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Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse

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Chapter 1

Mexico (Not Tenochtitlan)

Dear Doctor, please come to the above address ASAP.

Bring Bernice and Ace if they are with you. Urgent!!! –

CXA, 4 December 1993

* * *

Mexico City, 1994

The Doctor stood alone in the darkness, listening to the city breathe.

Had you been watching from above – say, from a high‐rise over Guatemala Street – you would have seen Mexico City stretching away to every horizon, buildings crammed together under an umbrella of industrial filth. The stars were blotted out. There were more houses and cars and flats and dogs and shops and garbage and streets and cockroaches and people than you could possibly have imagined.

The Doctor heard Mexico breathing. Something industrial, far away, pounding like a giant heart. The background chatter of the chilangos, the city dwellers, awake in the steamy midnight. A car skidding its tyres. A bell tolling. A shout. A CD playing. Snores. The sounds swelled together to become the city’s pulse, its music.

If you had been watching from the high‐rise, and your eyes were sharp enough, you might have seen him there – a shadow amongst the shadows, ignored by the passers‐by. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted, his face taut and yet relaxed with concentration. He leaned on his umbrella, a small, almost comical figure in his battered fedora and his crumpled white suit. You might even have mistaken him for human.

You might have wondered what he was doing there, standing alone and unnoticed.

But if you happened to be Huitzilin, standing at the window of the hotel room with one ghost hand pushing back the curtains, you would have known. And you might have smiled. There you were, a mere eight floors above him, winning the game of hide and seek.

* * *

But the story does not begin at midnight on Guatemala Street. It begins the morning before, in room 104 of the Hospital of Our Lady.

The sunlight oozed through a gap in the venetian blinds. It crept across the face of a man in his forties, alone in the pale green bed in the pale green room. There were no flowers.

His skin was Indian dark, his hair Indian black, shot through with early grey. He was thin, and even in sleep his face was tense. The skin around his eyes was deeply lined with worry. One hand held onto the bedclothes, clutching them to his chest, rising and falling in the quiet rhythm of sleep.

A door slammed. Cristián jerked awake with a cry.

He lay there for a few seconds, taking deep breaths, his heart thumping irregularly somewhere in the vicinity of his mouth. Telling himself it was right, all right, everything was going to be all right.

He had been in hospital for three weeks.

The Doctor still had not answered his message.

But it would be all right. Give him time, he thought.

He climbed out of bed with difficulty. His right arm was in a sling, the hand curled in the cloth like a dead spider. He wriggled his feet into his slippers and went to the window, tugging the blinds open.

Mexico looked in on him. The sky was full of grey, a haze of filth that clung to the windows. The sun was hot and bright somewhere behind that shroud; he could feel its warmth when he pressed his fingers to the glass.

Distantly, the sun was glinting off El Angel, the golden statue blowing its trumpet over the Paseo de la Reforma. He wondered how many steps there were in the statue’s base now. Long ago his father had told him that as Mexico City sank into the swamp, new steps had to be added to keep the statue at the same level. It had occurred to the four‐year‐old Cristián Xochitl Alvarez that Mexico City was sinking away from the angel, sinking away from heaven.

Down in the street, a boy who couldn’t be older than nine was eating petrol fire from a wooden loop. The drivers tossed him small change as they stopped at the lights. Cristián pressed his forehead to the glass and wondered if the four‐year‐old had been right.

There was a small noise behind him, and he