Over the last two decades, I have split my time between New York and Mexico City; in Mexico, I have lived in six different apartments. I’ve never loved any home more than Plaza Río de Janeiro 53. It was while living there, in the heart of Colonia Roma Norte, on a block that many have told me they consider to be the most beautiful in Mexico City, that I emerged from mourning for my late wife, Aura, wrote a book, and fell in love with Jovi, whom I later married. The apartment’s extraordinary spaciousness seemed to dissolve emotional constraints. I loved to stand at the living-room window, watching the enormous trees in the tropical park sway in the torrential rains. On clear days, you could see the Popocatépetl volcano, like a white origami sculpture, on the horizon; in the other direction, the city skyline. The kitchen was huge, with Mexican-tile walls. I learned that the apartment was for rent in 2011, from Guillermo (Memo) Osorno, who was then the editor of the magazine Gatopardo, and who lived in the building; upon moving in, my roommate Jon Lee Anderson and I hosted some raucous dinner parties there. The rent wasn’t cheap, but when Jon Lee, who lived in England with his family, gave up his share of the apartment after a year, I decided to take it on; I’d find other expenses to cut.
Roma Norte’s urban hipness was new to Jovi, who is from a family of small ranchers in Veracruz; when she moved to the city to attend a public university, she became the first person in her family to go to college. One morning, early in our relationship, when we were having breakfast in the café at the edge of the park, she said, “I may be a Communist, but I have to admit that I like a good cappuccino and a croissant in the morning.” Since 2013, Jovi and I have lived a quiet life of work and study as the neighborhood has become ever more fashionable. Living at Plaza Río de Janeiro 53, I experienced for the first time what it is to be house-proud. But pride blinds you to flaws. Our building has a worrisome history. Roma Norte, like the nearby Condesa, and much of older Mexico City, is built on an old lake bed. Our massive pink building, with ten floors, a penthouse, and a deep, two-story garage—one of the few ugly buildings on the block—nearly collapsed in the earthquake of 1985, in which ten thousand or more are thought to have died, mostly as a result of shoddy construction and the lax enforcement of building codes (fomented by the endemic corruption of the long-ruling PRI, which has been reviled in the city ever since). The building stood empty for three years while construction workers reinforced the structure, replacing the outdoor balconies with a column of concrete. Property prices plummeted in the area; it was ten years before bohemians and young people began buying homes in the Condesa neighborhood, then in Roma. Quakes, most of them minor, and none as strong as the one in 1985, remained a constant feature of life in Mexico City. Seventeen years ago, when I was living in the Condesa, one hit while I was in the shower. I attributed the way the floors and walls undulated like jello to my hangover.
I used to tell myself that I wasn’t afraid of earthquakes. Then, on April 21, 2013, at about eight-thirty in the evening, I was at my desk when everything began to move. Unfastened windows and doors opened and shut. Outside the front door, the heavy mirror that hangs by the elevator swung wildly back and forth. The building itself was groaning like an old wooden sailing ship caught in a storm. Should I run down the six flights of stairs, or should I stand inside a doorframe? I trusted the building to hold up even as I knew that I could be killed at any moment. Then blessed stillness and silence returned. Outside, sirens were wailing. I ran downstairs. On two landings, elderly neighbors were standing inside the steel frames of the service-elevator doors; they smiled as I passed. When I reached the lobby, Marcelo Ebrard and his wife, Rosalinda Bueso, were coming back inside from the sidewalk. Ebrard, who had just finished his six-year term as mayor of the Distrito Federal, as Mexico City was then still called, was living in his brother’s apartment, on the fourth floor; he and Rosalinda were in their bathrobes.
Ebrard had installed a seismograph in the lobby, which usually gave about a minute’s notice before a quake. In the past, the doorman had called up to warn us so that we could start running downstairs. Later, after Ebrard moved out, taking his seismograph with him, a citywide alarm system, with eight thousand loudspeakers, was introduced. Ebrard and I had become friendly. I once asked him whether he thought our building was safe. “It should hold up,” he said. “But my advice is, don’t buy an apartment in the building.” There were more quakes later in 2013 and in 2014. My subletter, a young Parisian, told me that new pieces of the wall and ceiling had fallen off with each one, and that living there made him feel afraid.
On August 24th, I injured my left knee lugging heavy boxes while vacating my apartment in Brooklyn; the owner was selling the building. Back in Mexico, an MRI revealed that I’d torn the anterior cruciate ligament. On September 6th, I underwent surgery, and returned to our apartment that night with crutches and instructions not to bear weight on my leg. Jon Lee was in Mexico to report a story, and was staying with us. The next evening, Jovi and I were in bed when the seismographic alert—“¡Alerta sísmica! ¡Alerta sísmica!”—began to sound. There was no way I could get downstairs. We tried to make it to the back of the apartment, to the corner with the laundry sink and gas boiler, which our landlord, who lives upstairs, had told us was the safest spot, but the floor was rising and falling too violently. Jon Lee, who’d been asleep, joined us as we crouched in the doorway, hugging each other. The young people who live in the other apartment on our floor emerged, looking panicked. “Run downstairs!” I shouted, and they dashed down the stairwell. The mirror in the hall seemed ready to fly away. The walls sounded like they were tearing themselves apart. Jovi, who clearly thought it was time to say goodbye, told me she loved me. I kept thinking that the earthquake had already lasted too long, that it had to stop at any moment, but it didn’t—until, finally, with a groan of settling concrete and steel, and the sound, like soft rain, of crumbling and falling plaster, it did.
The electricity was out, the elevators down. The stairs were covered with white dust and rock-sized pieces of plaster; Jon Lee supported me as I made my way down the stairs on crutches and in my underwear. For the next few hours, we stood outside on the sidewalks and in the park with our neighbors. People were wary of aftershocks and didn’t want to be alone. Our landlord, Dr. Ángel del Parral, a chain-smoking seventy-something cardiologist who has become a dear friend, thought that this earthquake felt stronger than the one in 1985. This was reassuring, he said, because it meant that the efforts to reinforce the building had worked. “Our building did dance, but it withstood,” he said. Eugenio, our stalwart doorman, had gone down to inspect the basement, and saw no signs of damage.
The epicenter of that August quake, Mexico’s strongest in more than a century, was in Chiapas, and fifty-eight kilometres beneath the surface. In that state, and in the state of Oaxaca and its impoverished, beautiful isthmus of Tehauntepéc, in the glorious matriarchal Zapotec town of Juchitán, there was death and devastation. But in Mexico City the damage was light and nobody was killed. Instead, the earthquake provoked a sense of communion, a haunted experience of terror and loss that we all shared. The spectre of 1985 is present to everyone who lives here, even to those who didn’t experience it. That quake had a magnitude of 8.1, and lasted two minutes; this one was 8.2, and lasted perhaps a little longer. But had it seemed stronger or less strong? Everyone had an opinion. Mexico City was given the democratic vote in 1998—before that, the ruling party, the PRI, appointed the city’s mayors—and since then has been governed by a series of center-left mayors who have enforced stricter building regulations. Perhaps that had saved the city, many speculated. Or were we spared because the epicenter of this earthquake was farther away, and deeper beneath the surface? Was that why this earthquake had come with the familiar side-to-side swaying, rather than the jarring up-and-down bucking of the 1985 quake?
Two weeks later, as the anniversary of 1985 approached, everyone seemed to have earthquakes on their minds. Jovi avoided the elevators in our building. I kept checking the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s seismographic Web site to monitor the aftershocks, of which there had been more than two thousand, mostly all minor, their epicenters all located in southern Mexico and close to the Pacific. On the morning of September 19th, there was a 4.2-magnitude quake at 4:58 A.M., in Michoacán, uncomfortably close to Mexico City. Did it mean anything?
Our bedroom overlooks a Catholic junior high school that regularly holds earthquake drills. The neighbors had been so freaked out by the recorded male voice robotically blaring “Alerta sísmica” at odd intervals that the school now hands out calendars of all the drills scheduled for the year. Jovi knew that there was to be an alarm at 11 A.M. on September 19th, in commemoration of the 1985 earthquake. She hates the sound so much that she had decided that, when the alarm went off, she would run down the stairs anyway. She walked to the Tuesday market in the Condesa. I worked in bed, still unable to sit at a desk for long. Jovi came home with a rotisserie chicken and other groceries, and prepared lunch.
At 1:14 P.M., just as she had taken the first bite of her chicken taco, and I my first spoonful of soup, everything began to move. “Esta temblando,” Jovi said, springing up from the table at the first sound of wrenching wood behind the walls; the kitchen door was slamming, the lamp above the table swinging violently. “We have to go!” she shouted. I insisted that she go without me. Jovi left as I made my way over the lurching floor, to the corner in the laundry room; I have a distinct memory of the floor rising like an ocean swell. I heard loud cracks and crashes, glass shattering, bookshelves falling in my office to the left. To my right, the gas boiler toppled to the ground. A mix of water and strong-smelling gas flooded the floor, which was ominously carpeted in rubble. I wondered if the mixture might ignite. The concrete edifice rocked back and forth dementedly, heavily, impossibly; rubble, trash, and broken glass skidded back and forth in the water and gas around my feet. Leaning on my crutches, I fixed my gaze on a corner of the ceiling that seemed to be billowing like a tarp filled by gusts of wind. That is where it would crack open, I thought. I found myself shouting, “Stop!” But the quake wouldn’t stop: it went on. I told myself that I wasn’t going to die but, for once, I really wasn’t so sure. Finally, with a sound like a dump truck slowly discharging a load of pebbles, it stopped. I could feel the massive building settling heavily back down into the quelling earth.
I noticed for the first time that all the glass in the door to the kitchen had blown out. I poked at the rubble with my crutch, looked into the office at all the books lying in water, and, with some effort, pulled open the door to the kitchen, where the plates and kitchen appliances and the coffee maker were smashed on the floor. I was covered in white powder. A few moments later, Jovi and Memo Osorno burst in and, with Jovi clearing rubble out of the way ahead of me, we began the descent once again.
For the first couple of hours, we waited in the park for news. Nobody had phone or Wi-Fi service. I found a place to sit. A group of men ran through the park carrying a a muscular young man, perhaps severely injured, on a litter, a woman alongside them calling for help. Several people rose and followed. We heard that there were two dead bodies in the store on the corner. City officials instructed over megaphones against the lighting of cigarettes because of gas leaks. It took a surprisingly long time for the sounds of ambulances to fill the air. The scale of what had just occurred had barely dawned on us. Now and then, friends stopped in the park with the news of another building that had collapsed. Our neighborhood and the Condesa had been especially hard-hit, again.
Eugenio took Jovi to retrieve some essentials from the apartment. It was risky, but we needed clothes, medicine. She brought down our computers, too. I sat in the park, working on my novel for a bit—a way, I suppose, to stave off a sense of utter uselessness. I was unable to go anywhere, unable to pitch in. I sat next to Betty, a housekeeper in the building, who was desperate for some word from her husband; she was pale, her face drained by terror. Doña Gloria, Memo’s elderly housekeeper, sat with us for a while. She was worried about her dog, and later set off on foot to her home, in the neighborhood of Observatorio. It was evening when our landlord finally came back. I told him that our apartment was no longer habitable. He seemed skeptical, but when he returned from seeing his own apartment, he was shaken. “It’s not habitable anymore, Frankie,” he said.
It struck me as odd how few people talked about the fact that this earthquake occurred on the anniversary of the 1985 one, as if it were in bad taste to mention the mind-boggling coincidence. In any case, there was nothing that could be said about it that would make any sense. Wi-Fi and phone service flickered. There were no taxis, no Uber. My friend the writer Alejandro Zambra, his wife, Jazmina Barrera, and her mother, the painter Teresa Velázquez, came to fetch us by car and brought us back to their house, which is where I am now. For the last three days, I’ve followed the aftermath of the earthquake online, as I would if I were in New York. I also listen to local radio, following the search for survivors at the collapsed Enrique Rébsamen School, and at the office building on the Avenida Alvaro Obregón—right around the corner from our building—where everyone on floors one to three, and five and six, are believed to have died, but where as many as forty survivors may be trapped alive on the fourth floor.
The death toll climbs every day. This morning, it was a hundred and fifty-five in the city, with more than double that number beyond it. Soon, when the rescue operations cease, and bodies are recovered as rubble is cleared away, it will be higher. In the old downtown, where a vast sewing sweatshop collapsed, some two hundred workers, many said to be Central American migrants, are believed to have been killed; a similar tragedy occurred at nearly the same place in 1985. So far, sixty-nine people have been rescued alive from collapsed buildings. The outpouring of volunteers, as in 1985, has been extraordinary. In many areas, there are more volunteers than the civic organizers knew what to do with. On a news video feed, I watched a rescue worker in a hardhat saying “Please, señoras, stop bringing us cooked meals, we have plenty,” before reciting a list of other things they needed. Chilangos, as the people who live here are called, are devoted to their city; their solidarity comes from the exacting and exhilarating challenge of living here. Mexico City stands apart from the rest of the country as a bastion of progress and idealism, always representing a last best hope in a country elsewhere controlled by the corrupt PRI and narco powers. When Interior Minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, the most powerful figure in the cabinet of the unpopular President Enrique Peña Nieto, turned up at a rescue operation downtown for a photo op, volunteers and workers chased him out, jeering and calling him an opportunist.
Jovi went out yesterday in response to a call for soup-kitchen volunteers near Plaza Cibeles, blocks from our building. Teen-agers who had been bringing food to rescue volunteers by bicycle had been ordered to take a break, but were remonstrating on the sidewalk, eager to get back to work. Contramar, the neighborhood’s iconic, trendy seafood restaurant, was one of the few open on the block, and was feeding rescue workers and volunteers for free. (Gabriela Cámara, the restaurant’s owner, had been a friend of my late wife, Aura; after her death, in 2007, she fed friends who had attended the funeral.) Last night, it rained. As I lay in bed, I thought of the thousands of people, most but not all of them Mexicans, most but not all of them young, who were desperately working to save lives and provide aid, all over the city in the pitch-dark, and my heart throbbed, and I thought, You are all the most valiant, generous people on earth.
“You’re an expert in earthquakes,” I said to Zambra, who has lived through several in Santiago, Chile, where he is from. “I’m an expert in Chilean earthquakes,” he said. Recent Chilean quakes have been stronger than those that have hit Mexico, but far fewer buildings have collapsed in Santiago, a newer city. The buildings that collapsed here, everyone seemed to agree, were mostly those that had barely survived 1985. The September 19th quake had measured 7.1, but had punched harder than the one two weeks before because it was so much closer, its epicenter in Morelos, and had hit us, everyone agreed, with the dreaded vertical bucking of the 1985 quake. As of this morning, there were reports of forty-seven collapsed buildings. I heard that at least sixty more, including, possibly, our building on the Plaza Río de Janeiro, would be condemned. It’s being reported that perhaps at least three thousand buildings in the city have been heavily damaged; it’s not yet known how many are left uninhabitable. Some of these buildings are new, their residents victims of the same old corruption that allows builders to cut corners. Thousands have been left homeless.
Some claimed that our building was still structurally sound. Jovi went over there today. She was nervous to go up to the apartment, but Don Victor, the old porter, went with her. Upstairs she found a long fissure in our living-room wall that opened onto the sky. Windows were smashed, their metal frames wrenched. Chunks of plaster, powder, and fallen objects were strewn all over the floors. More water from leaks had poured into my office and our bedroom closet. El Doctor, our landlord, was moving out; he told Jovi that if the building was saved, he’d sell his apartments. Outside, a city official was trying to reassure a crowd of neighbors, who were worried that the building was going to fall over onto the school next door. When Jovi came back, she told me that she’d stayed in our apartment at most ten minutes, while Don Victor turned off the gas, but that it had seemed an eternity, she felt so panicked. She’d tried to focus on what to rescue, the essentials we most needed. She broke out into a smile as she began pulling from her bag, one by one, the items she’d chosen. The first was the big bag of black beans that she’d bought at the market an hour or so before the earthquake struck—not dried, she explained, but still fresh and tender. The second provision was a bottle of champagne.
