— All architecture becomes distant; it occurred a thousand years ago, or will occur a thousand years from now. Ab ovum.
— But we are here today, we see the gray disorder of the everyday, and we don’t know how to see what has occurred and what will occur, without realizing — he opened his eyes and looked at us very seriously, without theatrics — that it is all occurring at all times.
He shook his head a little and looked at us, first at Carlos María, then at José María: us, the Vélez brothers.
— Okay, it’s all approximation, I’ve said it before, it’s nothing but approximation. But it’s the architect’s job, you know, to locate the space between the demands of the style and the response of the artist. We all want to consummate symbolic unions — for example, between change and the unchanging, or between the permitted and the prohibited. But another part of us wants to confront the product of these weddings with their probable divorce. I urge you, boys, my friends, to go out into the world denying what you yourselves do or see. Submit your vision to the negative that emerges from within yourselves. The perfect union of self and other, of reason and nature, is the most dangerous thing in the world. Art exists to keep desire alive, not to satisfy it. For example, if you could already see some likely architectural jewel in the middle of the mess in the construction zone, you would be identical with your desire, which is to conserve architecture. But since no one can see it, not you, not me, not anyone, at least so far, we are separated from our desire and therefore we are artists. And therefore we are sensual beings, searchers for the other. Or of the other …
He was silent for a while, and then he repeated: —Approximate, keep your eyes open, there is always a point in space where architecture organizes the sense of things, if only temporarily.
For the moment, however, the only thing we want is to set the scene for an experience that began that same August afternoon, in the rain, after we had brain quesadillas with Professor Ferguson, and to say here what we learned from the quesadilla wit of the cultivated architect. And isn’t that what Mexican architects are known for, since we are students, you know: we are the most elegant, the most handsome, the most sociable (professional deformation, virtue born of necessity, as you like), and surely the most cultivated.
Only a step separates us from the artist, the professor is right, but, unfortunately, another step, more inevitable, and we resemble a construction worker; and this afternoon, in the rain, stuck at the foot of the abyss that was the heart of all the muddy excavations in the center of the city, we noticed a tranquillity, an absence of the usual noises, which seemed supernatural. A group of engineers in white hard hats were talking to a group of workers in black hard hats. We got close to guessing the reason for the dispute; it wasn’t the first. They were always fighting about holidays. We had to observe the official holidays (the birthday of Juárez, the nationalization of petroleum), they wanted to observe the saints’ days (Maundy Thursday, the Cruz de Mayo — the masons’ feast day — the Ascension), and we were continually making a compromise between the two calendars, the civil and the religious, so as not to add to the infinite number of holidays, long weekends, and vacation time that kept paralyzing construction work in the city.
We tried to be reasonable when we talked with them. What they said to us was not.
6
As the word “miracle” bounced like a pinball from mouth to mouth (from hard hat to hard hat), we assumed it was another question of adjusting the calendar so that some vital holiday could be observed. We were amused by this recurring spectacle of the Catholic proletariat wrangling with atheist capitalism. It’s not easy to identify capitalism with the Catholic religion; but in Mexico the problem is not “being a Catholic” or “being an atheist” (or the variants: an obscurantist, a progressive). The problem is whether or not to believe in the sacred.
Right away, the miracle the group of construction workers at the San Juan site was discussing, with a mixture of reverence and fear, smelled to us more like blood than like incense, which is the difference (when it comes to miracles) between representation and execution.
Blood, because one of the foremen, a man named Rudecindo Alvarado, not known for his piety, showed us an injured hand and a blind eye, and when he touched his hand to his eye, it was covered with blood, and he began his self-reproach: it was punishment from heaven, because he was a heretic and an unbeliever, that’s what the dark-skinned, pimply Rudecindo, with his thinning hair and mustache, was yammering. All the other comments we managed to overhear were in the same vein: our sins warning … give up drinking … a vision. Rudecindo tried to catch it, and look what happened to him: he got it good!
We asked one of the engineers to give us the lay version of the excitement that had interrupted the whole project, with serious conse …
He interrupted us, shaking his head: How could you even talk about anything serious with this bunch of superstitious half-wits? They saw some lights last night hovering over the works and decided it was some sort of sign.
— It didn’t occur to them to think of flying saucers?
— One of them says he saw an image; it’s a boy or a girl, or all of a sudden it’s a ghost, or a dwarf, or an I-don’t-know-what, I just don’t know, continued the engineer, as condescending and uncomfortable as usual, in front of us. — I don’t know if architects can make out what is veiled to the rest of us, but if you’d like to spend the night, maybe the Vélezes will spot what the Pérezes cannot, and the miserable little engineer laughed, his talent for silly rhymes making us curse his wit.
We laughed disdainfully and went to work: the garden. This was a work of public health and culture, we could easily concentrate on it and not worry anymore about the tangle of engineers, construction workers, metro stations, skyscrapers, and telephone cables.
Everybody else had little shelters against the rain. We, the Vélezes, just like the British Army in the Great War we’ve already mentioned, had them build us a clean little office that smelled of pine, with a bathroom added, and a grill to warm the kettle. It wasn’t for nothing that we were disciples of Santiago Ferguson and his exquisite sense of style. In any case, why work in a dump when we could have beauty and elegance?
From there we watched the rain pour down the mouths of the different projects, the open mouths, ready to swallow up the mud excreted by the soft, loose entrails of the city, which we sometimes pictured as a grotesque sausage shop, its sky a ceiling hung with ham, baloney, pork sausage, and especially tripe infested with rats, snakes, and toads: from the small window of our temporary office, we saw a slice of the old city of Mexico, as Professor Santiago said, an almost geologic slice, exposing the depths of time, ever-deeper circles reaching to an inviolate center, a foundation that dates from pre-history.
We are architects, we can read the circles of this excavation, we can name the styles, Mexican Bauhaus, Neocolonial, Art Nouveau, Neo-Aztec, the imperious style of the turn of the century (when the Fergusons arrived from Scotland) with its boulevards and neo-mansard roofs, the Neoclassical style of the eighteenth century, then Churrigueresque, Plateresque, Baroque, the Indian city, finally … Far below what we facetiously call the dominant profile, the Bauhausmann, much deeper, we imagined the city beneath the city, the original lake, the symbol of all that Mexico would once again be, surviving only in ruins, not in garbage, as Ferguson said. But we didn’t see any of this then: none of the styles just mentioned emerged from the wretched magma of this construction zone. The ripples of memory didn’t go much further than: garage, lunchstand, hardware store, filling station …