THE EARTHQUAKE/EL TEMBLOR

This past week Mexico has been commemorating the 40th anniversary of the massive earthquake that struck Mexico City on September 19, 1985, leaving up to 40,000 dead, some 30,000 injured, and over five billion dollars in damage.

I was in Mexico City that fateful morning.

To this day, when I visit the city, I sleep with my shoes, pants, and wallet next to the door. I'm sure others who lived through the 1985 earthquake go through similar rituals - even if mine, with its suggestion of running out into the street with nothing but shoes and pants and wallet, makes for a strange, cartoonish, completely inadequate response to an event that exceeds human control in any case.

Raised along California's San Andreas Fault, I'd lived through my share of quakes. Back home, I'd stared up at ceilings sprouting a netting of cracks, tumbled to the floor among books and crockery, listened to car alarms and dogs’ howls spread like a tide across a shuddering landscape, watched chimneys separate from houses. I’d felt the earth move under my feet for reasons other than love. But the Mexico City earthquake, all three plus minutes of it, stayed with me as no other had. The capital still suffers tremors and quakes regularly, but none to equal that one. Nobody really knows how many fell that September morning. 56,000 buildings destroyed or damaged, a half million left homeless. Rubble was still being excavated years later, and gaps on the city mark leveled neighborhoods that were never rebuilt. To Mexico City, already reeling at the time from crime, poverty, overpopulation, corruption, and toxic contamination, the 1985 earthquake heaped injury upon insult. It changed the face of the city, and also its heart.

It was my first year living in Mexico. Foreign rights to a recently published novel, Opium, had been sold to British and French publishers, and I was on my way to Europe to meet them. My wife and I had arrived in the city the day before and taken a room at the Guardiola, a small hotel in the centro where we’d stayed before.

The next morning at 7:00 we were out on Calle Madero, flagging down a taxi. We'd been advised to get to the airport early, as the peso was falling hourly and our ticket prices might be revised upward, taking extra time. The streets leading away from downtown were clear, and in twenty minutes we were at the Benito Juárez Airport. Our fare price held and check-in went quickly, leaving us time for breakfast.

The restaurant was midway down a long terminal, reached by way of a public exhibition space that - amazing to me, if typical of Mexico - showed the work of major artists right in the middle of the airport. We paused to look at a haunting set of etchings by the Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo - mythological turtles, rabbits, dream figures - then hauled our carry-on bags into an American-style coffee shop. A hostess seated us along a back wall in a pink leatherette booth beneath some floral-patterned stained glass windows and handed us laminated menus.

Soon after the coffee arrived, it began sloshing on the table. I gripped my cup, but it was the table that was heaving. I looked at my wife. Crooked Mexican table, let's call the waiter, he’ll slip a matchbook or a shim under it.

No, the entire room was undulating. Earthquake.

I looked up at the stained glass windows. ”If they crack, let’s slide under the table.”

In California, earthquakes tend to be short and jiggle like a camera shaking. This one was long and heaving, like being in a tiny skiff in the backwash of a ship - a bilious rocking that didn't stop. I heard stucco, cement, and steel shifting behind the walls.

The lights went out, leaving only the cathode screens of the arrivals/departures monitors glowing eerily off some generator. A woman in another booth giggled improbably. We clutched the table, prepared to slide under. This quake wouldn't stop. The day before in the Zócalo I’d gazed at a maquette of old Tenochtitlán’s canals and floating gardens. Now contemporary Mexico was pitching like a drunk on the lake it was built on.

At last the shaking stopped. The room settled for a moment. Then an aftershock pitched us sideways. Pieces of plaster hit the table. Stillness again. Then the lights seeped back on. Nervous conversation broke out. I looked up at the pink stucco wall, matted with small cracks, wide ones where it met the ceiling. In the next minutes I heard three new Spanish words: temblor, terremoto, sismo. They all meant the same thing.

A waiter brought coffee refills, but customers were hastily rising to leave. We joined them, paid for our coffee, and hurried out of the low-ceilinged restaurant.

In the terminal corridor, people walked dazedly past, their visages drained. Long, ugly cracks veined the soaring pink walls. We cleared passport control and headed for the waiting area, having no idea what to expect; but the idea of getting up in the air and off the earth appealed. An announcement in Spanish said that our departure would be delayed - something about checking for broken fuel lines. We sat as far as possible away from the high windows facing the runway, waiting. Small aftershocks rippled through the airport; they felt like riding a bus over rough road. An hour later the call to board came.

As the plane rose aloft, the pilot announced we'd be making an unscheduled stop in Tampa to take on extra fuel. From a window seat as the plane circled the city, I looked out and saw billowing reddish dust covering the Metropolis like a shroud. “That's the worst smog I've ever seen,” I said.

It wasn't until we were changing planes at Dulles that we saw the first headline: KILLER QUAKE HITS MEXICO.

That wasn't smog blanketing Mexico City but the roiling red smoke of apocalypse.

*

At Heathrow, waiting for baggage, we read the first accounts. The quake hit at 7:50 A.M., its epicenter somewhere southwest of Mexico City. The capital had suffered severe damage: death, injuries, hundreds of people missing, scores of buildings destroyed. Crews digging in the rubble, rescue teams flying in from the United States, Japan. Aftershocks continued, some almost as strong as the original quake. Entire sections of Mexico City had been leveled, the downtown area around the Zócalo hit the worst. The American ambassador, flying over the scene, had estimated 10,000 dead. The figure would go much higher.

Leaving the airport, we glimpsed another headline: MEXICO DESTROYED. A photo showed downtown Alameda Park, and a pile of rubble where the Hotel Regis, home to retired theater folk, had stood. All residents were presumed dead, the caption said. We’d passed it only the afternoon before, had coffee in the old cafe next door. Now it was a crater in the ground. In the cab into London, my wife said "We'd better call our parents. They probably think we're dead.”

What remained of Mexico City? Was the Hotel Guardiola still standing? The depth of our worries surprised us: our Mexico suffered. Had San Miguel been hit? Sick at heart, we tried to call but all lines into Mexico were down. We reached our families in California: indeed they’d feared the worst.

In days to follow, we tracked the devastation in the European papers. The quake’s epicenter had been 230 miles southwest of Mexico City, damaging Acapulco and other areas as well. Aftershocks as high as 7.3 continue to rattle the country.Over 100,000 people homeless, countless numbers injured. Football stadiums turned into morgues. Editors and publishers I visited wanted to know about the Mexican tragedy. Confusion between the word “Mexico” and “Mexico City” gradually cleared up: no, the whole country hadn't been destroyed, not even the entire city.

For days, survivors were found among the ruins. A baby dug up alive six days after the quake was deemed a miracle. In the papers and on television we saw images of ruined buildings, grief-stricken families, rescue teams around Alameda Park.

On the day we arrived in Paris, the front page of the International Herald Tribune ran a photo of the cracked facade of the Hotel Del Prado, where we’d just booked rooms for our parents’planned visit before we left, its windows boarded shut.

Our whole trip was haunted by news of el gran temblor.

*

Two weeks after the quake, we flew back to Mexico on the emptiest plane I've ever taken. A dozen passengers at most, mainly Red Cross workers. As the plane flattened onto the Benito Juárez Airport runway, we wondered what we'd find.

In the airport building, masons on tall scaffolding spackled rifts in the walls. The restaurant where we'd endured the quake was cordoned off. From the window of the taxi taking us downtown, we looked out at blocks of gutted buildings, slumped houses. Metal beams dangling from structures like cracked branches. The closer to the center, the worse it got. The taxi driver told us a whole apartment building had come down in Tlatelolco Plaza, leaving the surviving residents homeless, the government deaf to their pleas, the corrupt contractors who built with cheap materials and violated codes disclaiming responsibility. A few blocks from the Zócalo, we saw an indelible image of futility: a lone worker atop a ruined skyscraper, swinging a pickaxe. How many years, at that rate, to demolish it?

The driver let us off in front of the Hotel Guardiola, where we’d awoken the morning of the quake. Wide cracks zigzagged down the stone facade. The entrance was boarded up. (It would never reopen.) Dazedly we stepped among piles of cement and masonry. Jagged fissures stabbed the crumpled window jambs of the 4th floor room where we’d stayed, its panes blown out. “If we hadn't left early to change our tickets…” my wife said somberly.

The Alameda looked like a bomb had hit it. Buldings slumped like sandbags, leaving views of the block behind; in others, upper floors had collapsed into lower ones as if someone has smashed a fish down on a wedding cake. Clouds of dust rose from the fallen Hotel Regis as rescue crews shifted debris and heavy machinery cut into the ruins.

In front of the Hotel Del Prado, a work crew was bearing a damaged section of wall with Diego Rivera's famed lobby mural Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park out into the very park it illustrates - a surreal sight the painter would surely have noted.

We dragged our bags to the Hotel Majestic on the Zócalo, whose 17th century stone structure had suffered little damage, and booked an interior room for the night. We slept uneasily in our clothes.

The next morning, we called our friends Carlos and Elenita in San Miguel.

“Only the chandeliers swayed,” Carlos said. “A couple of books fell from the shelves. Mexico City is fucked, we hear. Things are okay here.”

Elenita got on the line. “Come home,” she said.