Nonetheless, the elusory cafés of Mexico City represented singular refuges for reinventing the real with words.

In my adolescence North American-style diners were beginning to develop, but there was only one Vips and only one Denny’s. Although Sanborns had several locations already, the franchise coffee shop wasn’t omnipresent yet. Those of us who were starting to read would search out secluded cafés to hold gatherings that resembled conspiracies, not for what we said but for the scarcity of participants and the fanaticism we assumed.

From my rambling childhood, I passed to the sedentary life of cafés. There have never been many of them in Mexico City. If you don’t count the spots started by Cubans and Spaniards in the centro, among us the café has never occupied the preeminent place it has in other metropolises. What’s more, the North American-style chains have bit by bit replaced the little cafés where the owner would smoke behind the counter with a dog on a comfortable cushion at his side, the unique, unrepeatable places, the grottos of the initiates.

The capital’s best-known café is the Casa de los Azulejos, or House of Tiles, built by a revanchist Spaniard looking to get back at the authoritarian father who had told him, “You won’t even be able to build a house of tiles” (meaning a toy house). The stately building has a mural by José Clemente Orozco in its staircase. Upstairs there’s a bar with a little window in the shape of a flower which gives onto one of the best views of the centro histórico, dominated by domes and bell towers.

The Zapatistas ate breakfast at Sanborns after taking the capital in 1914 and left behind the indelible image of a people receiving for the first time the providential gift of pan dulce.

The writer Carlos Monsiváis liked to ask: “What percentage of you belongs to Slim?”

This building of indubitable lineage was the first in a chain that now belongs to Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world. The writer Carlos Monsiváis liked to ask: “What percentage of you belongs to Slim?” As investors own stakes in a boxer, so the owner of Sanborns controls a part of the life of every Mexican. The Casa de los Azulejos is merely the nucleus of an empire of ubiquitous businesses which spans the entire country. In 1990 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari initiated the privatization of Teléfonos de México. Slim was handed the company as an absolute monopoly for five years and a relative one for ten. Without this impetus foreign to free competition and derived from the trade of governmental favors, he wouldn’t have become the magnate he is today. The coffee at Sanborns is terrible, but it tastes even worse when you know the trajectory of the owner.