Mexicool

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Yet the next morning, I struck out in my own direction to Buenavista, northwest of the city centre, to visit the brand-new Vasconcelos national library. On the outside, the building looks like something out of Battlestar Galactica. Yet it was a massive installation inside that had drawn me there. Under rows of bookshelves floating in a sea of light, the black-painted skeleton of a humpback whale had been hung in mid-air by of one of the country’s most renowned artists, Gabriel Orozco. Brought out of its natural context, says the artist, the creature becomes a statement against Discovery Channel exoticism.

The motley crowd of El Chopo, the “countercultural market” that springs up every Saturday morning like a giant black mushroom next to the library, provides another kind of exoticism. Hundreds of small tents offer CDs and DVDs of uncertain origin, temporary tattoos, jewellery and leather bracelets. On a semi-improvised stage, hard-core musicians desperate to be noticed crank up their amps. The thousands of kids that emerge from the subway wear Slipknot or Tool T-shirts, as they would in any other North American city. Yet the Mexican mood is more lyrical: a host of pierced and dyed female goth vendors hold out delicate black roses under glass globes, like postpunk Frida Kahlos.

The city’s play of contrasts has a tentacle-like reach, touching down in the most unexpected places. Like, say, the sprawling industrial bottling complex that is host to La Colección Jumex, a contemporary art collection of 1,400 Mexican and international works purchased over five years by Eugenio López Alonso, heir to the JU(ice) of MEX(ico) empire. It’s bursting at the seams with ambitious, cheeky pieces like the installation by Carlos Amorales that covers an entire room with spiderwebs made of black tape, snagging human figures that seem to be falling from unidentified heights.

Back in Roma, on my way to meet a renowned designer who heads up Mexico’s centre for design and filmmaking, a sudden, heavy shower caught the city by surprise. Immense puddles flooded the streets, where cars rushed by like hurried schools of bright fish. As I turned into soup, I began to wonder if Orozco’s whale wasn’t about to head back out to sea.

The downpour also reminded me of an anecdote that the novelist Fabrizio Mejía Madrid himself had told me a few hours earlier as we savoured together a dish of huitlacoche (a tasty mushroom that grows on corncobs). In 1964, the Mexican government had chosen to decorate the entrance of the new museum of anthropology with a statue of the Aztec rain god Tlaloc that had, until then, stood in the middle of a working-class neighbourhood. Residents, fearing the rain would abandon them, blocked every attempt to remove the statue until the army intervened. As the people came out to pay a final tribute to Tlaloc, it began to rain.

The rain lasted three days, causing horrendous traffic jams in which a trapped young Colombian began imagining the story of a city living through decades of deluge. That young man happened to be Gabriel García Márquez, and the story became his beloved novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Fabrizio had warned me: “The lake comes back when it rains.” As I zigzagged between growing ponds, I could see it wasn’t just a metaphor.

Thankfully, when I arrived at my appointment, Héctor Galván, head of the design firm Omelette, handed me a towel and a cup of hot tea before enlightening me on the way Chilango art and life mix and mesh. His own design work is daring, irreverent and sometimes a little trashy. He takes aim at “taking typical aspects of the city and the country, reinterpreting them as design components,” excercising mean pleasure (like many Mexico artists) in poking fun at his country’s signature clichés.

Which is how he came to use hanging fabrics as the overarching visual theme of Hotel Deseo in Playa del Carmen, a tribute to the flapping clotheslines seen throughout Mexico. His design for Hotel Basico, also in Playa del Carmen, features apparent piping and a round reservoir-like pool as a quirky reminder of the all-important Mexican petroleum industry. At Hotel Condesa DF, he based the staff uniforms on those of the dreaded Mexico City police, with the erotic kits in each guest room inspired by holsters – Hector’s way of saying that “in Mexico, even monsters can be beautiful in their own way.”

I returned to my hotel under a clear and starlit sky. The rain had washed the town and lulled it into stillness. The multitudes had evaporated. The Roma and Condesa districts had turned into sleepy hamlets made to be tiptoed through. In a straight line, at last.

Stopping once again by Betsabée Romero’s toy car, I wound up the key. And when the crooner started belting out “Veraaacruuuuz,” I couldn’t help thinking that in Mexico City, nothing is ever quite what it seems. And that’s fine by me

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