— Open the door. The boys want to come inside.
— No. They have separated. Only one of them wants to enter here.
— Where is the other one?
— Pardon me. He is also seeking entry.
— Open the door, I say. Don’t abandon anyone, daughter.
— I’m not your daughter, Santiago. It’s your lover you have invited to Monticello. The mount of heaven, the mount of Venus, he murmured, lost in love, intoxicated with sexuality, Santiago Ferguson, Monticello, Venusberg, sweet mound of love, soft slope of goddesses.
II. MIRACLES
1
He went back slowly to the elevated portion of the project. His desire to return immediately to the watchman’s shack where Heredad Mateos was stitching the bridal gown was weakened by a sense of propriety, or perhaps the weakening really came from being alone: without me.
So he stopped in our belvedere, as we sometimes called it, calmly fixed himself a cup of tea, and sat down to sip it, staring out at the project, something we had often done together, but I don’t know if he saw what I had discovered miraculously, or if everything had returned to its original state — twisted iron, broken glass, corroded structures worn away by the city’s toxins.
I want to think that, separated from me, my brother José María lost the vision that we might have been able to share, the magic vision that two people can sometimes achieve, like spotting a fleeting film image, seeing what is rarely seen though it is always there.
2
I turned away from you and walked toward the hut where the old woman was mending the bride’s gown. I took the porcelain frog that we had seen in Catarina Ferguson’s bath. You headed toward the project, into the center of the maze, remembering what Professor Santiago Ferguson had said when we parted after lunch: “You have to accept the fact that we architects want to save what can be saved, but to do that, we must know how to see, we must learn to see anew.”
— Everything conspires to keep us from seeing. Remember Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”? Nobody can find the letter because it’s right out in the open, not hidden but in plain sight, where anyone can see it. The same thing happens to some of the most beautiful architecture in our ancient city of palaces.
You head toward something you’ve finally managed to see, in the middle of this mountain range of twisted metal; before, we looked at it without really seeing it, we saw it as one of the many constructions of our anarchic city, we saw only what concerned us: the problem of designing the public garden, caught between the practical constraints imposed by the engineers and our own indecision about what the garden should look like, what we, the Vélez brothers, José María and Carlos María, should do with the beautiful space that was entrusted to us: the space, as Professor Ferguson taught us, between what style demands and what the artist contributes.
You walk toward something you’ve finally found, an entrance, a door in a Neoclassical building, shrouded in gray stone, a severe style, but one that forces you to appreciate the nobility of the columns on either side of the main entrance, the triangular lintels over the windows without balconies, which have been covered over with gray bricks.
You ask yourself if you alone could see it, if I could not, or if I could see it, too, but let you go alone, seeing what you saw, desiring what you desired.
The windows are bricked up, the balconies closed off, and so you are afraid that the inside door will block your entrance. But your excited touch meets no resistance, nothing stops the impetus that is an extension of your wilclass="underline" an ardent will, as if in preparation for the cloistered fervor that you imagine in this house of zealously guarded entrances. You push the eighteenth-century entry door that appeared to you in the middle of the ruins in the heart of Mexico City. You fear what seems forbidden. You desire an image of a hospitality as warm as the welcome your teacher Ferguson always associates with Glasgow, the city of his ancestors, where a brilliant building, novel and revolutionary, by the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh met the scandalized disapproval of Victorian society and ended up, hypocritically, entombed inside the walls of a museum.
You push open the door, you take a step inside. Then you remember your teacher’s lesson: Mexican houses are all blind on the outside; the blank walls around their entrances tell us only that these houses look inward, to the patios, the gardens, the fountains, the porticoes that are their true face.
You push the door, you take a step inside.
3
Then I put down my cup of tea and walked toward the hut. The sounds of the project were the same as always: engines, riveters, excavators, and cranes, their bases buried in muck, overhead the midday sun masked by clouds. The gathering storm accompanied me, swelling up out of the high plateau, practically without warning, bringing on an early darkness.
I rapped my knuckles on the door of the hut. Nobody answered. When I tried to look through the little window, I saw that our promise to Jerónimo Mateos the watchman had been fulfilled: a pane of glass had been put in the window, to protect his mama from the wind and the rain. I rapped again, this time on the glass, and was blinded by the sudden reflection of a red light. I cursed instinctively — against all our entreaties, they had installed the traffic light. Never had they gotten work done so promptly. But once it became a matter of crossing the architects, even the vice of slowness could seem a sin, and they could be efficient for a change. But Heredad Mateos, it seemed, was not about to make any exceptions to our great national sluggishness.
I was tempted to go in, to force the entrance, I always had the excuse of being the architect. The light flashed on the glass again and I heard a groan — aged, this time, and brief, but of an ecstatic intensity — and I knocked on the window again, and then on the door, more loudly, more insistently …
— I’m coming, I’m coming, take it easy …
The old woman opened the door for me and her tortilla face — pocked with cornmeal moles, mealy as a stack of corn cakes, surrounded by cornhusk hairs, lit only by a pair of eyes like hot chiles in the dried, burnt surface of her skin — looked at me curiously, though with no sign of surprise. The candles burned, like the orange eyes of a cat, behind the old woman. She said nothing, but gave me a questioning look that seemed to be echoed by other looks behind her: the lights of the votive candles.
— May I come in?
— What do you want?
She was a small woman, and I am a rather tall man. I tried to see, over the aged woman’s cornhusk head, below the votive lights, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe illuminated by the burning tapers, the cot … Señora Heredad seemed to rise up on her toes to block my passage and my view. Embarrassed, uninvited, rude, I found it impossible to say, Señora, you are repairing a bridal gown, I think I recognize it, that is, my brother and I, we both recognized it, and we would like …