When we mention that possibility — the teacher’s death — our thoughts immediately turn to his daughter, Catarina, the girl of our twenty-year-old dreams. She was older than we were; we met her through her father, and we were desperately in love with her. Catarina, of course, never even gave us a glance. She treated us like a couple of kids. Her father was aware of our youthful passion and may even have encouraged it. He was a widower and proud of his stately daughter; she was quite tall and she held herself very straight; she had the longest neck seen outside a Modigliani painting, dark eyes, and an uncommon style — she wore her hair pulled back in a bun. You had to be as attractive as Catarina to dare defy fashion and wear a hairstyle associated, and with good reason, with do-gooders, old maids, nuns, schoolmarms, and such.
— So you’re both in love with the Salvation Army gal! said a waggish fellow student in a University City classroom, but he didn’t say any more because we knocked him out with a classic one-two punch. From then on, everyone knew that Professor Ferguson’s daughter had two gallant, though unrequited, admirers: us, the Vélez brothers, José María and Carlos María.
Our teacher knew it as well; Catarina never gave us any encouragement. We were never sure if the professor himself had arranged the one thing we got out of it. What happened was that one afternoon he scheduled an appointment with us in his office in Colonia Roma. We went up to the third floor, knocked, the door was open, the secretary was out and so was our teacher, so we ventured into the architect’s elegant office, an Art Nouveau whimsy — serpentine woodwork, stained-glass windows, and lamps like drops of molten bronze — complete with kitchen, toilet, and bath. We saw smoke pouring out of the bathroom, we were alarmed, but when we got a little closer we calmed down, seeing that it was steam, the hot water in the shower turned on full blast.
It was easy to make out white tiles decorated with a floral pattern and a white bathtub with inlaid porcelain frogs. It was harder to distinguish the clothes hanging over the shower pole, and even harder to see the naked body of Catarina, unaware of our presence, facing us, her eyes closed, holding a man with his back toward us, the two of them naked, making love amid the clouds of steam and the Art Nouveau frogs, in the bathroom of her father the architect.
Catarina, her eyes closed, her legs wrapped around her lover’s waist, had her arms clasped behind the head of a man who held her suspended in the air.
We said we would never know if that was to be our reward: a single glimpse of Catarina, naked, making love. Two months later, our teacher told us that Catarina was getting married to Joaquín Mercado, a thirty-five-year-old politician, for whom we immediately conceived a blind hatred.
3
The approach to the Lincoln had become an obstacle course, thanks to the never-ending construction on Revillagigedo, Luis Moya, Marroquí, and Artículo 123, the streets around it. The Federal Attorney’s Office, the site of the old Naval Ministry, several popular movie houses, and a real jungle of businesses, garages, hardware stores, and used-car lots made that part of the city look like a metallic mountain range: twisted, tortured, rough, rusty; several stages in the life of steel were exposed there, like the entrails of an iron-age animal — literal, emblematic — they were bursting out, exposing themselves and revealing their age, the age of the beast, the geology of the city. The deterioration of the iron and concrete amazed us: only a short time ago they were the very latest and most modern. Today, Bauhaus sounds like a cry or a sneeze.
Professor Ferguson loved to discuss these things over lunch. Tall, balding, white as the tablecloth where we set our beers, Santiago Ferguson spent the meal railing vainly against the destruction of the oldest city in the New World. Not the oldest dead city (Machu Picchu, Teotihuacan, Tula), but a city that’s still alive, and has been since 1325—Mexico.
It’s alive, you know, says Don Santiago, in spite of itself and in spite of its inhabitants: we have each, every one of us, tried to kill it.
Seen from the air, it’s a valley seven thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by lofty mountains that trap the exhaust vomited from cars and factories under a layer of frozen air, and we’ve added a new mountain range, surrounding ourselves with smoldering piles of garbage. And on this early afternoon in a typically rainy August we leap across holes as big as canyons, open sewers, protruding steel reinforcing rods, broken pavement, and huge puddles, amid the excavations and the shattered glass between San Juan de Letrán and Azueta, remembering something Professor Ferguson said:
— Mexico has ruins. The United States has garbage.
Then, we said, we’re growing more alike every day. But he replied that we must lose no time in freeing ourselves from garbage, cement, glass boxes, architecture that is not our own.
What we must do, immediately — he said — is see the modern as a ruin. That’s what it would take to make it perfect, like Monte Albán or Uxmal. The ruin is architecture’s eternity — he went on, this excitable, fast-talking, opinionated, wildly imaginative, affectionate, genial son of the open hearts and open arms of Glasgow. He said this between his last bite of red snapper stuffed with olives and his first taste of a rum-soaked cake: Professor Ferguson, the restorer, for us, of the wall as the fundamental principle of architecture.
He said that if Indians used the wall to separate the sacred from the profane, Spanish conquistadors to separate the conqueror from the conquered, and modern citizens the rich from the poor, the Mexican of the future should use the wall again (opposing it to glass, concrete, and artificial verticality) as an invitation to move freely about, leave and enter, flow along its horizontal lines. Arches, porticoes, patios, open spaces, extended by walls of blue, red, and yellow; a fountain, a canal, an aqueduct; a return to the shelter of the convent, to the solitude that is as indispensable to art as it is to knowledge itself; a return to the water we obliterated in what used to be a city of lakes, the Venice of the New World.
His voice and gestures grew more impassioned and we all were silent and listened, gratefully, respectfully. We Mexicans love utopias, which, like chivalric love, can never be consummated, so they are all the more intense and enduring. Ferguson’s vision of horizontal spaces — walls and water, arcades and patios — had only been achieved in a few houses in certain outlying districts, which he had wanted to keep pristine, private, but which were ultimately absorbed by the vast, spreading urban gangrene.
Sometimes, resigning himself, he could admit that eventually the walls would grow tired, so that even the air could pass through them.
But that’s all right — he would add, regaining his momentum — because it means that architecture will have fulfilled its original function, which was to serve as refuge.
Even though its pretext might be religious? (He spoke, but we also spoke about him; he was a teacher who became the subject of the students he taught.)
There has never been a civilization that hasn’t needed to establish a sacred center, a point of orientation, a place of refuge, from the pyramids of Malinalco to Rockefeller Center, replied Santiago Ferguson; for him, what was important was to distinguish a structure that was not visible at first (to the naked eye), a structure whose spirit would signify to him the unity of architecture, the building of buildings.
His thought (we students said) was part of his incessant search, his effort to find the point at which a single architectonic space, even if it doesn’t contain every space, symbolizes them all. But this ideal, because it was unattainable, at least led us toward its approximation. And that was the essence of the art.
We discussed this among ourselves and decided that perhaps the ideal of the architect was to affirm as far as possible our right to live in the spaces that most resemble our dreams, but also to recognize the impossibility of achieving that. Perhaps our teacher was telling us that in art a project and its realization, a blueprint and the construction itself, can never correspond perfectly; the lesson we learned from him was that there is no perfection, only approximation, and that’s the way it should be, because the day a project and its realization coincide exactly, point by point, it will no longer be possible to design anything: at the sight of perfection — we said to him, he said to us — art dies, exhausted by its victory. There has to be a minimal separation, an indispensable divorce between idea and action, between word and thing, between blueprint and building, so that art can continue to attempt the impossible, the absolute unattainable aesthetic.