The City on the Lake

La Gaviota — Anton Chekhov

“They taught us in school that Mexico City was founded on a lake. What they didn’t tell us is that the lake never went anywhere. There are subtle reminders during the rainy season, and less subtle ones during earthquakes. However much we want to believe we walk on solid ground, we still live in a lake.” — RS

I walked to the theater from Roma Norte to Juárez listening to The Cure’s “Disintegration” after a bitterer mocha than expected over a soft Sunday afternoon conversation.

“Plainsong,” then “Pictures of You.” Calle Berlín appeared in Juárez and reminded me of “Esto no es Berlín”: another CDMX, another decade, another life. Halfway through “Pictures of You,” I glanced at the map, tried to put the phone back in my pocket, and inadvertently hit the screen.

Tears for Fears.

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

I didn’t change it back.

I got assigned to seat C13 at the Foro Lucerna theater. All I was allowed to choose was the row. Once inside, C13 felt too far back, so I waited until the doors closed and quickly moved one row forward to an empty B13. I kept the thirteen, which led me to wonder whether Johnny Cash and Glenn Danzig ever went out for a beer together.

I learned later that Irina, the mother in the story, was so superstitious about the number thirteen that her older brother Pyotr joked she had gone from twelve to fourteen years old in her youth to avoid it. There was nothing magical in my move earlier. I just wanted to see better.

It’s funny how easily proximity becomes its own blindness. Schopenhauer’s porcupines came to mind: move closer for warmth and the quills begin to matter. I often want to see everything from close enough to touch it, then wonder why the view becomes blurry.

At the beginning, Nina performed Konstantin’s play. I sneaked a photograph at the risk of being expelled from the theater. I felt confident they would let me stay if I apologized for not knowing the rule — a more solid strategy when deliberately avoiding learning it.

There wasn’t a single non-tragic character in the play.

Konstantin wanted to be a misunderstood artist. That was aspirational as long as nobody understood him. Rejection gave shape to the person he believed himself to be: the wounded innovator, the unrecognized son, the man surrounded by people too small to see what he saw.

Then the inconvenient happened. People began to understand him. They read him, then published him. And then they favorably reviewed him. The great Boris, whom he envied, brought him a literary magazine full of glowing reviews of his work.

“Words, words, words,” Konstantin said.

Failure hurts. But success can be treacherous. Failure lets you preserve the dream of what recognition would have fixed. Success removes that excuse. You cannot not know what you know.

Alguien que no valora lo que tiene es exactamente igual que quien no tiene nada.

Konstantin had talent, recognition, readers, the lake, a mother who could still wound him because she still mattered, Masha’s love, Nina’s possible love… None of it could become possession because his identity required absence. Even his failed attempt at suicide seemed less like an escape than a demand to be seen. He could make pain visible, but he could not make himself present.

But Nina remained. Rather, whatever Nina was to Konstantin remained.

The girl. The actress. The lake. The possibility of another life. Something to want. All of it came back wrapped in seagull feathers dripping with blood.

Boris had once looked at the living seagull and found a story: a man sees something happy by a lake and, because he has nothing better to do, destroys it. He did something uncomfortably similar with Nina. She was young, naive, dreamy, available to wonder. He took her to the city, toward himself, to where the life she imagined was possible. But this fragile bird did not survive the trip intact.

—

She once accused me of seducing women not because I wanted them, but because I was bored. Because I could, and had nothing better to do. I remember the accusation more clearly than I would like to. If I slept, it would wake me up at night. I now know that I didn’t get to fully internalize its true meaning at the time. Reading comprehension is harder when words hurt.

—

Nina survived. When she returned, she was damaged, abandoned, professionally battered, but still moving. She had learned to fail.

The dead seagull is what was done to her. It did not have to become her. She could wear masks instead. She could become other people for a living, pretend, perform, disappear into roles and return as a different person each time. Acting was no longer merely the dream that took her away from the lake. It became her lifeline. The critics were cruel. Boris left her. Her baby died. And the audience rejected her. But she still went on.

Everybody wants to rule the world. Nina seemed to be the one character from the play who learned she couldn’t and didn’t have to.

Pyotr had wanted to perform too. He had wanted to sing and act and jump and skip and love before he became a judge. He once tried for a singing engagement and was told that his voice was very powerful, but also revolting.

He tried once and gave up. His desire did not return the favor.

“El hombre que quiso.” The man who wanted. He joked that it should be the title of a book. He had spent a lifetime turning the life he hadn’t lived into comedy, carrying it like his oxygen tank long before his body required a literal one.

Those who can’t act become critics. Those who can’t live, judge. He wanted to become a performer; he became a Judge instead.

By the time the village life asphyxiated him and he longed to return to the city, his body had joined the conspiracy. He could no longer support his own desire. El hombre que quiso no puede ya siquiera respirar por sí mismo.

He joked anyway. Comedy had become the last refuge of his broken spirit.

Yevgeny didn’t need to joke at all. It had been thirty years of demanding work. He had lived a life of women, travel, medicine, and logic. If something became heavy enough, too close, too real… there was always a bridge leading somewhere else.

He saved his money and used it to travel the world. He moved through women the same way he moved through cities. He successfully avoided the responsibilities of fatherhood and still partially satisfied his paternal instincts by becoming the man Masha could admire, resent, trust, and consult. He could stand beside feelings, inspect them, explain them, occasionally sleep with them, but always keep moving.

Masha told Yevgeny that they were similar. He didn’t believe her. Neither did I. She dressed in black, drank excessively, smoked like a house on fire, and made a home of her misfortune. Some of her tragedy was real. Some of it she seemed determined to create. Her love for Konstantin rested safely inside his rejection: if life refused to smile at her, then she was under no obligation to live courageously.

She married Semyon to forget Konstantin, and carried her love for the latter into her new life. Semyon worried about money, work, education, housing… practical life. Around him everyone was drowning in metaphysics. But Semyon… he lived in another postal code.

Polina, in maddening love with Yevgeny, saw the trap and stayed in it anyway. Boris could write other people into stories while remaining strangely helpless before his own appetites. Irina rejected whatever threatened the version of herself she needed to preserve: youth, relevance, the stage, the gaze. Motherhood asked her to nurture someone whose life would take priority over her own. She could not bear to leave the center of the stage and risk disappearing.

Semyon loved Masha, Masha loved Konstantin, Konstantin loved Nina, Nina loved Boris. Boris remained tied elsewhere. Polina wanted to be Yevgeny’s final anchor.

Then Nina left.

The others returned to the table, to conversation, to the small banalities people hold onto to make a room inhabitable, and life bearable.

A gunshot wounded the silence.

Yevgeny went to look.

He returned and gave everyone a mechanical explanation. Something in his medicine cabinet had exploded. He turned catastrophe into an object.

Then, quietly, he pulled Boris aside. “Make up an excuse and take her back to the city right away.”

Konstantin had shot himself again. This time he was successful.

Earlier, I thought of Yevgeny’s distance as just another escape mechanism. But distance can do more than protect a person’s feelings. Sometimes it protects those standing beside him. He did not let her see it. He did not turn her son’s body into spectacle. He threw a temporary shadow over the truth, just until she could be removed from the scene. Perhaps he could not always put himself inside another person’s shoes. But he knew that shoes can hurt. He knew very well about pain.

Nina knew about it.

Pyotr did too.

Konstantin barely survived it, and then he didn’t.

Yevgeny thought he could escape it.

Polina endured it.

Masha wrapped herself in it.

Semyon buried it under practical concerns.

—

I walked slowly toward the exit when the curtains fell, heavily, not making a sound. I felt like those curtains. It took me a moment to remember that this all had only been a play, one that contained another play and treated its fiction as reality. I was no longer sure which layer had earned the privilege of being called real.

The crew had left pieces of the evening on a table: the dead seagull, the theatrical mask Yevgeny gifted Konstantin, Pyotr’s oxygen tank, Nina’s red sunglasses, fragments of a story that no longer had anyone to perform for.

I took a hurried photo of the props, already delinquent from shooting Nina earlier. Only afterwards did I notice my shadow in it too.

Outside, on its wall, Librería Teorema exhibited the drawing of a writer collapsed over books, bottle and quill. I took a small and badly needed break.

Farther on, the pavement asked:

“I love your scent, what is it?”

“Wine.”

Or was it “Mine.”? I touched the painted words and felt a chill in my bones, as if I had been swimming through the city all along.

I stopped at home to pick up my computer and went to Loup Bar. I tasted a few reds without liking any until Edil, the bartender, offered to open a new bottle for me. The first taste felt like a kiss from someone who came back after years of absence. Out of a combination of moral obligation to Edil, and a little excitement about this amazing wine from Querétaro, in Mexico, I asked for the bottle to keep the pours going at my own leisure.

Tierra de Peña, 2023.

I put in writing what was still in my mind. A few hours later I called it a night.

By 6pm the following evening, I was waiting for some friends outside Baltra bar in Condesa. I got there early, a few minutes before they opened. The manager opened the doors, turned on the lights, and started the music. The first song?

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World”

There has been a lot of light these few days. More than enough shadow too.

I drank from the land I know, of solitude threaded with wanderlust, and thought about the stories I lived through these days in Mexico City. I was present in all of them, for a change. And I also witnessed them from that corner where only my shadow became visible.

Too much light can blind, and too much shadow can hide. The witness has to step aside and let the water flow.

In the end, all that’s left is our shadow.

Insomnia Street