*
I was alone when I awoke. Not lonely. Alone. She had been here. I would find her again. I would fall into privacy and security through interchangeable doors of absence and presence, rejection and acceptance. It was a beginning … the beginning of the radiant city.
I recalled the church the afternoon before; kneeling before the rail beneath the majestic portrait of Christ.
There was a hollow brimming lake under my knees.
I saw a balloon rise into the air. A child’s universe.
Then she came. I rose from my knees and we left together.
The light I had switched on when we got back to my hotel was burning still. Proof she had been here if proof were needed. Spark of tenderness, splinter, bone, flesh, illumined spectre of time. Womb of space.
How beautiful she had been. Pitiful too. Yet glittering, pitiless, robed in flesh. It had been raining when we got in. Naked eyes, glistening (as she undressed) arms, hips. The nipples on her breasts were black and the hair against her thighs shivered to a razor’s edge of light on the bed in the room. Perhaps despite everything, everything I felt now, it remained a cruel ecstasy, a cruel morning, a cruel sun as the aftertaste of rage I had not yet dispelled in the name of god. In the name of solid fire (solid door), in the name of solid earth (solid door), in the name of solid water, solid air (solid door), in the name of solid whore susceptible to all rejected visions, rejected mankind. I felt as if there was sand in my eyes. Fallen a great distance into the door of the sea. Or into a desert. A high wind, a fleeting glimpse…. Alone. I would find her again.
THE THIRD DAY (High Wind)
He felt, as he dressed that morning, the first intimations of having been thrust into a high dangerous wind that unsettled the state of the world. He needed to see her again. He needed to hold her again. How close did one come to the madonna as rejected commission of an age through ex-priestesses of forgotten cults, not only buried cults, drowned cults, but post-revolutionary, post-Christian hidden cults?
The conversation they had had (as between naked body and naked mind) still lingered in his head. Artist’s model. Fastidious as a nun. It seemed to someone like him (in search of a cure for his disease) a bizarre repudiation of paranoia through the displacement of opposite projections. In short (the Idiot scrupulously shaved) the new fall of man.
It was, she had said, the time of the year when the trees that lined the avenue to San Francisco Convent were streaming and bent high in the air, half-blown to kingdom come. If he wanted to meet her again he must go there and reconnoitre the neighbourhood. She lived within a stone’s throw of that avenue on the road from Mexico City to Cholula.
He hired a car and drove along the Insurgentes North past a modern railway station and social security hospital towards the Shrine of Guadeloupe. A sprinkle of rain fell out of a faint sky misty with pollution. The yellow Basilica loomed, fell behind.
He drove now through the edges of parkland — a rolling countryside of brown, grey hills with clumps of dark green wood. The sprinkle of rain ceased. A lorry was speeding in the distance upon a lane or track off the main road. Trailing dust.
He drew up at the roadside. Consulted his map. Had taken the long way round, needed to go right, join the Avenida Consulado.
There was an old road that ascended into the Sierra Madre and fell to Cholula.
Once again he was sailing through a dust-ridden landscape plotted with occasional fields, mounds, painted with deep shadow. The land was rising into higher altitudes. The thin mist was lifting now and there swirled far away that high wind unsettling the globe. Bones. Earth. Epitaph the Idiot wore in his head. Snow-epitaph far above upon the tops of ancient volcanoes, perhaps long extinct, the Sleeping Lady and Popocatapetl. It was time to lay aside for a while his hair of waving wood, dust-swirled reminiscences of terrestrial lakes, and to replace it with pine. Snow-cloud and pine. Sharp scent, sharp heights of pine. Time to bow to the Sleeping Lady and Popocatapetl the Warrior.
A truncated pyramid of landscape man Popocatapetl was. Deprived of a skull. Yet as the high wind swirled in the Idiot’s head an interchangeable epitaph was blown there towards him of shadow and light that turned outer absence into inner presence, rose backwards upwards into a fabric of glaciated sun or gigantic crystal hollow in space, volcanic skull, Aztec, Mixtec. Warrior. Priest. Displacement of opposites.
He drew up now upon a bridge and looked across a ravine into distances that concealed a memorial to Cortez erected within the pass he had taken four and a half centuries ago within the Sleeping Lady and her Warrior/Priest.
From there the conquistadores possessed their first view of Tenochtitlan shining in its lake. From there they began to descend into interchangeable vocations, Christ and Conqueror.
Twentieth-century Fool bore all this in the hand with which he stabbed the place now like a backward door into time. Winced to an invisible wire in his blood. Invisible wire or prick of bone in the fire-eater’s commission of virgin landscape.
Wire. Bone. Something coiling and glancing through him into Sleeping Spaces, Possessed Spaces, Dispossessed Spaces …
Sensation of a code, indefinable, implacable that conditioned the hand, the eye, the senses, one’s responses to a pebble, a fence, a mountainside that seemed there, given timelessly, forever now what they always were. Until one glimpsed one had been coded into it, into place and time like an involuntary puppet of subjective destiny — into the ground one trod that other men had shaped and trodden long long ago; into the road on which the Idiot drove that other men had driven like shepherds under flocks of cloud; into the bridge across the ravine set at a certain angle of sacrificed spaces time wore on its back.
It was this instinct, this passion for reversible objectivity/subjectivity at the heart of the world (man-made? god-made? nature-made?) that wired each bulb into epitaphs of place to flash a message through Idiot Skull.
*
The descent along the old road to Cholula — through a wide landscape pitted by shadow — drew one down into the battledress of approaching Easter.
Propped against a wall was a blood-bespattered Christ on its way to the Convent of San Francisco. The outlines of a chasm, a ditch, stood at its feet into which it seemed about to fall as if it had been riddled for that purpose by an invisible firing squad.
Its descent to the Convent lay, therefore, through a climax of dust that dozed in the sun. Path downwards as well as forwards into pointillist brides of space susceptible to Christ. The Convent of San Francisco was now a church. It may have once been an actual convent but with the revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century nunneries and monasteries had been banned by the state.
Some had therefore converted themselves into churches and chapels.
Others (such as the hidden Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla) had resisted the ban, concealed themselves for a number of years until they could no longer do so when they had become museums or vanished into oblivion.
And there were curious ironies, unconscious parallels and pits in that subjective/objective landscape of opposite tendencies. There were post-revolution convents that seemed to sink when their end came into excavations that had recently commenced, after centuries of eclipse, into preConquest Toltec shrines concealed in mounds and hills.