Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (43 page)

—You have reconstructed that bathroom everywhere, Santiago, the tiles, the recurring foliage, the porcelain frogs set in the white bathtub … Everywhere.

—They hold the secret.

—What secret, she implored, tell me, but he didn't answer directly:

—I chose them among all my disciples.

—You mustn't like them very much.

—Ask them if they, too, sense that others …

—You keep repeating that. Who?

—If the other beings are always there, or if they just sneak in between the stones and the bricks of all the buildings I've built since …

—Or what would be even worse, Santiago, in all the buildings you have imagined.

—So you finally understand what I'm saying.

—I'm glad, Santiago, that I will soon pass that burden on to the twins and let them puzzle it out.

—Someone must inherit the mystery of the dead.

That is what Santiago Ferguson said then, before he died.

Catarina looked at us with veiled eyes and said:

—I think that is Santiago Ferguson's legacy, twins. Now that you've heard it, and possibly understood it, you, like me, will never be free from the professor, as you call him …

We—José María and Carlos María—were going to tell Catarina, our unattainable love, that what she had told us might be a nightmare, but we were grateful for it anyway, if it allowed us to be near her at last, and to love her.

—To love you, Catarina.

—Both of you? She laughed.

We didn't know to what extent our intimacy and our love, as the father's disciples, meant the responsibility for his ghosts and his daughter.

The ghosts didn't worry us. We had heard the professor's lecture. An artist always creates an asystematic system, which he does not even recognize himself. That is his strength; that is why the work of art always says much more than the explicit intention of the author. The work—house, book, statue—
is
the ghost.

Love, on the other hand, blinded us again, though we hoped it would provide the final illumination.

But first there appeared, again, death and a journey.

III. LOVES

1

When Professor Santiago Ferguson died that autumn, his daughter Catarina called to tell us that her father had asked to be buried in Wells Cathedral in England. He had also said that he hoped his disciples, both old and young, who had dined at the Lincoln Restaurant, would accompany him to his final home. He didn't want it to seem an obligation, it was just a friendly invitation, a last sentimental request. We didn't try to find out how many others were going. We didn't call anyone: Say, are you going to go to the professor's funeral? Besides, those days nobody was doing any traveling except on business, on an expense account, or to get some money out of Mexico before it was too late. But our situation was different; we were associates in architectural firms in Europe and the United States, contributors to
Architectural Digest,
designers of some so-called residences in Los Angeles and Dallas, of the Adami Museum in Arona, on Lake Maggiore, and of various hotels in Poland and Hungary. We were members of the class of Mexican professionals that had been able to create an infrastructure outside our country, so we could afford the luxury of buying our own airline tickets, if we wished. First class, because, as Professor Ferguson used to say:

—I only travel first-class. If I can't, I prefer to stay comfortably at home.

Well, now he was traveling with Catarina, but in a coffin in the cargo compartment of a British Airways Boeing 747, because we were flying first-class on Air France to Paris, where the Mitterrand government had commissioned us to design an international conference center in a district near the Anet Castle, owned, incidentally, by an old Mexican family: the sequel to an itinerant Mexico, sometimes dispossessed, sometimes in voluntary exile, sometimes engaged in professional and artistic activities that could not be limited entirely to the homeland; and as we flew over the Atlantic, we browsed through a book on English cathedrals and the itinerant world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when religious and intellectual fervor caused people to travel more than they had before, though it took a greater effort and they faced greater difficulties than we do today, which puts us in mind of something the itinerant twelfth-century monk and educator Hugo de Saint-Victor said, that being satisfied with remaining in one's homeland and feeling comfortable there is the first stage in a man's development; feeling comfortable in many countries is the next stage; but perfection is attained only when a man feels exiled in any part of the world, no matter where he goes.

By that standard, our beloved teacher Santiago Ferguson had reached only the second stage, and we, his disciples, Carlos María and José María Vélez, brothers, might have shared that weakness; but we both knew well that it wasn't true, we had both traveled through extraordinary exiles, one of us to the summit of a tragicomic calvary guarded by Señora Heredad Mateos, the other to a place where nobody, not even its inhabitants, could ever feel satisfied. José María had traveled to a land of ritual; Carlos María to the subterranean discontent that fed it.

But we never told each other about our experiences. For each of us, true exile had been to be separated from the other, clearly making José María into a distant
I
and Carlos María into a remote
you.
If we were able to understand anything from this story, it was this: nowhere—not Glasgow, Mexico, Virginia, or Vicenza—was building a house enough to fulfill the human, professional, or aesthetic obligations of architecture. Someone had to actually
live
there. And those inhabitants were going to want what the Mackintoshes demanded of Ferguson, what the residents of the subterranean convent begged of Carlos María, what Doña Heredad Mateos asked of the Virgin and Child. Take care of us. Dedicate yourself totally to us from this time on. Have pity. Don't abandon us. What are the limits of creation? There is no artist who in his most private heart has not asked that question, afraid that the creative act is not free, not sufficient, but that it is prolonged in the demands of those who inhabit a house, read a book, contemplate a picture, or attend a theatrical performance. How far does the individual privilege of creation extend; where does the obligation of sharing that creation begin? The only work residing purely in the
I,
dispossessed of its potential
we,
is a work that was conceived but never realized. The house is there. Even an unpublished book, stored away in a drawer, is there. We Vélez brothers imagined a world of pure projects, pure intentions, whose only existence would be mental. But in that a priori universe, death reigns. That is, more or less, what happened to us when we separated—we lost the
us;
and now, flying over the Atlantic, we tried to regain it by avoiding all mention of what had happened: Carlos María never talked about what had happened to him when he went through the Neoclassical door, following the dog; José María never mentioned what had occurred at the shack of Doña Heredad Mateos. Only two mute objects remained as witnesses of those separate experiences: the wooden cross on the roof of the watchman Jerónimo Mateos's shack, which Carlos María had taken with him when he left the convent; and a wedding dress spread out as a temptation, as a remembrance, perhaps as a reproof, on the twin bed of José María in our family home on Avenida Nuevo León, by the Parque España, a house our father had designed in a style that was neat and sleek, or, as one said then, “streamlined” (or, another word: “aerodynamic”): in Mexican homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, circa 1938.

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?