He turned to scrutinize us, with something approaching tenderness.
—Simply, a building allows me to regain the difference between things, aiming for symmetry as the concept that contains identical measures of identity and difference.
These arguments, communicated by the professor with his usual fervor, were the essence of his thought, the ideology behind his always imperfect and incomplete work. He explained them, we said, with words and gestures that were warm and fluid—but more than once we surprised him peeing in the faculty bathroom, merrily spraying the white porcelain and repeating “I want symmetry, I want symmetry!” And still his elegance and energy seemed undiminished.
But in the Mackintosh house, at the same time that his faith in the significance of his profession was renewed, he also felt, in that labyrinth, that he was losing his motor control. He told Catarina it wasn’t that he felt paralyzed or that his limbs felt heavy. On the contrary, his movements were as quick and precise and fluid as ever. But they were not his.
Then Santiago stopped—Catarina continued the story—and he realized that there was someone mimicking every one of his gestures. Terrified, he wanted to seize him, but he couldn’t because the being that was imitating him was invisible; and yet Santiago could distinguish him perfectly well: he was a man with a thick mustache, wearing mourning clothes, a black silk tie, and a serious expression. I couldn’t see him, said Ferguson (to Catarina), because, since he mimicked me so exactly, that strange alien being was me—he was within me so he was me, transported, in a sort of vision, outside of myself, so that I couldn’t see him.
He felt that being within him and at the same time beside him, simultaneously preceding him and following him, so that it was impossible to determine whether that perfect similitude of expression and motion was an imitation of Santiago Ferguson by that repulsive, mournful being (he began to smell decay around him—putrid water, damp skin, old flowers) or if he, Santiago Ferguson, were imitating his invisible companion.
He told Catarina, “I wasn’t master of my movements. When I stopped abruptly in a corner of the Mackintosh house—a house that had three times been walled, displaced, disguised—and a shaft of icy light suddenly blinded me, I couldn’t tell, daughter, if I was the one who had stopped or if that being who imitated me so perfectly had stopped me. Then a totally alien voice came from my lips, saying, Take care of us. From this time on, dedicate yourself entirely to us.
“I don’t understand why, by what right, or on what whim, he dared impose that responsibility on me. I was blinded by the light but as my eyes adjusted to it, I could begin to make out a partly open door in one corner. Then the figure who had accompanied me pulled himself away from me and entered the space that could be glimpsed through the open door.
“Drawn in outline on the infinite whiteness within, two figures held out their hands to me, their arms open. The man who was and wasn’t me went to join them, and then I saw that, like those two figures, one obviously feminine, the other a child, the figure of the man who had emerged from me melted into the whiteness of a white-tiled bath with porcelain frogs inset in a white bathtub and floral patterns that were barely visible through the thick steam of that architectonic belly.
“The man joined the other two figures, and then I saw how the woman and the child, she dressed in black, with her dark hair piled high, the blond child dressed in an old-fashioned suit with candy stripes, were wrapping themselves in fabric, in towels or sheets, I’m not sure, but only white material, wet, suffocating, and the man who had asked me to take care of the three of them joined his family, and like her, he began to change into a damp sheet, one of the sheets that stuck to those bodies I imagined foul, faded, savagely shrouded …
“They held out their hands to me, their open arms.
“From the child’s little hands fell sweets wrapped in rich, heavy paper.
“The arms beckoned me, the sweets fell to the floor, and I felt myself surrounded by an intense, perfumed, unwanted love and I was about to succumb to it because no one had ever demanded and offered love with as much intensity as they did, that unlikely family, seductive, repugnant, white as purity itself but repulsive as the second skin, wet and sticky, of the shroud that covered them.
“I instinctively resisted the seduction, I decided they were the Mackintoshes, and that they were dead; you are a family of dead people, I told them, and with that a vista opened up behind them, behind their white, sticky redoubt, and there were all the houses of Glasgow, communicating with other structures that had been unknown before, almost unimagined, houses that had never been seen, perhaps had never been built, where other women wearing sumptuous capes of pale silk of the softest lemon and the filmiest olive walk through arcades and patios, carrying objects that I cannot recognize. Those women stood so erect, so sad, on a distant, precise, and horizontal world, that the effect—they were so far away yet I saw them so clearly—was to make me dizzy and nauseated.
“In the center of that distant horizon were two more figures, a woman clasping to her breast a child with an injured finger. The first group was hiding the other, but they were related, distant in space but near in time, symmetrical.
“I was afraid that they, too, would call to me and beg me: Take care of us. Dedicate yourself totally to us from this time on …
“Other houses, different spaces, but is it always the same trinity, the same responsibility? Everything telescopes back to the immediate, concealing the distance or the future, whatever it was (or perhaps it belonged only to the other and I was afraid it was mine, neither time nor space, at last, comprehensible, but only irrational possessions), and the figures before me returned to the foreground, I heard the tantalizing crackle of the cherry, gold, and blue wrapping paper that held the sweets, and I saw the swaddled heads of the figures smiling at me.
“Beneath the damp cloth, the blood ran from their gums, painting their smiles.
“I looked at those figures—now there were three of them—and I decided I preferred my vision of them, no matter how horrible, funereal and white, to my second vision of the incomplete figures behind them. The man was absent from that second scene. There was only the mother and child, beckoning to me. I had no wish to be that absent man.
“No sooner had I thought that than I saw them, the three figures in the closer group, huddled in the brilliant white light of the bath, their damp clothing removed, appearing naked, rapidly growing younger before me; I quickly closed my eyes, already driven out of my mind by the chaos of my sensations, convinced that their youth and their nakedness would overcome me unless I closed my eyes to negate both their youth and their seductiveness; if I didn’t look at them, they would grow old as quickly as they had regained their youth…”
He never explained to me—Catarina resumed the story—what he meant by “regaining their youth” insofar as the child in the candy-striped suit was concerned. Returning to the womb? Disappearing altogether? But Santiago did tell me that when the guards in that little Glasgow museum found him prostrate in a corner and asked him what had happened and what they could do for him, he couldn’t very well question them to find out if there was a family forever walled in, there in the corner where they had found him, by the closed-off door of a bathroom, so white and steamy, blinding and damp …
He just stared at the candy wrappers scattered over the floor.
16
—Catarina, I don’t know what I said in class today or why I said it. I don’t know if other beings have taken possession of me, daughter, talking through me, making me say and do things against my will.
—I am not your daughter, Santiago.
—They make me feel that my most private acts are public ones.
—You seem so tired. Lie down here.
—Abandon, for example; a careless cruelty.
—Can I make you tea?
—Have they been following me, constantly tempting me, imitating my movements as a kind of seduction so that I would imitate theirs? I will never kno
w, daughter.
—I am not your daughter, Santiago.
—Do they inhabit the real houses that you and I do, Catarina, or do they live only in imagined houses, invisible replicas of ours?
—You ask so many painful questions, Santiago. Look, you will feel better if I sit down next to you. What did you say in class today?
—I addressed the boys.
—And not the girls? You have plenty of girl students—and some of them are quite attractive.
—No, I was talking to the two of them, you know, to the twins, the Vélez brothers.
—And what did you say?
—I gave a class on architecture and myth, but I don’t know why I said what I said …
—Well, Santiago, in that case, the best thing would be for you to stay here by the fire with me and we’ll look at some books, as we always …
—That it is myths that haunt us, not ghosts, which are only specters produced by an unexpected intersection of myths. A Celtic myth, for example, might intersect with an Aztec one. But what interests me the most is the syncretic capacity of Christian myth to embrace them all and make them all rationally accessible at once, and at the same time irrationally sacred. That was my class. But I don’t know why I said all that.
—You have just explained it to me, Santiago. You were trying to reach those two, Carlos María and José María.
—Ah, yes. We think our actions are ours alone; an act of wantonness, for example: it seems entirely ours, but soon, Catarina, something else happens that completes, negates, and mocks the action we thought was ours, making it part of a much larger scheme that we will never comprehend. So maybe what we call myths are, finally, just situations that correspond despite their distance in time and place.
—Have something to drink. Look at the books. These are the prints you like the best. Piranesi, see, Palladio …
—That is the secret of the houses we build and live in. Tell the boys that. Tell the brothers, Catarina.
—They are my brothers, Santiago.
—Take care of us. Dedicate yourself totally to us from this time on. Have mercy. Don’t abandon us. Have pity.
—What can I do for you?
—Bury me far from here, in a sacred place, but a place where there are no Virgins on the altars. The creatures who are pursuing me will leave me in peace if I deceive them, by leaving the places I’ve lived in and the people I’ve known. I’ll make them think I’ve joined them permanently, joined their watery voice, their damp skin, their wilted flowers, after I returned from Scotland, my grandparents’ home …
—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, Vi
rginia, 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.
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins Page 33
