I understood practically nothing of the French and spent hours on a single paragraph, imagining the possible meanings of bougie, quatour, écailles—words I now find underlined in my copy. The écailles were, surely, to my Spanish-language ears, the escaleras, the stairs; and then “pesait comme des écailles sur mes yeux” was “weighed like stairs on my eyes,” and not, as I later understood, “weighed like scales on my eyes.” There are words that contain and words that overflow. Foreign words, the ones we don’t know and whose meaning we can barely guess at, spill out their probable content.
I now reread some paragraphs of À la recherche with a certain sadness, conscious that a language that is learned will never be a stairway but always a heavy scale on the lips. I know the prepositional phrase “en train de” will never again be a train that crossed certain written or spoken utterances because at some moment it became, forever, a mere verb tense.
Dangerous junction
Legend has it that Samuel Beckett, while lying ill in the bed in which, a few days later, he would die, took up his pen to write his last poem:
comment dire –
comment dire
Later, as if he’d climbed over a wall and seen revealed, on the other side, the outside, his forever foreign language, he rewrites in English:
what is the word —
what is the word
The language that Beckett, who was his own translator, inhabits is an intermediate space between one place and another, an outside and an inside.
The threshold — that’s the word.
Unloading zone
Wittgenstein used to imagine language as a great city permanently under construction. Like cities, language had modern areas, spaces in the process of renovation, historic zones. There were bridges, underground passages, walkways, skyscrapers, avenues, and narrow, silent streets.
Wittgenstein’s metaphor is tempting: but things look very different from where I sit. Here, language and the city are the threshold in which I wait for the next earthquake.
I listen to the workers outside:
What now?
Now we’re going to break up the whole wall — from here to here.
But where do we put the rubble?
We’ll pile it up here. For now.
RELINGOS: THE CARTOGRAPHY OF EMPTY SPACES
Work suspended
On the Paseo de la Reforma, that grand avenue simulating the entrance to an imperial Mexico City that of course no longer exists, there’s a quadrangle of tiny absences, small plazas, where once there were things that are now only gaps. As if the perfect, majestic smile of Madame de la Reforma now lacked a number of teeth. Only God and perhaps Salvador Novo — modernist chronicler of the city — know what was there before the appearance of those empty spaces.
These urban absences, as they might be called, were formed during the extension of the Paseo de la Reforma in the 1960s. The widening of the avenue and the addition of a new stretch were accompanied by the indiscriminate demolition of the buildings in the area. As this new road cut diagonally across the orthogonal layout of the city, some rectangular plots became triangular or trapezoidal. And, since the construction of buildings in these irregular spaces — leftovers from the Paseo — was inconceivable, the asphalt and paving-stone trapezoids and triangles remained like odd pieces of a jigsaw, the origin and purpose of which no one remembers any longer, but which, equally, no one dares to either destroy or use in any permanent way. Nowadays these residual spaces on and around certain corners of Reforma — between the enormous new junctions with the avenues Eje 1 Norte and Hidalgo — are abandoned to the perpetual comings and goings of ambulant street vendors, tourists, delivery men, petty thieves, the homeless, people taking strolls, dust, and debris.
A group of architects from the National University (UNAM), headed by Carlos González Lobo, have christened these spaces “relingos.” I’m not sure where the term comes from, but I imagine it could be related to the realengas of old Castilian, a term that refers to pieces of land not belonging to the Crown, abandoned to disuse. (The strange ups and downs of words: in certain Latin American countries, realenga is now used to talk about an animal with no owner; in others, the word is synonymous with “layabout.”)
I’m also pretty certain that relingo is derived from another similar concept: the terraines vagues of the Catalan architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales. Just like a relingo, the terraine vague is an ambiguous space, a piece of waste ground without defined borders or limiting fences, a species of plot on the margins of metropolitan life, even if it is physically to be found in the very center of a city, at the junction of two main avenues, or under a newly built bridge.
Coming out from Hidalgo metro station at the exit nearest to San Judas Tadeo church, there’s a small triangular plaza, in the middle of which stands a tribute to the work of Mexican journalists: a statue of the nineteenth-century newspaper editor and politician Francisco Zarco surrounded by a large fountain that bubbles and spits out mouthfuls of gray water. The homeless people of the neighborhood go there with their bars of soap and towels to wash their faces and bodies beneath the bronze figure. At certain hours in the afternoon, that same plaza becomes a six-aside football field, and at midday on Sundays it’s transformed again, into the venue for a tertulia for the deaf mutes coming out from the sign language mass at San Judas.
An architect friend of mine, José Amozurrutia, once showed me the plans of a possible building he designed for that relingo. What he envisioned there was a theater that would house the hypothetical San Hipólito Deaf League, and provide a space where the congregation of the sign language mass could indefinitely prolong their Sunday gatherings, silently reading scripts and rehearsing plays. I can’t think of a more brilliantly crazy idea for a relingo than a silent theater that has absolutely no possibility of ever becoming a reality.
Crane in use
Architecture, according to Roland Barthes, should be simultaneously the projection of an impossibility and the putting into practice of a functional order. In his well-known essay on the Eiffel Tower, Barthes recounts that in 1881, not long before the construction of the gigantic antenna, another French architect, Jules Bourdais, had imagined a “sun tower” for the Champ de Mars — at that time a relingo, a sort of playground or tabula rasa for speculative architects. However Bourdais may have conceived his tower, in Barthes’s version — at least in the English-language translation — the structure was to have an enormous “bonfire” that would illuminate the whole city by means of a complex system of mirrors. On the top floor of the tower, crowning the great beacon decorated with wrought iron galleries, there would be a space to which Parisian invalids could ascend for air therapy.
Although Barthes’s description of the sun tower lacks certain important details — for example, one wonders if the mirrors to reflect the light of the giant beacon would be installed around the city or on the tower itself, or how the invalids would get up to the top of the structure and, once there, not scorch themselves — the idea itself is perfect in the Barthesian-architectonic sense: a semifunctional folly. Whatever the case, being incapable myself of imagining things in three dimensions, I find it fascinating to think that a person would stop in the middle of an empty space and conceive there the details of a building full of deaf mutes acting out Macbeth or a tower on whose pinnacle the invalids of Paris would warm their hands on a giant bonfire.