My Pied À Terre In Mexico City
Haresh Shah
You would think, who in his right mind would get tired of living in Mexico City’s most luxurious and yet most making you feel at home hotel, Camino Real? Especially when the company is paying for it? During the first few months of my back-to-back trips and long sojourns in the city, Camino Real, or as my friends began to call it tu casa amarilla, because of its predominantly yellow façade, has become my permanent home. What’s more, I have fallen in love with the place. As big as it is, it has that warm homey feeling. By now, I know every nook and corner of this huge labyrinth of 720 rooms hotel, have been to each one of the restaurants and bars. The rooms are spacious and I am always welcomed by being placed in a poolside room with balcony. In a few short months, I have spent more romantic days and evenings at Camino Real than all other hotels of the world put together. I am regular at their French restaurant Le Fouquet and their private Le Club. Have splurged into frequent poolside buffets outside Los Azulejos, sat at La Cantina drinking beer and watching the traffic of the beautiful people of the city walking to and from the most-in Lobby Bar – the place where the locals and the hotel guests come together to see and be seen. And have danced the nights away at Cero Cero and then stumbled in for late breakfast at Las Huertas and nursed my hangovers with freshly squeezed tropical juices and very strong Mexican café con leche. Practically every service personnel knows and makes fuss over me. The place I feel at home in the true Mexican spirit of mi casa es su casa. What else can one ask for?
Well, like the Linda Ronstadt song, silver threads and golden needle, at some point that kind of indulgence too saturates you. What I suddenly want is a place of my own, a pied-à-terre, in the city that is becoming as much my home as is Santa Barbara. I want my own kitchen and make my own ham and cheese sandwich and my famous soon to be baptized Shamolette by Mick Boskamp of Holland. Pop a bottle of beer, instead of having it delivered to my room. I want to cook elaborate Indian food and invite friends, play my own music. Be able to go from one room to another. I want to have a place where my friends from north of the border can come and visit and be able to stay with me.
We find a place, not too far from Camino Real at the corner of Calle Guadalquivir and Paseo de la Reforma. It’s unpresumptuous two bedroom apartment, owned by a woman called Señora Maldonado. It is furnished and comes equipped with kitchen appliances including pots and pans, a set of dishes, silverware and all. Adequate for my trips to Mexico. Just that there is something very ordinary, very boring about the place. The starkness of the place and the lack of imagination makes it look and feel like a drab, but I still take it. It’s at the intersection of two busy streets with incessant auto traffic. This is Mexico and this is 1977. There are no rules about the air pollution and the noise. I spend night after sleepless night, tossing and turning, tortured by the shrill screeching of the metal over metal of the worn out breaks and grinding of the grease deprived gearshifts. Just within a couple of days, I know that I’ve got to get out of there. But I have signed a year long lease and Señora Maldonado is not in the least inclined to allow me to wiggle out of it. Finally with the intervention of my friends at the office, she very reluctantly lets me off the hook with me agreeing to pay her two month’s rent for having lived there barely for a week.
Hearing my woeful tale, our publisher Ricardo (Ampudia) picks up the phone.
‘Let me see what I can do!’
‘Hola Antonio….’ And I hear lots of laughs and bantering of the two old school buddies.
‘I think I have just the place for you.’
The very next day, I am climbing the elevator of Berna 14, in the heart of Mexico City’s famed Zona Rosa. The small L shaped street you can enter or exit from Paseo de la Reforma at the Angel and Florencia. Number 14 is snugly nestled in the sharp corner of the inverted L. The building so narrow that you may mistake the sliver of the visible façade to be a dividing line between the two edifices tightly hugging it. It has three floors and three apartments. Mine is on the top floor. Each apartment is accessible only through the elevator, and there are no buttons to push. You need a key for your floor. Like starting a car.
On the third floor, the elevator doors open into the total darkness. When the lights are switched on, you find yourself standing in the middle of a long tube of a submarine like abode. You are in the kitchen/dining room. On the right is the bedroom – the only room to face the street and is exposed to the natural light. It is tastefully furnished with a custom-made bigger than the California King size mattress, which is probably 20” high, placed directly on the floor. It’s covered with shiny white satin sheets and strewn around are several large pillows, also draped in satin. There are no windows, but floor to ceiling and wall-to-wall clear glass wall with the view of the street. When you draw the heavy drapes over the wall, you get a feeling of being in a submarine moored all the way down below the surface of the water.
Every inch of the apartment is covered with amply padded and a very high quality tightly woven off white wall-to-wall shag rug. The kitchen is well equipped and is efficiently placed along the wall and there is just enough room for maximum two people to squeeze in to cook. Rest of the space is covered with an enormous custom made round dining table with the diameter of 6 feet or more, which rests on heavy cast iron stainless steel pedestal. Around the table are very comfy white dining chairs. Next to the kitchen is the living room. Lushly furnished with soft cushioned couches and arm chairs, also in white. Appropriately placed is the cocktail table and state of the art sound system.
You get a feeling of being placed in a deep cave. The entire place is about 60 feet long and twelve feet wide (approx. 18.3 meters x 3.7 meters). In between there are no walls and/or doors. The rooms are visually divided by the passages designed in the image of the most curvaceous female torso. Recessed lighting illuminates the place.
It is created to play. Every nook and cranny of it screams of now & here. The dining table, the couches, the rugs are all as inviting as the playground size bed, which at some point must feel like too far of a walk when you’re in the mood.
The apartment belongs to Ricardo’s childhood friend, Antonio – a very rich industrialist, whose main residence is outside Mexico City. Probably a hacienda. He has built this man cave in the heart of Mexico City as his pied-à-terre for his extracurricular activities. From what I understand from Ricardo is, at the time, Antonio is going through a particularly dry phase in his life and therefore the apartment remains more or less unused. Not something you can advertise and rent to just anybody. Now to rent it to someone like me, a Playboy executive and a business partner of his childhood friend is another story. I agree to the monthly rent of US$ 500.- as suggested by Ricardo. Lot of money in Mexico and at that time also in the States. I pay less than half that much for my much bigger place in Santa Barbara, California. But then, mere four nights at the Camino Real would cost me more than that.
I couldn’t be happier. Patricia loves it. My young friend Ignacio (Barrientos) adores it. Even Manuel (Peñafiel) with his own super bachelor pad nods his approval. Several months later when things have changed in my life, Carolyn comes to Mexico to spend a few days and thanks to the cozy and intimate Berna 14, she barely gets to see much of the city! It is indeed the most unique place I have ever lived in and is undeniably forms an important part of my Mexico memories.
During my extensive travels and absences, I would let my friends use my apartments, be it in Chicago, Munich or Santa Barbara. I like the idea of someone being there enjoying the place, while also taking care of it, watering the plants, picking up the mail. But I would always be careful who I give my keys to. A couple of colleagues at Editorial Caballero alluded of their interest, but one lesson I had learned from my Lake Shore apartment in Chicago, never to give keys to your married friends for their rendezvous, especially when you also know their wives. A friend’s wife at Time Inc. is still pissed at me because of his clandestine frolicking in my apartment. But the young editor Ignacio is single and we are becoming to be close friends. He probably has as many or more memories of Berna than I do. And I was happy that someone would water my houseplants that I had put in the bedroom to make the place more mine and homier.
And to water them he did. Like my younger brothers in India, Ignacio too is still living at home, and being a boy, also like my brothers doesn’t have a clue of how these little household things work. So while watering plants, isn’t it better to water more and submerge the soil than leave it not quite saturated? I must have been gone two weeks and when I return, both of my plants in Mexico are promptly drowned and are drooping limply over the edges of their pots. Oh well! At least I don’t have his ex-wife to deal with and have not earned a permanent place on her shit list!
Other than that first meeting, I never have had a reason to see Antonio in flesh and blood until one evening when I am home early and am lying on the couch reading, I hear the elevator door open and someone getting off. Only other persons who had the keys was Ignacio, and Antonio’s manager Sergio, who would stop by every month to collect the rent. But neither of them would ever show up without first having called. A jolt of fear runs through my system, I jump up from the couch and run to the kitchen.
‘I am sorry for barging in on you. I was in the neighborhood and thought come and say hello to you.’ It’s Antonio. Still dressed in his impeccable business suite with an expensive looking leather briefcase in his hand. But other than the perfunctory apology, what I see on his face is the entitlement he must feel, and okay to barge in on me just because he owns the joint. I don’t really like it, but welcome him nevertheless. Offer him a glass of wine. I sense he already have had a couple of drinks before he decided to wander in. Whatever! We talk about inconsequential things and somewhere along the line he mentions that perhaps we should talk about raising the rent a little bit.
I am not exactly against it, but I think what I was paying to be a fair rent, and I tell him how I paid only $230.- for my Santa Barbara apartment. But he seems to be in a funky mood.
‘You don’t think it makes any difference to me at the end of the day how much rent you pay, do you?’
And then we trail off talking about something else. Somewhere along the line, he picks up his briefcase, opens it and slides out of it – a gun. He holds it his hands, looks at it endearingly and almost caresses it. Swirls it around his fingers the way John Wayne and Clint Eastwood do in their westerns. The metal of the gun shines like a newly minted penny and its wooden handle is polished to the T.
‘I just bought this. Isn’t she a beauty? You want to hold it?’
‘No it’s alright. I don’t think I have ever held a real gun in my hands.’
He once again fondly looks at it and puts it gently down on the cocktail table in the middle. We continue to talk, but I am no longer as comfortable. What I am thinking is; what the fuck? What does this man have on his mind? I feel a jolt of fear scurry through my spine.
We’re sitting in his time capsule of an apartment, completely sealed off from the outside world. Other than the elevator, there is a door at the very end of the living room that opens at the back of the building, which is double bolted. I know, there are keys in the kitchen, in case of emergency. And what could Antonio have against me? I try to think of the women I have been out with in Mexico City and wish that none of them had anything to do with the man sitting across from me. You know, sort of honor killing. If her were to pull the trigger for whatever reason, no one would hear the bullets popping. His lackeys would get rid of me in a classic Mexican maneuver as if I disappeared in the thin air walking down Paseo de la Reforma. Adios Amigo! My thoughts sound absurd. But they occur to me nevertheless. Outwardly, I stay cool and carry on.
‘Well, I think I better get going so I can be home in time for dinner. By now, the traffic should have eased somewhat.’ He picks up his gun, slides it back into his briefcase, and is gone as abruptly as he had shown up.
© Haresh Shah 2015
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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