Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Reasonable People

I. CONSTRUCTIONS

1

Again last night the glow appeared.

2

We invited our old teacher, the architect Santiago Ferguson, to join us for lunch at the Lincoln Restaurant. It was a long-standing custom: we’d gone there regularly, every month or so, since 1970. Eighteen years later, our teacher sitting there between us, we felt both sorrow and relief: he was getting old, but he had kept his vigor and, perhaps more important, his manias.

One of them was eating in this restaurant, which was always very busy but still managed to seem a secret. One of the best restaurants in the city, it’s called the Lincoln only because it’s annexed to the hotel of that name. The Great Emancipator never saw anything like the food it serves: brain quesadillas, basted red snapper, the best marrow soup in the world …

The restaurant is divided into several long, narrow sections, with the staff lined up on either side. The waiters look as if they’ve been there since 1940, at least. They greet our teacher by name, and he responds in kind. We’re like a family, and we’d prefer to go on being one even when our teacher is gone.

When we mention that possibility — the teacher’s death — our thoughts immediately turn to his daughter, Catarina, the girl of our twenty-year-old dreams. She was older than we were; we met her through her father, and we were desperately in love with her. Catarina, of course, never even gave us a glance. She treated us like a couple of kids. Her father was aware of our youthful passion and may even have encouraged it. He was a widower and proud of his stately daughter; she was quite tall and she held herself very straight; she had the longest neck seen outside a Modigliani painting, dark eyes, and an uncommon style — she wore her hair pulled back in a bun. You had to be as attractive as Catarina to dare defy fashion and wear a hairstyle associated, and with good reason, with do-gooders, old maids, nuns, schoolmarms, and such.

— So you’re both in love with the Salvation Army gal! said a waggish fellow student in a University City classroom, but he didn’t say any more because we knocked him out with a classic one-two punch. From then on, everyone knew that Professor Ferguson’s daughter had two gallant, though unrequited, admirers: us, the Vélez brothers, José María and Carlos María.

Our teacher knew it as well; Catarina never gave us any encouragement. We were never sure if the professor himself had arranged the one thing we got out of it. What happened was that one afternoon he scheduled an appointment with us in his office in Colonia Roma. We went up to the third floor, knocked, the door was open, the secretary was out and so was our teacher, so we ventured into the architect’s elegant office, an Art Nouveau whimsy — serpentine woodwork, stained-glass windows, and lamps like drops of molten bronze — complete with kitchen, toilet, and bath. We saw smoke pouring out of the bathroom, we were alarmed, but when we got a little closer we calmed down, seeing that it was steam, the hot water in the shower turned on full blast.

It was easy to make out white tiles decorated with a floral pattern and a white bathtub with inlaid porcelain frogs. It was harder to distinguish the clothes hanging over the shower pole, and even harder to see the naked body of Catarina, unaware of our presence, facing us, her eyes closed, holding a man with his back toward us, the two of them naked, making love amid the clouds of steam and the Art Nouveau frogs, in the bathroom of her father the architect.

Catarina, her eyes closed, her legs wrapped around her lover’s waist, had her arms clasped behind the head of a man who held her suspended in the air.

We said we would never know if that was to be our reward: a single glimpse of Catarina, naked, making love. Two months later, our teacher told us that Catarina was getting married to Joaquín Mercado, a thirty-five-year-old politician, for whom we immediately conceived a blind hatred.

3

The approach to the Lincoln had become an obstacle course, thanks to the never-ending construction on Revillagigedo, Luis Moya, Marroquí, and Artículo 123, the streets around it. The Federal Attorney’s Office, the site of the old Naval Ministry, several popular movie houses, and a real jungle of businesses, garages, hardware stores, and used-car lots made that part of the city look like a metallic mountain range: twisted, tortured, rough, rusty; several stages in the life of steel were exposed there, like the entrails of an iron-age animal — literal, emblematic — they were bursting out, exposing themselves and revealing their age, the age of the beast, the geology of the city. The deterioration of the iron and concrete amazed us: only a short time ago they were the very latest and most modern. Today, Bauhaus sounds like a cry or a sneeze.

Professor Ferguson loved to discuss these things over lunch. Tall, balding, white as the tablecloth where we set our beers, Santiago Ferguson spent the meal railing vainly against the destruction of the oldest city in the New World. Not the oldest dead city (Machu Picchu, Teotihuacan, Tula), but a city that’s still alive, and has been since 1325—Mexico.

It’s alive, you know, says Don Santiago, in spite of itself and in spite of its inhabitants: we have each, every one of us, tried to kill it.

Seen from the air, it’s a valley seven thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by lofty mountains that trap the exhaust vomited from cars and factories under a layer of frozen air, and we’ve added a new mountain range, surrounding ourselves with smoldering piles of garbage. And on this early afternoon in a typically rainy August we leap across holes as big as canyons, open sewers, protruding steel reinforcing rods, broken pavement, and huge puddles, amid the excavations and the shattered glass between San Juan de Letrán and Azueta, remembering something Professor Ferguson said:

— Mexico has ruins. The United States has garbage.

Then, we said, we’re growing more alike every day. But he replied that we must lose no time in freeing ourselves from garbage, cement, glass boxes, architecture that is not our own.

What we must do, immediately — he said — is see the modern as a ruin. That’s what it would take to make it perfect, like Monte Albán or Uxmal. The ruin is architecture’s eternity — he went on, this excitable, fast-talking, opinionated, wildly imaginative, affectionate, genial son of the open hearts and open arms of Glasgow. He said this between his last bite of red snapper stuffed with olives and his first taste of a rum-soaked cake: Professor Ferguson, the restorer, for us, of the wall as the fundamental principle of architecture.

He said that if Indians used the wall to separate the sacred from the profane, Spanish conquistadors to separate the conqueror from the conquered, and modern citizens the rich from the poor, the Mexican of the future should use the wall again (opposing it to glass, concrete, and artificial verticality) as an invitation to move freely about, leave and enter, flow along its horizontal lines. Arches, porticoes, patios, open spaces, extended by walls of blue, red, and yellow; a fountain, a canal, an aqueduct; a return to the shelter of the convent, to the solitude that is as indispensable to art as it is to knowledge itself; a return to the water we obliterated in what used to be a city of lakes, the Venice of the New World.

His voice and gestures grew more impassioned and we all were silent and listened, gratefully, respectfully. We Mexicans love utopias, which, like chivalric love, can never be consummated, so they are all the more intense and enduring. Ferguson’s vision of horizontal spaces — walls and water, arcades and patios — had only been achieved in a few houses in certain outlying districts, which he had wanted to keep pristine, private, but which were ultimately absorbed by the vast, spreading urban gangrene.

Sometimes, resigning himself, he could admit that eventually the walls would grow tired, so that even the air could pass through them.

But that’s all right — he would add, regaining his momentum — because it means that architecture will have fulfilled its original function, which was to serve as refuge.

Even though its pretext might be religious? (He spoke, but we also spoke about him; he was a teacher who became the subject of the students he taught.)

There has never been a civilization that hasn’t needed to establish a sacred center, a point of orientation, a place of refuge, from the pyramids of Malinalco to Rockefeller Center, replied Santiago Ferguson; for him, what was important was to distinguish a structure that was not visible at first (to the naked eye), a structure whose spirit would signify to him the unity of architecture, the building of buildings.

His thought (we students said) was part of his incessant search, his effort to find the point at which a single architectonic space, even if it doesn’t contain every space, symbolizes them all. But this ideal, because it was unattainable, at least led us toward its approximation. And that was the essence of the art.

We discussed this among ourselves and decided that perhaps the ideal of the architect was to affirm as far as possible our right to live in the spaces that most resemble our dreams, but also to recognize the impossibility of achieving that. Perhaps our teacher was telling us that in art a project and its realization, a blueprint and the construction itself, can never correspond perfectly; the lesson we learned from him was that there is no perfection, only approximation, and that’s the way it should be, because the day a project and its realization coincide exactly, point by point, it will no longer be possible to design anything: at the sight of perfection — we said to him, he said to us — art dies, exhausted by its victory. There has to be a minimal separation, an indispensable divorce between idea and action, between word and thing, between blueprint and building, so that art can continue to attempt the impossible, the absolute unattainable aesthetic.

So — our teacher smiles — always remember the story of the Chinese architect who, when the Emperor scolded him, disappeared through the door he’d drawn on his blueprint.

We caught Ferguson’s determination from him and we shared his dreams, all of us, his former students, now almost forty years old, gathered around him in this restaurant, with its gleaming wood and copper, spicy with the sharp smells of garlic, oil, and fresh greens, but for us those dreams took a path that nobody else, not even the professor himself, knew: at the end of his porticoes, patios, passages, and monastic walls lay the secret source of water, not vaulted but serpentine, where the moisture surging from the earth and the moisture falling from the sky join the fluids of the human body and together are reduced to steam. Catarina Ferguson in the arms of a man who had his back to us while she, her eyes shut in pleasure, raised her rapt face to her two youthful admirers, confused, cautious, and, finally, discreet.

We carried that dream with us always; we believed it was our teacher’s compensation for the melancholy burden of the imperfection of things, which, no matter how beautiful they might be, are created to be used up, to grow old, to die; but a few weeks later Ferguson said to us:

— Catarina is getting married two months from now. Why not do me a favor, boys? Go shopping with her. I know her, she won’t be able to carry everything. You have a van. Don’t let her get too carried away, keep an eye on her, take care of her for me, all right, boys?

4

Ferguson knew our father, an architect like us, and he told us that as time went by, we would look more and more like “the old man,” until we couldn’t anymore, since he had died at fifty-two. But that was enough of a life, said our teacher, to establish comparisons between father and sons. The Vélezes, he said, would all end up looking alike, the same high forehead, dark complexion, thick lips, narrow nose, deep furrows running down the cheeks, glossy black hair, which later turned gray, so much so that our father, with his skin as dark as a Moor’s and his snow-white hair, got the nickname “The Negative.” But, and we laughed, we didn’t yet deserve such a nickname.

— And that restless, darting Adam’s apple that bounced like a bobber, like a bobbing ball — the professor laughed — like the virile hook from which your own restless bodies hang, bodies almost as metallic as the twisted rack of rusty iron that is our city, wired bodies, hanging and, well, hung, Adamic and Edenic — joked the professor — strung-out bodies that rise up like kites and soar like comets, like Giacomettis, yes, heavenly bodies at high velocity, the velocitous, preposterous, felicitous Vélezes! He laughed again.

— Architecture’s destiny is ruin, he repeated. The walls will crumble and anything will be able to pass through them, the air, a look, a dog … or the velocitous Vélezes.

As for us, sitting in the Lincoln having lunch with Santiago Ferguson, we saw a more subtle resemblance, our resemblance to Ferguson, our teacher; it wasn’t a physical similarity — he was fair, we were dark, he was balding, we had thick hair — it was more that we imitated him. We are formed not merely by our ancestors but by our contemporaries, especially our teachers, who are studied, admired, and respected by us. Our Indian blood was obvious in our dark complexions, while Ferguson was but a third-generation Mexican. His ancestors were part of that small wave of Scottish, Irish, and English immigrants who came to Mexico at the turn of the century, armed with surveyor’s tools, blueprints, and cases of whiskey, to build our bridges and railroads. They easily adapted to their new lives, married Mexican women; they stopped feeling homesick as soon as they found out that, among us, Galicians had a monopoly on bagpipes; they never switched from whiskey to cider, but they did change their baptismal names — James became Santiago: a militant Apostle, a soldier, a Moor-slayer instead of a tender young Apostle, the companion of Jesus, Santiago the Lesser — and nobody wore kilts anymore (except for a doll Catarina played with as a child; the Scottish skirt persisted, but they put it on a girl). Santiago Ferguson, who could have been James, from a family of engineers, studied in Britain, but while he was there he had a revelation: what impressed him was not the iron of bridges and trains but the gilded stone of the cathedrals.

— English cathedrals are the best-kept secret of Europe, he often said during the course of our lunches, sometimes almost obsessively wrinkling his forehead and squinting his restless little brown eyes. — No one goes to see them because England is no longer Catholic; for the Catholic tourist, going to Salisbury or York is like entering a den of heretics; and this prejudice has spread since the Middle Ages became the monopoly of Rome. We forget that English architecture still has a primeval quality, it’s like returning to our origins, it inspires awe in a way that Bruges or Rheims never can, because they are the product of a strictly formal Catholicism. The English cathedral is entirely different: it asks us to dare to go back to being Catholic, to rebel toward the sacred, to abandon the dreadful secular life that was supposed to bring us happiness but only brought us horror.

And then he would say, in a serious voice:

— I like the religious secret of my old islands. I would like to be buried in an English cathedral. I would go back there in rebellion, in affirmation of the sacred, the incomprehensible.

Gradually, we began to adopt his mannerisms — the way he arranged his napkin in his lap, for example; his movements — the self-conscious way he bent his head to clinch an argument, conveying an element of doubt, a horror of dogma, even the rejection of the very conclusion he was asserting; his irony, the feigned shock, the exaggerated open mouth, when someone proposed a belated discovery of the Mediterranean; his humor, his taste for the practical joke in the British style (what the Spanish call broma pesada): he would pretend a classmate was getting married, invite us to the wedding; when we got there, amid the laughter, there would be a celebration going on all right, but not of an alarming marriage, rather of our same old comfortable friendship; the fraternity of celibates that could be our camaraderie, in which we shared the discipline of the lecture hall, the apprenticeship, the examination, the imagination. Another of his jokes was always to refer to his enemies in the past tense, as dead and gone (“the late critic X; the architect Y, who in his lifetime perpetrated such-and-such an atrocity; the celebrated architect Z, whose work, unfortunately, is ugly, but, fortunately, is destined to perish…”). He had no patience, basically — with pretentiousness, with lack of discipline and of punctuality, with the worship of money or its opposite, the cryptogenteel pretense of scorn for it: any lack of authenticity was anathema to him. But he didn’t confuse sincerity with the absence of mystery. We ate with him and he told us that our ancestors could be our ghosts but that we are the ghosts of our teachers, the same way the reader, in a certain sense, is the ghost of the author who is being read: I, ghost of Machen; you, ghost of Onions; he, ghost of Cortázar; we, ghosts of …

There are no empty houses, he said on one occasion, remember that … He sometimes imagined ghosts that were jokers, a lot like him, the professor, often so playful. He had invited us to so many weddings that when he told us about his daughter Catarina’s, we thought it would be one more joke, a cruel one, but still a joke. Deep down inside, we were convinced that he had kept her from us, that was why he had perversely agreed to meet us in his office that afternoon, knowingly (or not?), the afternoon of the steam and the tiles, and the frogs, of the girl enjoying herself. Perhaps he knew this would excite us even more. But now here we were, just like Professor Ferguson and, by extension, his daughter, tall, dark, and proud, holding her head as high as ever as she walked toward the nave of the Church of the Holy Family on the arm of her father the architect, dressed in a white gown that we had helped her choose in an old seamstress’s shop downtown, where they still make those old marvels, a Swiss-organdy dress with English embroidery — as the seamstress said, as modest as she was expensive, a gossamer veil that would have floated away if it hadn’t been weighted down with jewels and beads, and a full, heavy skirt that dragged on the ground, that we would have carried with pleasure, two mere attendants to our putative, unattainable bride, so much like us — dark, with flashing eyes and hair pulled back — who was approaching the altar to be joined to that chubby little lawyer, half freckled, half tan, who shook his little coffee-colored head with the satisfaction of a eunuch who’s been made to think he’s a stud.

That’s how we saw her, so different from her father (except that they were both tall), and we thought of the dead mother of our impossible lover; we looked at her and it struck us that there had never been a single photograph of the late Mrs. Ferguson in the professor’s house in the Pedregal, and, on top of that, he never mentioned her in conversation. Perhaps the combination of these things allowed us to give our imagination free rein. Catarina’s mother, who was not present at her daughter’s wedding, was dark like her, but dead, we decided. Catarina’s mother: unmentionable, clamorously mute. What would she, that gaping void, have thought of her son-in-law, Joaquín Mercado, the orange-complexioned groom? It was enough to make us want to speak for her, saying:

— Carlos María, you know, that speckled piece of shit isn’t the man we saw Catarina screwing in the bathroom.

— Don’t get excited, José María. Better think about the little porcelain frogs.

— As the professor says: Well, what can you do?

— I don’t think Catarina is ever going to be ours, brother.

5

We appreciated the fact that the place where we met for lunch with the professor turned out to be close to the place we worked, the busy area just south of the old, crowded avenue of San Juan de Letrán (which is now called Eje Lázaro Cárdenas), where several construction projects were going on at the same time: the metro was being expanded, the buildings damaged in the 1985 earthquake were being torn down, new green spaces were being created, historic buildings preserved, and a parking garage big enough for three hundred cars was being built — an urban smorgasbord that had turned those twenty-odd blocks in the center of the city into a combat zone.

In fact, all you had to do was close your eyes to imagine you were in the thick of a World War I battlefield: trenches, gas, bayonets that weren’t entirely imaginary; and all this beneath the summer rain that we should have been used to, God knows, it’s nothing new; but we acted as if it were: we can’t seem to give up on our toxic city’s promise of eternal spring — beneath a layer of industrial smoke and exhaust fumes; it’s another of our utopias. Even though we know that from May to September it’s going to rain hard all afternoon and a good part of the evening, we don’t carry umbrellas and we don’t wear raincoats. If the Virgin of Guadalupe could give us roses in December, perhaps one day her Son will give us summers without rain (without smog, without pollution).

Until then, this is a city of people (us included) who run through the rain with newspapers over their heads.

When he got to the door of the Lincoln, our teacher laughed and, more or less, put on his mackintosh — a Scottish architect with the same surname as the inventor of the raincoat, which could well be our professor’s ghost, a ghost that makes its appearance now with the peculiar sound of a black umbrella snapping open at a single touch: the umbrella is the ghost; it leaves with our teacher, whose giant strides carry him away from us, down Calle Revillagigedo, in the rain.

We were wet when we got to the center of the construction site on San Juan de Letrán, as we, traditionalists to the death, insisted on calling it.

The excavation had kept on growing until six or seven municipal projects converged on a point from which radiated, on one side, the tubes for a grand new subway station; on another, black bundles of telephone lines; a little farther, the earthquake-proof foundation of a twenty-story building that its owners wanted to save at all costs; and, nearby, the spot where we were going to put our rather Babylonian project, a garden, still completely imaginary, sunk in the mud, which was supposed to act as the “lungs of the city”—at least, that’s how it was euphemistically described.

We took the job at the urging of Professor Ferguson, who insisted that, come hell or high water, fine old buildings should be saved from the wrecking ball. They had told him that there were no such buildings there. Typically, he replied that that remained to be seen; behind a lunchstand, under a filling station, there could be a marvelous Neoclassical building from the eighteenth century, or a stairway to a forgotten colonial cemetery, who knows? It’s like Rome, Ferguson told the authorities. Mexico City has an almost geological layering of architectural styles.

Ferguson’s arguments won over the municipal bureaucracy (no doubt, they wanted to be rid of this tall, ungainly, and stubborn professor who came into the federal offices like a fjord cutting into the coastline: cold, violent, sure of his right to be there, and even more sure of the beauty of his rightness), and he even won over the two of us, his old disciples, when he also convinced the bureaucracy that we, the Vélez brothers, were the ideal architects for the project.

— But what are we supposed to do?

Our position (we consulted with each other) was none too clear.

— Someone has to preserve the historic buildings.

— But there aren’t any here.

— You two know as well as I do that these things can appear unexpectedly.

— But we need something more concrete to do.

— Think of our dignity, maestro. We have to keep up a front. People already think architects are a bunch of designing loafers.

He laughed and said that we hadn’t lost our student humor, adding that our job, officially, would be to create the garden, the green space — and that our contribution to the campaign against the urban emphysema wouldn’t be just hot air, certainly — but we would also be rescuing from bureaucratic and commercial pillory a vestige of the crystalline city Mexico used to be.

— And don’t tell me that neither you nor the gross municipal bureaucracy can find any building worth saving in this project; don’t give up the architect’s vision so easily, he said, furrowing his brow so his bald head looked like a white lake stirred up by a sudden storm, his head wrinkled from eyebrows to crown (quite a spectacle: we exchanged glances). That excuse won’t work, Professor Ferguson said seriously, quietly, because the architect must look at chaos — including a chaos that seems as irredeemable as this project — intently, as an artist would, and organize that chaos, knowing that if you can’t find the work of art in the midst of material confusion, the fault is yours, entirely yours, the architect’s, the artist’s.

— All architecture becomes distant; it occurred a thousand years ago, or will occur a thousand years from now. Ab ovum.

— But we are here today, we see the gray disorder of the everyday, and we don’t know how to see what has occurred and what will occur, without realizing — he opened his eyes and looked at us very seriously, without theatrics — that it is all occurring at all times.

He shook his head a little and looked at us, first at Carlos María, then at José María: us, the Vélez brothers.

— Okay, it’s all approximation, I’ve said it before, it’s nothing but approximation. But it’s the architect’s job, you know, to locate the space between the demands of the style and the response of the artist. We all want to consummate symbolic unions — for example, between change and the unchanging, or between the permitted and the prohibited. But another part of us wants to confront the product of these weddings with their probable divorce. I urge you, boys, my friends, to go out into the world denying what you yourselves do or see. Submit your vision to the negative that emerges from within yourselves. The perfect union of self and other, of reason and nature, is the most dangerous thing in the world. Art exists to keep desire alive, not to satisfy it. For example, if you could already see some likely architectural jewel in the middle of the mess in the construction zone, you would be identical with your desire, which is to conserve architecture. But since no one can see it, not you, not me, not anyone, at least so far, we are separated from our desire and therefore we are artists. And therefore we are sensual beings, searchers for the other. Or of the other …

He was silent for a while, and then he repeated: —Approximate, keep your eyes open, there is always a point in space where architecture organizes the sense of things, if only temporarily.

For the moment, however, the only thing we want is to set the scene for an experience that began that same August afternoon, in the rain, after we had brain quesadillas with Professor Ferguson, and to say here what we learned from the quesadilla wit of the cultivated architect. And isn’t that what Mexican architects are known for, since we are students, you know: we are the most elegant, the most handsome, the most sociable (professional deformation, virtue born of necessity, as you like), and surely the most cultivated.

Only a step separates us from the artist, the professor is right, but, unfortunately, another step, more inevitable, and we resemble a construction worker; and this afternoon, in the rain, stuck at the foot of the abyss that was the heart of all the muddy excavations in the center of the city, we noticed a tranquillity, an absence of the usual noises, which seemed supernatural. A group of engineers in white hard hats were talking to a group of workers in black hard hats. We got close to guessing the reason for the dispute; it wasn’t the first. They were always fighting about holidays. We had to observe the official holidays (the birthday of Juárez, the nationalization of petroleum), they wanted to observe the saints’ days (Maundy Thursday, the Cruz de Mayo — the masons’ feast day — the Ascension), and we were continually making a compromise between the two calendars, the civil and the religious, so as not to add to the infinite number of holidays, long weekends, and vacation time that kept paralyzing construction work in the city.

We tried to be reasonable when we talked with them. What they said to us was not.

6

As the word “miracle” bounced like a pinball from mouth to mouth (from hard hat to hard hat), we assumed it was another question of adjusting the calendar so that some vital holiday could be observed. We were amused by this recurring spectacle of the Catholic proletariat wrangling with atheist capitalism. It’s not easy to identify capitalism with the Catholic religion; but in Mexico the problem is not “being a Catholic” or “being an atheist” (or the variants: an obscurantist, a progressive). The problem is whether or not to believe in the sacred.

Right away, the miracle the group of construction workers at the San Juan site was discussing, with a mixture of reverence and fear, smelled to us more like blood than like incense, which is the difference (when it comes to miracles) between representation and execution.

Blood, because one of the foremen, a man named Rudecindo Alvarado, not known for his piety, showed us an injured hand and a blind eye, and when he touched his hand to his eye, it was covered with blood, and he began his self-reproach: it was punishment from heaven, because he was a heretic and an unbeliever, that’s what the dark-skinned, pimply Rudecindo, with his thinning hair and mustache, was yammering. All the other comments we managed to overhear were in the same vein: our sins warning … give up drinking … a vision. Rudecindo tried to catch it, and look what happened to him: he got it good!

We asked one of the engineers to give us the lay version of the excitement that had interrupted the whole project, with serious conse …

He interrupted us, shaking his head: How could you even talk about anything serious with this bunch of superstitious half-wits? They saw some lights last night hovering over the works and decided it was some sort of sign.

— It didn’t occur to them to think of flying saucers?

— One of them says he saw an image; it’s a boy or a girl, or all of a sudden it’s a ghost, or a dwarf, or an I-don’t-know-what, I just don’t know, continued the engineer, as condescending and uncomfortable as usual, in front of us. — I don’t know if architects can make out what is veiled to the rest of us, but if you’d like to spend the night, maybe the Vélezes will spot what the Pérezes cannot, and the miserable little engineer laughed, his talent for silly rhymes making us curse his wit.

We laughed disdainfully and went to work: the garden. This was a work of public health and culture, we could easily concentrate on it and not worry anymore about the tangle of engineers, construction workers, metro stations, skyscrapers, and telephone cables.

Everybody else had little shelters against the rain. We, the Vélezes, just like the British Army in the Great War we’ve already mentioned, had them build us a clean little office that smelled of pine, with a bathroom added, and a grill to warm the kettle. It wasn’t for nothing that we were disciples of Santiago Ferguson and his exquisite sense of style. In any case, why work in a dump when we could have beauty and elegance?

From there we watched the rain pour down the mouths of the different projects, the open mouths, ready to swallow up the mud excreted by the soft, loose entrails of the city, which we sometimes pictured as a grotesque sausage shop, its sky a ceiling hung with ham, baloney, pork sausage, and especially tripe infested with rats, snakes, and toads: from the small window of our temporary office, we saw a slice of the old city of Mexico, as Professor Santiago said, an almost geologic slice, exposing the depths of time, ever-deeper circles reaching to an inviolate center, a foundation that dates from pre-history.

We are architects, we can read the circles of this excavation, we can name the styles, Mexican Bauhaus, Neocolonial, Art Nouveau, Neo-Aztec, the imperious style of the turn of the century (when the Fergusons arrived from Scotland) with its boulevards and neo-mansard roofs, the Neoclassical style of the eighteenth century, then Churrigueresque, Plateresque, Baroque, the Indian city, finally … Far below what we facetiously call the dominant profile, the Bauhausmann, much deeper, we imagined the city beneath the city, the original lake, the symbol of all that Mexico would once again be, surviving only in ruins, not in garbage, as Ferguson said. But we didn’t see any of this then: none of the styles just mentioned emerged from the wretched magma of this construction zone. The ripples of memory didn’t go much further than: garage, lunchstand, hardware store, filling station …

We stood staring for a long time, imagining the probable center of this excavation, and that’s where we first saw it, that afternoon, although initially we thought it was just that we’d been almost hypnotized by concentrating too hard: we saw the glow dancing in the rain.

We shut our eyes and then opened them.

We laughed together.

Saint Elmo’s fire, an electrical illusion caused by the rainstorm.

We were a bit tired, we thought we’d have a cup of Earl Grey, and everything would still have been the same if that distant light, the glow moving along the edge of the site, over the restorations, the earthquake hazards, and the devastated gardens, had not been accompanied by the most mournful sound that anyone has ever heard: a groan unmistakably bound to the two extremes of existence.

We looked at each other as brothers, recognizing each other at last. We had been born together.

And the glow became a single point before our eyes and vanished into space.

7

The next day there was even more commotion at the project. A lot of the workers wanted to bypass the civil authorities and go right to the heads of the Church. Even so, the growing number of people who wanted to see a divine miracle (how many human miracles are there?) in the phenomenon of the glow never shed their suspicion, after yesterday afternoon’s cry, that it might all be a trick of the devil. Thirty thousand years of magic and only five hundred of Christianity had taught the Mexican people at least not to be blinded by appearances. Enigma, enigma: Is the devil using the image of God to deceive us, or God the tricks of the devil to test us? Divine that, diviner.

While this was under discussion, we maintained our personal façade of serene rationality, and although we had heard yesterday afternoon’s horrible howl, we neither admitted it nor elaborated on it. We had an implicit agreement: to be born or to die was nothing out of the ordinary; and that’s what the famous cry sounded like, one of those two verbs. So the engineers and the workers turned to their superstitions, sacred or profane. We stayed firmly ensconced in our tower of secular skepticism. We were reasonable people.

But it was not God or the devil, a construction worker or an engineer, who changed our minds; it was a dog. A dog soaked to the skin, its hair so damp it looked as if it were rotting, falling in clumps from its poor skin, arrived whimpering at the door of our office, which faced the excavations. It made a tremendous racket, so we were forced to open the door.

It was carrying a broken object in its mouth, a piece of something. It dropped the object, opening its sticky drooling mouth, shook its spotted mangy hide, and turned away, showing us its wounded rump. At our feet was part of a frog, a piece of porcelain, a green frog in a sinuous style, part of a decoration that we knew and remembered only too well, that we longed for too much … We picked it up. The dog disappeared, running toward the same point where the glow had disappeared the afternoon before.

We looked at each other and in no more time than it took for the water in the teapot to come to a boil and for us to be intoxicated by the bergamot perfume, we had reached an ironic conclusion, laughing: if God or the devil wanted to get us in his clutches, he certainly knew our weakness.

The workers could be enticed by a miracle; for us, the lure was architecture, decoration, the art object, above all — were we still smiling? — those things coming together in a green porcelain frog that we saw for the first time in the bathroom of Catarina Ferguson, our unattainable love. Our banter, our self-absorbed thoughts while we drank our tea in silence, our emotional desire (every kind of desire) were all interrupted by new shouting in the construction zone, by the workers flying toward us like a flock of birds, advancing on our private belvedere, since we, the architects (artists? the grains or the brains? the glorified bricklayers?), were also the arbiters, and the dispute was this: the mother of one of the night workers, the watchman, in fact, whom we needed to keep an eye out for accidents, mud slides, thieves, the thousands of things that can happen at a project like this, anyway, she was bringing her son his dinner of lentil soup — the workers are very precise about their meals — with chicken, rice, and soft white cheese, and as she was making her way to the hut where her son spent the night, she ran into a little kid, maybe twelve years old, barefoot, sort of blond, she said, a cute little rascal, wearing just a short skirt, but the señora insisted it wasn’t a girl, it was a boy, she could tell, and she, the mother of fourteen, knew the difference: a luminous child, said the mother, if you could have seen it, a child who glowed, and if that doesn’t prove what is happening here, what more proof do they want, the heretics and unbelievers?

— The Child Jesus has appeared. It’s a miracle, I tell you it’s a miracle.

— Just a minute, madam. You say that you know it was a boy, and not a girl.

— It stuck out. It raised his skirt.

Deliver us from temptation. From our heights, we were not going to fall for a miracle. With Cervantesque irony, we could readily accept Don Quixote’s celebrated explanation of miracles to Sancho: “They are simply things that seldom occur…” Otherwise, they would be the norm, not the exception. Blessed Quixote, who has saved your children from the pangs of contradiction, you’re a little like Lenin for the Communists that way.

The fact is, without offending the popular faith of the workers who wanted the miracle, or the agnostic faith of the engineers who denied it, we would have to be the arbiters that both parties wanted.

To the workers we said: The engineers are unbelievers; let us investigate this, we promise we’ll be perfectly honest about it.

To the engineers, we explained with a wink (the ploy of conmen, for which we beg pardon) that if we didn’t decide in favor of belief, belief, as always, was going to decide against us. If word of this got out — the Child Jesus appearing in the construction site on Calle José María Marroquí, between this subway station and that pile of boulders — in less than twenty-four hours, just picture it, there’d be television crews, cameras, newsmen, reporters, opposition representatives hooked on religion and official representatives hooked on the secular rule of the Constitution but afraid of offending the simple faith of the people, et cetera, and all of them followed by crowds of the faithful, vigil lights, stalls, relics, balloons, lottery tickets, sweatshirts with the Sacred Heart, even a ferris wheel and Coca-Cola venders and pinwheels: is that what they wanted? It would cost them their jobs. Leave it to us.

— Ah, these architects. Always so nice and tactful! said the wisecracking engineer who had made the rhyme on Vélez and Pérez and who, but for a stroke of luck and a mistake in scholarship awards, would still be washing dishes in a tamale parlor.

We laughed at him, but not at ourselves. We spoke to the group of workers. You trust us? Grudgingly, they said yes; we were the most important-looking people on the job; reasonable people, they could see in us what, in the end, they always needed: masters they could respect — the bosses. Yes, yes, we trust you. Then, we trust you, too. It was hard, but we asked them to be silent about what the mother of one of them had seen.

— Doña Heredad Mateos, mother of our buddy Jerónimo Mateos, who is night watchman here.

— That’s okay, boys. And, Jerónimo, listen.

— Go ahead, sirs. Tell me.

— Say to your mother: If you tell anyone about this, Mama, the Child Jesus will never appear to you again.

Their faces said, are you kidding? yet they took us seriously; but we couldn’t help picturing the mamacita, Doña Heredad, getting back to her neighborhood, scattering the information from patio to patio, upstairs, downstairs, as you scatter seed for the birds.

Has your mama gone back home? No, boss, she was too excited, I got her to lie down on my cot. Well, leave her there, please, Jerónimo. But she can’t stay there all night, she’ll freeze to death. Why? There’s no glass in the window of the night watchman’s hut. Then we’ll put some in, so that the señora will be comfortable. But she mustn’t go back to her neighborhood. My mamacita has to work to live, was Jerónimo Mateos’s answer, and it sounded like a reproach. Then she can go on working, we told him, she can do it here, at the construction site. Really? She can? So, what does she do? Bridal gowns, boss. She repairs old bridal gowns. The rich women sell them when the dresses get old, and she mends them and sells them to poor brides.

— Then she can bring some outfits here to mend — we said, a little impatient at all the complications — but tell her not to accept any more work.

— Oh, each outfit takes her a month, at least. My mamacita is a very careful worker.

— And, above all, make sure nobody comes to visit her here.

— Only the Child Jesus, said her silly son Jerónimo Mateos, adding with a sigh, “This is what I get for being an unbeliever.”

We laughed at his parting shot and returned to our own work, satisfied that we’d smoothed things over on a project that had really gotten beyond us. The projects we worked on were precise; we worked on small areas, at an extremely slow pace (like Doña Heredad and her bridal outfits); our projects were adapted more to permanency than to haste. But word of the miracle forced us to move faster; we would have liked more calm, but that was a luxury we couldn’t afford if we wanted to avoid the damage a rumor can do, the eventual paralysis of the project; none of us can resist the temptation of a religious celebration; it’s our moment of respite in the middle of so many calamities.

8

Everything seemed pretty much back to normal when the engineers came to consult us about where to put the traffic signals, as their contract required them to do.

They looked at us with more animosity than usual, as if to say what the hell do these architects know about the best place to put a traffic signal in streets as congested as these, but we had insisted (we were throwing our weight around, it’s true) on a clause giving us a voice in all matters concerning the aesthetics of the work. A traffic signal, we maintained, is like a pimple on the face of a goddess; we couldn’t allow the constant blinking of tricolor lights to ruin the total effect.

We have to be practical, said the engineers. We have to consider beauty, we replied. Traffic will be even more congested, they said, exasperated. There were no automobiles in the eighteenth century, we said, half smug, half pedantic.

The engineers had done more than make up their minds, they had planted the first traffic light at the entrance to the project. We had no choice, they insisted. If the drivers don’t see this perpetual red light from a distance, they could make a mistake and drive into the project. Then we’d have to ask them to leave, it’d be a waste of time. You could put up a sign saying DO NOT ENTER, we said with a certain irony. Most of them are illiterate, said the poor engineers; better to rely on their reflex reaction to a red light. We were amused by these byzantine arguments. How many angels fit on the head of a pin? How many semi-literate drivers depend on an innate Pavlovian reflex?

They were giving up. This was getting ridiculous. We just liked to get their goat, we repeat.

Then our dispute was interrupted by an ancient woman who came out of the watchman’s hut at the entrance to the project. Shhh, she said, with a finger pressed to her toothless lips, shhh, don’t disturb the child; all the shouting upsets him.

We dropped the argument; but the old woman was carrying a wedding gown, white and filmy, that contrasted with the black severity of her own attire. It had to be her, the mother of the watchman; for God’s sake, what was the name?

— Him? Jerónimo Mateos.

— No, his mother.

— Heredad Mateos, at your service. Don’t make any noise. It makes him very nervous.

A scream. The sound of a pitiful scream came from inside the hut. We ran to see what had happened; the engineers, some of them, made a gesture of indifference; others, the sign that someone is a little crazy, a finger moving in circles near the temple. We ran; we were excited, anticipating a sign, without even knowing it, that would take us beyond our innocent complacency. Then everything happened at once: we went into the shack where Señora Heredad Mateos was living, a room full of filmy tulles, brocade bodices, and jeweled veils. Oh, my pet, what happened? she asked, and we were looking at a little boy about twelve years old, dressed as if for a costume ball or a pastoral, a very fair child, with wavy blond hair, false eyelashes, and a dreamy look, who had just pricked his finger on the seamstress’s needle: blood oozed out and one of us took the stained veil from him, the Swiss-organdy dress with English embroidery, it forced us to look at it and recognize it, but the child ran off, and we watched him go. We followed, running after him, but he disappeared with the speed of light; he glowed for a moment and then disappeared, where? We didn’t know how to express the fact that he hadn’t simply vanished, he had gone into the construction site, and at the same time somewhere else, into a space we had never seen before …

We returned to the watchman’s hut, converted to a seamstress shop by Doña Heredad Mateos, who was sequestered there to prevent gossip in the neighborhood. Now the old lady was shaking her gray head with a mixture of disapproval and resignation, and we turned back together, clasped hands, and in our free hands we held the veil, the dress, stained with the blood of the child.

— It can’t be. You must be wrong.

— You’ve forgotten already? It can’t be.

— Then I’m right.

— No, I mean that it’s the same dress. It’s unforgettable.

— I haven’t forgotten it either. But it can’t be.

— We’d better go ask her.

But we didn’t dare, as if both of us — Carlos María, José María — were afraid that if the mystery were lost, our souls would be, too.

The old lady shakes her head, picks up the needle the child dropped, puts it in a pincushion, goes back to her work, singing a wordless song.

— I tell you it’s Catarina’s dress.

Perhaps we both think that although the mysterious can never be obvious, we had at hand a way to get closer to it. It’s true: we were now near the place where we worked, the garden that we had to restore in the midst of the hopelessly twisted ugliness of the city’s premature ruins.

We looked at the construction zone. We said it was a web of contorted materials torn from the earth and abandoned there. All the metallic elements seemed revived by a final, fiery cold meeting; this late afternoon’s sickly capricious light played over all the angles of the remnants of foundations, of buildings, of columns and spiral staircases, of balconies, of cars and hardware, all mixed together, tangled up, forged with a glimmer of living copper here, of dying gold there, with the opacity of lead sucked dry by a great transparent exhalation of silver, until something new forms in this excavation in the center of Mexico City, which we’re seeing anew this afternoon, a hole stretching from Balderas to Calle Azueta, past Revillagigedo, Luis Moya, and, farther, to San Juan de Letrán and even, if we follow the line, to the walls of the old convent of the Vizcainas.

We looked at the construction zone.

We looked at each other.

Were we seeing the same thing? Were we looking at the invisible that had become visible, its separate elements organized little by little in our heads, through concentration or nostalgia, as Ferguson the architect had wanted?

— Do you see, José María?

We had worked on this project more than six months.

— Do you see? It all fits together, our teacher was right, we weren’t concentrating, brother, we hadn’t managed to see it, what our teacher told us, the point where architecture appears as the only unity possible in a fragmented world …

— You’re too worried about unity. Better to respect diversity. It’s more human. More diabolic.

— You know how I feel, José María? Like a traveler who reaches the mountain highlands for the first time and his need for oxygen gives him a marvelous sensation of happiness and exaltation …

— Careful. Exhaustion will follow, and death.

— José María, don’t you see?

— No.

— It’s the entrance. We’re looking at the entrance.

— I don’t see anything.

— Come with me.

— No.

— Then I’ll go alone.

— Don’t forget the little frog.

— What?

— Take the little porcelain frog, will you?

— The dog only brought half, remember?

— And you and I must also separate for a while.

— You think that’s necessary?

— We are going to tell two separate stories, brother.

— But I hope they become a single true story in the end.

9

When I was young I made a trip to Scotland, my grandparents’ country, Santiago Ferguson told his daughter, Catarina. For me, that visit was both an inspiration and a reproach. In Glasgow, I encountered the past.

Let me tell you how in 1906 the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh bought a house in a suburb of Glasgow and moved there with his wife, Margaret, and their two little children. Mackintosh retained the Victorian façade but converted the four floors into a modern habitation where his creative imagination could be exercised daily. He replaced doors, fireplaces, and ornamentation; he tore down walls; he installed new windows, new lights, and in that new space he laid out the invisible spaces and the visible details of a new art, an art of rebellion, of purgation, the style of art that, in Barcelona, is associated with Gaudí’s treelike cathedrals and cathedral-like gardens, in Paris with Guimard’s métro entrances, and in Chihuahua with the mansion abandoned by the Gameros family, who, before they ever lived there, fled the excesses of Pancho Villa’s revolution: in Scotland there is only the modest residence of the Mackintoshes, the architect and his family: a spectacular succession of absences, a black-and-white entryway, like an ideal division between light and shade, life and death, outside and inside (rest, Catarina), a dining room of high beams and walls covered in gray wallpaper, a study full of white light (close your eyes, Catarina), but the white and the dark always equally artful, the unexpected blaze of the lamp, pearl, bronze …

Mackintosh was not a success, he was not understood (the professor told his daughter, who was lying with her head on his shoulder, as he told us, his students, walking down the street, or in class, or at dinner), he and his family left their ideal house, it passed from hand to hand. I was there in the fifties and I saw what was left of it, desecrated and diminished; in 1963 the house was demolished, but its decorative elements were collected in an art museum, some of the architectonic sequences and the furniture were saved and others were reconstructed and hidden inside a shell of cement. There are photos of the architect and his wife. They do not look Scottish, but that may be because, like everyone in 1900, they tried to look old, dark, sober, serious, and respectable, even though his art was dedicated to a scandalous light. Both Charles and Margaret Mackintosh — he with his thick mustache, his black silk cravat, his funereal attire, and his thick mane, she with her high dark hair parted in the middle, wearing a severe dress that went down over her feet and half her hands and covered her entire throat, up to a black choker — seemed thirty years older than they were, and thirty meridians south. But their children were fair and dressed in sugar-candy colors, clear colors, like the bedrooms of the house, wonderfully displayed in the heart of their cloister, like the green bath decorated with porcelain frogs. Those who saw how they lived there say that although the ornamentation and the entire architectural conception were revolutionary, the couple lived in a world of look-but-don’t-touch. Everything was always in its place: immobile, perfect, clean, perhaps unused.

One day, already ill, Santiago exclaimed: —To think that so beautiful a conception, one of the heights of Art Nouveau, has to be shut away, preserved and enshrined, as fragile as a cathedral of cards, as protected as a sand castle, ephemeral as an ice palace, within the walls of a concrete jail. It was one of the most detestable triumphs of Le Corbusier — he said dejectedly, always mixing his most intimate feelings with his professional judgments — and of Gropius: architects whom Professor Ferguson spoke of as his personal enemies. But Ferguson did not exempt the Mackintoshes from his criticism — perhaps they deserve to live on in that concrete tomb, since while they were alive they themselves treated their creation with conventional middle-class respect — look-but-don’t-touch, as if it didn’t deserve to live, as if it were destined, from the beginning, to serve only as an example.

— Bah, if that was the case, the Mackintoshes deserve their tomb, their frigid museum, he exclaimed, before reversing himself and praising them again.

Perhaps that was what was most characteristic of him: Santiago Ferguson was able to rekindle his love, and when he told his daughter, Catarina, lying there with him, the story of his return to Scotland, he insisted, let our homes be places that are really lived in, not museums but houses where love can be shared, again and again.

And when you die?

I fear that like the achievements of the magnificent Charles Rennie Mackintosh — sighed the professor, who was ill, confined to his bed — my poor accomplishments will end up encased in some museum.

No, we aren’t thinking of your work, but of its death, your death (we said, Catarina and us, the Vélez brothers, the daughter and the disciples): Had he chosen where he wanted to be buried: his final refuge?

The father and the daughter are embracing each other and he is telling her stories about houses the way other fathers tell stories about ogres, sleeping beauties, and children lost in the woods; Santiago Ferguson extrapolates a single element from all the legends — the dwelling, because he believes that we can learn to love only from what we have constructed; nature, he murmurs to his daughter, is too destructive and too often we must destroy it in order to survive; architecture, on the other hand, can only be a work of love, and love requires a haven; Mackintosh and his family, in Glasgow, didn’t understand that they made their refuge into a museum, you and I, Catarina, we keep on searching, we keep on identifying with the place that rescues us, if only for a moment, from the dilemma plaguing us from the moment we are born, exiled from the belly that gave us life, condemned to the exile that is our punishment, daughter, but is also the condition of our life, yes, Santiago, I understand, Santiago: Catarina, inside or outside, that’s the entire problem, inside you live, but if you don’t leave, you die; outside you live, but if you don’t find a refuge, you also die; entombed inside, exposed outside, ever condemned, you search for your exact place, an outside/inside that nurtures you, daughter, and protects you, father; now we are in Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, where he is telling his daughter, the architect is saying to his daughter, come to me, my house is a belvedere, and it has mountains, woods, rocks, and rivers extending from it: the house is suspended over nature, it neither ruins it nor is ruined by it, so I call our house monte, the mount, of the cielo, the sky, daughter, an ark against the storms, a tower that enables us to look endlessly into the workshop of nature: spread before us, daughter, are the clouds, snow, hail, rain, and storms; we watch them being made: nature does not surround us, does not threaten us any longer, daughter, we are united, you and I, Santiago, in this perfect viewpoint, the refuge that contains all refuges; the world constructs itself at our feet, and when the sun appears, it seems to be born from the water, and when it reaches the top of the mountains, it gives life equally to you, to me, and to nature.

— Open the door. The boys want to come inside.

— No. They have separated. Only one of them wants to enter here.

— Where is the other one?

— Pardon me. He is also seeking entry.

— Open the door, I say. Don’t abandon anyone, daughter.

— I’m not your daughter, Santiago. It’s your lover you have invited to Monticello. The mount of heaven, the mount of Venus, he murmured, lost in love, intoxicated with sexuality, Santiago Ferguson, Monticello, Venusberg, sweet mound of love, soft slope of goddesses.

II. MIRACLES

1

He went back slowly to the elevated portion of the project. His desire to return immediately to the watchman’s shack where Heredad Mateos was stitching the bridal gown was weakened by a sense of propriety, or perhaps the weakening really came from being alone: without me.

So he stopped in our belvedere, as we sometimes called it, calmly fixed himself a cup of tea, and sat down to sip it, staring out at the project, something we had often done together, but I don’t know if he saw what I had discovered miraculously, or if everything had returned to its original state — twisted iron, broken glass, corroded structures worn away by the city’s toxins.

I want to think that, separated from me, my brother José María lost the vision that we might have been able to share, the magic vision that two people can sometimes achieve, like spotting a fleeting film image, seeing what is rarely seen though it is always there.

2

I turned away from you and walked toward the hut where the old woman was mending the bride’s gown. I took the porcelain frog that we had seen in Catarina Ferguson’s bath. You headed toward the project, into the center of the maze, remembering what Professor Santiago Ferguson had said when we parted after lunch: “You have to accept the fact that we architects want to save what can be saved, but to do that, we must know how to see, we must learn to see anew.”

— Everything conspires to keep us from seeing. Remember Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”? Nobody can find the letter because it’s right out in the open, not hidden but in plain sight, where anyone can see it. The same thing happens to some of the most beautiful architecture in our ancient city of palaces.

You head toward something you’ve finally managed to see, in the middle of this mountain range of twisted metal; before, we looked at it without really seeing it, we saw it as one of the many constructions of our anarchic city, we saw only what concerned us: the problem of designing the public garden, caught between the practical constraints imposed by the engineers and our own indecision about what the garden should look like, what we, the Vélez brothers, José María and Carlos María, should do with the beautiful space that was entrusted to us: the space, as Professor Ferguson taught us, between what style demands and what the artist contributes.

You walk toward something you’ve finally found, an entrance, a door in a Neoclassical building, shrouded in gray stone, a severe style, but one that forces you to appreciate the nobility of the columns on either side of the main entrance, the triangular lintels over the windows without balconies, which have been covered over with gray bricks.

You ask yourself if you alone could see it, if I could not, or if I could see it, too, but let you go alone, seeing what you saw, desiring what you desired.

The windows are bricked up, the balconies closed off, and so you are afraid that the inside door will block your entrance. But your excited touch meets no resistance, nothing stops the impetus that is an extension of your will: an ardent will, as if in preparation for the cloistered fervor that you imagine in this house of zealously guarded entrances. You push the eighteenth-century entry door that appeared to you in the middle of the ruins in the heart of Mexico City. You fear what seems forbidden. You desire an image of a hospitality as warm as the welcome your teacher Ferguson always associates with Glasgow, the city of his ancestors, where a brilliant building, novel and revolutionary, by the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh met the scandalized disapproval of Victorian society and ended up, hypocritically, entombed inside the walls of a museum.

You push open the door, you take a step inside. Then you remember your teacher’s lesson: Mexican houses are all blind on the outside; the blank walls around their entrances tell us only that these houses look inward, to the patios, the gardens, the fountains, the porticoes that are their true face.

You push the door, you take a step inside.

3

Then I put down my cup of tea and walked toward the hut. The sounds of the project were the same as always: engines, riveters, excavators, and cranes, their bases buried in muck, overhead the midday sun masked by clouds. The gathering storm accompanied me, swelling up out of the high plateau, practically without warning, bringing on an early darkness.

I rapped my knuckles on the door of the hut. Nobody answered. When I tried to look through the little window, I saw that our promise to Jerónimo Mateos the watchman had been fulfilled: a pane of glass had been put in the window, to protect his mama from the wind and the rain. I rapped again, this time on the glass, and was blinded by the sudden reflection of a red light. I cursed instinctively — against all our entreaties, they had installed the traffic light. Never had they gotten work done so promptly. But once it became a matter of crossing the architects, even the vice of slowness could seem a sin, and they could be efficient for a change. But Heredad Mateos, it seemed, was not about to make any exceptions to our great national sluggishness.

I was tempted to go in, to force the entrance, I always had the excuse of being the architect. The light flashed on the glass again and I heard a groan — aged, this time, and brief, but of an ecstatic intensity — and I knocked on the window again, and then on the door, more loudly, more insistently …

— I’m coming, I’m coming, take it easy …

The old woman opened the door for me and her tortilla face — pocked with cornmeal moles, mealy as a stack of corn cakes, surrounded by cornhusk hairs, lit only by a pair of eyes like hot chiles in the dried, burnt surface of her skin — looked at me curiously, though with no sign of surprise. The candles burned, like the orange eyes of a cat, behind the old woman. She said nothing, but gave me a questioning look that seemed to be echoed by other looks behind her: the lights of the votive candles.

— May I come in?

— What do you want?

She was a small woman, and I am a rather tall man. I tried to see, over the aged woman’s cornhusk head, below the votive lights, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe illuminated by the burning tapers, the cot … Señora Heredad seemed to rise up on her toes to block my passage and my view. Embarrassed, uninvited, rude, I found it impossible to say, Señora, you are repairing a bridal gown, I think I recognize it, that is, my brother and I, we both recognized it, and we would like …

— What do you want, señor? Doña Heredad said to me, firmly enough to convey a suggestion of irritation.

— Nothing, señora. I am the architect. I wanted to see if everything was in order, if there was anything you needed.

— Nothing, sir. My son takes care of that. But if I don’t work, I’ll die of sorrow. Good afternoon.

4

You were alone for some time, getting used to your surprise. You asked me if I saw the same thing you did, or if only you saw it; you asked me if what you saw is true if I saw it and false if I did not share your vision. You ask this constantly now that you are inside the house and you are alone.

You find yourself in a hall that does not match the severe style of the entrance, which you leave behind when the eighteenth-century exterior door closes behind you and becomes an Art Nouveau door through which the luminous child and the dog and even the frog that you hold in your hand had, perhaps, entered: you are blinded by the serpentine plaster roses, the silver fans, the embedded crowns of pearl, glass, and ivory; you move along a gallery that contains nervous peacocks, crystal nests, silver confessionals, zinc washbasins, perfumed by a heavy fragrance of spent flowers, and into a long, narrow passage entirely bare except for a lead umbrella stand — you touch it, as if it were an anchor in the emptiness of the salon. It holds several parasols, some black, others multicolored, and almost a dozen umbrellas, carelessly dumped, still damp, in the lead receptacle — you touch them and you have the feeling that solitude and silence would be complete here if the passage were not illuminated by four lamps, one in each corner, all of them — you touch them, too — made of copper, and the copper painted silver, and with glass drops around the center of the febrile carbon filaments, like the antennas of the first insect that saw the light of the newly created universe.

This illumination seems fainter because it contrasts with a torrent of white light that comes through a half-open door, a light as sharp and steely as the blade of a knife.

You walk to the half-open door and enter, covering your eyes with your hand, pausing to get used to the dining room’s unfamiliar glow, its high, narrow chairs, mahogany table, walls covered with elegant beige wallpaper, and only gradually do you realize that numerous objects are strewn over the floor where you can trip on them, instead of on the table: on the floor are cornhusks, and vases of water, and flowers — the yellow dianthuses of All Souls’ Day, spikenards and calla lilies, gardenias: the heavy odor of dead flowers or, what is the same, flowers for the dead — on the floor are hampers full of fabric, baskets holding thimbles, colored thread, yarn, knitting needles, pins. There is a basket of eggs. There is a chamber pot.

You look up. You search for something else in this dining room, so cleanly conceived but so full of the wrong things, as if the present inhabitants of the place were totally foreign, or were almost enemies of the work of the decorator and the architect, depreciating it, consciously or not. That’s what you would like to think, anyway: the inhabitants of this house must hate it, or at least hate its maker and the style he wanted to give it. What most shocks you, more than the objects strewn over the floor, the eggs, or the chamber pot that almost makes you want to smile, are the rustic chairs of woven straw, low to the ground, which seem to defy, even insult, the narrow, high-backed chairs: those chairs like Giacometti statues (Giacometrics) are insulted by the terrestrial, agrarian abundance of everything else in the room (everything else: you sensed a silent conflict in this room between an exclusive, elegant refinement and a gross inclusiveness, an affirmation of the abundance of poverty, as if a chicken coop had been set in the middle of Versailles).

A woman is sitting on one of the low chairs, sewing. The child sitting with her has just pricked his finger with a needle, he sucks it, the woman looks at him sadly, the blood stains the basket of eggs at the woman’s feet. A dog enters, barks, and goes out again.

5

For the first time in my life, I stayed and slept in the little office on the construction site: I was wakened by a whistling that I took to be the teapot signaling that the water had come to a boil. It found me asleep in one of our pair of director’s chairs; as a joke, we’d had VELEZ ONE and VELEZ TWO stenciled on their canvas backs, identifying ourselves the way English schools distinguish brothers with the same surnames.

I was sleeping with my legs stretched out and when I woke up I felt a dull but persistent pain in my ankles.

The whistling was coming from the construction area, and from the office I could see a crowd of people running every which way, but converging on the project’s entrance, on the watchman’s shack. I ran out of the office, not even closing the door behind me — I was upset, afraid I was going to lose what I sought. I might already have lost it. I imagined ways of obtaining that object, of getting hold of it somehow or other.

I made my way through the chill morning mist, through the crowd, people with wool jackets slung over their shoulders, with mufflers around their necks, their hands joined amid the hustle, barring the way to the hut. I am Vélez the architect, it’s urgent, let me through, let me through. I couldn’t get anywhere and I heard a noise that I found unendurable, almost unspeakable. If I closed my eyes, everything disappeared except that intolerable murmur of the unspeakable: I wanted to identify it, and I pushed my way toward the door of the hut. Sighs. Moans. Wails. A solemn hum came from the watchman’s shack, but that high-pitched sadness disguised a celebration. Dressed in black, clasping her hands in prayer one moment, making the Sign of the Cross the next, tears rolling down her cheeks like oil on a burnt tortilla, Doña Heredad Mateos was kneeling before the window of the shack, hissing through her wrinkled lips:

— A miracle, a miracle, a miracle!

Behind her, on the cot, I saw Catarina Ferguson’s wedding dress, lying inert, held together with pins, ready to pass into new hands, to dress a young bride, ignorant of the marvelous woman who had filled it once and then forgot it, who, perhaps, gave it to a friend, the friend to a poor relative, she to her servant. And next to Señora Mateos, I could make out a form in the glass that had recently been put into the window; it was as fuzzy as an out-of-focus photograph, vague but three-dimensional, like a holograph, and, obsessed with the bride’s gown on the cot, I could not really say what it was; but she, Doña Heredad, proclaimed it:

— The Virgin and the Child! Reunited at last! Praise be to God! A miracle, a miracle, a miracle!

6

You wanted to speak to them and you stepped forward to say something, to call out, to ask them … The bells rang and the woman and child hurried on, without looking at you. The child smoothed his curly hair and white tunic, the woman threw a heavy cloak over her shoulders and with nervous, awkward fingers arranged a white cowl on her head, leaving the ends loose under her chin.

The child took the woman’s hand and held it as the sound of the bells swelled. They opened a door and went into a colonial patio, another negation — you notice at once — of the previous styles, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau. Now the colonnades supported four arched porticoes, and chest-high screens that allowed — allowed you—to observe the woman’s anxious arrival, holding the child’s hand, at the center of the bare patio — it had neither garden nor fountain, only implacably naked stones — and to see the pair join the women who were walking there, together in the rain, protected by their umbrellas, walking in circles, Indian-file, one behind the other, one of them lightly touching the shoulder of the woman in front of her from time to time: but the woman with the child, not protected by an umbrella, seemed to be looking for something, as the ends of her cowl whipped against her cheeks, and the child, who was holding her hand, let the rain wet his face and mat down his blond curls, his eyes closed, wearing a grimace that was half gleeful and half perverse.

They all walk like that — the nine women and the child — in circles, in the rain, for more than an hour, not acknowledging your presence, but not asking you to leave, as you feared they might at first — one of the women, in a straw hat and pink brocade dress, even approaches you and touches your hand, though without looking at you — and the others, also without looking at you, make a huge clamor as soon as she touches you. You try to distinguish between their laughter, exclamations, bawls, groans, sobs, complaints, moans, exultations, but, unable to, you turn your attention to what those figures in the rain are looking at and what each is carrying in the hand that doesn’t hold an umbrella. They give you an oppressive sensation of dynamic abulia, a paradox, but it seems to describe them because they don’t take a single step that isn’t slow and solemn, and there isn’t a single one of their gestures that isn’t deliberate. In one hand, each holds an umbrella; in the other, they carry various objects, shielding them from the rain. The first a basket and the second a shepherd’s staff. The third a bag full of teeth and the fourth a tray holding bread that’s been sliced in two. The fifth wears bells on her fingers and the sixth has a chameleon clasped in her fist. The seventh holds a guitar and the eighth a sprig of flowers. Only the ninth woman does not hold an object — instead, she holds the hand of the drenched child with his eyes closed.

They all wear cloaks draped over their shoulders like shadows.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the woman with the shepherd’s staff raises it and dashes it against your hands; you cry out; they, too, cry, and you drop the frog that you had been holding in your fist. They laugh, flee, the patio is a confusion of umbrellas and water splashing, and the bread falls, and the teeth roll in the puddles, chattering madly, and the dog with the wounded rump, which had been watching them silently, now lets loose a howl, takes the frog in its muzzle and runs toward the convent.

7

They said they couldn’t see anything from the outside, it was just an old lady’s craziness, seamstresses get too wrapped up in themselves, they’re alone too much, with nothing but their thoughts, pretty soon they end up needing glasses, why should anybody believe her? And she answers that they should go in one by one, or two together, and then they will see what she saw on the windowpane in her bedroom. He saw what he had been afraid of, just what he had been trying to avoid, publicity, idle gossip — and the worst thing was that the people who were gathered around the shack wanted to believe, they were hoping that this would turn out to be a true miracle, that they would be the witnesses who would tell everybody else about it, since the worst thing about miracles was the way, after you saw them, you had to tell somebody else about them for them to be believed, and it was the same thing here at the shack of Doña Heredad Mateos, mother of Jerónimo the watchman of the same last name, where from outside you couldn’t see anything, and if you went into the little space you could see the señora was telling the truth. When you looked at the glass, the figures stood out clearly, so close together they were like one, the Virgin with the Child in her arms, a recognizable silhouette, the Madonna and the Child who was conceived without sin, with halos around them as white as snow: it’s splendid, if a little blurry, but you can’t see it from outside, you understand? only from in here. You have to go in one at a time, or by twos, that would be better, by twos so there won’t be malicious talk, you can see it only in here, in the shack where, as luck would have it, Señora Heredad Mateos was staying, the one who set out the orange votive lights and the images of the Virgin in the back, the one who brought all these precious bridal gowns, which, if it’s proper to think such a thing, are the dresses of the wife of heaven, Holy Mary full of grace, who conceived without sin.

— They’re going to ruin the dresses, he said to her.

— We never know how the Lady will choose to come to us.

— It’s dangerous, let me take care of them …

— Here they stay. Otherwise, what will the Virgin wear, tell me that…?

— I swear that as soon as this is over you’ll get them back.

— Praised be the Lord, who sent His wife and His Son here, where they could receive lodging and even clothing, a thousand times praise the Lord!

Doña Heredad Mateos gave me (José María Vélez) a look with her eyes of hot chile, her tortilla face marked by pocks of corn.

— And you know, the Son of God is a most venerable Child.

— By all you hold dearest, señora, do not give that dress to anyone!

8

The nine women are gathered around the wooden table, sitting in the high-backed Art Nouveau chairs. At last you can see them clearly, although the child, sitting next to you, constantly tugs at your sleeve and tells you stories — wicked tales, slanders — about the women in the refectory. They pour cups of chocolate from a steaming pitcher and pass the sweet rolls hot from the oven, and the fair child, whose hair is limp from the rain, picks up a corner of the tablecloth to rub it dry, with an impudent laugh at the women, who continue eating impassively, without even glancing in his direction. He will talk only to you, the stranger, but his remarks are intended for the women, who are now revealed in all their splendor — they’ve taken off their rain capes and are dressed in silks, brocades, multicolored shawls; their collective beauty is enhanced by the brilliance of pink and green, orange and pale yellow. The table is heaped with flowers and fruits and they extend pale, fine hands to take the fruit, to arrange the bouquets, to serve the chocolate, but they never speak to one another, the malicious child is the only one who says anything, pointing his finger from one to another, until he stops to dry his hair and wipe the grit from his eyelashes and shouts at them: Nuns! Whores!

They just eat and sip their cups of chocolate, except the woman who accompanied the child from the beginning. She sits with her elbows on the table and her head between her hands, perfectly still, staring into empty space, in despair. The others are lovely women, from Sonora or Sinaloa would be your guess if they were Mexicans, although you doubt it — Andalusian, Sicilian, Greek, their skin never touched by the sun or by the hand of man, the little boy tells you with a wink, they would rather die than be touched (you try to pierce the lowered gaze, the shadows of the thick eyelashes, of the woman dressed in orange silk, who briefly raises her eyes, looks at you, and veils her eyes again, after that single savage glance). That’s it, that’s it, says the child, look at her, so sweet and pure, she has always been accused of entering convents just to seduce the nuns. And the one next to her, do you like her? (the perfect oval of her cinnamon face has a single flaw, a five o’clock shadow above her lip), well, don’t kid yourself, she has nothing to do with the work of man, as the priests say; she dressed up as a man to keep from being violated by men and ended up accused of fathering her landlady’s son! That’s why she wound up here, to give her old bones a rest — what a way to go!

This story amuses its narrator enormously, and he laughs until he sputtered and choked, pointing his finger at the girl with the mustache and the short chestnut hair. She serves the steaming chocolate while the child subsides; your drink immediately congeals in your cup; the bread turns cold at your touch. You seek the dark eyes of the woman with braids twisted like wagon wheels around her ears, who is dressed in a pink brocade dress buttoned up to the neck: that one would do anything to save herself from men, continued the child. Look at the rolls on her plate: do they resemble tits? Well, that’s what they are, they’re hers, cut off when she refused to give herself to a Roman soldier. Agatha, show the gentleman, entertain our illustrious guest. You lower your eyes as Agatha unbuttons her blouse and reveals her scars, to the hoarse laugh of the boy.

— Sometimes she carries bread, sometimes bells, it’s terribly symbolic: the tintinnabulation of toasted tits, get it? And look at the next one, Lucía, you hear me? Look up, poor little Lucy! Lift your veil, let our visitor see the empty sockets where your eyes used to be, you preferred being blinded to being screwed, didn’t you? So now you chew your eyes, served up like fried eggs on your plate …

He laughed like crazy, exposing his bloodstained baby teeth, pointing with his finger, getting more worked up since he met with no argument, like a precocious drunkard, commanding the woman with long mahogany hair to open her mouth and show her gums, Apollonia, not a tooth, see, not a single molar, ideal for cocksucking (he laughed harder and harder), a second vagina, the toothless mouth of the dentifrical saint, shake your bag of teeth, Apollonia; which she does, and they all hurry to do something without his asking. The girl with the straw hat, instead of putting the lizard she is holding into her mouth, tries to put herself into the mouth of the lizard; the blind woman takes the fried eggs from her plate and puts them in her empty eyesockets; Apollonia takes the teeth out of her bag and puts them in her mouth; and the child shrieks with laughter and shouts: They just won’t fuck! They just want to get away from men! From repulsed suitors! From unsatisfied fathers! From raging soldiers! Better dead than bed! The convent is their refuge from male aggression, see, they tried to seduce me, I’d like to see them try again; and one woman begins to play the guitar, another the harp — beautiful women, women the color of spikenard and lemon, cinnamon women and pearl women, lilting as an endless autumn, silent as the heart of summer, silky and lacy as a contemplative sea: they don’t look at the child, the child points at them with his tiny finger, the finger injured by the needle; the woman who accompanies him holds her head in her hands, she lowers her arms, she makes me look at her, she is the only one who isn’t beautiful, she is a dusky woman with moles on her temples, she reaches out and drops a thorn from the rose on the table. Come, she says to the child, and the child resists, he says no, she doesn’t repeat her command, she just looks at him, he closes his eyes and puts out his hand, she gives him the thorn, he takes it, and without opening his eyes, he pricks his index finger with it.

His blood flows. The women around the table cry, their voices join in a mournful chorus, the guitarist and the harpist keep on playing, Sister Lucía raises her eyelids and reveals the endless labyrinth of her empty gaze, Sister Apollonia opens her toothless mouth, Sister Margarita tries to force her nose into the lizard’s mouth, Sister Agatha shows the purple scars on her chest, Sister Marina licks her mustache, Sister Casilda places a rope around her neck, the dusky woman calls out their names, as if introducing them to me and the child, who is beside himself and runs to sit on his chamber pot; he makes a face, he stops crying, he screams with worn-out pleasure, and hurrying back to the table with the pot in his hand, he empties it among the roses and the bread. The shit is hard, the shit is golden, the shit is gold. Miracle! Miracle!

— Desire is like snow in our hands, says the melancholy woman who accompanies the child, gold is nothing to us. Look at the dog; he doesn’t know what gold is. But he recognizes shit.

Carlos María: for a long time they hadn’t looked at you, and you hadn’t spoken to them, and in that indifference that combines silence and separation, all you see is a whirl of colors, taffetas, silks, roses, baskets, guitars, doe eyes, peach skin, and cascading hair, and you, too, feel distanced, as if you were watching yourself through opera glasses from the upper balcony of a theater, the paradise of the spectator, absent and present, seeing but seeming absent, tacitly ignored and yet represented, there and not there, part of a rite, a link in the ceremony being celebrated — you suddenly realize — with or without you, but which has been practiced a thousand and one times in preparation for this moment when you are there, absent and present, seeing without being seen, in a theater of the sacred, which seems cruel and bloody to you, the spectator, because it is caught between the style the work demands and the style the spectator provides, it is the midpoint — you stare intently at the child’s pricked finger — between the conception of the sacred and its execution. One can conceive of God without a body, but action requires a body. The child looks at you and runs over to you to put his arms around your waist, growling like a little animal. It is only then that you realize that the floor of this refectory is not made of ordinary red tiles but of dried blood turned to brick.

9

The father and the daughter are going to look at two or three art books together, as they do every night, without discussing what they are going to look at, with the books open on his knees and her lap, pointing out one print or another, from time to time sipping a glass of claret or port, an old custom in the British Isles that has continued through the generations on this side of the Atlantic, he chooses a book of Piranesi prints, lord and master of the infinite, he tells Catarina, the author of engraving’s most absolute light and shade: Roman landscapes and prisons, he points, prisons and vistas without beginning or end, Santiago Ferguson caresses the head of his daughter, the engraving as an infinity symbol lying on its side as you are, alongside my legs, an endless sleep, entrance and exit, liberty and prison, an imprisoned vista, a prison with a view.

— This is what I am offering you. How will you correspond?

She opens her own book, which is resting on her lap. She indicates a photograph of the Teatro Olimpico of Vicenza: she says she prefers Palladio’s public architecture to his domestic architecture; he created uninhabitable Roman temples for the bourgeois of Italy, but for the public, poor and rich alike, he created imaginary cities, prosceniums that refused to be pure theater, instead they extended into streets, alleys, barely visible city vistas, urban mazes that, Catarina Ferguson repeated, as the professor had often said, gave the scene another, an infinite dimension.

— You don’t see it?

— No. I don’t see what you’re talking about.

— It’s the entrance. We are looking at the entrance.

— All I see is the same door as ever, bricked up, the same as always.

— Come with me. I will prove to you that the entrance is there.

— Will you? Has it happened to you, what sometimes happens, that suddenly we seem to see or feel something clearly, something that was there all along but we hadn’t noticed until that moment, when everything comes together around it, and everything stops and falls into place …

— Do you see it, Catarina? Do you see that it’s so? It is …

Later, in each other’s arms, she told him to stop torturing her, it was so tempting to find out about it, but she didn’t want to enter that hateful place ever again, and even though she detested it, and the people who lived there horrified her, still she couldn’t seem to get over the temptation to return to it.

— You don’t believe that there’s a symmetry in all things? Santiago asked her.

— I believe things only happen once.

— In that case, we will never understand each other.

— Very well, Santiago.

— You have to learn to give things that have failed, that have been damaged or destroyed, another chance.

— But not at the expense of my health. I’m sorry.

10

The child falls asleep on the lap of the woman with the dusky face. The nuns wait on her silently, bringing her drinks, plates of rolls; they kneel before her as she sits in one of the low straw chairs surrounded by baskets of eggs and handkerchiefs, scissors and thread, corncobs. Some of the nuns fan her from time to time; others take handkerchiefs and moisten her forehead and bathe her eyes, her lips. The woman, sitting close to the ground, is stroking the child’s hair, which is dry now; he is sleeping, his face calm. She smiles; she tells you that she sees a glint in your eyes which she recognizes; she knows what you were thinking, tell her if she’s right, a nun is a woman, but not a woman one sees every day. Men don’t get used to her in everyday encounters, so they desire her even more ardently; she is hidden, forbidden, veiled, in a convent, in a prison, in an infinite construction where every door conceals another, this one leading to that, and that, and yet another … like the nuns, doesn’t it seem?

You say yes.

That is why they make that response you heard at the end of the meal, she repeats: Desire is like snow in our hands.

And you also repeat: Yes.

She looks tenderly at the sleeping child, and without shifting her gaze, she talks to you, there is never enough time for everything, maybe for animals there is, since they don’t measure time, if they even have any, but for people, well, the ones who manage to become flesh, who possess a body, isn’t it true that they never have all the time they want?

You return her look with your own uncomprehending one; you are sitting in a higher chair, staring down at the woman and the child; no, what she means — she speaks rapidly, in a sad but strong voice — Sister Apollonia takes care of wiping off the saliva that sometimes trickles from her lips — is that nobody ever has enough time for life, even if they live to be a hundred years old; nobody leaves the world feeling they’ve exhausted life; there is always one last hope, an encounter we secretly wish to have, a desire that remains unfulfilled.

Yes …

There is never enough time to know and to taste the world completely, and the nun sighs, stroking the head of the little boy. — My son was denied things, there are things he never experienced. Does that seem incomprehensible to you?

No.

Abruptly, she takes your hand, her eyes shining, and asks, But this time? He could live longer than he did the other time, that’s why he has come back to be reborn, she tells you, that’s why I dared to do it again, they say I don’t have the right, that my child has no right to be born twice, sir (the mutilated nun, Agatha, dries the sweat off her brow), they say it’s monstrous (she squeezes your hand, this time her touch hurts), they say what I’m doing is monstrous, bringing him back into the world a second time (the blind nun, Lucía, carefully cleans the blood flowing from under the woman’s skirts, forming a puddle on the floor), but you have to understand what I’m doing, you have to help me …

— Señora …

— You are a mason, or a carpenter, or something like that, aren’t you?

You listen to her with annoyance, irritated, you don’t understand her. But you agree, yes, you are, a manual laborer; and she sighs, perhaps the miracle can be repeated, despite what everyone says; she slowly opens her eyes, the blind nun wipes them with the bloody handkerchief, she doesn’t close them, as if welcoming that stain, murmuring, If he has three fathers, why can’t he have three mothers? And if he has three mothers, why can’t he have had three fathers…?

You look around you: the eight nuns are there, standing, surrounding the three of you, the woman with the dusky face, the sleeping child, and you, and one holds a harp in her hands, another a guitar, one a staff, another a lead plate, the fifth’s hand has bells on every finger, the sixth a fork, the last a knife, a real dagger pointing at your eyes. You have a horrible feeling that everything unspeakable — sighs, sorrows, griefs — is about to find a voice.

— No, says the woman, delicately lifting the head of the sleeping child, you don’t have to say anything …

You manage to say something anyway, in a panic: —The child is already alive. You don’t have to do anything, look at him, he’s sleeping but he’s alive, you babble on a moment before the eight women begin to press up against your body, and you feel those other bodies against you, an intimacy of smells and skin and menstruation, a delicious sensation of bodies naked under green silk, their saliva in your ears, the conch in your mouth; orange silk covered your eyes and the breath of eight women had become a single breath, as fragrant as your nights, as bitter as your mornings, as sweat-drenched as your middays, and in the center of the circle, reserved for you, untouched, immaculate, the woman who was dusk itself, dark, desperate, the moles on her temples tightening like screws, saying come, José María, it took you a long time to arrive, but you are here at last, my love … The woman and her companions speak in unison, pressing against you, surrounding you, suffocating you, shutting you in the tiled bathroom decorated in a pattern of foliage, with porcelain frogs set in the white bathtub that is like a vast bed of water into which you sink … You are suffocated by unwanted kisses, smothered in that bath of steam in which you suddenly remember the maternal womb you have longed to regain before you die, and that other bath floods over you, my brother, Carlos María.

11

Those first days, Doña Heredad Mateos sat at the door of the watchman’s hut in a severe black dress, with her shawl sometimes over her head, sometimes hiding her face, when a kind of willful mortification made her hide her features, which nonetheless appeared about to slide from her face like pebbles from the wall of a ruin. At times she would drape the shawl over her shoulders to emphasize various attitudes: majesty, resignation, hope, even a hint of seduction. For all this and more, since its invention, the Mexican shawl, the rebozo, had served, and the aged Doña Heredad employed it with a kind of atavistic wisdom, seated at the entrance of her temporary home, on a rude woven straw chair, with her feet planted in the dust, the points of her black, well-shined shoes peeking out of her dark skirts.

Her breast was covered with scapulars commending her to all the saints, male and female. And by her side, though she never touched it, a cup decorated with flowers, ducks, and frogs silently inviting everyone to leave the contribution that she neither solicited nor, seemingly, touched. The cup was always half full and each twosome entering the hut added a handful of pesos to the pot, but later they began to leave coins and Doña Heredad assessed them out of the corner of her eye, fearing and confirming that some were mere coppers dropped from poor fists, but others — she didn’t reveal her delight — were treasures taken from who knows what hiding places, flowerpots, mattresses, money boxes: testons, silver pesos, even the occasional gold piece.

So they came in pairs, a woman with a man, a woman with a child, a man with a child, two children, two women, almost never two men, and some left crying, others wearing beatific smiles, most in silence and with their heads bowed, some trying not to laugh, and they were the only ones Doña Heredad favored with a look of icy fury that was like a premonition of what hell reserved for the infidel, and the promise of paradise was reserved for those who left on their knees, repeating Miracle, miracle, miracle, and when the lines grew and began to snake through the construction site and down Calle José María Marroquí, a look of satisfaction appeared on her face, particularly when the aged mother of the watchman Jerónimo Mateos noticed scapulars like hers on the chests of the devout, and even cactus thorns piercing the breasts of the most faithful, and she tried not to feel too happy about the trail of blood left by the knees wounded on the painful climb from the excavations to the shack, since (as my brother Carlos María Vélez would say ironically), in addition to using the direct entrance to the shack from the street, where the engineers had put the much-discussed traffic light, those who felt they didn’t deserve the vision without some penance decided to crawl through the mud, the construction materials, the debris, the barbed wire, the iron rods, and the clutter of the project, to be rewarded with the divine vision inside the shack of Señora Heredad: miracle, miracle, miracle, Madonna and Child, revealed in the window of a humble shack, practically a manger, said a woman to her husband, Bethlehem, O little town of Bethlehem, how still … no, said another man to his wife, I happen to know that they just put the glass in that window; but that doesn’t make it less holy, you heretic, answered his wife icily …

— Mexico is instant Fellini, I said to a group of engineers (I am José María Vélez), not expecting them to understand me or to see the irony of having discussed to death whether to put in the famous traffic light in order to keep traffic from backing up, and now look, you can’t take a step into Calle José María Marroquí between Independencia and Artículo 123, first because of all the curious and the penitent, and now because of the increasing throng of ice-cream, popcorn, and hot-dog venders and carbonated-water hawkers, competing with the stands that sold tamarind, papaya, and pineapple drinks, and chunks of coconut, and raspberries, and the piles of tricolor banners that began to appear, the sweatshirts with stencils of the Child Jesus and the Holy Virgin in various poses: the Child on the knees of the Mother, the two embracing, he sucking the maternal breast; the steaming sizzling grills with fried tortillas and meat pies and pig cracklings, their spicy smells mixing with those of sputtering candles and heavy incense, which were the prologue to the upright boxes on wooden sawhorses offering holy pictures, Sacred Hearts of silver, novenaries, hymns, Magnificats and other prayers written in ancient, crude, almost archaic characters, on fragile paper, and boxes containing statues of the Good Shepherd, Our Lady of Sorrows, the Immaculate Conception, the Sacred Redeemer, the Wise Child, all of them reflected infinitely in the mirrors of the boxes in which they were set and in the metal of the carts, the windshields of the automobiles, the windows of the stores …

Then one morning a thousand colored balloons appeared bearing the image of the Virgin and Child and a phosphorescent advertisement for Oasis Condoms proclaiming: Men, Be Prepared — Only the Virgin Conceived without Sin; but even this excess could not divert my attention, which remained fixed on the entrance and exit of the shack. I looked over the heads of the faithful, grateful for the way the penitents bowed low, so I could guard, from a distance, the purity of the wedding dress that lay on the cot, the painstaking, prolonged work of restoring it having been abandoned by the woman of the hour, Doña Heredad, mother of the watchman Jerónimo Mateos, the humble mother and son singled out for the blessing of the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus, who had visited them and so allowed the people to taste, to savor, to share in the sacred glory, and only then the police appeared to ensure that order was maintained, and later the truckloads of soldiers arrived to impose it once and for all, when the crowds bearing placards claiming violations of the Constitution and championing a progressive lay society, free of superstition, were on the point of confronting other, Catholic crowds, crying: Christ the King Lives! Christianity Yes, Communism No! and the dialectic discourses were drowned out by Hail Marys in which hope was tempered with the benediction and that with the anticipation of the eternal, the celestial tower, ivory tower, tower of David, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus …

But what really caught my eye, in the line waiting to enter and witness the miracle, was that pair of unbelievers, the engineer Pérez and the foreman Rudecindo Alvarado. Of course, the engineer could be playing doubting Thomas: until I see, I refuse to believe; and Rudecindo’s agnosticism had already cost him an injured hand when he tried to capture the vision of the glowing child. Engineer Pérez and foreman Alvarado entered gravely, the engineer circumspect Rudecindo with his head bowed, into the shack of Doña Heredad Mateos.

— And the Day of the Holy Cross I did say a thousand times Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! Jerónimo Mateos struck his chest, kneeling beside his mother, who when she saw the television cameras coming told her son to guard her post and not let anyone by, she had to change fast so she’d look her best on television, and José María was afraid she would come back wearing the wedding dress, ruining it just so she’d be suitably decked out; but no Doña Heredad Mateos reappeared, not in her black clothes, but in a pink jacket and pink running pants, a big Adidas logo on her breast and new white tennis shoes bearing the same trademark, and I, taking advantage of the confusion and of the sudden shower that disrupted everything and confused the couple inside the shack and the other people who went in to take refuge, I slipped inside, feeling less than a man and more than a god — I, José María, your brother — no more, no less than a fleeting drop, mobile, unattainable, of mercury; a winged thief, I hurried into the shack while Doña Heredad was outside cursing the heavens that had betrayed her with rain just as the television cameras arrived, and I, your brother, touched the wedding dress with incredulous fingers, then I clasped it passionately, embracing it, closing my eyes, as Catarina closed them in her embrace, repeatedly kissing the hem, caressing the jewels sewn to the dress, giving thanks for the miracle of having rescued that lost object of my desire, of my erotic memory. Who would take it away from me? You? Don’t you have your own vision, brother, and your own object? And don’t Professor Ferguson and Catarina and even Doña Heredad, and the absent mother of our unattainable love? You have your own vision and your own desire, brother; never give them up. And don’t take mine away from me.

12

Exhausted, you wake up enveloped in a dripping skin; that is the first thing you notice, and your first question is whether it is your skin or that of some wet animal protecting you from the attack of another animal. That is what your sense of touch tells you. Your sense of smell detects the heavy fragrance of dried flowers, flowers that have withered and died.

Your soaked skin; the dry odor. The trembling of a pack of hounds that passed and pissed on you.

It tastes of gall; you spit it out and the spoon that the toothless nun forces between your gritted teeth falls out. You also smell the patched, urine-drenched, sweaty clothes of the group of nuns who surround you and take care of you; they buzz around like a cloud of bees in a hive, and you search in vain for the woman with the moles on her temples — she is the one you are looking for — but you hear instead — now you can hear it — a soft step approaching you, but the nuns, hearing that same step, seem to want to block out the voice that is getting closer, so they begin to talk animatedly, in no particular order, but keeping to a common theme: I left my house dressed as a man to keep my father from raping me, I begged my brother to kill me to avoid marriage to an old lecher, I threw myself on the soldier’s sword and told him this is the only thing of yours that will penetrate me, they tore out my teeth, they gouged out my eyes, they cut off my breasts, so that I wouldn’t fornicate, so that I’d be worthy of heaven, to preserve my sanctity, blind, toothless, mutilated, but chaste, brides of Our Lord Jesus Christ and mothers of the Baby Jesus and servants of the Holy Virgin …

Then comes a voice from within the circle of women, laughing.

He comes forward, still laughing, exclaiming: —Leave me alone with my father!

You see a familiar figure approaching, holding one hand up as if in blessing, but all the while smirking possessively; the other hand holds a curse, he has a whip, which he raises (still blessing with the other hand) to lash at the nuns, who moan and fly away like frightened bats.

When he kneels in front of you, you recognize the child who yesterday, a few hours ago, or perhaps only a few minutes, leapt, glowing, over the excavations on the construction site, who walked in circles around the convent patio holding the woman’s hand, who ate in the refectory, who pricked his finger with a thorn …

You recognize his bloodstained tunic, but it seems shorter; you recognize his artificially waved hair, but it is not as blond, it’s darker; you recognize his blue eyes, but they are smaller, it’s just his makeup that seems to enlarge them; you recognize his sweet lips, but they are surrounded by the first traces of a nascent down, and when the boy raises his arm to stroke your forehead, he gives off the concentrated odor of armpits and damp hair like a nest waiting for birds to take shelter there; a burrow, you decide as he embraces you and kisses your lips and you are savagely assaulted by the memory of other touches both near and far, because you felt this same touch yesterday, last night, or a second ago, when the woman with the moles on her temples and the face of perpetual dusk kissed you and thanked you and told you …

— Thank you, says the grown boy.

Standing close to you, mild, fair, stinking of goat and shit and sweat and fried bread, a boy of the people, a farmhand or a laborer, he tells you that he and his mother are grateful for what you’ve done, and what’s done is done … but now he offers you his hand to help you up, you shake off your drowsiness and try to hurry, we don’t have much time, says the young man, who is strangely old, older every minute, there is never enough time, it’s August and your son will be born in December — thank you — and in January they’ll circumcise him, you know? and in April they’ll kill him, and in May they’ll celebrate him, recalling his death, putting wooden crosses over all the construction sites, you should know this, José María, you should be getting to work, come with me into the corral and the shed …

You take his hand with its black nails and follow him through the empty refectory and the already sunny patio, you hurry through the clean, dry bathroom, its stained-glass windows no longer steamy, its porcelain frogs dry and rough, no longer suffused with the warm moisture of last night … You and the aging boy go through the gallery of the house — the convent, the retreat, the maternity ward?

The stained-glass windows with twining floral patterns, the sideboards built into the wall, the bronze ornaments and the crystal drops, the mirrors, are suddenly behind you. The boy opens a door, the light is blinding, you cross another patio, and you have arrived at a shed full of hammers, boards, nails, files, saws, with a strong smell of sawdust.

Inside, sitting on a cane chair, surrounded by baskets of eggs and handkerchiefs, corncobs and embroidery, the woman with the face of dusk — her face even more shadowy, covered by a blue veil that hides the moles on her temples, which look less like flesh than like parts of the veil — she looks at you and smiles, but she doesn’t put down the gold-trimmed tunic she’s sewing.

— Thank you, she repeats, letting out a seam, and she gestures to you, inviting you to come into the workroom, pointing out the boards, the nails, and then makes an impatient gesture, telling both the boy and you that you should set to work.

He knows what he is supposed to do; he sits on the ground by the woman’s side, takes the thorns, and begins to weave them into a crown.

But you don’t know; she looks at you impatiently; she gets herself under control and again smiles sweetly.

— It’s necessary to work. You will have to get used to it, she tells you in her gentlest voice, it kills time …

— If you like your time dead! — the irrepressible boy laughs, sitting by the side of the seamstress.

She gives him a light smack; he pricks his finger with a thorn; he cries; he brings his bloody finger to his mouth and whines, but this time she does not make a sorrowful face, she has lost the look of despair that he knew …

— It doesn’t matter, says the woman, it doesn’t matter anymore. Now we will have him with us forever, and every year, when you die, my child, he will come back to make me a child to take your place, in December you’ll be ready for the manger, my child, in April for the cross, and in May …

She looks up, between her appeal and its answer, to see you better:

— Isn’t that so, José María?

— No, I’m not José María, I am Carlos María. José María is my brother, he stayed above, he chose not to accompany me …

First a thrush flies overhead, and its wings make a sound like metal in the hollow sky. Then the woman with the twilight face opens her mouth, the sweetness leaves first her lips and then her eyes, she looks at the boy who is sucking the blood from the finger he pricked with the thorn, and she raises her hands to her head again, her look of anguish returns, she whimpers, we’ve been deceived, we have been sent the wrong one, and the boy says it doesn’t matter, Mother, taking her arm in his bloodstained hand, whoever he is, he has done what you wanted, the new child will arrive in December, don’t worry, the child will die, Mother, and I’ll be able to go on living, I’ll grow old finally, Mother, isn’t that what you want, look, I’m growing and I won’t be killed in April, I will grow old, Mother, I will grow old with you, the child will take my place … Mother, it doesn’t matter who fucks you as long as I’m reborn!

He embraces her and she looks at you without comprehension, as if her entire life depended on certain ceremonies that by being repeated had become in equal part wisdom and folly, and you try to say something to explain the inexplicable, you manage to mumble no, your brother, José María — I—was not deceived, I chose to remain because I was in love with a woman named Catarina and, as I could not have her, I wanted instead to possess her wedding dress, her …

But they don’t understand a thing you say.

— Mother, the name doesn’t matter, what matters is what happened …

— What names do the gods use among themselves? Who knows?

— You continue conceiving, Mother, the boy said, almost crying now, holding the woman sitting on the cane chair, don’t keep asking these horrible questions, the boy said, crying, pleading with his mother, begging her, and he shows his devotion by his tears, he’s strung tight as a bow, sending the arrows of his misery in every direction, but he surrenders as well, trying to show that he’s been overcome, that the true anguish lies in the son’s breast, in his, not his mother’s, that his sorrow and sense of disillusionment would outshine hers any day, that her tricks and her moods always fall on his shoulders, but it doesn’t matter, he cries, if that’s what it takes to make her happy, he’ll just die again, and now she is the one who is sobbing, no, if it means you don’t have to die every time the dog appears …

The woman calms down and picks up her sewing, she arranges it in her lap and looks at you, asking herself, asking you, can’t miracles be repeated? How come it’s a miracle to give birth without sin the first time and a crime the second? Isn’t it possible to give birth to two gods, one good, the other bad? Tell me, then, who is going to save the imperfect and the bad, those who most need God?

Each time his mother asks one of these questions, the boy punctuates it by throwing an egg against the wall. In his face you see the rage of your country, which is the rage of the injured, the humiliated, the impotent, the insulted; you recognize it because you have seen it everywhere, all your life, in school, at work, among the engineers and among the masons, and you were its counterpart — your excessive self-confidence, the arrogance revealed in the ease with which you ignore the obstacles, and the price of those powers, which is insensibility and finally indifference, the twin of death … And then you wonder if the only people spared those destructive extremes were the architect Santiago Ferguson and his daughter, Catarina, if some quality possessed them, and if they possessed some quality that went beyond the humiliation of some and the arrogance of others, and what that quality would be called, that saving grace … It must be something more than what my brother and I say we are: reasonable people. You and I, brother.

Another egg bursts hatefully against the wall and you think of the walls of the architect Ferguson that structure space, opening and unifying it, but none of that concerns the seamstress with the darkened temples. Instead, she’s worrying about a name, more than a man, a name; you had the man, the boy says; I want the name, she replies, because the name is the man, the name is what says what he is, the name is the same as the thing it names, that is my faith, that’s what I believe, what I believe, what I believe …

But then she quiets down and reaches for two boards, which she makes into a cross. She nails the cross together and hands it to you. You cannot reject their gift, because they’re giving you something — now at last you know — that they expected from you.

13

Between the faithful and the doubting, between the troops and the television teams, the engineer Pérez made his way toward the shack where Doña Heredad Mateos was being filmed for the evening news, dressed in her Adidas outfit, and he shouted to the foreman, Rudecindo Alvarado, turn off the traffic light, and to the believers who were inside the shelter, did they see anything now, and yes, they answered yes, yes, because they were seeing what they wanted to see, the engineer shouted, see if you can find someone without mud in his eyes and a frog in his throat, someone who sees and speaks clearly, you and you, look, they’re going by, and you two, don’t say no, look, what do you see, frankly? nothing, nothing but a sheet of glass, right? just put in, and now, Rudecindo, turn on the traffic light that shines in the window of the shack, and now if I’m not mistaken, now the figures appear again, right? It’s only an optical illusion, a reflection of the prints the old lady stuck on the wall when she moved in here to do her sewing, it’s the candles under and in front of the prints, combined with the light of the traffic signal, which never goes off but is always changing from red to green to yellow, that’s what causes the reflection of the Mother and the Child, are you satisfied? Now go back to your homes, break it up, nothing’s going on here, and you, good woman, you can keep the proceeds from what you started, nobody is going to take them from you, don’t worry, cash the check they gave you to wear that sports logo, and God be with you, señora, I tell you nothing has happened here, and you, Jerónimo, go back to work, nobody is being accused of anything, but we have to put an end to this farce and get back to work, we’re way behind schedule.

— And my dress? said Doña Heredad, managing to look impassive through it all.

— What do you want, señora? Dress any way you like, pink pants or black skirts, it’s all the same to me.

— My wedding dress, I mean.

— Ooooh … Aren’t you a little old for that kind of game, you old flirt?

— The one I was sewing, where is it? Who took it? asked Doña Heredad.

She was about to cry Thief! Stop, thief! and Pérez the engineer was afraid that there was no limit to the capacity of the old woman, Señora Mateos, for inciting riots, when a silhouette appeared against the suffocating alkaline, midday sun that announced the approach of an afternoon storm; from the depths of the construction site the architect appeared, one of the Vélez twins, who knows which, it was impossible to tell them apart, walked toward them, followed by a dog. He carried a cross in his hands, two boards nailed together, and he reached the watchman’s shack and scrambled up some stones and planted the cross firmly on the roof.

14

When they led you out of the Art Nouveau house which looked Neoclassical from the outside, the toothless nun Apollonia, followed by the mutilated nun Agatha and the blind nun Lucía, dressed entirely in orange silk, Agatha with her braids entwined with flowers, Apollonia in her straw hat, and Lucía with a shepherd’s staff, you wanted to think that it was your teacher, Don Santiago, who led you here, asking you to view the ordinary with fresh eyes so as to make it yield its secret, which for the architect is the composition of a dispersed and hidden structure that only the artist knows how to see and reunite. You ask yourself if your brother — I, José María — couldn’t or didn’t want to see what you saw, or, seeing it, chose to pretend that he hadn’t, that the lodestone wasn’t there but in the watchman’s shack, where Catarina Ferguson’s wedding dress lay, waiting.

Before you answered your own question, you were blinded by the glare of the midday sun, as the door of the house swung open and the nuns said these parting words, my brother:

— Leave us. Don’t worry about us.

— A nun is only a forgotten bride.

— And never bring us flowers.

— Do you know what the dead feel when flowers are put on their graves? The flowers feel like nails. The living don’t know that. Only the dead know. Each flower is one more nail in the coffin.

— Don’t ever come back. Please.

— Leave us in peace. Please.

— They are nails. They are sweet-smelling poison.

— Your work here is completed, said the blind Lucía.

— Things are as they are, said the mutilated Agatha.

— The dates can change, said the toothless Apollonia.

— But nothing can change the fatality of time, said the blind Lucía, and she opened the door onto the light of a Mexican noon.

It’s true, you would have liked to say to the nuns, but I shall forget everything the minute I step out the door, except these four things: that nuns are only women who are rarely seen; that since they drink shadows they are always fresh; that flowers are like nails in the coffins of the dead; and that in December, perhaps, a child of yours will be born here. Only about this last do you have any doubts, just as the woman and the boy seemed to waver between two possibilities. Will a new child be born in December to prevent the other child you conceived from dying in April, the one who grows old or fades away before your eyes? But if the child you know is going to grow old and die much later and the new child is going to die in his place at the beginning of spring, will it be necessary to create a new sacrificial child each year who will assume, indefinitely, the death of the glowing child? Who will be the annual father of the sacrificial child? This year it was you, though they were expecting your brother, the carpenter José María. Does it matter who fertilizes the mother, how many pricks have entered and will enter the blessed and fertile belly of the dark woman? Or, perhaps, the boy you know will die, forsaken, in April, and each year a new child will be substituted, to be born in December and, growing rapidly, to die in April. In either case, the mother will be impregnated every year. This was your year … But of the dog you have no doubts; he guided you here and now he is showing you the way back. You realize that you had only noticed his injured rump, not his yellow body, streaked and stinking, not the melancholy eyes that perhaps give gold its value.

15

When I was young I made a trip to Scotland, my grandparents’ country, Santiago Ferguson told his daughter, Catarina. For me, that visit was both an inspiration and a reproach. In Glasgow, I encountered the past.

— Is that where you want to die?

— No.

— Then do you know where you want to die?

— Yes, in Wells Cathedral, he told her, he told us, far from anything that reminds me of all the things I don’t wish to remember, in the place that least resembles what we have created here. In a church without Virgins.

After his burial she told us a story: the day he visited the Mackintosh house in Glasgow, Santiago Ferguson left his companions and lost himself in the labyrinth of those three buildings that fit one inside the other, like stacked Chinese boxes: a modern municipal building made of concrete, a prison posing as an art museum, and, at the heart of the architecture, the reconstruction (sorrowful, secret, shameful, Catarina) of the home of the Mackintosh family.

But as he became more and more lost in astonishment (labyrinth: maze, amazement, repeated Ferguson, possessed by that astonishment), two things happened simultaneously.

First of all, he felt the various styles of architecture, infinite and wonderful, shifting before him: Palladian theaters, prisons designed by Piranesi, Jeffersonian lookouts above the clouds of Virginia, Art Nouveau palaces in the Chihuahua desert, all telling him (as he, always teaching, tells her, tells Catarina) that the word “labyrinth” also denotes a poem that can be read backwards and forwards and makes sense either way.

At the same time, he felt that he was losing control of his movements.

The first sensation filled him with the special ecstasy associated with one of his most singular notions, that of an ideal communication between all human constructions. In the bold, the adventurous mind of Santiago Ferguson (our teacher, our father, her husband, your lover), architecture was the simple and complex approximation to an imagined and unattainable model. Through these ideas, Ferguson flirted with the simultaneously tempting and horrifying notion of a perfect symmetry that would be as much the origin as the fate of the universe.

Then we remembered that in class, as we tried to comprehend the mysterious web our teacher had woven around our lives without our realizing it, Santiago Ferguson vigorously rejected the concept of unity. He called it the “ultimate Romantic nostalgia.” But he considered equally detestable the notion of fragmentation, which he said was the devil’s own work.

— The blithe Romantic identification of subject and object not only repulses me (it was as though we were still in his class, hanging on his every word); it terrifies me.

He made a sweeping gesture in the air. His blackboard remained empty. — It is a totalitarian idea, impossible physically, but enslaving mentally and politically, because it sanctions the excesses of those who would first impose it and then maintain it as the supreme, unassailable virtue.

Then he startled us, pounding his hands together twice, saying first — to see if we’d been dozing — that unity — now listen! — is no virtue, and, second, he scraped his chalk across the board to make our nerves stand on end, so we would be sure to hear:

— I fear happiness at any price. I fear imposed unity, but I have no desire for fragmentation either. Therefore, I am an architect. Ab ovum.

He turned to scrutinize us, with something approaching tenderness.

— Simply, a building allows me to regain the difference between things, aiming for symmetry as the concept that contains identical measures of identity and difference.

These arguments, communicated by the professor with his usual fervor, were the essence of his thought, the ideology behind his always imperfect and incomplete work. He explained them, we said, with words and gestures that were warm and fluid — but more than once we surprised him peeing in the faculty bathroom, merrily spraying the white porcelain and repeating “I want symmetry, I want symmetry!” And still his elegance and energy seemed undiminished.

But in the Mackintosh house, at the same time that his faith in the significance of his profession was renewed, he also felt, in that labyrinth, that he was losing his motor control. He told Catarina it wasn’t that he felt paralyzed or that his limbs felt heavy. On the contrary, his movements were as quick and precise and fluid as ever. But they were not his.

Then Santiago stopped — Catarina continued the story — and he realized that there was someone mimicking every one of his gestures. Terrified, he wanted to seize him, but he couldn’t because the being that was imitating him was invisible; and yet Santiago could distinguish him perfectly well: he was a man with a thick mustache, wearing mourning clothes, a black silk tie, and a serious expression. I couldn’t see him, said Ferguson (to Catarina), because, since he mimicked me so exactly, that strange alien being was me — he was within me so he was me, transported, in a sort of vision, outside of myself, so that I couldn’t see him.

He felt that being within him and at the same time beside him, simultaneously preceding him and following him, so that it was impossible to determine whether that perfect similitude of expression and motion was an imitation of Santiago Ferguson by that repulsive, mournful being (he began to smell decay around him — putrid water, damp skin, old flowers) or if he, Santiago Ferguson, were imitating his invisible companion.

He told Catarina, “I wasn’t master of my movements. When I stopped abruptly in a corner of the Mackintosh house — a house that had three times been walled, displaced, disguised — and a shaft of icy light suddenly blinded me, I couldn’t tell, daughter, if I was the one who had stopped or if that being who imitated me so perfectly had stopped me. Then a totally alien voice came from my lips, saying, Take care of us. From this time on, dedicate yourself entirely to us.

“I don’t understand why, by what right, or on what whim, he dared impose that responsibility on me. I was blinded by the light but as my eyes adjusted to it, I could begin to make out a partly open door in one corner. Then the figure who had accompanied me pulled himself away from me and entered the space that could be glimpsed through the open door.

“Drawn in outline on the infinite whiteness within, two figures held out their hands to me, their arms open. The man who was and wasn’t me went to join them, and then I saw that, like those two figures, one obviously feminine, the other a child, the figure of the man who had emerged from me melted into the whiteness of a white-tiled bath with porcelain frogs inset in a white bathtub and floral patterns that were barely visible through the thick steam of that architectonic belly.

“The man joined the other two figures, and then I saw how the woman and the child, she dressed in black, with her dark hair piled high, the blond child dressed in an old-fashioned suit with candy stripes, were wrapping themselves in fabric, in towels or sheets, I’m not sure, but only white material, wet, suffocating, and the man who had asked me to take care of the three of them joined his family, and like her, he began to change into a damp sheet, one of the sheets that stuck to those bodies I imagined foul, faded, savagely shrouded …

“They held out their hands to me, their open arms.

“From the child’s little hands fell sweets wrapped in rich, heavy paper.

“The arms beckoned me, the sweets fell to the floor, and I felt myself surrounded by an intense, perfumed, unwanted love and I was about to succumb to it because no one had ever demanded and offered love with as much intensity as they did, that unlikely family, seductive, repugnant, white as purity itself but repulsive as the second skin, wet and sticky, of the shroud that covered them.

“I instinctively resisted the seduction, I decided they were the Mackintoshes, and that they were dead; you are a family of dead people, I told them, and with that a vista opened up behind them, behind their white, sticky redoubt, and there were all the houses of Glasgow, communicating with other structures that had been unknown before, almost unimagined, houses that had never been seen, perhaps had never been built, where other women wearing sumptuous capes of pale silk of the softest lemon and the filmiest olive walk through arcades and patios, carrying objects that I cannot recognize. Those women stood so erect, so sad, on a distant, precise, and horizontal world, that the effect — they were so far away yet I saw them so clearly — was to make me dizzy and nauseated.

“In the center of that distant horizon were two more figures, a woman clasping to her breast a child with an injured finger. The first group was hiding the other, but they were related, distant in space but near in time, symmetrical.

“I was afraid that they, too, would call to me and beg me: Take care of us. Dedicate yourself totally to us from this time on …

“Other houses, different spaces, but is it always the same trinity, the same responsibility? Everything telescopes back to the immediate, concealing the distance or the future, whatever it was (or perhaps it belonged only to the other and I was afraid it was mine, neither time nor space, at last, comprehensible, but only irrational possessions), and the figures before me returned to the foreground, I heard the tantalizing crackle of the cherry, gold, and blue wrapping paper that held the sweets, and I saw the swaddled heads of the figures smiling at me.

“Beneath the damp cloth, the blood ran from their gums, painting their smiles.

“I looked at those figures — now there were three of them — and I decided I preferred my vision of them, no matter how horrible, funereal and white, to my second vision of the incomplete figures behind them. The man was absent from that second scene. There was only the mother and child, beckoning to me. I had no wish to be that absent man.

“No sooner had I thought that than I saw them, the three figures in the closer group, huddled in the brilliant white light of the bath, their damp clothing removed, appearing naked, rapidly growing younger before me; I quickly closed my eyes, already driven out of my mind by the chaos of my sensations, convinced that their youth and their nakedness would overcome me unless I closed my eyes to negate both their youth and their seductiveness; if I didn’t look at them, they would grow old as quickly as they had regained their youth…”

He never explained to me — Catarina resumed the story — what he meant by “regaining their youth” insofar as the child in the candy-striped suit was concerned. Returning to the womb? Disappearing altogether? But Santiago did tell me that when the guards in that little Glasgow museum found him prostrate in a corner and asked him what had happened and what they could do for him, he couldn’t very well question them to find out if there was a family forever walled in, there in the corner where they had found him, by the closed-off door of a bathroom, so white and steamy, blinding and damp …

He just stared at the candy wrappers scattered over the floor.

16

— Catarina, I don’t know what I said in class today or why I said it. I don’t know if other beings have taken possession of me, daughter, talking through me, making me say and do things against my will.

— I am not your daughter, Santiago.

— They make me feel that my most private acts are public ones.

— You seem so tired. Lie down here.

— Abandon, for example; a careless cruelty.

— Can I make you tea?

— Have they been following me, constantly tempting me, imitating my movements as a kind of seduction so that I would imitate theirs? I will never know, daughter.

— I am not your daughter, Santiago.

— Do they inhabit the real houses that you and I do, Catarina, or do they live only in imagined houses, invisible replicas of ours?

— You ask so many painful questions, Santiago. Look, you will feel better if I sit down next to you. What did you say in class today?

— I addressed the boys.

— And not the girls? You have plenty of girl students — and some of them are quite attractive.

— No, I was talking to the two of them, you know, to the twins, the Vélez brothers.

— And what did you say?

— I gave a class on architecture and myth, but I don’t know why I said what I said …

— Well, Santiago, in that case, the best thing would be for you to stay here by the fire with me and we’ll look at some books, as we always …

— That it is myths that haunt us, not ghosts, which are only specters produced by an unexpected intersection of myths. A Celtic myth, for example, might intersect with an Aztec one. But what interests me the most is the syncretic capacity of Christian myth to embrace them all and make them all rationally accessible at once, and at the same time irrationally sacred. That was my class. But I don’t know why I said all that.

— You have just explained it to me, Santiago. You were trying to reach those two, Carlos María and José María.

— Ah, yes. We think our actions are ours alone; an act of wantonness, for example: it seems entirely ours, but soon, Catarina, something else happens that completes, negates, and mocks the action we thought was ours, making it part of a much larger scheme that we will never comprehend. So maybe what we call myths are, finally, just situations that correspond despite their distance in time and place.

— Have something to drink. Look at the books. These are the prints you like the best. Piranesi, see, Palladio …

— That is the secret of the houses we build and live in. Tell the boys that. Tell the brothers, Catarina.

— They are my brothers, Santiago.

— Take care of us. Dedicate yourself totally to us from this time on. Have mercy. Don’t abandon us. Have pity.

— What can I do for you?

— Bury me far from here, in a sacred place, but a place where there are no Virgins on the altars. The creatures who are pursuing me will leave me in peace if I deceive them, by leaving the places I’ve lived in and the people I’ve known. I’ll make them think I’ve joined them permanently, joined their watery voice, their damp skin, their wilted flowers, after I returned from Scotland, my grandparents’ home …

— You have reconstructed that bathroom everywhere, Santiago, the tiles, the recurring foliage, the porcelain frogs set in the white bathtub … Everywhere.

— They hold the secret.

— What secret, she implored, tell me, but he didn’t answer directly:

— I chose them among all my disciples.

— You mustn’t like them very much.

— Ask them if they, too, sense that others …

— You keep repeating that. Who?

— If the other beings are always there, or if they just sneak in between the stones and the bricks of all the buildings I’ve built since …

— Or what would be even worse, Santiago, in all the buildings you have imagined.

— So you finally understand what I’m saying.

— I’m glad, Santiago, that I will soon pass that burden on to the twins and let them puzzle it out.

— Someone must inherit the mystery of the dead.

That is what Santiago Ferguson said then, before he died.

Catarina looked at us with veiled eyes and said:

— I think that is Santiago Ferguson’s legacy, twins. Now that you’ve heard it, and possibly understood it, you, like me, will never be free from the professor, as you call him …

We — José María and Carlos María — were going to tell Catarina, our unattainable love, that what she had told us might be a nightmare, but we were grateful for it anyway, if it allowed us to be near her at last, and to love her.

— To love you, Catarina.

— Both of you? She laughed.

We didn’t know to what extent our intimacy and our love, as the father’s disciples, meant the responsibility for his ghosts and his daughter.

The ghosts didn’t worry us. We had heard the professor’s lecture. An artist always creates an asystematic system, which he does not even recognize himself. That is his strength; that is why the work of art always says much more than the explicit intention of the author. The work — house, book, statue—is the ghost.

Love, on the other hand, blinded us again, though we hoped it would provide the final illumination.

But first there appeared, again, death and a journey.

III. LOVES

1

When Professor Santiago Ferguson died that autumn, his daughter Catarina called to tell us that her father had asked to be buried in Wells Cathedral in England. He had also said that he hoped his disciples, both old and young, who had dined at the Lincoln Restaurant, would accompany him to his final home. He didn’t want it to seem an obligation, it was just a friendly invitation, a last sentimental request. We didn’t try to find out how many others were going. We didn’t call anyone: Say, are you going to go to the professor’s funeral? Besides, those days nobody was doing any traveling except on business, on an expense account, or to get some money out of Mexico before it was too late. But our situation was different; we were associates in architectural firms in Europe and the United States, contributors to Architectural Digest, designers of some so-called residences in Los Angeles and Dallas, of the Adami Museum in Arona, on Lake Maggiore, and of various hotels in Poland and Hungary. We were members of the class of Mexican professionals that had been able to create an infrastructure outside our country, so we could afford the luxury of buying our own airline tickets, if we wished. First class, because, as Professor Ferguson used to say:

— I only travel first-class. If I can’t, I prefer to stay comfortably at home.

Well, now he was traveling with Catarina, but in a coffin in the cargo compartment of a British Airways Boeing 747, because we were flying first-class on Air France to Paris, where the Mitterrand government had commissioned us to design an international conference center in a district near the Anet Castle, owned, incidentally, by an old Mexican family: the sequel to an itinerant Mexico, sometimes dispossessed, sometimes in voluntary exile, sometimes engaged in professional and artistic activities that could not be limited entirely to the homeland; and as we flew over the Atlantic, we browsed through a book on English cathedrals and the itinerant world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when religious and intellectual fervor caused people to travel more than they had before, though it took a greater effort and they faced greater difficulties than we do today, which puts us in mind of something the itinerant twelfth-century monk and educator Hugo de Saint-Victor said, that being satisfied with remaining in one’s homeland and feeling comfortable there is the first stage in a man’s development; feeling comfortable in many countries is the next stage; but perfection is attained only when a man feels exiled in any part of the world, no matter where he goes.

By that standard, our beloved teacher Santiago Ferguson had reached only the second stage, and we, his disciples, Carlos María and José María Vélez, brothers, might have shared that weakness; but we both knew well that it wasn’t true, we had both traveled through extraordinary exiles, one of us to the summit of a tragicomic calvary guarded by Señora Heredad Mateos, the other to a place where nobody, not even its inhabitants, could ever feel satisfied. José María had traveled to a land of ritual; Carlos María to the subterranean discontent that fed it.

But we never told each other about our experiences. For each of us, true exile had been to be separated from the other, clearly making José María into a distant I and Carlos María into a remote you. If we were able to understand anything from this story, it was this: nowhere — not Glasgow, Mexico, Virginia, or Vicenza — was building a house enough to fulfill the human, professional, or aesthetic obligations of architecture. Someone had to actually live there. And those inhabitants were going to want what the Mackintoshes demanded of Ferguson, what the residents of the subterranean convent begged of Carlos María, what Doña Heredad Mateos asked of the Virgin and Child. Take care of us. Dedicate yourself totally to us from this time on. Have pity. Don’t abandon us. What are the limits of creation? There is no artist who in his most private heart has not asked that question, afraid that the creative act is not free, not sufficient, but that it is prolonged in the demands of those who inhabit a house, read a book, contemplate a picture, or attend a theatrical performance. How far does the individual privilege of creation extend; where does the obligation of sharing that creation begin? The only work residing purely in the I, dispossessed of its potential we, is a work that was conceived but never realized. The house is there. Even an unpublished book, stored away in a drawer, is there. We Vélez brothers imagined a world of pure projects, pure intentions, whose only existence would be mental. But in that a priori universe, death reigns. That is, more or less, what happened to us when we separated — we lost the us; and now, flying over the Atlantic, we tried to regain it by avoiding all mention of what had happened: Carlos María never talked about what had happened to him when he went through the Neoclassical door, following the dog; José María never mentioned what had occurred at the shack of Doña Heredad Mateos. Only two mute objects remained as witnesses of those separate experiences: the wooden cross on the roof of the watchman Jerónimo Mateos’s shack, which Carlos María had taken with him when he left the convent; and a wedding dress spread out as a temptation, as a remembrance, perhaps as a reproof, on the twin bed of José María in our family home on Avenida Nuevo León, by the Parque España, a house our father had designed in a style that was neat and sleek, or, as one said then, “streamlined” (or, another word: “aerodynamic”): in Mexican homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, circa 1938.

But we had lost the object that could have united our respective experiences — the porcelain frog — and now, perhaps, we were traveling secretly in search of that object that was so strongly associated with our love for Catarina, the object we had discovered one afternoon in her father’s bath, and again in the secret convent on Calle Marroquí. Was there something that linked those two places and, consequently, those two experiences? The Mackintosh house in Glasgow meant nothing to us.

Perhaps, looking over the photographs of English cathedrals and sipping the Bloody Marys we had ordered, ignoring all the wise prescriptions against jet lag that advise forgoing alcohol at forty thousand feet, we were really looking back at our true home in Colonia Hipódromo, as if to compensate for the transitoriness of the shelter that carried us from Mexico to Paris in thirteen hours. And yet there was something more deadly about the maternal womb of aluminum and foam rubber now carrying us than about the immobile terrestrial home where we grew up.

An acquaintance of ours, a low-level Mexican bureaucrat, came into the first-class section and walked past us, nervously clutching a Martini wrapped in a wet paper napkin, grumbling:

— I feel like I was born in this thing and I am going to die in it. Bottoms up! She sighed, taking a gulp of her drink, and adding in a suggestive voice: —And that’s all that’s going down here, brothers.

She laughed, looking at us sitting there, identical, with our drinks and our art book, and said that our laps were already occupied anyway, get it? And she guffawed and turned away: she was dressed for the long flight in a jogging suit with an Adidas logo, a pink jacket and pants, and tennis shoes. We looked at the photograph of the inverted arches that may not be the most subtle but are certainly the most spectacular element of Wells Cathedral; the double stone opening at the end of the nave creates perspectives similar to those of the interior of an airplane, while recalling the primogenial cave: two entrances to the refuge — the engines of the 747 were inaudible, a lap cat makes more noise — which safeguarded us and also, perhaps, imprisoned us. The home is a refuge that does not imprison, and in ours, our father taught us and made us what we are: gave us our love for architecture, the world, and its two geographies, natural and human. From our father, who died too young, we learned the lesson that Santiago Ferguson reaffirmed for us; we can’t return to pure nature: she does not want us and we have to exploit her to survive; we are condemned to artifice, to copy a nature which will not suffer for us, which can protect us without devouring us. That is the mission of architecture. Or of architectures, plural, we said, quickly turning the pages of our book to the glorious images of York and Winchester, Ely and Salisbury, Durham and Lincoln, names that conjure up the glory possible in the kingdom of this world. Cathedrals with long naves, through which all the processions of exile and faith can pass; immense, intense pulpits out of which can tumble the most flexible and inventive rhetoric in the world, that of the English language; and yet, beside this splendor, rise the modest, infinitely varied sculpted façades of the towers; the wide arms of the monasteries embraced in the majestic hospitality of Canterbury and Chichester. Luxury liners, laden with souls, wrote the poet Auden: hulls of stone.

This is the place Santiago Ferguson has chosen for his burial, for if it was not in his power to determine the hour of his physical death, at least he was able to fix the place and setting for the death of his spirit, which, he always said, would be nothing less than the source of life itself. There is not a single life that does not spring from death, that is not the result of or recompense for the deaths that preceded it. The artist and the lover know that; other men do not. An architect or a lover knows that the living owe their lives to the dead, that is why they make love and art with such passion. Our deaths, in turn, will be the origin of other lives, of those who remember or are affected by what we did in the name of those who preceded or followed us.

This was our secret requiem for our beloved teacher Santiago Ferguson. If the living Vélez brothers still retained a longing (and a memory as well, since we had lived there) for our own private cathedral, it was not a cave, not an airplane, but a house, a home, where our childhood possessions were gathered: toys, adventure books, outgrown clothes, a teddy bear, deflated soccer balls, photographs … Our father, the architect Luis Vélez, was nicknamed “The Negative” because his skin was dark and his hair white, so that, looking at him in a photo, one was tempted to reverse the image and give him a white face and dark hair. Our mother, on the other hand, was pale and fair; her negative would have been completely dark, the only exception, perhaps, the fine line of her eyebrows or the carmine of her lips. She died during the difficult delivery of twins. Us. We are the sons of María de la Mora de Vélez, so we were both baptized with the name of our lost mother.

The Mexican under-secretary again interrupted what we were doing, what we were thinking; in her high-strung ukelele voice she barked, Up and at them, boys, lift those curtains, we’re about to land at Pénjamo, you can see the light of its towers, and she blinded us with daylight and the sight, at our feet, of the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel.

We were entering France through Brittany, we would spend two days in Paris, and Sunday was the event at Wells. We looked at each other, brothers, both thinking of Catarina, who was waiting for us there with the body of her father.

— Catarina is waiting for us with the body of her father, said José María, while the absurd under-secretary, plastered to the gills, sang “Et maintenant,” no doubt to celebrate her arrival in Paris with a song from her youth.

— And her husband? asked Carlos María. Joaquín Mercado?

— He doesn’t matter. Catarina and her father are the only ones who matter.

— Et maintenant, que dois-je faire?

— Just shut up, señora, please!

— What did you say? You bastard, I’m going to report you!

— Go right ahead. I have no use for your fucking bureaucracy.

— Never mind. She doesn’t matter either. Only the father matters.

— He is dead.

— But you and I are not. Which will she choose?

— Her father was our rival, you know?

— Yes, yes, I knew he was the one Catarina was screwing that afternoon.

— You and I must not be rivals now, promise me that?

We didn’t know which of us asked for that promise, as the plane began its descent to Charles de Gaulle Airport.

2

We had a tacit understanding that each of us would keep his secrets, but there was one, at least, that we had to share. Catarina had become irresistible to us the moment we saw her making love with her father. Then there was no rivalry between us, or jealousy of her father; once again, the professor had preceded us; he had done what we wanted to do; he did it first, he showed us the way, as he did in class. But now, entering the deep Gothic nave of Wells Cathedral, walking through the yellow and green, the white and red and olive lights, every color but blue, that were created by the great high stained-glass windows, we knew Professor Santiago Ferguson would do, would say, no more; never again.

She was standing by the casket. She saw us but didn’t move. She knew as well as we: there would be only three mourners; no others would attend.

She was dressed in black, a severe silk suit, dark stockings, and flat shoes that could not relieve her exceptional height. She took our hands, kissed our cheeks: she withdrew one hand and touched the lid of the lacquered box. We did the same. We knelt. We heard a tape-recorded sermon, followed by a very brief Requiem.

The brevity of the ceremony was appropriate: the professor had no need for ceremony, he was at Wells, where he wanted to be, and the important thing was not to delay his solitary entrance, not to that marvelous English cathedral but to architecture itself, his true homeland, a place where he would never find peace, so much had he desired it, so much had he dreamed of it. Ferguson had to become architecture.

Here, with him, we felt that was how it should be, that all the places we could recall from our long friendship with him were here — the Mackintosh house in Glasgow, which was a delicate reflection of the professor’s spirit, and which we knew better from his lectures than from photographs; or the projects on José María Marroquí, which we knew all too well; or our house on Avenida Nuevo León, where our impossibly fair mother died, and our father, dark like us; or the office on Colonia Roma, where we surprised the pallid architect Ferguson screwing his daughter, who was dark like us; or Ferguson’s own house in the Pedregal, which contained not a single photo of Catarina’s mother. If Catarina did not resemble her father, did she look like her mother, dead, absent, mute, unmentionable? Nobody ever dared mention her, neither us nor them, the father and the daughter, except once, when we heard Catarina say:

— When we moved here to the Pedregal, we got rid of a thousand old things, photos, dolls, dresses, records, all that, you know …

Here, our professor’s wisdom was plain to see; here, he was equidistant from all his favored places, those of architecture and of his heart. This was the point of equilibrium — how well he understood! — on which his entire life balanced, and only in death could he occupy it.

Catarina knew this as well as we did; we could go now, leaving the casket to the work of time, and meet outside.

A pair of tall monks with light, graying hair and profiles like ecclesiastic Hamlets were walking through the cloisters in animated discussion, accentuating our melancholy mood, our feeling that every stone is a forgotten memory.

We were silent as we left the cloisters and went outside, to admire the incomparable façade of Wells Cathedral, which is the point of departure from the Middle Ages, just as Santiago de Compostela is its point of entry. But if grace welcomes glory in Galicia, with its arch of prophets in animated conversation, as if eternal life were a continuous, perfect, sacred cocktail party, and Daniel smiles at us with the enigmatic look of a thirteenth-century Mona Lisa, in Wells the inclusivity of its great entrance undermines the Gothic ideal; the Gothic of Wells is an imminent Baroque, a hunger for figuration that finds its expression in the tiers of three hundred forty stone figures that cover the façade and the tower of the cathedral, in vast horizontal groupings that proclaim the triumph of the Church: one line of prophets and apostles; another of angels; the intermediate ranks of virgins and martyrs, at the side of the confessors; and then the resurrection of the dead; and, at the very top, the faded majesty of Christ.

That is what you say, Carlos María, detaching yourself from us for a moment, but he, José María, does not agree with you, this is not the familiar Baroque of Mexico, Peru, and Spain, it remains Gothic, he says, faceted into multiplicity to increase our awe, when it finally reveals itself as pure void. The whole vast façade of Wells Cathedral, intoning a hymn to the triumph of the Church, offers infallible signs and absolute truths, which immediately demonstrate their fallibility and deceptiveness. He says that the Gothic loved that effect because it desired not what was revealed but what could not be revealed, what is only imminent, what …

— Isn’t that so, Professor?

Then we looked at each other, with a little sadness and a lot of surprise. For a moment, we were back at our monthly meal in Lincoln Restaurant.

Catarina says that fewer than half the original statues remain; many have been mutilated; several — she smiles behind a veil that isn’t there, because her dark skin is also a veil, accentuated by the deep eyes of her Indian and Spanish beauty — were decapitated; and all of them, without exception, are being devoured by the salt breezes from the nearby Irish Sea.

After a pause, Catarina continues. The three hundred and forty statues were born together, but they have been dying separately, one by one.

She asked us if the statues that have survived suffered, did they long to rejoin the ones that were gone.

She called us twins, brothers.

We didn’t answer her questions, either because we didn’t understand them or because we didn’t think they were important: we were savoring the way she had addressed us, the Vélez brothers, Carlos María and José María, born at the same time but almost certainly doomed to die separately: one would survive the other — you? I? — as now, the three of us, together here beneath the sculpted sky of Wells Cathedral, facing its façade and its tower eroded little by little by the wind, we have survived our teacher, the father of Catarina Ferguson: he. The absurd undersecretary in the airplane had also called us brothers, and laughed — but what a difference in the way Catarina now said:

— Do you think, brothers, that the statues that have survived suffer, do they long to rejoin the ones that are gone?

She laughed and took two long steps with her slender legs, to stand face to face before us. Then she told us how she and Santiago Ferguson had spent hours talking about other homes, not only the ones where we had lived — together or separately: Ferguson’s house in the Pedregal; ours in Avenida Nuevo León; his office on Colonia Roma where we saw the father making love to his daughter — but others, which Catarina and Santiago talked about and slowly re-created, she lying on his lap, he stroking her long, flowing black hair, freed from its prim bun: recollecting, reconstructing, caressing, just as they felt comforted and caressed by those houses, the Mackintoshes’ in Glasgow, Jefferson’s in Virginia, Palladio’s in Vicenza, remembering that, though we make the houses, they outlive us, but a part of us remains in them, for they do not simply survive us, they keep our ghosts alive, they are the voices of our memory, dependent on us even after we are dead, as we are dependent on them when we are alive: Catarina and Santiago, holding large glasses of port in their hands, caressing, drinking, turning the pages of the architecture books, convinced that we will be received in the refuge we constructed only if we accept everything that occurred in it — crimes and punishments, births and deaths, sorrows and joys, sacrifices: Catarina and Santiago embracing in front of the domestic hearth, resolving to forget nothing, to destroy nothing, sometimes full of passionate humility, sometimes of a humble compassion before the world, sometimes inventing a married couple in Scotland, sometimes a father and child in Virginia, sometimes a couple consisting of a theater and its audience in Italy; exploring to their final consequences the comfort of refuge and the horror of openness, the capacity of a house to provide a space for love, life, death, the imagination, miracles; for a bath with porcelain frogs, a lead umbrella stand, for a rainy patio circled by nuns mutilated in defense of their virginity; a watchman’s hut in which a traffic light was reflected, a rich woman’s wedding dress passed from hand to hand, down to the dispossessed poor; for a violent desire to survive, for an imminent, unwanted birth, a once immaculate conception, which is corrupt and sinful the second time, for a …

— … so many little things, childhood toys, outgrown clothes, old movie programs, who knows why we saved them, old photos, so many objects, brothers, said the woman we had both desired so deeply, all our lives: Catarina took something from her jacket pocket and handed it to us.

It was a photograph, like the ones we kept in our house on Avenida Nuevo León, a photograph she may have kept in the drawer in a secret bathroom decorated with a floral pattern with frogs set in the bathtub, exposing it to moisture, perhaps in the hope that the steam would erode the image away, as the sea breeze eroded the statues on Wells Cathedral.

… Mackintosh; the Teatro Olimpico; Monticello; the house abandoned by the Gameros family in Chihuahua at the beginning of the Revolution: Santiago and I recalled all those, and out of our love we shaped the single, unbending resolve of discovering an architecture that would contain all those places that we explored in an effort to prevent their death, to keep them alive at any cost, or to bring new life to them, make them fertile again, brothers, as if houses were living bodies, with flesh, viscera, memories …

It was a photograph of the young architect Santiago Ferguson, instantly recognizable, holding the pudgy hand of a child with black bangs and deep-set eyes that had not yet known passion or remorse, the emotions that we saw now in the dark eyes our unattainable beloved raised to us.

The father was standing, holding the hand of the child, who was sitting in the lap of a dark woman dressed in a black forties-style suit, with the open-collar piqué blouse and padded shoulders that have been revived in current fashion; she was gazing intently at the child. The woman had a noticeable mustache on her upper lip, and a mole on each of her temples. She had a dusky face.

— Is she dead? asked Carlos María after a long pause.

— No, said Catarina, she is being taken care of. It’s for her own good. I am telling you because it’s our responsibility to keep her isolated, secure. Nobody must see her.

— Ah. We may never see her? Is that an absolute prohibition?

— Not everyone can be granted that privilege. Catarina smiled. On altars, perhaps, you may see her.

— And in memory.

— When memory comes fully to life, it can be an aberration or a crime. On altars — Catarina repeated — there, perhaps, we may see our mother.

— Not here. There are no Virgins on Protestant altars. Why did Santiago Ferguson choose this place to die?

— As you say, perhaps he felt that something was missing here. Perhaps he felt that there was a place for him in this cathedral. Perhaps this is the place that contains all others, or the place that excludes all others. Either way, he may have felt that this was the ideal architecture he had been seeking all along, an architecture without the burden of the maternal image. Santiago Ferguson was explicit about that. But if he wanted a resting place without Virgins, he could not wish for a place where bodies separated by death are reunited. We must respect his wishes. He wanted, really, to rest in peace.

— You loved him, truly, José María dared to say.

— I loved Santiago Ferguson, but not our father, Catarina replied.

— No, our father died very young, when you were a child.

Then, children of dark, loving parents, offspring of their dark love, of love between friends, we took each other’s hands and walked away, vowing never to reveal what we now knew, what denied her brothers the intimacy of Catarina’s body, what gave that right to Santiago Ferguson, what denied the death in childbirth of the fair María del Moral, or what opened the empty page of the mystery of her death, what removed Catarina’s mother from the world forever, our mother, lover of our father, the architect affectionately known as “The Negative,” our mother, shut away to protect the friendship between families, the memory of the father, or the love of Santiago and Catarina. We silently vowed never to speak of these things. We would never mention what gave our teacher the right to do what we could never do, condemning us to the separation of being three, not one, never one, and of never repeating what we saw and experienced separately, yet what brought us together, holding each other’s hands, in passionate humility before the mysteries of life.

We left Wells Cathedral, each of us knowing that we could return only when we again had a thirst for miracles, and that our newfound kinship would depend on our continuing to believe in the miracle of the others. Apart from that, to all appearances, we would continue to be “reasonable people.”

At that moment we lost the possibility of the couple, but we gained, behind the multitude of our ghosts, a fraternal trinity. Carlos María, José María, Catarina.

Had that been Santiago Ferguson’s secret wish, after all?

3

Again last night the glow appeared.

Doña Heredad Mateos arrived at the convent hidden in Calle José María Marroquí, and in the hot white bathroom where the steam formed drops on the dried-up, wrinkled backs of the frogs, she presented to the woman who had just given birth an old patched wedding dress, which the old seamstress’s art had made like new: pearls, organdy, and a whiff of naphthalene. The nuns thanked her for the gift and placed it, as though to try it on, over the stretched-out body of the woman who had just given birth, who did not smile. The mask of her immobile face, embellished only by the hair on her upper lip and the moles on her temples, broke as she asked, again, why the birth was a miracle the first time and now, the second time, it was a sin. The seamstress said she didn’t know anything about that kind of thing, it was beyond her, all she had was faith. And, as always, she would gladly take care of the child. Yes, it was better, as always, for the father not to know about the child. She would take care of him.

— What a good idea it was to build this temascal—said Doña Heredad, looking around at the steamy white bath. — It’s good here — she said tenderly to the woman who had just given birth.

Then the old seamstress, dressed in black, with her long skirt, her rebozo, her cotton stockings and flat shoes, took the baby and placed it in her crude multicolored shopping basket, hailed a bus on Artículo 123 and, after a long ride through the city of sorrows, got off on the broad avenue of La Esplanada, in Las Lomas de Chapultepec.

There, with the shopping basket in her hand, she went patiently from door to door, from one luxurious residence to another, requesting “an offering for this poor mother,” and receiving, from time to time, a bottle of lemonade, the leftovers from a banquet, fried pork or seafood, dry tortillas, a bit of tossed salad. The assiduous woman placed it all in her basket, indifferent to the sounds of cars and trucks and helicopters and motorcycles; oblivious to the black clouds of exhaust fumes, because she knew that none of that affected the child; this child was born without lead in his lungs; each year when he was born, the child was saved from stain, sickness, and death. Presenting him at the doors of Las Lomas, Doña Heredad was oblivious to the noise and pollution. She received alms, but her memory went far beyond the limit of her travails, and in her head she heard the ancient sounds of organ-grinders, itinerant venders, old-clothes sellers, and knife sharpeners filling the ever-expanding, ever more immense terrain of the oldest city of the New World — another city, murmured Doña Heredad Mateos to herself, a pure city, in whose houses the living could rejoin the dead, a small city where people could tell their stories, a city of faith where miracles occurred, even if reasonable people never understood, said Doña Heredad, asking charity for the god child, charity for the newborn, showing the foam-rubber doll with his golden curls and his blue eyes and his white gown with gold edging and his bloody fingers — charity, charity for the child.

Varaville, Normandy, Easter 1987

Tepoztlán, Morelos, Easter 1988