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That tone infuses the National Palace, where soldiers spend their days directing tourists to the Diego Rivera murals and guarding that tiny fraction of the city’s 2.5 million civil servants who labor in the upstairs offices. The ominous quality exists primarily in the imaginations of those who read history. For centuries this building was the seat of secular power in Mexico. The sixty-three colonial viceroys ruled from here; poor Maximilian, the handsome and doomed Austrian, arrived here in 1863 with his Belgian wife, Carlota, to claim the throne of Mexico; Benito Juárez, the Zapotec Indian lawyer who fought and then executed Maximilian, issued his reforms from its balcony; the dictator Porfirio Diaz entertained British and American oilmen in its salons and sold them huge portions of his country; Zapata and Villa walked its halls; most of the revolutionary presidents of the modern era worked here. But Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the newest Mexican president, labors in Los Pinos on the edge of Chapultepec Park; except on days of patriotic ceremony, the palace is another empty symbol. In the midst of the worst Mexican economic crisis in sixty years, the ominous tone has receded and the tragic has increased.

The Metropolitan Cathedral on the north side of the plaza is another matter. Begun in 1573, consecrated in 1667, and finished in 1813, it is built upon part of the old Aztec ceremonial grounds. For hundreds of years its bishops worked with the inhabitants of the palace to control and exploit Mexico for the profit of God and the distant Spanish throne. But for most native Mexicans in those days, Christianity was a calamity. There were, of course, kind friars and priests who fought for the rights of Indians and tried to preserve the pre-Columbian heritage; but they were exceptions. This cathedral was intended from the beginning to be a symbol of the utter triumph of the Christian god over the gods of the Aztecs. Its gloomy power can best be sensed in the interior, which is high, smoky, and dim. Indian slave labor carved and hand-fitted these slabs of tezontle, cantera, and marble. It is said that there are no nails in the cathedral, except in the hands and feet of the dying Jesus, no iron except on the doors. The place has five naves, fourteen chapels, and a jumble of styles.

Beggars appear from the gloom, their glazed eyes a reproach; they are called pordioseros after the imploring Spanish phrase meaning “for the love of God.” You turn from them to examine the famous Altar of the Kings, and the mind teems with images of what has happened in this injured country for the love of God. Designed in 1737 by Jeronimo de Balbas, the altar is an operatic extravaganza, at once a celebration of death and a vision of heaven, clearly designed by an agnostic who must have hoped somehow to cure his doubts. Everything is gold. The baroque swirl of twisted gold columns, gold angels, gold flowers, gold sculptures, the golden visions of pain and ecstasy, the two dark, gold-framed paintings incorporated into the design, the polychrome statues, the opulent golden glaze applied over the Christian images of suffering and death: All combine to demand submission.

The modern man flees.

And in the bright, hazy sunshine, among Pepsi stands and trinket shops, he wanders down a street on the right called Seminario into the remains of the world the Spanish destroyed.

There is the splendid new museum of the Templo Mayor. Part of it is an excavation of the Great Temple of the city the Aztecs called Tenochtitlán, part of it an exhibit that reconstructs life and culture here before Cortés. Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325 on some islands in the midst of Lake Texcoco. By the time Cortés arrived almost two hundred years later, it had grown into a city of 300,000 inhabitants; fifty thousand white buildings, palaces, and pyramids; exquisite gardens; even a zoo — and a dense, complex civilization that encompassed both astronomy and blood sacrifice. From this city, the Aztecs ruled over an empire of almost 6 million subjects.

The Spaniards were astounded: This city of heathens and barbarians was the size of Seville. Years later the tough old conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo would write: “And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.” No wonder that Cortés, after conquering the Aztecs with guile, courage, gunpowder, and luck, was capable of describing Tenochtitlán in his report to Carlos I of Spain as “the most beautiful city in the world” while determining to wipe it from the face of the earth.