20 worldliteraturetoday.org essay opening photo : eneas de troya author photo : fabien castro July–August 2013 • 21 The Invisible City Alberto Chimal For Alberto Chimal, stock characterizations of The City (think Hemingway’s Paris) are too hard-and-fast. Nodding to Calvino’s Invisible Cities in more than just his title, Chimal’s childhood impressions of Toluca, Mexico, suggest that cities are constructed more from poetry than from steel. M y generation, or almost all of it, grew up in cities. Whether we write or not, when thinking about a personal geography—on a map of the space that surrounds us and influences us—we won’t point out mountains, forests, lakes, or meadows as much as rooms, halls, buildings, and streets. Almost all our outings will be to parks, resorts, and gardens: places that allow the outside world, domesticated and partitioned, to mix with the world we have constructed for ourselves. We will never be, if we write, like Hölderlin, who celebrated nature even in madness, or Conrad, who lived at least part of his work, of the spirit that informs it, in rivers and seas. Of course, no matter how similar the possibilities of experience in cities may be, all cities are different, if not in big ways then in intimate details, for each city dweller. And their influence on writers, then, is equally diverse. This diversity isn’t as obvious as it seems since in every period of literary history, only a few visions of the city have dominated and eclipsed all others, for different reasons: that of Julio Cortázar and his dislocated Paris, for example, or that of T. S. Eliot and his unreal London, or that of Carlos Fuentes ’s transparent region. And it may not be unfair that each of these cities, as private and unique as the perception of those who described them, has been, at least for a moment, for someone, The City in uppercase. But for good or ill, I have had a different experience, and I’d like to propose an example that is close to me: the city where I grew up. Toluca, the city inside a city, is situated less than seventy kilometers from Mexico City, which we call the Distrito Federal. Within a matter of a few decades, Toluca will be gobbled up by the D. F., which grows, like every capital, in every direction. Years before, however, during my childhood , the distance was (a) far enough that it was outside Mexico City, separate from the so-called Área Metropolitana, and (b) close enough to render it irrelevant: it’s always been perceived as farther, or at least less different and striking than Tijuana, Monterrey, or San Cristóbal de las Casas. It must be because Toluca itself is the capital of the State of Mexico: a province that is blurred by the country with which it shares its name. This is important because of a single chance fact: since shortly before my birth, the distance allowed my mother to travel five days a week to the capital to work. Separated from my father soon after I was born, she returned to the back and forth, Monday through Friday, until shortly before her death. Her siblings took care of me as lovingly as they knew how, but the idea of absence, which I became aware of very quickly, stayed with me. I didn’t foresee the occasion to write this essay, nor did I take notes during those crucial years. But there must be something true in my memories, because my childhood, now that I look back at it, was filled primarily with absences : empty spaces. The hallways and rooms, where there was no one, were at times frightening . The streets I learned to see, empty, from the windows of the family car in a series of slow, repeated drives, never before nine at night, in the beginning were an option for lulling me to sleep but later became routine. The bed, which grew immense during my summer fevers, and in which my confused body, as far as I remember , seemed to swell to excess, only later grew Alberto Chimal is regarded as one of...