Ay! And yet he was a man, had loves, lost them, Artemio Cruz had a wound, kid, do you have any? I don’t see scars on your body …
“Then what do you see, Señora?”
Ay, I see ignorance about yourself. You don’t know who you are. You still don’t know. Artemio Cruz had an open love wound and spent his life trying to close it. He failed. And it was his own fault he failed. That’s all. He had a brave son. He lost him. On the other hand, that caliph of the northern border, Leonardo Barroso, that one has no excuse. He was a thug who never had a day of compassion, not even for his own impaired son, he took his wife away and prostituted her, are you listening to me? one Michelina Laborde, one of those little society whores sold to the highest bidder with no shame at all because in order to feel shame you have to have some smarts, just a little bit of brain, that’s all, and these little society ninnies move their necks and you hear a marble rolling around though their eyes blink like calculators. Leonardo Barroso was a miserable asskisser to the Gringos, father of another cruel, misogynistic son, son and grandson of incest with the aforementioned Michelina but grandfather to a brave, astute, and perverse woman, María del Rosario Galván, whom you will suddenly meet in your new life. Generation after generation, degeneration!
I questioned in silence. She read the silence.
You know, my boy? Sometimes I feel … well, nostalgia for times gone by. Except we no longer have gold coins, like in the old days, to memorialize what we have lived. We have photos, we have movies, we have TV. That was our memory: photographable, filmable, archivable. Now everything has changed, and here comes the story of my son Max Monroy. The fruit doesn’t fall far, etcetera. Except Max is no fruit. He’s a trunk. He’s like the Tree of Tule in Oaxaca, a gigantic cedar forty meters high and forty-two meters around and two thousand years old. And though Max Monroy is only in his eighties, it’s as if he incarnated two millennia because he’s so sharp and such a bad fucker though he’s my son and that’s the way he is because fortunately he inherited nothing from his father except the vague memory of a country destroyed by its own epic, kid, you can’t live on that forever, I mean on an epic, and in Mexico the epic of the revolution justified everything, progress and backwardness, construction and corruption, peace and politics. Everything in the name of the revolution. Until the Tlatelolco Square massacre left the revolution stripped bare. Stripped bare but shitting blood, of course.
“How do you compete with an epic?”
The señora’s voice trembled, and in it she did not hide a certain satisfaction with herself, about herself.
By moving ahead—she affirmed from the grave—as I did. I’ve already told you about that. I moved ahead of everything and that’s why I could leave my son Max Monroy an independent fortune not subject to presidential favor or political changes. That exhausted my miserable husband. The general lived in a world of torments, tormented by insults, physical challenges, excessive praise, toadies, eventual guilt—when they were alone, do you think all the sons of bitches we’ve had in Mexico never felt guilty, do you think that?
Max Monroy, his invisible but indefatigable mother exclaimed from the grave, Max Monroy!
And then in a very low voice and jumbling together eras, dead dry fields, lost harvests, orphaned children, everyone to the mountains, always fleeing, children, women, cows, to the mountains, the mountains, the mountains … One day we had to be still, resigned, obedient … The nation was worn out. Or it was worn out by the marriage of indigence and injustice. Who knows?
The voice was fading.
The señora was lost in memories of what she wanted to forget.
It was all unpredictable …
“It still is, Señora,” I dared to contribute.
Death, harvests, descendants …
“Do you want me to tell your son anything? A message?”
The sepulchral silence was followed by vast laughter.
Our souls hover like vampires …
When they cross the river, the dogs stay behind the soldiers …
The soldiers skinning goats, roasting pigs, it’s over!
My tits swelled for a whole year.
To nurse my son.
Go on, three times around my grave.
—
I WOKE ON the mat in Lucha Zapata’s house and looked, bewildered, at the light of dawn. My immediate memory did not hold the cemetery or the address or zip code of where I came from but only a nonexistent river on this desolate, dry, and stifled mesa. A river like a truncated finger pointing the way to the sea.
You, who already know my end, may think I’m inventing a posteriori the events of the past. I swear to you I’m not. And the reason is this: At dawn there was a recurrence of astonishing continuities between my hours at Antigua Concepción’s grave and my waking in Lucha Zapata’s house.
As if the voice of Max Monroy’s dead mother continued in the voice of the living lover of Josué Nadal, who is myself, the narrator of this tale, Lucha Zapata, in a white nightgown, walked barefoot from the mat to the kitchen and back to the mat describing, evoking, as dazed as a sleepwalker, an encounter on an old forgotten street, sordid and dissolute. Lucha finds in a corner of the night (that’s what she said, now these are her words, not mine) a man in rags and covered by newspapers. It is very dark. The man’s eyes are very black and shining. Everything about him is exhausted except his gaze.
They look at each other. He gives his hand to Lucha. He stands without saying a word and leads her along the streets of the night. They stop in front of a lighted window. Inside people are holding a party. It is probably a family occasion. A girl of about eight or nine entertains the others by prancing about, telling jokes, and singing songs. Lucha seems charmed, she opens the door (which was already ajar) and goes in, moving toward the little girl who is the center of attention. Lucha approaches. The girl looks at her and retreats, farther and farther back, into a dark corner of the room.
When Lucha has her cornered, the girl sits down on a hard chair. She looks as if she were being punished. Lucha tells me the little girl is there, though in reality she is very far away. She hugs a stuffed bear and covers herself with her security blanket.
“Who are you?” the girl asks Lucha. “What are you doing here? We don’t want you. Go away.”
Lucha tries to say something but can’t get the words out. Lucha doesn’t understand the reason for the girl’s rejection. She feels humiliated. She runs out. She trips over a white tricycle decorated with a flowered basket. She gets up and in the street she falls into the arms of the dark man who leads her far away.
The road descends abruptly. A gigantic night surrounds them, as irresistible as a carnival: Lucha allows her thoughts to carry her along, her thoughts carry her very far from the place where she is. The night is transforming her—she says, she tells me this morning—leading her to a world where her senses enjoy peace and sufficiency at the same time they are cruelly stirred, demanding more, always more …
Suddenly she addresses me. “You know, Savior? Pleasure is a little pride and another little bit of self-hatred. A feeling of desperation. Along with a childish sensation of eternal life …”
She says she was a member of a gang that protected her and gave her what she needed. She compared her earlier solitude and forgot the familial warmth. Now she was part of a gang.
She gave names: “Maxi Batalla. El Florido. El Tasajeado. El Cacomixtle. El Sabor de la Tierra.”
They meant nothing to me. She knew that and went on.
“You become part of a legion of outsiders, of strange people or strangers, whatever you prefer. Your life belongs to no one. During the day you sleep.”
One night—she continues—from that anonymous, faceless group, an individual emerges. A dark boy, tall and slim. She says that between the two of them a feeling is born of love, tenderness, and mutual appreciation. An attraction.
“I’m no longer a face in the nocturnal crowd, Josué.”
I don’t say anything. For the fi
rst time, she is remembering. I wouldn’t interrupt her for anything in the world. I leave assembling the pieces of the puzzle for another time. I don’t say she has met a man twice for the first time. Dreams have their own logic, and we don’t understand it. She is also wrong to call a group “anonymous” whose names she “remembers.”
“Yes.”
She said that with him she felt totally free and open. He offered her a way out. Not a return to conventional values but a movement toward her own thoughtful, creative values.
“I wanted to be sincere with him. I wanted to return with him to the lighted window in the house.”
Lucha Zapata opened her eyes and I realized that everything she had told me she had said without seeing.
“He understood. He understood where I was coming from. He understood how much of myself I had left behind and how much I owed to what I denied with so much rebellious zeal … One night, sleeping side by side, he woke and drew me to him. I don’t know if it was dawn or dusk. But I did understand that after going with me to the lighted house, he was ready to be like me, do you understand? as much as he could. He made love to me and when I came I understood that with him I could reach a compromise. We wouldn’t go back to the world I had left or the world where he found me. Together we would create our own world.”
She said that was the concession. Together the two of them would leave the desolate city. That was Lucha’s concession. His was to share with her one last night in the artificial paradise, evoking Baudelaire, “aflame with love of beauty, I cannot give my name to the abyss that will be my tomb,” because what neither of them realized was that his body, which belonged to her sexually, no longer was hers organically.
“I tried to wake him,” Lucha shouted on this morning. “I shook him, Savior. I touched him. He was the icy statue of death … And what did I do then, Savior? I abandoned him. I abandoned the corpse in the hotel room. I went down to the street. I fell into the center of the night wanting to die if that would bring him back.”
I tried to get up from the mat to seize her waving arms and the hands that scratched at her eyes and she shouted to leave her alone, she had to tear off her own skin, her own identity, savage, blind, violent, searching for death—I gave her a tight embrace—courting death—I grasped her hands—closing the curtain of nothingness over any creative purpose that could deflect her from a life more and more and forever more reckless.
She hung from my neck.
“Savior, I’m the dead sweetheart of a living memory. There’s no tomorrow tomorrow. You lose all sense of time. Each day is identical to the one that came before and the one that follows. What a fuckup, Savior!”
“If you want,” I said to her, “don’t put off your death anymore, Lucha Zapata.”
“I’m not putting it off,” she replied. “I’m speeding it up.”
NO ONE WILL deny, Brother Angelo, my good intentions. I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be a creator. I’m Venetian. I look at the tremulous light of Tiépolo. I embody it in the luminous architecture of Palladio. That light and this architecture populate the north of Italy: we have light and we have form. Being an architect after Palladio. Illuminating after Tiépolo. Brother Angelo: both things were denied me. I traveled from Venice to Rome—I was twenty years old—in the retinue of Francesco Vernier, ambassador of the city of Venice to the Pontiff. I looked at the eternity of its ruins. I looked at the fugacity of Rome in its papacy. The Pope dies. The court changes. Rome fills with new families clamoring for positions, favors, commissions. Eternal City? Fleeting, transitory city. Eternal City? Only the mute stone endures.
For that reason I wanted to be an architect, Brother. I saw the inert world and wanted to animate it with architecture. I wanted to create. The inertia of the world told me: No. There are enough works already from yesterday and today. Nobody needs another architect. Don’t think about the works you won’t be able to make. No? Ah! Then I’ll think about the works I won’t be able to make.
I did not find a Maecenas. Without a Maecenas nothing is done. And so I found a Maecenas. The city of Rome, asking me, Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, I will be your Maecenas, I, Rome, with my ruins, my unknown corners, my scavenged garbage, my devastated sarcophagi, I offer myself to you, Piranesi, on the condition that you don’t reveal my secrets, don’t show me in the light of day but in the most obscure depths of mystery …
They demand, Why don’t you study the nude more? Why do you insist on depicting hunchbacks, the maimed, cuadroni magagnazi, sponcherati storpi? Why don’t you show esthetic truth? Why?
Because I wager on esthetic infidelity. Even if it’s ugly? No. Because it possesses another beauty. The beauty of the horrible? If horror is the condition for acceding to beauty that is unknown, latent, about to be born, if—Then do you scorn ancient beauty? No, I find the place that refuses to be ancient. And what place is that? Is there any place that doesn’t age?
I gather together my guardians. Invoke my witnesses, Brother Angelo. Stone lions, looks. Stone bridges, sighs. Stone walls, confinement. Stone blocks, prisons.
I will introduce machines and chains, ropes and stairs, towers and banners, rotting crossbars and sickly palm trees into the space of the prison. A scenography. Invisible smoke. Deceptive sky. What do we breathe, Brother? What sky illumines us? Veils. There are the sky and the smoke. But they are uncertain, untouchable, part of the scene, passing distractions, theatrical illuminations: smoke and light for a prison with no entrances or exits, the perfect prison, the prison within the prison within the prison. A profusion of escapes: They lead nowhere. What enters stays here forever. What is alive dies. It becomes excrescence. And excrescence becomes ruin.
The world is a prison? The prison is a world?
The prison frees itself from itself in the earlier design of my stewardship? I, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, say this. Or is my own image the one that imprisons the prison?
There are no human beings here. But there is the human question regarding the origin of light. And if there is no light other than the question, the question becomes the negation of destiny, as somber as these prisons, sepulchral chambers of a heaven in eternal dispute. There are no human beings in the lost heaven. There are prisoners. The prisoner is you.
They poisoned me, Fra Angelo, the acids I use for etching. My art killed me. Will my prisons survive? I believe so. Why? Because they are the works I could not make: they are the ruins of the buildings I could not construct.
Still, I died with the ambition of designing a new universe. Except no one asked me to and I had to depart with one anguished question: How does one imprison life in order to destroy death?
I ask you, my brother Angelo Piranesi, because you are a Trappist monk and cannot speak.
NO DAD, NO mom, not even a little barking dog softened the guardian of my childhood and adolescence, Doña María Egipciaca, which signified my insignificance in the vast order of human relationships, beginning with the family. Destiny, if not virtue, later provided me with relationships that were fleeting (with the nurse Elvira Ríos), more or less permanent (with the tormented Lucha Zapata), and very vulgar and at the same time mysterious (as with the whore who had a bee tattooed on her buttock).
Now, the decision (apparently unappealable) of Maestro Antonio Sanginés led me to the doors of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the brand-new, prosperous district of Santa Fe, an old abandoned wasteland on the road to Toluca, full of sandy precipices and white chalk barrens, that overnight, driven by the great bursting heart of the Mexican metropolis, was flattened out first only to have erected immediately afterward, in a vast valley of cement and glass, vertical skyscrapers, horizontal supermarkets, underground parking garages, all of it always guarded by sentries of glass and cement that were like the raised eyeglasses of an imposing sun determined to avenge the challenge of a Scandinavian architecture made to admit the sun in a country—ours—where ancestral wisdom demands thick walls, long shadows, sounds of water, and hot coffee to combat the damag
ing effect of excessive sunlight.
The strange thing—I told myself as I approached the Vasco de Quiroga building—is that in Santa Fe the Spanish prelate of that name founded a utopia intended to protect the recently conquered indigenous population and offer them a society—another society—inspired in the ideas of Thomas More: a utopia of equality and fraternity but not liberty, since its rules were as strict and confining as those of any project that proposes to make us all equal.
In front of the building, the white statue of the prelate, standing and caressing the bowed head of an Indian child. Inside the building, an entrance watched over by classic bodyguards with shaved heads, white shirts, old bow ties, black suits and shoes, and jackets bulging with the unavoidable tools of the trade. The guards looked indifferently at the statue of the protector of the Indians without understanding anything, although, perhaps, they were certain that being gunmen who protected politicians, potentates, and even prelates in the Mexico of immense insecurity in the twenty-first century was a remunerated form of utopia. The truth is that behind the large black glasses of the guards and at the feet of their ward-robelike physical proportions, there was no reflection and no basis for any kind of utopia.
I complied with security requirements. I passed through the triumphal arches of universal suspicion. I rang for the elevator and got out on the twelfth floor of the building. A very short, very dark girl adorned, like an announcement of the loves of Pierrot and Columbine, with large glasses that had black-and-white frames, above whose glasses fell the light shower of the uniform hairdos of various secretaries, nurses, and saleswomen, which dance above the brows as if fleeing the skull, who said the often repeated “This way, Señor,” and I followed the triumphal clicking of her heels (it announced her salvation from who knows what fate worse than death: I imagined her cornered, raped, beaten, hungry, why not? a toss of destiny’s coin, heads or tails? was enough) with the fatal certainty I was walking behind the permitted spoils of war. One centimeter more and the señorita—