Has your mama gone back home? No, boss, she was too excited, I got her to lie down on my cot. Well, leave her there, please, Jerónimo. But she can’t stay there all night, she’ll freeze to death. Why? There’s no glass in the window of the night watchman’s hut. Then we’ll put some in, so that the señora will be comfortable. But she mustn’t go back to her neighborhood. My mamacita has to work to live, was Jerónimo Mateos’s answer, and it sounded like a reproach. Then she can go on working, we told him, she can do it here, at the construction site. Really? She can? So, what does she do? Bridal gowns, boss. She repairs old bridal gowns. The rich women sell them when the dresses get old, and she mends them and sells them to poor brides.
— Then she can bring some outfits here to mend — we said, a little impatient at all the complications — but tell her not to accept any more work.
— Oh, each outfit takes her a month, at least. My mamacita is a very careful worker.
— And, above all, make sure nobody comes to visit her here.
— Only the Child Jesus, said her silly son Jerónimo Mateos, adding with a sigh, “This is what I get for being an unbeliever.”
We laughed at his parting shot and returned to our own work, satisfied that we’d smoothed things over on a project that had really gotten beyond us. The projects we worked on were precise; we worked on small areas, at an extremely slow pace (like Doña Heredad and her bridal outfits); our projects were adapted more to permanency than to haste. But word of the miracle forced us to move faster; we would have liked more calm, but that was a luxury we couldn’t afford if we wanted to avoid the damage a rumor can do, the eventual paralysis of the project; none of us can resist the temptation of a religious celebration; it’s our moment of respite in the middle of so many calamities.
8
Everything seemed pretty much back to normal when the engineers came to consult us about where to put the traffic signals, as their contract required them to do.
They looked at us with more animosity than usual, as if to say what the hell do these architects know about the best place to put a traffic signal in streets as congested as these, but we had insisted (we were throwing our weight around, it’s true) on a clause giving us a voice in all matters concerning the aesthetics of the work. A traffic signal, we maintained, is like a pimple on the face of a goddess; we couldn’t allow the constant blinking of tricolor lights to ruin the total effect.
We have to be practical, said the engineers. We have to consider beauty, we replied. Traffic will be even more congested, they said, exasperated. There were no automobiles in the eighteenth century, we said, half smug, half pedantic.
The engineers had done more than make up their minds, they had planted the first traffic light at the entrance to the project. We had no choice, they insisted. If the drivers don’t see this perpetual red light from a distance, they could make a mistake and drive into the project. Then we’d have to ask them to leave, it’d be a waste of time. You could put up a sign saying DO NOT ENTER, we said with a certain irony. Most of them are illiterate, said the poor engineers; better to rely on their reflex reaction to a red light. We were amused by these byzantine arguments. How many angels fit on the head of a pin? How many semi-literate drivers depend on an innate Pavlovian reflex?
They were giving up. This was getting ridiculous. We just liked to get their goat, we repeat.
Then our dispute was interrupted by an ancient woman who came out of the watchman’s hut at the entrance to the project. Shhh, she said, with a finger pressed to her toothless lips, shhh, don’t disturb the child; all the shouting upsets him.
We dropped the argument; but the old woman was carrying a wedding gown, white and filmy, that contrasted with the black severity of her own attire. It had to be her, the mother of the watchman; for God’s sake, what was the name?
— Him? Jerónimo Mateos.
— No, his mother.
— Heredad Mateos, at your service. Don’t make any noise. It makes him very nervous.
A scream. The sound of a pitiful scream came from inside the hut. We ran to see what had happened; the engineers, some of them, made a gesture of indifference; others, the sign that someone is a little crazy, a finger moving in circles near the temple. We ran; we were excited, anticipating a sign, without even knowing it, that would take us beyond our innocent complacency. Then everything happened at once: we went into the shack where Señora Heredad Mateos was living, a room full of filmy tulles, brocade bodices, and jeweled veils. Oh, my pet, what happened? she asked, and we were looking at a little boy about twelve years old, dressed as if for a costume ball or a pastoral, a very fair child, with wavy blond hair, false eyelashes, and a dreamy look, who had just pricked his finger on the seamstress’s needle: blood oozed out and one of us took the stained veil from him, the Swiss-organdy dress with English embroidery, it forced us to look at it and recognize it, but the child ran off, and we watched him go. We followed, running after him, but he disappeared with the speed of light; he glowed for a moment and then disappeared, where? We didn’t know how to express the fact that he hadn’t simply vanished, he had gone into the construction site, and at the same time somewhere else, into a space we had never seen before …
We returned to the watchman’s hut, converted to a seamstress shop by Doña Heredad Mateos, who was sequestered there to prevent gossip in the neighborhood. Now the old lady was shaking her gray head with a mixture of disapproval and resignation, and we turned back together, clasped hands, and in our free hands we held the veil, the dress, stained with the blood of the child.
— It can’t be. You must be wrong.
— You’ve forgotten already? It can’t be.
— Then I’m right.
— No, I mean that it’s the same dress. It’s unforgettable.
— I haven’t forgotten it either. But it can’t be.
— We’d better go ask her.
But we didn’t dare, as if both of us — Carlos María, José María — were afraid that if the mystery were lost, our souls would be, too.
The old lady shakes her head, picks up the needle the child dropped, puts it in a pincushion, goes back to her work, singing a wordless song.
— I tell you it’s Catarina’s dress.
Perhaps we both think that although the mysterious can never be obvious, we had at hand a way to get closer to it. It’s true: we were now near the place where we worked, the garden that we had to restore in the midst of the hopelessly twisted ugliness of the city’s premature ruins.
We looked at the construction zone. We said it was a web of contorted materials torn from the earth and abandoned there. All the metallic elements seemed revived by a final, fiery cold meeting; this late afternoon’s sickly capricious light played over all the angles of the remnants of foundations, of buildings, of columns and spiral staircases, of balconies, of cars and hardware, all mixed together, tangled up, forged with a glimmer of living copper here, of dying gold there, with the opacity of lead sucked dry by a great transparent exhalation of silver, until something new forms in this excavation in the center of Mexico City, which we’re seeing anew this afternoon, a hole stretching from Balderas to Calle Azueta, past Revillagigedo, Luis Moya, and, farther, to San Juan de Letrán and even, if we follow the line, to the walls of the old convent of the Vizcainas.
We looked at the construction zone.
We looked at each other.
Were we seeing the same thing? Were we looking at the invisible that had become visible, its separate elements organized little by little in our heads, through concentration or nostalgia, as Ferguson the architect had wanted?