Δ The Volkswagen pulled away with growling gears and Franz said that down the road there was a restaurant he liked. “Beer. Sausages, mustard.”
Isabel looked out the window. Mexico’s midland, semi-tropical, a road of straw huts with inclined thatch roofs, of low-flying vultures, of little boys wearing tattered short shirts with their small genitals showing and their bellies swollen out, little boys forgotten by parents who worked in blue shirts and muddy sandals, stooped over in the rice fields shoveling along with their hands the water that had to pass evenly the length of the meandering channels. And then the land changed. The Volkswagen descended the rim of the tableland into the zone of heat, from the high desert to the low coastal region.
Franz drove swiftly, expertly, slowing and accelerating smoothly, gearing down for turns, shifting up again without a jerk. It was his car and he knew it like his hand. A foreigner, like you, Dragoness. And like you blond and graying but with a blondness that was almost white. His skin, in contrast, was burned dark by the sun. A face of precise firm lines: short nose, smooth forehead, smooth cheeks, firm jaw protruding a little. White, even teeth. Rather thin lips that smiled with restraint. A German, Dragoness, as German as they come.
* * *
Δ He had used to love music and architecture, he said. Both. Music perhaps even more than the other, though it was architecture he studied. He lived with his friend Ulrich in a rented room on a winding narrow street. The gables of the houses facing across the street almost touched and made the street dark. You were too close to them, you could not get back far enough to admire their old baroque façades properly. More accurately, they were façades that had been added as decorations to the still older, medieval structures beneath. Smooth ancient stone, covered by yellow or rose plaster that today was falling off, allowing the original gray to be seen. And the city, a German city, was full of yellow plaster palaces with golden domes and striated columns, capricious eaves, niches filled with vines and cherubim, labyrinthine halls, patinaed mirrors.
Flies buzzed in and out through the open window. They irritated you. Franz was saying, “We had little money. Almost none. So we roomed together. It cut our expenses in half.”
It halved also the effort and time needed to cook their meals on the electric hot plate and make up the bed and straighten the room. They took turns with the bed, Franz using it one week, Ulrich the next. The one who was bedless bunked on a narrow divan that creaked all night and forced him to sleep with his feet on a stool (Ulrich) or propped on the arm of the divan (Franz). Splitting its cost, they bought one wooden drawing table and a high stool. Rolls of paper were strewn around the floor, and the room smelled of India ink, of gutta-percha gum, of glue. On the papered walls they thumbtacked reproductions of classical architectural models: the Parthenon, Saint Sophia, Charlemagne’s chapel at Aixla-Chapelle. Monday through Saturday they got up early. Franz would go out in the hall to fill a basin with cold water from the faucet while Ulrich rubbed his eyes and groggily warmed the coffeepot. They washed their faces mechanically and drank their coffee as they dressed.
“I remember him putting on his shoes. Sitting on the couch holding his cup in one hand. With the other hand pulling on his shoe without loosening the laces.”
They would wrap in their mufflers and run out, hurrying to catch the 7:12 trolley, smiling as they trotted down the winding street, their breath clouds puffing before them. Caps tilted, mufflers up over their mouths, hands stuffed in their pockets, they would wait for the trolley and then swing aboard and stand outside on the platform swaying to keep balance as it moved away with a jerk and stopped with a jolt. The shaking trolley that carried them from the crowded streets to openness. Past the trolley yards. The park with its rusty statues and its fountains that now during the winter had no water. The art museum and the wide avenues beyond. Then a foggy plain and finally the school of architecture. There they separated. Ulrich was one year ahead of Franz. They met again at noon in the student tavern, the one arriving first grabbing a table, by force if necessary, and holding it until the other appeared, in the meantime ordering their standard meaclass="underline" two sausages, cabbage, beer, a cream pastry they divided. And until then, all morning, they would rise to their feet as the professor entered the classroom. Four professors each morning, different names but the same pomp: black coat, striped trousers, wing collar, spats over high shoes.
“Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel,” you interrupted, Dragoness, laughing. “Do you remember it? I saw it as a girl in the neighborhood movie. All of us wanted to be exactly like Marlene. What was she called?”
“Lola,” said Franz, smiling. “Lola-Lola. And he was Professor Unrat. Professor Trash. Yes, Jannings made our professors into commonplace and very ordinary mortals.”
But from his high seat in the lecture amphitheater, one of two hundred shivering students who clouded the air with the vapor of their breathing, Franz saw his professor as anything but ordinary, saw him as cold as the room, as aloof as he was distant. On the blackboard he swiftly traced calculations for a foundation. He related how Brunelleschi had climbed the vault of the Pantheon in Rome, removed some stones, and discovered the secret of the double structures sustaining each other reciprocally, and then had made his contemporaries marvel at his dome in Florence. He defended classical principles against the innovations proposed by Gropius and the Bauhaus group. To question the professor was forbidden. And he always entered with great solemnity, inclined his head briefly to the standing students, and launched off on a lecture
“… He had given over and over without changing a word for twenty or thirty years.”
With your hand you brushed at a fly that was circling your nude bodies.
“Don’t you want me to close the window, Franz?”
“No, leave it open. It’s hot.”
They had to eat lunch hurriedly because other students were waiting for the tables. Cigarette haze, smells of beer and human breath, smells made thick because the ceiling of the tavern was very low. After lunch they worked through the afternoon in a hall with high windows and dozens of inclined drawing tables. On Thursdays the tables were folded up and stacked against the wall and the hall was converted into a gymnasium and in long sweatshirts and black shorts and tennis shoes they jumped and sweated performing calisthenics, and lifted weights. They started home at five in the afternoon, walking. Despite the cold and darkness that the far-apart lampposts did not lighten, they enjoyed that long walk across a plain dotted with linden trees. Sometimes they bought roasted chestnuts at a stand mysteriously planted there far from traffic, far from people, and walked on chewing the dry sweet meat of the nuts. Spring came and their routine did not change. But now they felt freed from so many things, from their mufflers, from the bite of the cold, the need to jump up and down in one spot to keep their blood circulating, to warm their hands in front of their open mouths. A freedom one never felt in Mexico, for one never had those needs.
“Yes. I miss the change of seasons too.”
“I remember one spring. Not the year. I remember it because Ulrich got a check for his twenty-first birthday.”
A great, an enormous event. Ulrich considered the situation very seriously. One day he cut classes and went shopping and when Franz returned to their room that evening there against the wall, white as an igloo, was an electric refrigerator. Ulrich smiled a little worriedly, almost shamefaced. He scratched his head. In those days he wore his hair very short and he was very blond. His spectacles glittered as he opened the door of the refrigerator. Sausages, spare-ribs, bottles of beer, and a tall thin bottle of wine.