Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  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 re
call 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 un
attainable 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.