Column without end, part 19

By Bart Barry-

Editor’s note: For part 18, please click here

MEXICO CITY – Beautiful is a word I didn’t think to
associate with this city before visiting because I’d not heard anyone call it
that, and so perhaps I’ll be its first.  After
nearly a dozen encounters with its airport I am for a first time without its
airport, in La Condesa neighborhood specifically (11 kilometers west of Romanza
Gym), and nearly enchanted by the city’s beauty.

It is doubtful either the Brothers Marquez, on
their first trip to Romanza, or their mentor and trainer, Nacho Beristain, would
recognize very much of their city that I’ve seen and plan to describe.  This neighborhood is “fifí”; a playfully
derogatory Spanish term, like “spoiled” or “snobbish”, that invests its target
with a pride proportionate to its speaker’s envy.  It is Barcelona much more than Ciudad Juarez
and remarkably devoid of what dust and noise dominates most Latin American
capitals from here to Patagonia.

The people are more courteous, or at least less
numerous, than anticipated.  And about
them, here’s an observational parallel: The populations of Mexico’s two largest
cities mirror the populations of the United States’ two largest cities both in
appearance and mien.  Mexico’s
second-most-populous city, Guadalajara, has the beautiful people – just like Los
Angeles.  Mexico’s most-populous city,
this one, has the ambitious ones – just like New York.  There’s a quicker pace here than in Guadalajara;
one imagines it far easier to move from here than to move to here; if few
passersby could pass by beauty alone in Guadalajara, they come from a place
where no one passes by beauty alone.

This neighborhood is aspirational bohemian (a
redundancy in most cases, that) and traffics in the expected incongruencies of
the combination.  Lots of serious eyeglass
frames and fashion beards complemented by an inexplicable tendency to sit among
familiars and exaggerate to strangers – effectively, to care less about the
opinions of those you see daily than those whom you’ll never see again.  In the Massachusetts of my youth we’d’ve
called most guys here “faggy”, but the slur strikes me as entirely
inappropriate today for more than just the obvious reason.

Thirty-five years ago we called each other by gay
slurs in large part because we didn’t know any gay people, or if we did, we
didn’t know we did – I can confidently state I never called a gay classmate by
a gay slur because, by dint of inexperience and misperception, the guys I
targeted went on to have wives and children. 
We used gay slurs to imply something like fifí – delicate, preoccupied
by others’ judgments, unlikely to mate. 
And therein lies an irony one sees quite a bit in this city but especially
in Nuevo Polanco, with its art collections and homage plazas built by Carlos
Slim.

The only obviously mated folks are the gay
ones.  While their ostensibly
heterosexual peers engage with platonic hugs and fraternal banter, the men who
like men are kissing, the women who like women are holding hands, the only
couples anyone can say with confidence are coupled share the same gender.  It’s delicious ironic for an American raised
in the airhead morality of “family values” th’t in 2019 the only men in our
continent’s largest city secure enough in their masculinity to show public love
are those gazing longingly in other men’s eyes.

Dude, this is getting uncomfortable.  Can we get back to Juan Manuel or Rafael?

I thought of them a bit a few days ago in Papalote
Museo del Niño, this country’s largest children’s museum, as the young guides
doggedly presented their educational wares to father and son alike.  Unlike their lessinspired American
counterparts in San Antonio’s DoSeum, a sister venue with a video feed into
Papalote, coincidentally, Mexican guides do not allow failures in their
exhibitions.  You sit at a table, whether
to assemble from papercups a windtunnel-ready flying saucer or to repair a
deadbolt lock, and you do not leave till your work is complete – lest a guide
less than half your age lecture you on what a poor example you’re setting as a
quitter.  And it works.  You feel triumphant when you eventually win
that teenager’s stern approval.

It made me wonder what Beristain told the Brothers
Marquez during their first week in his gym. 
Did he have to tell them the consequences of their new vocation? did he
have to invest them with the seriousness of their hoped-for craft? was Rafael
already the more physically gifted specimen? was it obvious to Beristain?

At Castillo de Chapultepec the next day I thought
of Marco Antonio Barrera, as I often do. 
Also a chilango – and that’s a loaded term, too, as Ciudad de Mexico is
no longer a federal district but recently a state of its own surrounded by a
state named Mexico in a country named Mexico, though a city-cum-state whose
residents may or may not still call themselves chilangos and probably should be
offended if you were to – Barrera somehow doesn’t belong in a boxing gym, in my
imagining of him.  While Juan Manuel
Marquez labors under Beristain’s tyrannical tutelage in Romanza, Barrera gazes
across his city’s extraordinarily large forest park from the ramparts of Maximilian’s
royal home and relies solely on contempt for opponents to prepare himself.

Did you forget Barrera and Marquez fought 12 years
ago?  I had.  Then it came to me while touring the castle,
in a memory of Barrera’s petulant scowl when he dropped Marquez on his gloves
at the end of round 7, paused for two full beats to line him up, and then
clocked his felled opponent with a right uppercut.  Cold contempt, not rage – an almost comical
contempt.

A beautiful city filled with aspirational
inhabitants incubated contempt, apparently, in one of our beloved sport’s
largest brains.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry