The boy who worked at Montezuma’s Gym was an orphan, and that was his primary topic of conversation. On the third visit, we became friends. He was only eighteen, and wanted to buy a car, so he was saving everything he could: tips were scant. According to Laura, he was a little slow. I thought he was nice.
In every public bath, there tends to be a fight from time to time. We never saw or heard any there. The clients, conditioned by some unknown mechanism, respected and obeyed every word of the orphan’s instructions. Also, to be fair, there weren’t very many people, and that’s something I’ll never be able to explain, since it was a clean place, relatively modern, with individual saunas for taking steam baths, bar service in the saunas, and, above all, cheap. There, in Sauna 10, I saw Laura naked for the first time, and all I could do was smile and touch her shoulder and say I didn’t know which valve to turn to make the steam come out.
The saunas, though it might be more precise to call them private rooms, were a set of two tiny chambers connected by a glass door. In the first, there was usually a divan—an old divan reminiscent of psychoanalysis and bordellos—a folding table, and a coatrack; the second chamber was the actual steam bath, with a hot and cold shower and a bench of azulejo tiles against the wall, beneath which were hidden the tubes that released the steam. Moving from one vestibule to the next was extraordinary, especially if the steam was already so thick that we couldn’t see each other. Then we would open the door and head into the chamber with the divan, where everything was clear, and behind us, like the filaments of a dream, clouds of steam slipped by and quickly disappeared. Lying there, holding hands, we would listen or try to listen to the barely perceptible sounds of the gym while our bodies cooled. Practically freezing, submerged in silence, we would finally hear the purr welling up through the floor and the walls, the catlike whir of hot pipes and boilers that stoked the business from some secret place in the building.
One day I’ll wander around in here, Laura said. Her experience raiding public baths was greater than mine, which wasn’t saying much, considering I’d never before crossed the threshold of such an establishment. Nevertheless, she said she knew nothing of baths. Not enough. She’d gone a couple of times with X and, before X, with a guy who was twice her age and whom she always referred to with mysterious phrases. In total, she hadn’t been more than ten times, always to the same place, Montezuma’s Gym.
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.
