Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins
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 lit
tle 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 architectu
re 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.