Roberto Bolaño at the baths

Together, riding a Benelli—they were everywhere then—we attempted to visit all the baths in Mexico City, guided by an absolute eagerness that was a combination of love and play. We never succeeded. On the contrary, as we advanced the abyss opened up around us, the great black scenography of public baths. Just as the hidden face of other cities is in theatres, parks, docks, beaches, labyrinths, churches, brothels, bars, cheap cinemas, old buildings, even supermarkets, the hidden face of Mexico City could be found in the enormous web of public baths, legal, semilegal, and clandestine. Setting our course was simple at first: I asked the boy at Montezuma’s Gym to point me in the direction of some cheap baths. I got five cards and wrote the addresses of a dozen establishments on a piece of paper. These were the first. From them, our search branched off countless times. The schedules varied as much as the buildings did. We arrived at some at 10 A.M. and left at lunchtime. These, as a rule, were bright places with flaking walls, where we could sometimes hear the laughter of teen-agers and the coughing of lost and lonely men, the same men who, a little while later, having collected themselves, would get up and sing boleros. The essence of those places seemed to be limbo, a dead child’s closed eyes. They weren’t very clean, or maybe the cleaning was done later in the day. At others, we’d make our appearance at four or five in the afternoon and wouldn’t leave until dark. That was our most common schedule. The baths at that hour seemed to enjoy, or suffer from, a permanent shadow. That is, a trick shadow, a dome or a palm tree, the closest thing to a marsupial’s pouch; at first you’re grateful for it, but it ends up weighing more than a tombstone.