A night with a bang

The Hysteria discotheque, near Mexico City’s airport, is a monument to local sexual fluidity. A round, two-story cavern, on a recent night in its passageways I saw a man in his thirties dressed in the plaid skirt, white shirt and sweater that makes up a girl’s high-school uniform, while another man wore the short tight tube skirt, the slinky tube top and high heels of a $10 hooker from the Merced Market. Another man wore the outfit of a Playboy bunny. A woman walked by, with her beautiful breasts exposed to the four winds. But were they real? And was she really a woman? That was the $64,000 question regarding the various beauties who circulated in the atmosphere.

There were less spectacular specimens of both genders, too, including bureaucrats in beige suits, boys dressed like members of the Mara Salvatrucha, and a guy in his sixties with a Seventies suit like Travolta’s in Saturday Night Fever. Around one in the morning, the transvestite show began, but suddenly, while an enormous fat man was lip-synching one of Shakira’s biggest hits, gunshots were heard and the majority of the clientele ran for the door.

I stayed put, reasoning that it was better to wait out destiny with a drink in hand than to get stomped by a multitude. Indeed, within minutes everything was back to normal. I left an hour or so later and saw that the entrance had been cordoned off and 12 bullet shells were on the ground. A cop from patrol car S00933, in a bored tone of voice, said, “Absolutely nothing happened. Just a shooting. No one died.”

Lagunazis

Photo by Ibarí Ortega

Manuel won’t say yes, and he won’t say no. Maybe Hitler killed six million Jews in the Holocaust, as well as six million others. And maybe he didn’t. “It’s very arguable,” he says. “I wasn’t born yet in those days. I’m not the type of person who looks at a photo of an individual that I don’t even know, and says he’s this big criminal. I’m not the kind of person who lets others manipulate him. I’m nobody’s sheep.”

After I identify myself as a Jew, who had grandparents, uncles and various relatives who died in the gas chambers of concentration camps, Manolo becomes pensative. “Probably it happened, and it’s a tragedy. But you know what? It’s not my problem.” For over ten years he has sold Nazi paraphernalia in La Lagunilla, Mexico City’s most important flea market. Among his problems, Manolo mentions the Jews who occasionally pass by his stand and insult him. Manolo’s only ideology is commerce, and he even sees these people’s ire as a potential business opportunity. “I tell them, if you want to burn that Nazi flag, go ahead. It costs 2000 pesos. Give me the money and you can burn it right here.”

He says a lot of his clients are looking for “spiritual reinforcement,” and some of them find it once they’ve put on a T shirt with a swastika emblem. They are yet another prospect. “They come back and they say, ‘That T shirt has something, I put it on and I want to go to work, to do exercise,’” he says. “And I tell them, ‘Look, I’ve got other models.’” A badge that Manolo says is from the Nazi era costs between 1500 and 2500 pesos and an Iron Cross– the medal won by Nazis wounded in battle – in its original box costs 15,000. Manolo also makes copies, which are cheaper.

Conversation with him is more coherent than that of the five young men who work the stand a few yards away. Under a Nazi flag they sell the most notorious anti-Semitic literature translated in Spanish. The day I arrived they told me they had sold out their copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf, but suggested that if I came early the following week, there would be more. They insist the Holocaust never happened. “It’s a lie, a trick, a fraud,” says one, who appropriately identifies himself as Adolfo.

They believe in their cause so strongly that it doesn’t faze them that the majority of the world thinks that what they have read in Holocaust-denial literature is absurd. They say the diary of Anne Frank is fraudulent because it was written with a kind of pen that didn’t exist until after the war. That Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were all Jews. That today, Coca-Cola and Pepsi are supporters of Zionism and that the Jews manage international drug traffic from the fourth floor of the New York Stock Exchange. And why doesn’t everyone know all this? Obvious: the Jews control all the media in the universe.

When I mention that nearly all of my mother’s family died in the camps, they look at me like a misinformed unfortunate. Adolfo assures me that some of them may have died fighting against Hitler, while others may still be around in some part of Poland.

The scourge of globalization

There is a cornucopia of good things to eat in Mexico City, and most of them are found on the street. The sidewalk is a Mexican’s bistro, his pit stop, his perpetual picnic. The choices are nearly endless – tacos, quesadillas, tortas, tlayudas, sopes, gorditas, et alia. And sushi. And teriyaki. You heard right: Japanese food has found its place on the sidewalk here. There have been Japanese restaurants in Mexico City for longer than I can remember. Most tend to serve items that clearly pander to the home team. For instance, in addition to fish, sushi rolls are usually stuffed with cream cheese, jalapeño peppers, or mayonnaise, and in certain gruesome instances, all three.But those are restaurants of the indoor, sit-down variety. As far as I can tell, the stand pictured above, on Avenida Insurgentes just south of the Chilpancingo metro station, is the first street stall dispensing Japanese food in the city. While I consider myself a culinary swashbuckler, for some reason I haven’t been enthused by the idea of eating sushi that’s been sitting out in the heat all day. Should I change my mind and succumb, you’ll be the first to know.

One thing leads to another

For the Spanish-impaired, the sign below advertises a sex fair -- the hottest of them all. The rosier sign on top promises an expo about "your" wedding, scheduled just a few days later.

Carmen María hears voices

Her clients tend to refer to Carmen María Oca as “an angel”or “a light,” and insist that she has changed their lives. A politician says that he won’t take a step without consulting her first, and a restaurateur claims that after her session, she was left with “a sense of peace” and the idea that life might have a divine order. Nearly everyone who sees her is left in awe by her accuracy.Ostensibly a tarot-card reader, Carmen María’s secret is that she doesn’t really read cards. “They indicate something and give me a structure,” she says. “But the truth is that they really just tell me a little, maybe half. I see images. I hear voices. I could do readings without cards, but people would get scared. And although I can guess things, that is the least important part of what I do. I give clarity, I cure. I’m convinced that my job is therapeutic.” Carmen María arrived to Mexico City from her native Havana when she as a child, after Fidel Castro took over the island. She married at 19 and divorced at 27, and had been a mother, a public-relations woman, a marketing consultant and an assistant in a Lamaze clinic, among other jobs, before becoming a full-time tarotista. “If a cat has nine lives, I’m like eight cats,” she says. After learning the tarot she knew she had found her calling. “I said to the voices, ‘I don’t know who you are, and I’m terrified, but I’m not moving from here.’”