Another egg bursts hatefully against the wall and you think of the walls of the architect Ferguson that structure space, opening and unifying it, but none of that concerns the seamstress with the darkened temples. Instead, she’s worrying about a name, more than a man, a name; you had the man, the boy says; I want the name, she replies, because the name is the man, the name is what says what he is, the name is the same as the thing it names, that is my faith, that’s what I believe, what I believe, what I believe …
But then she quiets down and reaches for two boards, which she makes into a cross. She nails the cross together and hands it to you. You cannot reject their gift, because they’re giving you something — now at last you know — that they expected from you.
13
Between the faithful and the doubting, between the troops and the television teams, the engineer Pérez made his way toward the shack where Doña Heredad Mateos was being filmed for the evening news, dressed in her Adidas outfit, and he shouted to the foreman, Rudecindo Alvarado, turn off the traffic light, and to the believers who were inside the shelter, did they see anything now, and yes, they answered yes, yes, because they were seeing what they wanted to see, the engineer shouted, see if you can find someone without mud in his eyes and a frog in his throat, someone who sees and speaks clearly, you and you, look, they’re going by, and you two, don’t say no, look, what do you see, frankly? nothing, nothing but a sheet of glass, right? just put in, and now, Rudecindo, turn on the traffic light that shines in the window of the shack, and now if I’m not mistaken, now the figures appear again, right? It’s only an optical illusion, a reflection of the prints the old lady stuck on the wall when she moved in here to do her sewing, it’s the candles under and in front of the prints, combined with the light of the traffic signal, which never goes off but is always changing from red to green to yellow, that’s what causes the reflection of the Mother and the Child, are you satisfied? Now go back to your homes, break it up, nothing’s going on here, and you, good woman, you can keep the proceeds from what you started, nobody is going to take them from you, don’t worry, cash the check they gave you to wear that sports logo, and God be with you, señora, I tell you nothing has happened here, and you, Jerónimo, go back to work, nobody is being accused of anything, but we have to put an end to this farce and get back to work, we’re way behind schedule.
— And my dress? said Doña Heredad, managing to look impassive through it all.
— What do you want, señora? Dress any way you like, pink pants or black skirts, it’s all the same to me.
— My wedding dress, I mean.
— Ooooh … Aren’t you a little old for that kind of game, you old flirt?
— The one I was sewing, where is it? Who took it? asked Doña Heredad.
She was about to cry Thief! Stop, thief! and Pérez the engineer was afraid that there was no limit to the capacity of the old woman, Señora Mateos, for inciting riots, when a silhouette appeared against the suffocating alkaline, midday sun that announced the approach of an afternoon storm; from the depths of the construction site the architect appeared, one of the Vélez twins, who knows which, it was impossible to tell them apart, walked toward them, followed by a dog. He carried a cross in his hands, two boards nailed together, and he reached the watchman’s shack and scrambled up some stones and planted the cross firmly on the roof.
14
When they led you out of the Art Nouveau house which looked Neoclassical from the outside, the toothless nun Apollonia, followed by the mutilated nun Agatha and the blind nun Lucía, dressed entirely in orange silk, Agatha with her braids entwined with flowers, Apollonia in her straw hat, and Lucía with a shepherd’s staff, you wanted to think that it was your teacher, Don Santiago, who led you here, asking you to view the ordinary with fresh eyes so as to make it yield its secret, which for the architect is the composition of a dispersed and hidden structure that only the artist knows how to see and reunite. You ask yourself if your brother — I, José María — couldn’t or didn’t want to see what you saw, or, seeing it, chose to pretend that he hadn’t, that the lodestone wasn’t there but in the watchman’s shack, where Catarina Ferguson’s wedding dress lay, waiting.
Before you answered your own question, you were blinded by the glare of the midday sun, as the door of the house swung open and the nuns said these parting words, my brother:
— Leave us. Don’t worry about us.
— A nun is only a forgotten bride.
— And never bring us flowers.
— Do you know what the dead feel when flowers are put on their graves? The flowers feel like nails. The living don’t know that. Only the dead know. Each flower is one more nail in the coffin.
— Don’t ever come back. Please.
— Leave us in peace. Please.
— They are nails. They are sweet-smelling poison.
— Your work here is completed, said the blind Lucía.
— Things are as they are, said the mutilated Agatha.
— The dates can change, said the toothless Apollonia.
— But nothing can change the fatality of time, said the blind Lucía, and she opened the door onto the light of a Mexican noon.
It’s true, you would have liked to say to the nuns, but I shall forget everything the minute I step out the door, except these four things: that nuns are only women who are rarely seen; that since they drink shadows they are always fresh; that flowers are like nails in the coffins of the dead; and that in December, perhaps, a child of yours will be born here. Only about this last do you have any doubts, just as the woman and the boy seemed to waver between two possibilities. Will a new child be born in December to prevent the other child you conceived from dying in April, the one who grows old or fades away before your eyes? But if the child you know is going to grow old and die much later and the new child is going to die in his place at the beginning of spring, will it be necessary to create a new sacrificial child each year who will assume, indefinitely, the death of the glowing child? Who will be the annual father of the sacrificial child? This year it was you, though they were expecting your brother, the carpenter José María. Does it matter who fertilizes the mother, how many pricks have entered and will enter the blessed and fertile belly of the dark woman? Or, perhaps, the boy you know will die, forsaken, in April, and each year a new child will be substituted, to be born in December and, growing rapidly, to die in April. In either case, the mother will be impregnated every year. This was your year … But of the dog you have no doubts; he guided you here and now he is showing you the way back. You realize that you had only noticed his injured rump, not his yellow body, streaked and stinking, not the melancholy eyes that perhaps give gold its value.