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 Entertainment | February 2007 
Mexican Reverie
 Michael Werbowski - PVNN
Ricardo entered the Farolito, the Puerto Del Sol, no, it was actually El Nivel just off the Zocalo and near the Presidential Palace. He stepped into a noisy, smokey paradise - or perhaps hell. It opened in 1855 and hardly ever shut down for a single day since. Except for the funeral of the owner last week.
Here a steady literary crowd converged daily. Journalists, political analysts, writers and artists. He ordered the usual - a "Michelada" with a "Negro Modelo." The waiter came and brought him his frosty mug and taunted him with humorous obscenities and lewd jokes.
He opened "the News" and scanned the headlines: a colleague from El Excelsior was found stabbed to death in his flat, the body of a tourist from Acapulco was being shipped back North. Her head was missing in the coffin.
The crime page was full of gore. In the room, he noticed a man at the table sipping tequila. He looked like Octavio Paz and was immersed in a discussion with Sergio Pitol or perhaps Alfonso Reyes? At another table sat Leonora Carrington sketching alone. A German tourist sat with a copy of "Under the Volcano" in German translation.
At the next table, Ricardo noticed Malcolm Lowry drinking with his buddy the ex-British counsel, Geoff Fermin and his brother Hugh, along with the former council's estranged wife Yvonne. They were talking intensely about Mexican politics and art and music and the destruction of the Casino de la Selva.
Ricardo K. looked around him. At another corner table he saw a man who resembled Graham Greene talking about his journey throughout Mexico which he documented in the "Lawless Roads." He overheard him mentioning an upcoming novel "The Power and the Glory" to Malcolm Lowry who sipped a Mescal, behind a row of empty Corona bottles.
Lowry puffed intently on a Delicado cigarette; its aroma was somewhat entrancing as it wafted in the air. A Mexican wearing a general's uniform laughed loudly at the bar and spat on the floor. Two Zacateca Indians slid a huge block of ice to keep the beer cold behind the bar.
At the counter stood a row of patrons: hacks, would be assassins, corrupt city officials and some American tourists. A woman went around taking the patrons' blood pressure for $10 pesos a measure... more ice blocks melted in the lanterns as drunken men urinated on them.
Cases of unopened Negra Modelo and Pacifico were stacked to the ceiling. An organ grinder came in with a chimp on a red leash. The portrait of Porfirio Diaz and Benito Juarez hung above the rows of Tequila bottles. The bottles began to rattle and glasses clinked as the earth began to move. The patrons started to sing the Mexican national anthem in unison.
Ricardo awoke from his brief daze. He was jolted back to reality. "Do you have air miles?" the young Mexican girl working at the cash asked. |
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