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?
— Her father was our rival, you know?
— Yes, yes, I knew he was the one Catarina was screwing that afternoon.
— You and I must not be rivals now, promise me that?
We didn’t know which of us asked for that promise, as the plane began its descent to Charles de Gaulle Airport.
2
We had a tacit understanding that each of us would keep his secrets, but there was one, at least, that we had to share. Catarina had become irresistible to us the moment we saw her making love with her father. Then there was no rivalry between us, or jealousy of her father; once again, the professor had preceded us; he had done what we wanted to do; he did it first, he showed us the way, as he did in class. But now, entering the deep Gothic nave of Wells Cathedral, walking through the yellow and green, the white and red and olive lights, every color but blue, that were created by the great high stained-glass windows, we knew Professor Santiago Ferguson would do, would say, no more; never again.
She was standing by the casket. She saw us but didn’t move. She knew as well as we: there would be only three mourners; no others would attend.
She was dressed in black, a severe silk suit, dark stockings, and flat shoes that could not relieve her exceptional height. She took our hands, kissed our cheeks: she withdrew one hand and touched the lid of the lacquered box. We did the same. We knelt. We heard a tape-recorded sermon, followed by a very brief Requiem.
The brevity of the ceremony was appropriate: the professor had no need for ceremony, he was at Wells, where he wanted to be, and the important thing was not to delay his solitary entrance, not to that marvelous English cathedral but to architecture itself, his true homeland, a place where he would never find peace, so much had he desired it, so much had he dreamed of it. Ferguson had to become architecture.
Here, with him, we felt that was how it should be, that all the places we could recall from our long friendship with him were here — the Mackintosh house in Glasgow, which was a delicate reflection of the professor’s spirit, and which we knew better from his lectures than from photographs; or the projects on José María Marroquí, which we knew all too well; or our house on Avenida Nuevo León, where our impossibly fair mother died, and our father, dark like us; or the office on Colonia Roma, where we surprised the pallid architect Ferguson screwing his daughter, who was dark like us; or Ferguson’s own house in the Pedregal, which contained not a single photo of Catarina’s mother. If Catarina did not resemble her father, did she look like her mother, dead, absent, mute, unmentionable? Nobody ever dared mention her, neither us nor them, the father and the daughter, except once, when we heard Catarina say: