The emperor next door

My friend C.M. Mayo publishes the frantically active Madam Mayo blog, and is the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for her collection of short stories Sky Over El Nido. Unbridled Books has just released her novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, an epic about Maximilian von Hapsburg, the Archduke of Austria, who for a few curious years in the 1860s was declared and installed as Emperor of Mexico. I look forward to a sunny afternoon, where I envision myself taking it up to the castle in Chapultepec Park (where Maximilian reigned, along with his wife, the bipolar Empress Carlotta). At 448 pages it will be a long afternoon, but knowing C.M.'s writing, I am sure it will be a page-turner. I wish her the best of luck with the book.

My paper

When I lived in New York, it was a guilty pleasure among certain supposedly educated citizens, myself included, to pick up the tabloid The Post in the morning. Frequently, the front-page headlines were so good that nothing inside the paper could possibly measure up. The most famous example, from the 1980s, is “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”

Few of my friends here, except for the novelist J.M. Servín, admit to reading Metro, the local equivalent to the Post. Most days there is a bloody corpse on the cover (as frequently the result of a traffic accident as of a murder). The headlines are priceless, although hard to translate into English. Here are a couple of the milder examples from about a month ago, in the good old days before the swine flu crisis.

The headline above, about the explosion of 60 cylinders of gas after a truck crashed, is a variation on a standard insult, ¡A su madre!, which is a sort of all purpose expletive whose meaning depends on the context. Literally it is an insult to someone’s mother. Metro’s version, !Gásumadre! combines the word gas with the insult. (Like I said, something gets lost in the translation.) The headline on top of the page alludes to the arrest of various pedophiles, one of whom was a priest.

If you read this blog regularly, you may remember a recent post about a 46-year-old systems engineer named David Mondragón Vargas. While wearing a wig and a dress, he was arrested on the metro during rush hour, in cars reserved for women only. He had been sexually accosting them. The headline here, Vestida … para tortear, is a variation on the title of a Brian De Palma film from the 1980s called Dressed to Kill, or, in Spanish, Vestida para matar. The translation of Metro's headline is, more or less, “Dressed ... to cop a feel.” (The swine flu crisis is the best thing that ever happened to Mondragón, as it literally wiped him off the pages of the newspapers.)

At the movies

When films from the U.S. are shown in Mexico, exhibitors not only translate but frequently change the titles. In the Mexican adaptations, certain heated words are almost always utilized -- among them death, murder, fatal, mortal, passion, desire, secret, terror, horror and so on. My ex-wife, who used to write movie criticism for the newspaper La Jornada, once marveled in print that they had not retitled Hamlet as My Son is an Incestuous Killer. Once in a while, however, the Mexican title is better than the original. Oliver Stone’s film about George W. Bush, W., has just opened here, and they’ve called it Hijo de … Bush. For those who don’t understand Spanish, that would be translated as Son of a … Bush.

More on masks

In 1950, poet Octavio Paz -- the only Mexican to have ever won the Nobel Prize for literature -- published El laberinto de la solead (The Labyrinth of Solitude). An essay about Mexican identity, nearly 60 years later it is still his most celebrated work. Some of it may be a little dated, but several of its chapters are startling in how relevant they still are.

The most pertintent and germane chapters are called "Mexican Masks" and "The Sons of La Malinche." Read together, they reflect that Mexicans typically hide behind impersonations -- metaphorical masks -- of servility or dominance, indifference or remoteness, disguising what are deep-seated feelings of suspicion, mistrust, resentment and inferiority.

At all costs, wrote Paz, Mexicans resist revealing themselves to others. Doing so would be a sign of weakness, and expose them to all sorts of terrifying vulnerability. Paz wrote that Mexicans viewed life as combat.

"His face is a mask," wrote the poet, "and so is his smile. In his harsh solitude, which is both barbed and courteous, everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation."

And, "He builds a wall of remoteness between reality and himself, a wall that is no less impenetrable for being invisible."

Perhaps Paz's essay goes some way in explaining why Mexican health care authorities, even with the CDC and the WHO breathing down their necks, have managed to avoid exposing details of how they managed -- or perhaps mismanaged -- the swine flu crisis. We stll know very little about why most of the few people who died of it are Mexicans, and next to nothing about the Mexicans who died. This article which appeared late last week reveals a few details.

I wonder what the poet would have thought of those days when so many in Mexico City wandered its streets wearing officially sanctioned surgical masks, disguising (or perhaps exposing) whoever it is that they are. Perhaps he would have seen it as their shining hour. This montage is in his memory.

P.S. Here is a link to a story about a poor creature who must know how the Mexicans feel these days.

Nearly nude

In one of the first posts I wrote for this blog, I expressed the opinion that much of public space in Mexico City has been raped. Enormous billboards are not only in your face on the inner-city highways, but they also hover over the main boulevards. In residential neighborhoods they sometimes are painted on the sides of buildings or hang like banners over balconies and terraces.

A friend – let’s just say he is a gringo well into his sixties – saw that post and said he thought I had been harsh in my assessment. “Don’t forget,” he said. “There are all those ads of women in their underwear.”