Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (36 page)

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 …