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.