So — our teacher smiles — always remember the story of the Chinese architect who, when the Emperor scolded him, disappeared through the door he’d drawn on his blueprint.
We caught Ferguson’s determination from him and we shared his dreams, all of us, his former students, now almost forty years old, gathered around him in this restaurant, with its gleaming wood and copper, spicy with the sharp smells of garlic, oil, and fresh greens, but for us those dreams took a path that nobody else, not even the professor himself, knew: at the end of his porticoes, patios, passages, and monastic walls lay the secret source of water, not vaulted but serpentine, where the moisture surging from the earth and the moisture falling from the sky join the fluids of the human body and together are reduced to steam. Catarina Ferguson in the arms of a man who had his back to us while she, her eyes shut in pleasure, raised her rapt face to her two youthful admirers, confused, cautious, and, finally, discreet.
We carried that dream with us always; we believed it was our teacher’s compensation for the melancholy burden of the imperfection of things, which, no matter how beautiful they might be, are created to be used up, to grow old, to die; but a few weeks later Ferguson said to us:
— Catarina is getting married two months from now. Why not do me a favor, boys? Go shopping with her. I know her, she won’t be able to carry everything. You have a van. Don’t let her get too carried away, keep an eye on her, take care of her for me, all right, boys?
4
Ferguson knew our father, an architect like us, and he told us that as time went by, we would look more and more like “the old man,” until we couldn’t anymore, since he had died at fifty-two. But that was enough of a life, said our teacher, to establish comparisons between father and sons. The Vélezes, he said, would all end up looking alike, the same high forehead, dark complexion, thick lips, narrow nose, deep furrows running down the cheeks, glossy black hair, which later turned gray, so much so that our father, with his skin as dark as a Moor’s and his snow-white hair, got the nickname “The Negative.” But, and we laughed, we didn’t yet deserve such a nickname.
— And that restless, darting Adam’s apple that bounced like a bobber, like a bobbing ball — the professor laughed — like the virile hook from which your own restless bodies hang, bodies almost as metallic as the twisted rack of rusty iron that is our city, wired bodies, hanging and, well, hung, Adamic and Edenic — joked the professor — strung-out bodies that rise up like kites and soar like comets, like Giacomettis, yes, heavenly bodies at high velocity, the velocitous, preposterous, felicitous Vélezes! He laughed again.
— Architecture’s destiny is ruin, he repeated. The walls will crumble and anything will be able to pass through them, the air, a look, a dog … or the velocitous Vélezes.
As for us, sitting in the Lincoln having lunch with Santiago Ferguson, we saw a more subtle resemblance, our resemblance to Ferguson, our teacher; it wasn’t a physical similarity — he was fair, we were dark, he was balding, we had thick hair — it was more that we imitated him. We are formed not merely by our ancestors but by our contemporaries, especially our teachers, who are studied, admired, and respected by us. Our Indian blood was obvious in our dark complexions, while Ferguson was but a third-generation Mexican. His ancestors were part of that small wave of Scottish, Irish, and English immigrants who came to Mexico at the turn of the century, armed with surveyor’s tools, blueprints, and cases of whiskey, to build our bridges and railroads. They easily adapted to their new lives, married Mexican women; they stopped feeling homesick as soon as they found out that, among us, Galicians had a monopoly on bagpipes; they never switched from whiskey to cider, but they did change their baptismal names — James became Santiago: a militant Apostle, a soldier, a Moor-slayer instead of a tender young Apostle, the companion of Jesus, Santiago the Lesser — and nobody wore kilts anymore (except for a doll Catarina played with as a child; the Scottish skirt persisted, but they put it on a girl). Santiago Ferguson, who could have been James, from a family of engineers, studied in Britain, but while he was there he had a revelation: what impressed him was not the iron of bridges and trains but the gilded stone of the cathedrals.
— English cathedrals are the best-kept secret of Europe, he often said during the course of our lunches, sometimes almost obsessively wrinkling his forehead and squinting his restless little brown eyes. — No one goes to see them because England is no longer Catholic; for the Catholic tourist, going to Salisbury or York is like entering a den of heretics; and this prejudice has spread since the Middle Ages became the monopoly of Rome. We forget that English architecture still has a primeval quality, it’s like returning to our origins, it inspires awe in a way that Bruges or Rheims never can, because they are the product of a strictly formal Catholicism. The English cathedral is entirely different: it asks us to dare to go back to being Catholic, to rebel toward the sacred, to abandon the dreadful secular life that was supposed to bring us happiness but only brought us horror.
And then he would say, in a serious voice:
— I like the religious secret of my old islands. I would like to be buried in an English cathedral. I would go back there in rebellion, in affirmation of the sacred, the incomprehensible.
Gradually, we began to adopt his mannerisms — the way he arranged his napkin in his lap, for example; his movements — the self-conscious way he bent his head to clinch an argument, conveying an element of doubt, a horror of dogma, even the rejection of the very conclusion he was asserting; his irony, the feigned shock, the exaggerated open mouth, when someone proposed a belated discovery of the Mediterranean; his humor, his taste for the practical joke in the British style (what the Spanish call broma pesada): he would pretend a classmate was getting married, invite us to the wedding; when we got there, amid the laughter, there would be a celebration going on all right, but not of an alarming marriage, rather of our same old comfortable friendship; the fraternity of celibates that could be our camaraderie, in which we shared the discipline of the lecture hall, the apprenticeship, the examination, the imagination. Another of his jokes was always to refer to his enemies in the past tense, as dead and gone (“the late critic X; the architect Y, who in his lifetime perpetrated such-and-such an atrocity; the celebrated architect Z, whose work, unfortunately, is ugly, but, fortunately, is destined to perish…”). He had no patience, basically — with pretentiousness, with lack of discipline and of punctuality, with the worship of money or its opposite, the cryptogenteel pretense of scorn for it: any lack of authenticity was anathema to him. But he didn’t confuse sincerity with the absence of mystery. We ate with him and he told us that our ancestors could be our ghosts but that we are the ghosts of our teachers, the same way the reader, in a certain sense, is the ghost of the author who is being read: I, ghost of Machen; you, ghost of Onions; he, ghost of Cortázar; we, ghosts of …