The City That Never

Mexico City never finishes. It builds on top of itself, layer after layer, like a geological formation made of concrete and memory and street food. The Aztec temple is under the cathedral which is under the smog which is under the sky which is, on good days, a blue so clean you forget you're breathing the air of twenty-two million people who are all, at this exact moment, trying to get somewhere else. I was born in Coyoacán, in a house with a courtyard and a lemon tree and a crack in the wall that my grandfather blamed on the 1985 earthquake, which he blamed for everything including his bad knee and the price of avocados. The earthquake was the great explainer. Before: the city was one thing. After: the city was another. What fell down was rebuilt. What was rebuilt was different. My grandfather preferred what fell down. I live in Roma Norte now, which used to be bohemian and is now expensive, which is what happens to bohemian neighborhoods when enough people discover them. The cafés have pour-over coffee. The bookshops sell books in four languages. The tacos are still good because tacos are the last honest thing in any gentrifying neighborhood — nobody has figured out how to make a bad taco expensive. Someone will. Give it time. The city sinks three centimeters a year. This is not a metaphor. It was built on a lake — the Aztecs built Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, and the Spanish drained the lake and built a city on the mud, which holds water the way a sponge holds water, and as the city pumps out the groundwater the ground compresses and the buildings tilt and the cathedral leans and the Metro stations are at different depths than they were when they were built. The city is eating itself from underneath. I work in civil engineering. I know exactly how much the city sinks and where and why and I cannot stop it. Nobody can. The city needs water. The water comes from the aquifer. The aquifer is the ground. The ground sinks. This is the equation and it has no solution that doesn't involve twenty-two million people drinking less water or moving somewhere else, and neither of these things will happen, so we monitor the sinking and we shore up the buildings and we adjust the plumbing and we keep going. Keeping going is what Mexico City does. Not thriving, not surviving — just continuing, with a stubbornness that is either admirable or insane depending on how much you know about the seismic zone and the aquifer depletion rate and the traffic, God, the traffic, which is its own geological force, slow and massive and unyielding. My daughter asked me why we don't move. I said: where would we go? She said: somewhere that doesn't sink. I said: everywhere sinks, mija. Some places are just honest about it. The lemon tree in my grandfather's courtyard is still there. The house is an art gallery now. The tree is in the courtyard, bearing lemons, sinking three centimeters a year with the rest of us. It doesn't seem to mind.