The trees of Guadalajara

I feel like I don't really get to know Guadalajara because I haven't explored it on foot. Walking is a privileged form of knowledge. I can almost always see this immense Guadalajara of Mexico from the window on a very high floor of the hotel or through the raised window of a car, one of those SUVs that seem to have been made on the scale of Texas highways. From the heights of the hotel, the city is an expanse of low-rise buildings and very green patches of vegetation interrupted by industrial blocks or by office or apartment towers. On the horizon, the city stretches mistily into low, blue hills, climbing towards them, and when night falls everything is submerged in an ocean of darkness punctuated by lights, those of the red lights of cars like rivers of lava on the avenues clogged with traffic, the blue or red lights that illuminate some very tall buildings. At night, as during the day, there are very few people walking on the sidewalks, but the blackness of weak street lights and deserted places instills in those who arrive from afar a sense of helplessness, and perhaps danger. The well-lit gas stations, the windows of the luxury restaurants, shine like islands. In a desolate area of low houses that are warehouses or workshops, the promising light of a humble food stall is sometimes lit up. Anyone who arrives from Europe after a flight that has lasted more than 12 hours looks out of the taxi window, dazed at the same time by sleep and insomnia, and sees everything behind a veil of unreality: that highway at the airport, the straight and heavily tree-lined avenues, like boulevards, the sheer length of the journey, accentuated by the time change and by that dreamy oddity of the cities we arrive at night.

Sometimes, my job is to stay alone in a room and tell imagined things that don't exist outside of me; Other times it's going out into the street, into the world, and forgetting myself and leaving my imagination in suspense to tell what I see, what I hear, what I'm told. Perhaps fiction is sedentary, and non-fiction, the chronicle, is itinerant. Neither is more or less literary than the other. The two chroniclers I admire the most, Josep Pla and Joseph Roth, were wandering men who always went from one country to another, from one city and one hotel to another, and wrote very quickly to arrive on time for the closing of the newspapers, which is one of the most fertile lessons that a writer can have. Joseph Roth tells a friend in a letter, "What I want to do is the portrait of my time."

I look at Guadalajara from far above, at midnight, or in the first soft, slightly veiled light in the morning, or when I am driven from one place to another, and it seems to me that I shall not be able to understand the riddle of the city well, because I am told that it is not safe for a stranger to walk through it. and because the distances are so excessive that you can't walk anywhere, except inside the historic center, with its admirable Baroque cathedral and the imposing buildings of the viceregal administration, the Hospicio Cabañas, the most extraordinary of all, a mixture of the severity of El Escorial and the novelties of the Enlightenment, with courtyards of arcades and orange trees in which one suddenly finds oneself as if in a courtyard of Andalusian classicism.

I drive from the hotel to a restaurant or a university campus that is always far away. I walk from the hotel to the labyrinthine hangar of the Guadalajara Book Fair, another immensity as closed to the outside as those casinos in the United States where there are no windows so that you lose track of night and day and never stop playing. You can learn something here about the city, maybe even about the country, if you look closely, if you ask questions and listen. What is most surprising, coming from Europe, is the youth of most of the public, of the readers who come and like to ask them about their lives before signing a book, and also the youth of the journalists who wake you up from their tiredness and their bewilderment at the sharpness and precision of their questions. for the fervent seriousness with which they do their work and a love of literature not clouded by cynicism or resentment. Here you see that this is a younger world. And you can also see, you discover, conversing with people, the driver who takes you from one place to another and the cleaner of the room, a natural courtesy, a formality without rigidity that manifests itself in the beauty of popular speech, the varied and flexible richness of Mexican Spanish.

It is as if one were always considering things that are incompatible with each other: the prodigious botanical abundance and the horror of traffic; the calm of those remote neighborhoods of tree-lined streets and houses with gardens and the desolate proliferation of lawless urbanism subjected to tyranny and the noise and pollution of cars; the scenographic opulence of extreme luxury restaurants and those indigenous teenage mothers who beg at traffic crossings with their babies on their backs, or those beggar girls who maternally take a younger brother by the hand, like couples of abandoned children in a fairy tale. The base of the monument to the Niños Héroes is plastered with posters with photographs of disappeared men and women, almost all of them young, almost always victims of the criminality of drug traffickers. A university professor tells me that two weeks ago she was having lunch with her husband and daughter on the terrace of a restaurant and that, suddenly, in the mild afternoon, a shooting broke out that no one knew where it came from, and that lasted about 20 minutes. The customers threw themselves on the floor and crawled to the kitchen. There are young women who disappear without a trace because a drug trafficker saw them one night at a party place and became infatuated with them, and did not forgive them for not acceding to his wishes. The driver tells me about a taxi driver friend who had just bought a new truck, and who was taken away by drug traffickers after shooting him badly wounded. At university, a young, serious girl, who has asked me accurate questions, asks me to put a dedication in a notebook and says: "I won't bring you a book because I'm poor and I can't buy it."

Sometimes it's not enough to observe, or even ask questions. There always remains the mystery of a country with so many cordial, capable, educated people, full of the drive of youth, in which, however, unpunished criminality reaches the proportions of a lethal epidemic, and in which poverty and injustice prey on the innocent, throw them into misery, force them to cross the northern border risking their lives. I stay, on the verge of leaving, before crossing the city for the last time, looking out the window of a taxi, with the fervor and clear gaze of very young students, with the richness of vocabulary, of popular foods, of trees with familiar names and exotic names, with the unsatisfied desire to know more.

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