Bernardo Bátiz V.
M
and I mean my city: Mexico, capital of the country where I was born some years ago; of which I say as a joke that “we grew up together.” His father’s house was in the Algarín neighborhood, on Manuel Navarrete Street, and the Río de la Piedad ran two blocks away; Beyond stretched the plains where the lines of avenues and streets of the colonies that arose to the south began.
The river was a trickle of muddy water, between two high banks on each side of the flow, which received garbage, dead cats or dogs, food scraps, and discarded objects from some neighbors; no crystalline water, on the contrary, muddy, which grew in wet weather. Its course goes the opposite of the sun, from west to east, seeking the lower parts, beyond the plains of Balbuena where the brand new airport was already located, to empty into Lake Texcoco.
Near the edge, on Manuel Navarrete Street, there was a bicycle rental business; I preferred a 24 tread, “The Reinforced One,” because from one side to the other of the handlebar it had a tube welded on each side “to reinforce it,” the manager said. I would fly pedaling or quickly descending along the edge of the river, leaning on the tube that gave that bike its name; I think it was to have the hands less separated and the posture of a professional runner and thus print greater speed when going towards the lonely street whose name I mentioned. This happened when I was 10 or 11 years old; We had not yet moved to the Álamos neighborhood, where I spent my adolescence and youth.
I miss all this and add something else, in congruence with the title of this article; On the banks of the river there was not a single tree, nor do I remember any in Niño Perdido or Bolívar, which were the avenues with bridges for vehicles to cross the squalid stream; I remember, yes, a solitary “little thunder” near my house, in front of that of Luis Cabrera, a politician of some renown at the time.
But what I want to get at with these somewhat idle reflections and remembrances is an observation of mine: although both in my house and in that of other neighbors, not trees were planted in the patios or corrals, but various ornamental plants or some vegetables to complete the daily menu, I do not forget a leafy chayote that shaded the small backyard and provided us with its thorny fruits, which once cleaned and stewed tasted heavenly, and I do not forget the “chinchayotes” (fat chayote roots), which, raw or stewed by my grandmother, completed our diet every year’s end.
Much later, when I was a deputy for the party in which I was then beginning to participate in politics, I read an article (which I have not had the patience to search for) in which Mr. Daniel Cosío Villegas, with all the weight of his authority as a recognized intellectual, criticized the then regent of Mexico City, Mr. Octavio Senties, for filling the streets with those who Mr. Daniel, not without irony, called “Don Octavio’s varejones.”
Of course, and from a distance, it is evident that Don Daniel’s ironic criticism was wrong: those scrawny bastards who, overnight and by order of the regent, appeared everywhere in the city and later others, many more, planted by other heads of government, delegates and mayors, and also neighbors, became trees and have transformed the city that I knew as a child.
In those years, to see trees, run around and play among them, my father took us either to the Alameda, in the center of the city, in front of the Correo and Bellas Artes palaces, or to the Chapultepec Forest, with its lake and castle. I remember my father, Don José Bátiz Grajales, then employed in the central office of a bank, in his shirt sleeves, rowing a boat through the calm waters of our not very large, but very visited lake of Chapultepec, which was surrounded by ahuehuetes. As passengers on the boat, my brothers and I.
But in the rest of the city, the truth is that, except for a few avenues and a few parks, it looks like a desert; The city was a large slab of concrete and asphalt.
Life flies away; Decades later, he became first an opposition politician and then a public servant, while the city became a gigantic city, according to some, the largest in the world, and against the predictions of many and largely thanks to “Don Octavio’s varejones”, into a tree-lined city, very tree-lined, especially in the colonies south of the beautiful and historic first square, half colonial, half modern.
Now, to go from my house to work, I cross three town halls and as an accomplished walker, I can be satisfied to see that trees abound and fulfill functions of decoration, shade, but mainly support so that we city dwellers have fresh air; I always boast of being a native and inhabitant of “the largest and most beautiful city in the world” and even more so because its trees are now countless.
