You can still die here if you´re so inclined, but the modern transplant in Mexico - artist, journalist, business type or retiree - generally hangs on to her or his lifelong identity and comes to live more, not less.

Still, we tend to remember the ones who don´t make it.

Because he was fictionalized in print and film, the U.S. journalist and wit Ambrose Bierce most often represents the romantic notion of the tired angel who disappears into Mexico´s "good, kind darkness." But another candidate has recently emerged - or rather, re-emerged - to fill the prototype of the mysterious stranger who made Mexico his last address under curious circumstances.

Arthur Cravan, born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, crossed at Nuevo Laredo three years after Bierce´s 1914 disappearance. But he wasn´t American. Cravan was a Swiss-born, Irish-descended, French-speaking poet.

He was also a boxer and bon vivant who fled Paris for New York to avoid military service in World War I. He then fled the United States at age 30 for the same reason. The New York poet Mina Loy later met up with him in Mexico City, where they were married.

Cravan may indeed have come here to redefine himself, because he had been doing just that all his life.

He claimed to be Oscar Wilde´s nephew, which was only a slight exaggeration since he was indeed the nephew of Oscar Wilde´s wife. His boasts along the Paris café circuit were as legendary as they were unlikely, and once rooted in Mexico City, he would describe himself variously as, among other things, a thief, a muleteer, a chauffeur, and a gold prospector.

As for losing himself, there wasn´t much chance of that. Cravan stood 6 foot 4 inches and weighed about 250 pounds, with short blond hair, big shoulders and a menacingly square jaw. He had, according to his wife´s memoirs, "the air of a Viking."

The dying part came, as far as anybody knows, in October of 1918, less than a year after his arrival. He went to Salina Cruz, the Oaxacan seaport on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, looking to buy a boat. He was never heard from again. What happened to him, and whether he did indeed survive and take up a new identity, is the stuff of legend.

The reason it´s legend is that we don´t have much in the way of written sources on Cravan´s brief, intense life, least of all on the Mexican phase of it. Mina Loy´s remembrances are sketchy and poetic. Most of his poetry was published in France in a short-lived literary magazine called Maintenant. Much of it has been translated into English in a book called "4 Dada Suicides" (Cravan´s work is sometimes considered Dada-esque).

There is an obscure 1932 fictionalized memoir by one Bob Brown, apparently based on the "slacker" crowd Cravan and Loy hung out with in Mexico City. A 1993 biography in Spanish by María Lluisa Borrás exists, but I haven´t been able to find it. A docu-drama entitled "Cravan v Cravan," in which that same author appears, came and went several years ago. Also, a biography in English by Roger Lloyd Conover, "the leading Anglophone Cravaniste," is in the works.

In the meantime, we are fortunate to have Charles Nicholl´s account of Cravan´s last year, which appears in the latest issue of the London Review of Books to make it across the pond, dated March 9. Nicholl, a brilliant author and journalist, now mostly writes biographies of big historical figures (his latest subject is Da Vinci). But his 1980s portrait of life in Colombia´s cocaine corridor, the Fruit Palace, still stands out in my mind as a shining example of what non-judgmental, you-are-there reportage can accomplish.

Nicholl´s modus operandi is to explore the locations he writes about, so we get something close to a Cravan Tour of the Historic Center. Cravan had once fought Jack Johnson in Barcelona, and he made his living in Mexico City as a boxing instructor and sometimes prizefighter. (The sweet science seems to be a common cultural causeway linking Mexicans with Americans and Europeans; a certain type of ex-pat reflexively seeks out the Mexican boxing scene).

Cravan´s boxing school, the Escuela de Cultura Física Sandow, stood on Tacuba Street, and is still standing, according to Nicholl, "elegantly refurbished, with tall French windows illuminating the former gym on the first floor." An address would have been helpful here.

Nicholl describes Tacuba as quieter than the nearby and parallel "fashionable shopping streets of Cinco de Mayo and Francisco I. Madero." "Fashionable" isn´t a word I usually associate with either of those streets, but a 1930s description by Graham Greene of Tacuba as a street "where you can buy your clothes cheaper if you don´t care much for appearances" seems current in spirit if not actual reality.

Cravan lived first at the Hotel Juárez, also on Tacuba, but when Loy arrived they set up home on Calle de Soto, which is behind Reforma Avenue near the current Guerrero Metro stop.

Nicholl followed Cravan and Loy´s route to Salina Cruz, finding the station their train pulled in at to be deserted, "a bordered up ticket-office in fake red brick, a girdered terminus rampant with shrubbery." It reminds him of some translated lines of Cravan´s poetry, about a train that "whistles infinitely across the valleys, dreaming of the oasis: the station with a sky of glass."

Salina Cruz has turned into a major oil-moving seaport in the nearly 80 years since Cravan, and Nicholl´s found little of the old fishing village that Cravan knew. But as he sat on a hill overlooking the Gulf of Tehuantepec, he became convinced, as others have, that Cravan indeed died on the waters between Salina Cruz and Puerto Angel, either capsized by the notorious tehuantepecanos, as the sometimes hurricane-force autumn winds are called, or was murdered by pirates.

Some like to believe, however, that Cravan survived and changed his name from A. Cravan to B. Traven, thus producing the body of work attributed to the even more mysterious German-American turned Mexican citizen. The idea is absurd on its face, but it gets repeated in every account of Cravan´s Mexican disappearance (including this one) because it´s so much fun.

Others contend that Cravan re-emerged as one Dorian Hope, a vagrant poet who sold forged Oscar Wilde manuscripts in New York and Paris in the early 1920s. That sounds like something Cravan might have done, but Nicholl points out how unlikely it is that nobody in Paris would have recognized the very recognizable former man about town.

A full-length work by Nicholl on Cravan´s Mexico finale would be most welcome, but if his research was meant for anything beyond the London Review article, nobody´s telling us about it yet.

Those of us inflicted with curiosity about foreigners´ experiences in Mexico will wait instead for Roger Lloyd Conover´s biography, and keep searching for María Lluisa Borrás´ book.

Kelly.Garrett@eluniversal.com.mx