And Brambila took off for Washington, leaving me stunned by his great faith in my power to create warmth.
* * *
Sept. 19. That very afternoon, with one suitcase, I moved into the mansion on Puente de Alvarado. It is truly beautiful, however much the exterior with its Second Empire Ionic capitals and caryatids seems to refute it. The salon, overlooking the street, has gleaming, fragrant floors, and the walls, faintly stained by spectral rectangles where paintings once hung, are a pale blue somehow not merely old but antique. The murals on the vaulted ceiling (Zobenigo, the quay of Giovanni e Paolo, Santa Maria della Salute) were painted by disciples of Francesco Guardi. The bedroom walls are covered in blue velvet, and the hallways are tunnels of plain and carved wood, elm, ebony, and box, some in the Flemish style of Viet Stoss, others more reminiscent of Berruguete and the quiet grandeur of the masters of Pisa. I particularly like the library. It’s at the rear of the house, and its French doors offer the only view of a small, square garden with a bed of everlasting flowers, its three walls cushioned with climbing vines. I haven’t yet found the keys to these doors, the only access to the garden. But it will be in the garden, reading and smoking, that I begin my humanizing labors in this island of antiquity. Red and white, the everlastings glistened beneath the rain; an old-style bench of greenish wrought iron twisted in the form of leaves; and soft wet grass, partly the result of love, partly perseverance. Now that I’m writing about it, I realize that the garden suggests the cadences of Rodenbach … Dans l’horizon du soir où le soleil recule … la fumée éphémère et pacifique ondule … comme une gaze où des prunelles sont cachées; et l’on sent, rien qu’à voir ces brumes détachées, un douloureux regret de ciel et de voyage …
* * *
Sept. 20. In this house I feel very far removed from the “parasitical ills” of Mexico City. For less than twenty-four hours I’ve been inside these walls that emanate a sensitivity, a flow, suggestive of other shores. I’ve been invaded by a kind of lucid languor, a sense of imminence; with every moment I become increasingly aware of certain perfumes peculiar to my surroundings, certain silhouettes from a memory that formerly was revealed in brief flashes but today swells and flows with the measured vitality of a river. Amid the rivets and bolts of the city, when have I noticed the change of season? We don’t notice the season in Mexico City: one fades into another with no change of pace, “the immortal springtime, and its tokens.” Here the seasons lose their characteristic reiterated novelty of parameters with rhythms, rites, and pleasures of their own, of boundaries about which we entwine our nostalgia and our projects, of signs that nurture and solidify consciousness. Tomorrow is the equinox. Today, in this place, I have with a kind of Nordic indolence noted, not for the first time, the approach of autumn. A gray veil is descending over the garden, which I am observing as I write; overnight, a few leaves have fallen from the arbor, carpeting the lawn; a few leaves are beginning to turn golden, and an incessant rain is fading the greenness, washing it into the soil. The smoke of autumn hovers over the garden, as far as the walls, and one could almost believe one heard, heavy as deep breathing, the sound of slow footsteps among the fallen leaves.
* * *
Sept. 21. I finally succeeded in opening the French doors in the library. I went out into the garden. The fine rain continues, imperceptible and tenacious. If in the house I seemed to caress the skin of a different world, in the garden I touched its nerves. In the garden those silhouettes of memory, of imminence, that I noticed yesterday make my nerves tingle. The everlastings are not the flowers I know: these are permeated with a mournful perfume, as if they had been gathered from a crypt after years among dust and marble. The very rain stirs colorings in the grass I want to identify with other cities, other windows; standing in the center of the garden, I closed my eyes … Javanese tobacco and wet sidewalks … herring … beer fumes, the haze of forests, the trunks of great oaks … Turning in a circle, I tried to absorb the totality of this quadrangle of vague light that even in the rain seems to filter through yellow stained glass, to glimmer in braziers, made melancholy before it became light … and the verdant growth of the vines was not that of the burnt earth of the plateau; this was a different, soft, green shading into blue in the distant treetops, covering rocks with grotesque slime … Memling! Between the eyes of a Virgin and reflections of copper, I had seen this same landscape from one of your windows! I was looking at a fictitious, an invented landscape. This garden was not in Mexico! This misty rain … I ran into the house, raced down the hallway, burst into the salon, and pressed my nose to the window: on the Avenida Puente de Alvarado, a blast of jukeboxes, streetcars, and sun, the monotonous sun. A Sun God without shading or effigies in its rays, a stationary Sun Stone, a sun of shortened centuries. I returned to the library: the rain still fell on the old, hooded garden.
* * *
Sept. 21. I’ve been standing here, my breath misting the door panes, gazing out at the garden and the reflection of my blue eyes. Hours perhaps, staring at the small, enclosed space, fingering my beard absentmindedly. Staring at a lawn that minute by minute is buried beneath new leaves. Then I heard a muted sound, a buzzing that might have come from within me, and I looked up. In the garden, almost opposite mine, another head, slightly tilted, its eyes staring into mine. Instinctively, I leaped back. The face in the garden never varied its gaze, impenetrable in the deep shadows beneath its brows. The figure turned away; I saw only a small body, black and hunched, and I covered my eyes with my hands.
* * *
Sept. 22. There’s no telephone in the house, but I could go out on the Avenida, call up some friends, go to the Roxy … After all, this is my city; these are my people! Why can’t I leave this house; more accurately, my post at the doors looking onto the garden?
* * *
Sept. 22. I am not going to be frightened because someone leaped over the wall into the garden. I’m going to wait all evening — it continues to rain, day and night! — and capture the intruder … I was dozing in the armchair facing the window when I was awakened by the intense scent of the everlastings. Unhesitatingly, I stared into the garden — yes, there. Picking the flowers, the small yellow hands forming a nosegay. It was a little old woman, she must have been at least eighty. But how had she dared intrude? And how had she got in? I watched as she picked the flowers: wizened, slim, clad all in black. Her skirts brushed the ground, collecting dew and clover; the cloth sagged with the weight, an airy weight, a Caravaggio texture. Her black jacket was buttoned to the chin, her torso was bent over, hunched against the cold. Her face was shadowed by a black lace coif which covered tangled white hair.
I could see nothing but her bloodless lips, the paleness of her flesh repeated in the firm line of a mouth arched slightly in the faintest, saddest, eternal smile devoid of any motivation. She looked up; her eyes were not eyes … what seemed to emerge from beneath the wrinkled lids was a pathway, a nocturnal landscape, leading toward an infinite inward journey. This ancient woman bent down to pluck a red bud; in profile, her hawk-like features, her sunken cheeks, reflected like the vibrating planes of the reaper’s scythe. Then she walked away toward…? No, I won’t say she walked through the vines and the wall, that she evaporated, that she sank into the ground or ascended into the sky; a path seemed to open in the garden, so natural that at first I didn’t notice it, and along it as if — I knew it, I’d heard it before — as if treading a course long-forgotten, heavy as deep breathing, my visitor disappeared beneath the rain.