Illustration by Owen Freeman

Laura and I did not make love that afternoon. In truth, we gave it a shot, but it just didn’t happen. Or, at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love. That’s what Laura said, and while we were at it she introduced me to the world of public baths, which from then on, and for a very long time, I would associate with pleasure and play. The first one was, without a doubt, the best. It was called Montezuma’s Gym, and in the foyer some unknown artist had done a mural where you could see the Aztec emperor neck-deep in a pool. Around the edges, close to the monarch but much smaller, smiling men and women bathe. Everyone seems carefree except the king, who looks fixedly out of the mural, as if searching for the improbable spectator, with dark, wide-open eyes in which I often thought I glimpsed terror. The water in the pool is green. The stones are gray. In the background, you can see mountains and storm clouds.

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.

The baths were most crowded at seven, seven-thirty, eight at night. On the sidewalk next to the door, teen-agers stood guard, talking about baseball and pop songs. The hallways echoed with the sinister jokes of workers who’d just come from factories and workshops. In the foyer, old fags, birds of passage, would greet the receptionists and those killing time in the armchairs by first name or nom de guerre. Getting lost in the hallways, nourishing a kind of indiscretion in small doses, like pinches, never ceased to be highly informative. Open or half-open doors, like landslides, like cracks in the earth, usually offered live paintings to the happy observer: groups of naked men who left all movement and action entirely to the steam; teen-agers lost like jaguars in a labyrinth of showers; small but terrifying gestures of athletes, bodybuilders, and loners; a leper’s clothes hanging; little old men drinking Lulú and smiling as they leaned against the wooden door of the Turkish bath. It was easy to make friends, and we did make some. Couples, after passing a few times in the hallways, felt obliged to greet one another. This was owing to a kind of heterosexual solidarity; women, in many public baths, were an absolute minority and it wasn’t uncommon to hear extravagant stories of attacks and harassment, even though, truth is, those tales weren’t very credible.

These kinds of friendships rarely went beyond a beer or a drink in the bar. We’d say hi to one another in the baths and at most we’d take neighboring saunas. After a while, the first to finish would knock on their friends’ door and, without waiting for an answer, holler that they’d be in such-and-such restaurant, waiting. Then the others would leave, they’d go to the restaurant, have a drink or two, and say goodbye until next time. Sometimes the couple would take you into their confidence, the woman or the man, especially if they were married but not to each other; they’d tell about their lives and you’d have to nod, say that’s love, that’s a shame, that’s destiny, that’s children. Tender but bored. The other friendships, which were a bit more turbulent, were the ones where they’d visit your private room. These could get to be just as boring as the first type, but were much more dangerous. They’d show up without prelude, just knock on the door, a strange quick knock, and say, Let me in. They were rarely alone, almost always in threes, two men and a woman or three men; the motives they put forth for such visits tended to be stupid or not too believable: to smoke a little weed, which they couldn’t do in the group showers, or to sell us something or other. Laura always let them in. The first few times, it made me tense, ready to fight and fall blood-soaked on the tiles of the private room. I figured the most logical thing was they were coming to rob us or to rape Laura, or even to rape me, and my nerves were on edge. The visitors knew this, somehow, and they addressed me only when necessity or good manners made it impossible to avoid. All the propositions, deals, and whispers were addressed to Laura. She was the one who let them in, she was the one who asked what the fuck they wanted, she was the one who let them pass through to the room with the divan. (I would listen, from the steam, to how they sat down—first one, then another, then the next—and Laura’s back, unmoving, could be seen through the frosted-glass door separating the steam from that antechamber, which had suddenly been transformed into a mystery.) Finally, I’d get up, put a towel around my waist, and go in. Or a man, a boy, and a girl, who would wave hesitantly when they saw me, as if all along, against all reason, they’d been expecting only Laura and not the two of us; as if they’d only expected to find her. From the divan, their dark eyes never missed a single gesture of hers, while their hands independently rolled the weed.