive darkness to be lifted by institutionally more egalitarian, democratic attitudes and procedures, many in the country would fear for a breakdown of national order.

Authoritarians fear that a loosening of the rules would lead to class unrest, anarchy, rampant criminality, and a frightening and untested new social contract. (Since the late eighties Mexico has in fact witnessed just such a trend. As the major political force in the country, the long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), gradually relinquished some of its hold on the instruments of political power in order to gain international perquisites, crime burgeoned. Street crime, petty and violent theft, and drug-related murders seem to have replaced the older institutionalized white collar criminality Mexico had long known.)

Providing a show of force to discourage crime or civil unrest, on the landscape of the nation on any given day, one can behold the Darth Vadarish visage of lorry-loads of grim, androgen-burdened, carbine-bearing youths being hauled, like livestock, down the local lanes and highways in the basest, most sinister display of raw police terror.

This sobering sight so clouds one’s perspective on Mexico that despite the gestapoesque presence of these enforcers, it is something of a surprise to recognize that very little of this theatricality (for that is mostly what it is) bears much of a relationship to the actual containment of crime. For instance, one day in the late nineties, the only bank in the Guadalajara-area pueblo of Ajijíc was boldly robbed of a million dollars by a gang whose booty was exacted at the same time as the local constabulary, situated catty-cornered across the street, remained posted to their station, presumably unaware of the unfolding heist. It was speculated that the thieves were probably the cops themselves.

On the final day of our three-day expedition to Guadalajara, Gary, Mike and I discovered we could no longer resist the attraction of booking the Pullman car. We chided one another for our penny-wise pound-foolish resistance to parting with so little extra money for the luxury. For thirty-seven dollars all the way from the border to Guadalajara, we could have already been enjoying the splendors of plush cool comfort. Sleep acquired in the bed of a rolling train, swaddled in fresh crisp cotton sheets, is a supreme pleasure all its own. The further amenity of being able to have a full bath richly enhances the experience. As we pulled into Guadalajara station the next morning we were completely rested and fresh.

Before leaving Los Angeles, my doctor had given me gamma globulin to inocculate me against the danger of hepatitis. He had also prescribed Enterovioform for dysentery, instructing me to ingest three tablets a day. Not suspecting an adverse reaction, I began to down them from the moment I entered Mexico. By the time we reached Guadalajara my stomach was upset and I was feeling pain. It had taken two days for the medicine to achieve this unexpected result. I checked into the Hotel del Parque and continued dutifully swallowing the lozenges, expecting that I would soon improve. It hadn’t occurred to me that the pills would be the source of my trouble, so I went on taking them. I was sure I would soon recover and had faith in the eventual efficacy of the treatment. But as the ensuing weeks ahead were to bear out, staying on the program would prove futile. When I returned a month later to California and quit the regimen, my health came back.

Guadalajara in 1966 was a very charming city of ubiquitous flowers abundantly perfuming the relatively smogless air. The population was but a tenth of today’s. The avenues were lined with jacarandas and palm trees, flowers abloom everywhere, the air redolent of jasmine and endless sweet scents. Los Angeles is supposed to have been like this in the years before the industries of World War II deflowered her.

Four days of Guadalajara gave me my first immersion in a wholly Spanish-speaking city. I ordered the afternoon comida and the evening cena from novel menus. Every morning I knocked back a tall milkshake-like vessel of café! méxicana, a ravishing kind of café au lait. Of late, it is most lamentable that even on the coffee winds that have wafted down from Starbucks, a café méxicana can scarcely be found in this land of coffee. In so many bars and cafés only instant coffee and a mug of hot water are offered the disappointed patron. Efficiency seems to be culpable in turning us toward this sad, characterless state. One can be grateful, though, that real coffee can still be had in private homes. It is, coincidentally, a comfort that the bolillo, that scrumptious little french roll, a staple of the middle class

Mexican table, has not—at least yet—been added to the culinary endangered species list.

Five days after reaching Guadalajara I flew on to México. In a humorous anecdote in The Sudden View, Sybille Bedford’s brilliant account of a trip she made to America’s contiguous southern neighbor in 1950, we are reminded that the country’s people call only the city, and not the country, Mexico.

Until the eighties when the airline’s name was changed after a bad economic patch and reorganization, Aeroméxico was known as Aeronaves de México. On board the plane from Guadalajara a stewardess accidentally poured hot coffee into my lap. I was wearing a well-pressed suit, customary travel raiment at that time but now only a quaint artifact from that earlier generation. It would be anachronistic for a traveler, unless destined for a business engagement, to dress so today. Realizing her gaffe as I suddenly popped up out of my seat in shock, the panicked young attendant was overcome with tears. Consolingly reassuring her and insisting I was fine, just moister than I would have liked, the stewardess composed herself and handed me a robe, directing me to the lavatory. I removed my soaked trousers and passed them to the young woman. Now robed, I took my seat while the pants were cleaned and ironed. I had never thought an iron might be carried on board a plane.

Arriving at Mexico City was exciting. I climbed into one of the scores of taxis lined up outside the exit from the domestic arrivals terminal and found myself within minutes in the Zona Rosa district. (Even then, cabbies drove at meteoric speeds.) Many cities had neighborhoods as sophisticated as the Pink Zone, though few possessed its thrilling allure, this toney barrio adjoining the city’s great park-like boulevard, the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico’s Champs-Elysées.

The Zona Rosa was a magnet for foreigners because of its chic hotels and restaurants. Its nightclubs and trendy, elegant watering holes were in ample supply. Many haunts of the demimonde, gay venues particularly, were oases that retained security guards to keep out potential or real troublemakers. Some of these, such as the cops, were not averse to demanding the requisite mordida for their silence. Once collected, they could move on to further racy scenes and tributes.

In my first days at the capital I was put up at a soigné, architecturally fine, small establishment, the Vasco de Quiroga, now long gone, probably a casualty of the devastating terremoto that killed ten thousand people in 1985. Doormen, porters, bellhops, reception clerks all wore sleek suits adorned with polished brass appurtenances at the shoulders and the ends of their sleeves.

Late one July evening I wandered in to one of the nearby bars. There I met a number of men who were leaving for a party. Hitting it off well with them, I was invited along. The six of us soon found ourselves driving up the Paseo de la Reforma in a flashy Cadillac, an over-the-top flivver in those days, its dimensions so vulgarly grand, its details so ostentatious.

Strangers in the Night, the enormous Sinatra hit of the day, was spinning out from the radio into the balmy evening, a chorus of male voices reprising every rapturous word. We sang the verses back to the radio, loudly belting out every Do-be-do-be-do . . . as we cruised along the boulevard before its imposing heroic statues. While we were entertaining ourselves, pedestrians gaped in bemusement before our inspired outpourings.

Recalling that long-ago experience through the filter of evanescent decades, the subsequent party seems to have vanished into a penumbra of happy, but relatively unimportant transpirations, chapters in life, perhaps, but surely not life markers. After all, I was really only looking to be concupiscently entangled with Tomás, whose sweetness would be permanently etched upon my memory of that night which culminated in a little room at the Hotel Canadá. Tomás later told me that his amigos referred to me as his norteamericano.

We savored those short weeks of intense affections only a short walk from the main plaza (the only zócolo in the country spelled with a capital Z) and the national cathedral, that always sinking pile of ponderous stone which girds the city’s pre-Euro-pean past. Tenochtitlan. A very big center of culture when Imperial Rome ruled what it thought was the world.

Following the serene nights with Tomás, I passed the days discovering and exulting in the beauty of Mexico City’s cultural and historic shrines. That chapter in my experience of the nation was radiantly endowed by my exposure to the Museum of Anthropology, in luxuriantly verdant Chapultepec Park. Up till that time in my life, most of the knowledge I had acquired of man’s ancient cultures could be laid to experiences in American natural history museums. Their contents all paled before the collections in Mexico’s dazzling building. The art and artifacts that made up these unique treasures, inasmuch as they encapsulated such a broad compendium of prehispanic archaelogy and anthropology representing one country, were singularly impressive, not least for the scholarship taking place under this one roof. I loved the museum’s fresh, uncluttered exterior and its utilitarian interior spaces, so well-suited was it all to the mission of sharing the country’s patrimony with her own people and the larger world.

By early August I was on my way back to Los Angeles, having pretty much tasted the essence of Mexico. I had decided to return to California on the Tres Estrellas de Oro bus, a line whose three gold stars were as hard to defend then as they would be today. (I saw their coaches in the late nineties, so I know they still ply the roads.) I boarded my bus at Guadalajara’s old downtown depot destined for stops at Mazatlán and Guaymas, just two among numerous undistinguished towns along national route 15, in the sixties a two-lane highway, today a mostly cobbled-together patchwork freeway. I steeled myself for the long journey north to the border.

The air was steamy hot when the coach pulled into the

Mazatlán station. The air conditioning had been failing much of the way and certain passengers complicated matters by keeping their windows open and defeating the shaky cooling system. One huge woman in particular, giving the bus a lot of gratuitous ballast, surely would have topped scales at three hundred and fifty pounds. She had had to buy two seats to contain her mass. The caloric output alone must have encumbered the overworked air conditioner with such strain as to render it nearly ineffectual.

Passengers left the bus for the air as much as for a drink and a torta, a sandwich. A young couple had been making out on a bench, and like the rest of us they came on board when the driver called out our departure. The lovers were good-looking, and this observation was underscored for me by the comment a young man, an American student named Richie, from the University of California, Berkeley, had made when he sat down in the seat next to me for the continuation of our ride.

Richie had spent the week lying on the beach at Mazatlán and, accentuating his natural handsomeness, had become radiantly copper-colored. His companionship was just the element I needed to get me through the next day as the Three Gold Stars negotiated the highway north. Richie was intelligent and very outgoing. He had been studying English lit at Berkeley and was only a year away from completing his BA. I could hardly resist his coruscating wit and was happy to be traveling in his pleasurable company, a relieving hedge to set against the distractions of the bus with its air richly perfumed by human smells and cheap pulque.

Late the next morning we pulled into the station at Mexicali. I’d invited Richie to accompany me in the Volvo to L.A. I would see him to the airport and he could go on back to Berkeley. The nice old man who had been looking after my car for the past month met me as planned and Richie and I drove over the frontera and off into California.

Across the two hours of desert heat that paved the way for our arrival at the ocean-front apartment I rented at Manhattan

Beach, that sanitized middle class suburb on the Pacific ten miles south of Los Angeles airport, it had become clear that Richie would be staying the night and not flying on immediately to San