There are no empty houses, he said on one occasion, remember that … He sometimes imagined ghosts that were jokers, a lot like him, the professor, often so playful. He had invited us to so many weddings that when he told us about his daughter Catarina’s, we thought it would be one more joke, a cruel one, but still a joke. Deep down inside, we were convinced that he had kept her from us, that was why he had perversely agreed to meet us in his office that afternoon, knowingly (or not?), the afternoon of the steam and the tiles, and the frogs, of the girl enjoying herself. Perhaps he knew this would excite us even more. But now here we were, just like Professor Ferguson and, by extension, his daughter, tall, dark, and proud, holding her head as high as ever as she walked toward the nave of the Church of the Holy Family on the arm of her father the architect, dressed in a white gown that we had helped her choose in an old seamstress’s shop downtown, where they still make those old marvels, a Swiss-organdy dress with English embroidery — as the seamstress said, as modest as she was expensive, a gossamer veil that would have floated away if it hadn’t been weighted down with jewels and beads, and a full, heavy skirt that dragged on the ground, that we would have carried with pleasure, two mere attendants to our putative, unattainable bride, so much like us — dark, with flashing eyes and hair pulled back — who was approaching the altar to be joined to that chubby little lawyer, half freckled, half tan, who shook his little coffee-colored head with the satisfaction of a eunuch who’s been made to think he’s a stud.
That’s how we saw her, so different from her father (except that they were both tall), and we thought of the dead mother of our impossible lover; we looked at her and it struck us that there had never been a single photograph of the late Mrs. Ferguson in the professor’s house in the Pedregal, and, on top of that, he never mentioned her in conversation. Perhaps the combination of these things allowed us to give our imagination free rein. Catarina’s mother, who was not present at her daughter’s wedding, was dark like her, but dead, we decided. Catarina’s mother: unmentionable, clamorously mute. What would she, that gaping void, have thought of her son-in-law, Joaquín Mercado, the orange-complexioned groom? It was enough to make us want to speak for her, saying:
— Carlos María, you know, that speckled piece of shit isn’t the man we saw Catarina screwing in the bathroom.
— Don’t get excited, José María. Better think about the little porcelain frogs.
— As the professor says: Well, what can you do?
— I don’t think Catarina is ever going to be ours, brother.
5
We appreciated the fact that the place where we met for lunch with the professor turned out to be close to the place we worked, the busy area just south of the old, crowded avenue of San Juan de Letrán (which is now called Eje Lázaro Cárdenas), where several construction projects were going on at the same time: the metro was being expanded, the buildings damaged in the 1985 earthquake were being torn down, new green spaces were being created, historic buildings preserved, and a parking garage big enough for three hundred cars was being built — an urban smorgasbord that had turned those twenty-odd blocks in the center of the city into a combat zone.
In fact, all you had to do was close your eyes to imagine you were in the thick of a World War I battlefield: trenches, gas, bayonets that weren’t entirely imaginary; and all this beneath the summer rain that we should have been used to, God knows, it’s nothing new; but we acted as if it were: we can’t seem to give up on our toxic city’s promise of eternal spring — beneath a layer of industrial smoke and exhaust fumes; it’s another of our utopias. Even though we know that from May to September it’s going to rain hard all afternoon and a good part of the evening, we don’t carry umbrellas and we don’t wear raincoats. If the Virgin of Guadalupe could give us roses in December, perhaps one day her Son will give us summers without rain (without smog, without pollution).
Until then, this is a city of people (us included) who run through the rain with newspapers over their heads.
When he got to the door of the Lincoln, our teacher laughed and, more or less, put on his mackintosh — a Scottish architect with the same surname as the inventor of the raincoat, which could well be our professor’s ghost, a ghost that makes its appearance now with the peculiar sound of a black umbrella snapping open at a single touch: the umbrella is the ghost; it leaves with our teacher, whose giant strides carry him away from us, down Calle Revillagigedo, in the rain.
We were wet when we got to the center of the construction site on San Juan de Letrán, as we, traditionalists to the death, insisted on calling it.
The excavation had kept on growing until six or seven municipal projects converged on a point from which radiated, on one side, the tubes for a grand new subway station; on another, black bundles of telephone lines; a little farther, the earthquake-proof foundation of a twenty-story building that its owners wanted to save at all costs; and, nearby, the spot where we were going to put our rather Babylonian project, a garden, still completely imaginary, sunk in the mud, which was supposed to act as the “lungs of the city”—at least, that’s how it was euphemistically described.
We took the job at the urging of Professor Ferguson, who insisted that, come hell or high water, fine old buildings should be saved from the wrecking ball. They had told him that there were no such buildings there. Typically, he replied that that remained to be seen; behind a lunchstand, under a filling station, there could be a marvelous Neoclassical building from the eighteenth century, or a stairway to a forgotten colonial cemetery, who knows? It’s like Rome, Ferguson told the authorities. Mexico City has an almost geological layering of architectural styles.
Ferguson’s arguments won over the municipal bureaucracy (no doubt, they wanted to be rid of this tall, ungainly, and stubborn professor who came into the federal offices like a fjord cutting into the coastline: cold, violent, sure of his right to be there, and even more sure of the beauty of his rightness), and he even won over the two of us, his old disciples, when he also convinced the bureaucracy that we, the Vélez brothers, were the ideal architects for the project.
— But what are we supposed to do?
Our position (we consulted with each other) was none too clear.
— Someone has to preserve the historic buildings.
— But there aren’t any here.
— You two know as well as I do that these things can appear unexpectedly.
— But we need something more concrete to do.
— Think of our dignity, maestro. We have to keep up a front. People already think architects are a bunch of designing loafers.
He laughed and said that we hadn’t lost our student humor, adding that our job, officially, would be to create the garden, the green space — and that our contribution to the campaign against the urban emphysema wouldn’t be just hot air, certainly — but we would also be rescuing from bureaucratic and commercial pillory a vestige of the crystalline city Mexico used to be.
— And don’t tell me that neither you nor the gross municipal bureaucracy can find any building worth saving in this project; don’t give up the architect’s vision so easily, he said, furrowing his brow so his bald head looked like a white lake stirred up by a sudden storm, his head wrinkled from eyebrows to crown (quite a spectacle: we exchanged glances). That excuse won’t work, Professor Ferguson said seriously, quietly, because the architect must look at chaos — including a chaos that seems as irredeemable as this project — intently, as an artist would, and organize that chaos, knowing that if you can’t find the work of art in the midst of material confusion, the fault is yours, entirely yours, the architect’s, the artist’s.