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A few years ago I spent two months in Mexico City without ever glimpsing the sky. Every day its more than thirty thousand factories and 3 million buses, trucks, and automobiles pump fifteen thousand tons of microcarbons, metal, dust, chemicals, and bacteria into the thin air. That winter (temperature inversions are most common from November to the end of February) more than two hundred birds fell dead one morning upon the manicured lawns of the Lomas de Chapultepec, killed by the poisoned air. Last April the environmentalist Homero Aridjis, president of the Group of 100, did laboratory tests on twelve dead sparrows found in the Alameda Park. Six birds had high levels of lead, mercury, cadmium, and chromium, along with pesticides, in their lungs, livers, and hearts. The immune system of one bird had been damaged by the high chromium levels. Employees of the American embassy are entitled to a hardship allowance simply because they have the unfortunate habit of breathing. Some Mexican ecologists estimate that thirty thousand people die every year of respiratory diseases caused by la contamination. It is sickening to see, worse to breathe, particularly if you were here in the fifties when the population was about 3.5 million and each morning you could gaze from a high window and see the volcanoes, Popocatéptl and Ixtaccíhuatl, framed against the blank sky. In those years, this was a great big wonderful city.

When I’m here now, I still carry that beautiful lost city around in my head, and that helps explain my irrational affection for a place that I know doesn’t love me back. It also underlines my sense of horror. I know that the city now contains thousands of beggars; I know that some twenty thousand human beings make their living by picking through its seven immense garbage dumps, to which are added fifteen thousand tons of garbage every day; I know that, in spite of pollution and poverty and the ravages of the September 19, 1985, earthquake, hundreds of people still arrive from the hungry provinces every day, and that by the year 2000 the population could reach 30 million. The city now is simply immense, its more than one thousand colonias (neighborhoods) spreading thirty-five to forty miles in all directions from the Zocalo. It has spilled into the Valley of Mexico, where it has eaten what was once the richest farmland in the country. Mexico City is so large now that it actually contains a 535th Street.

And yet I still feel a small tremble of a lover’s excitement when I get off the airplane, still love that first moment among Mexicans, feeling drowned in vowels, can still detect in odd drafts the old aroma of the city, that intangible compound of charcoal fires, tortillas, flowers, herbs. In some way, here I am always twenty-one: walking down the Paseo de la Reforma at dusk, when the paths were still made of hard-packed earth instead of tiles; listening to Cuco Sanchez sing “La Cama de Piedra” from the jukebox of that cantina on Melchor Ocampo; waiting for a girl named Yolanda in the Alameda Park with my hair freshly cut and my shoes shined and wondering why she is late.

So I come here now and see the horror, and I can also see the city that has survived, the city that was here when I was young, the city that existed long before I ever walked the earth. The Zocalo remains the heart of that city and the very heart of the country of Mexico. All roads in the republic are marked in kilometers leading to this immense place — the largest public square in the Western Hemisphere. As it did in the fifties, the Zocalo still gives off the aura of a tremendous, inarticulate sadness. Once there was a park here, palm trees, a depot for trolley cars; today, when not occupied with the circuses of the state, it is a bald, paved plain, devoid of green, with a Mexican flag standing in the center of the emptiness. The reason for its denuding is unclear; the most plausible explanation involves the need for a clear field of fire for the palace guards in the event of revolutionary unpleasantness. One tenet in the military version of urban design is that you cannot hide a regiment behind a flagpole.

But the bleak emptiness doesn’t fully explain the sadness. Wandering under the arcades along the side of the square, I remembered a passage in the brilliant 1957 travel book on Mexico by the Brazilian novelist Erico Verissimo. Looking at the Zocalo, he spoke of the city’s “dark, ominous tone that gives us the sensation that something tragic is always about to occur — a murder, an earthquake, a revolution.”