The Toxquis’ house, where Lorenzo lived, was made of dirt, the floor as well—rocks piled on top of one another, the stone wall turned white in the sun, the toilet a paradise of buzzing flies. From the ceiling of his room, hanging next to the lightbulb as the only luxury, was a yellow strip blackened with flies. But Doña Martina had lined the exterior walls with Mobil oilcans in which geraniums flowered, and fragrant herbs grew in chipped washbasins. She spent her time washing. The first day, with a fresh smile, she gave him a bar of Palmolive soap, informing him that soon the bath with a shower would be ready. She kept her promise, the tiles arrived within a month. “In the meantime, Professor, the bath is a bucket under the fig tree. No one will peek at you.”
Even though Martina scolded her children, “Shhhh, the professor is resting,” Lorenzo never slept more than six hours. Two black hogs grunted in the patio, the chickens cackled, the dogs scratched themselves, and the little donkey waited for its daily load. Florencia again? Her presence was stronger in the countryside than in the city, and living in Tonantzintla was a return to the garden at San Lucas. Maybe that was why Lorenzo felt so good.
When the sun was on its way to the summit, Lorenzo, in a splendid mood, went into the observatory darkroom to develop his plates and then sit in front of the microscope and examine them. The seemingly inanimate world that he had watched sleeplessly the night before was concentrated on a plate, and Lorenzo marked a star with a tiny x.
He felt a cosmic repulsion for earthly things, sometimes even for Juan and his preposterous projects. Nevertheless, on Sundays when Don Lucas Toxqui invited him for turkey mole, he went with pleasure. Don Lucas was a tiempero, a caretaker of time. Don Lucas’s
strongest relationship, the decisive one, was with the volcanoes. Popo and Izta ruled that man’s destiny. During his walks, Lorenzo had discovered the power the mountains held over the town’s inhabitants; these peaks were god and goddess to whom altars were raised with offerings: corn, fruit, flower buds, incense, and pulque. They were truly greater gods than the Christ brought by the Spanish, who died on the cross like a pitiful thing. Like any man, Popocatépetl had his own temperament. Toxqui called him Don Goyo. The villagers at the foothills of the volcanoes didn’t fear the Sleeping Woman, her hair a white train of snow. Popo was the only one that could end it all. That was why the offerings were essential—so the rivers wouldn’t run with lava, taking away houses and crops.
Some certainties weakened in Lorenzo. He was no longer sure that the volcanoes didn’t have powers. The story about the tiemperos initiated him into a world of popular wisdom. Hadn’t Tonita, the girl who cooked and cleaned for them at the observatory, predicted that they wouldn’t be able to observe that night, when she had seen him and Erro sitting on the main step to the building?
“Why, Toñita?”
“Because the flies are flying very low.”
She was right. They couldn’t observe. These natural phenomena were intrinsic here like corn, beans, and their children’s growth. The volcanoes were husband and wife, walking hand in hand. They sat together at dusk; they fought; they made up and slept in each other’s arms. Their presence defined the life of the inhabitants of the village. The volcanoes, mother and father, could avert the wind and the sun.
The certainties in the minds of the caretakers of time compensated for Lorenzo’s visceral anguish, which was provoked by the expanding universe discovered by Hubble, and by the thousands of miles of galaxies, of which his was just one. No one shared his efforts to understand it, and Lorenzo asked himself if the universe would continue expanding.
Talking with the farmers was like going back in time. He listened to Don Lucas Toxqui, to his friends Honorio Tecuatl and Filomeno Tepancuatl, and to his cousin David Quechol de Pancoatl.
One of Don Lucas’s ancestors had died as an infant and was buried in the atrium at Santa María Tonantzintla. The prayer on the blue-and-white ceramic plaque said, GOD WANTED ANOTHER ANGEL, MICHAEL, FOR HIS GLORY, OCTOBER 8, 1918. Another even older plaque read MONDAY THE 1ST OF FEBRUARY DON ANTONIO BERNABÉ TECUAPETLA ESCRIBANO FROM IBICA, TONANRIN, DIED IN THE YEAR 1756. Deeply rooted to their land, the villagers not only walked on the bones of their dead, they also had a tranquil wisdom. They understood that if the night stars looked tiny, it was because they were farther away than people were capable of understanding. They accepted the sun for what it did to the earth, to their bones, to their very skin. They studied the seasons of the sun to know when to put up adobe walls and when to put roofs on their houses. They carried the solar cycles in their veins, and the questions they asked Lorenzo were not in the least artificial. On the contrary, they came from ancient knowledge. These people did not speak of the sun as a god, but rather of the day in which man will reach it without burning himself. “But that day there will not be a sun. It will have cooled, and we will be dead,” said Lucas Toxqui. They worried that the sun might disappear. “It could disappear, and then we’ll die or have to go somewhere else.”
“Where else?”
“To a place like this, if we can find it.”
“The sun moves; the sun spins. It doesn’t stop just like that.”
“Without sun, the cornfield doesn’t grow.”
“Without sun there is no green.”
“Without sun we’ll die of cold.”
“I think the sun gets bumps all over it. That hillside that you see from is also a bump, and surely up there on the sun there’s another one like it. I’ve seen the holes on the sun.”
“Look, Professor, with the naked eye you can see that the stars change place. I’ve proven it, because as a child, I picked my star, and now that I’m fifty, I’ve lost it. I don’t know if it went out or where it moved to, but it moved.” Everyone followed Don Lucas, with his slow speech, which offered him an unexpected peace as he sat having one beer after another right out of the bottle, while the women hastened around the stove.
From the moment Lorenzo began to observe, he realized that the cosmos was changing him. Of course he would live among the others; he would walk with them, eat with them, and smile. But he had his own world. He tolerated the everyday only because he knew he could return to the telescope at night. The life of the stars was more genuine to him than that of men, to whom he listened, estranged, without the least bit of curiosity. He couldn’t observe them under the microscope as he could his plates, to predict their coarse conduct compared with that of those objects in the sky. Like the men, the stars were born, grew, and died; they had a fascinating life. To his surprise, the largest stars were the ones that shone for less time, and the tiny ones, like white dwarfs that were very, very dense, lasted a long time. Maybe someday, in a billion years, the sun would contract into a white dwarf. Or could the stars have been born before the universe itself?
Lorenzo was obsessed with the death of stars. Surely Florencia had exhausted her fuel before her time, and her extinction was the result. But she was out there combining helium and hydrogen, and every now and then she blinked so he would recognize her. Just as with men, the longevity and the lifestyle of a star was determined by its initial mass. From the time they were small, some people promised to be creatures of strength; others wore out. They burned their internal fire and died before their time. That’s what would happen to him. He would explore the sky until he exhausted himself; he would continue taking measurements between one star and another; he would calculate their angles, reconcile his tables. He must surely need glasses by now. He would become the detector of stellar objects, and even if he had to write down millions of figures, he would not weaken. He would specify the positions and movements of more than one hundred thousand stars. Erro assured him that there were more stars in the sky than men on Earth.
Lorenzo developed the habit of thinking during the day about the problems from the previous night, mulling them over while he lived alongside everyone else. The young Braulio Iriarte, nephew of the observatory’s benefactor, would greet him: “And how is the absentminded professor today?” Lorenzo continued on his way without even noticing.
The comments of Don Lucas Toxqui’s belligerent cousin brought him back down to Earth. When Lorenzo had been at the observatory for a year, the man surprised him by saying, “You are all up there buying and buying devices, writing and writing little numbers, and our children have to go all the way to Atlixco to school because we don’t have one here.” The statement struck him. He’d build them a school. But with what? He had to find a solution to their poverty.
“Why don’t you grow flowers, Don Honorio?” Lorenzo asked his neighbor. “They do so well here.”
“The flower?” (They said “the flower,” “the egg,” “the pea,” “the e shoe”; they never used the plural.)
“Yes, devote yourselves to the flower. You yourself, Don Honorio, told me that visitors always want to buy your roses. Instead of getting into corn, try flowers.”
“Are we supposed to eat flowers?”
“Honorio, don’t play the fool! You’ll earn money. Your loved ones will eat much better if you sell flowers rather than corn.”
“Where can I get money to build a school?” Lorenzo asked his brother.
Juan was blunt: “Galileo had to court dukes and marquises from Venice like a bulldog to secure donations and buy the lenses for his telescope. He traveled from Venice to Florence, from Rome to Venice, to visit his potential patrons. In exchange, he placed models of his inventions in their hands. You only have to go as far as the Federal District. See your tycoon buddies, or the Secretaries of State. Swallow your pride; arm yourself with courage, brother. Turn to the politicians and the businessmen. There’s no other way.”
“I can’t. I’ve never asked for anything.”
“Don’t give it another thought. If you want to help the village of Tonantzintla, you’ll have to bend over backward and pay your dues just like everyone else.”
Erro advised, “Use your eloquence, Tena, my friend. You can be persuasive when you want to. Employ your gift of convincing others.”
But up until that point Lorenzo had never even knocked on a single door to ask for donations. He hated any administrative task.
He wanted to sink into the night, live for it, become part of the agreeable symmetry of the sky, and not argue at ground level, among human weakness.
It was barely daylight when the incipient white light impeded his ability to distinguish the planets. Lorenzo reluctantly prepared to close the cupola. Stiff, he stretched his arms, moved his legs. He smiled when he heard the roosters crowing and the sound multiplying throughout the village. Then came the chorus of crickets still rubbing their elytrons, chirping in the semidarkness. Crickets bring good luck, he thought as he slowly descended to the town, still dizzy from his high night of radiant energy. Now it was the stars from below that shone in the grass, in the branches. There were hundreds of minute particles of light that struck up a new dialogue with him.
Lorenzo associated everything with the sky. His true existence was up there, and it began at night. For him, the sun enclosed the Earth in a deceptive circle of light. When night arrived, the darkness gave the universe its true dimension: the abyss, the emptiness. It made him exclaim, “Son of a bitch! Where the hell am I?”
Once, when he spoke to his brother about his cosmic solitude, Juan answered sarcastically, “Don’t be crass, brother. Don’t kid yourself. You sound like Aunt Tana. Facts. Astronomy requires facts, not feelings. Your solitude is laughable. You’re not living with the Aristotelian sky from four hundred years before Christ, which consists of a thousand twenty-seven cataloged stars. This is the twentieth century. It doesn’t ask you to become ecstatic about the craters on the moon or allow for sentimental drivel. You must discover the origin of the universe. We still don’t know how it emerged five billion years ago.”
Luis Enrique Erro put Lorenzo in charge of obtaining permission from the Department of Communications to pave the road from Acatepec to Tonanzintla. It was a small stretch, but it was indispensable for the trucks to enter, especially for transporting the Schmidt camera. Shapley was sending them this telescope, which was capable of reaching greater areas of space, of photographing
large regions of the sky, and of seeing celestial objects that were previously indistinguishable.
After he was kept waiting in the reception area, which irritated him, Lorenzo met with the department undersecretary, who arrogantly responded, “Tell your boss there isn’t any money for special requests. Besides, we don’t have any reason to spend a cent on research that will always be behind that of our neighbors to the north.”
Lorenzo lost his temper. “If we let others think for us, we’ll never get ahead. All I want is to use my own head, Mr. Secretary, and it appears that you would rather live borrowing the work of others.” Any chance of paving the road went down the drain, and Lorenzo gained a powerful enemy.
Erro was furious. “I’ll go the see the president myself to fix this vexing matter. You’re a terrible ambassador.”
“Let’s see what horseshit that idiot gives you.”
“Listen, Tena, don’t you be a smart-ass.”
Control of Tonantzintla was Erro’s business, and without realizing it, he also intervened in “his” scientists’ personal lives. Fernando Alba went to mass with his wife simply because he loved her. Erro was indignant and missed no opportunity to tell him so.
“I’m not a believer, Don Luis,” Alba responded, “although I had the same religious upbringing as you did at the Sacred Heart. For me Jesus Christ was a man who fought for others in his own way and was killed, like so many. But I respect my wife, and if she wants me to go with her, I’ll go.”
Erro kept on, cruelly. “Come on. Come on. Let the church mouse speak,” he said in a sarcastic tone.
Lorenzo intervened. “Leave him be, Don Luis.”
“Listen to me, young man …”
“Don’t get involved in what doesn’t concern you, Don Luis.”
“You are disrespecting me.”
“You are abusing your authority,” Lorenzo said.
The incident caused quite a commotion, and if it weren’t for Graef’s intervention, it would have escalated. Graef’s humor, his continuous jokes, were indispensable in Tonantzintla.
Graef laughed. “Listen, we’re all nervous about the arrival of the
telescope, and I recommend that we go down to the Santa María church and flutter around among the angels and cherubs, even if Erro won’t go into a church, even by accident.”
The telescope traveled in pieces by truck from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the border in Laredo. It was overseen by Harvard graduate students—one Mexican and the other North American. Who was going to be responsible for the transfer from the border to Tonantzintla?
Erro chose the de Tena brothers. “It is proof of the trust I have in you.
Lorenzo lived through the journey vacillating between states of terror and euphoria. The precious cargo that Juan was ferrying would change the lives of many Mexicans. In their truck, the brothers advanced like pachyderms under the sun behind other tractor-trailers, Lorenzo biting his nails. The telescope, built during wartime—like the ones at Harvard, the Technical Institute of Cleveland, and the observatory at the University of Michigan—was a greater treasure than all that Montezuma had accumulated. Would they conduct First World science in Tonantzintla that would be capable of competing with the United States and the Soviet Union? After today, Tonantzintla would possess one of the largest Schmidt cameras in the world.
Would the pieces fit together correctly? Would the mirror work? It wasn’t the traditional type, but a spherical one. The Perkins-Elmer optic—the most advanced in the world—would it be effective? The Schmidt camera encompassed an area of five degrees by five degrees. Would it allow them to reach very weak objects?
When Lorenzo switched with Juan and rode in back, he had placed his hand on the lens and left it there during the entire trip. He protected it as if it were a child. Any incline or curve that was too pronounced made his heart accelerate. For him this was a warrior’s vigil. Juan took it more in stride. “It looks like you’re praying to the Schmidt, brother. Don’t be so fanatical. There are other venerable objects in the world.”
“Like the Tenalosa?” barked Lorenzo, and he immediately regretted it. He had wounded his brother. How stupid I am, he thought. But instead of admitting to his pitiless sarcasm, he closed
up inside himself. It wasn’t the first time. Surely Juan had gotten used to his darts. From the time he was a child, the harsh words of his elders had entered the depths of Juan’s being.
In the months that followed, the mounting of the telescope distracted Lorenzo, and he didn’t have time for Juan. He forgot about him. The atmosphere in Tonantzintla was electrified. All they talked about was the strength of the platform that would hold the cupola of the telescope, the circular rails on which the dome would revolve, what would be achieved with the telescope once it was functioning, and, most of all, the glass. Fernando Alba was the expert; he had already installed the measuring apparatus of the first cosmic-ray laboratory at the Engineering College of Mining.
Erro feverishly pressured him. “Do you know a good mechanic in Puebla?”
Lorenzo was dazzled by the ingenuity of the young Eduardo Miranda, who without any formal education always came up with the right answer. Each dawn Miranda arrived in the dark on his bicycle, which had no lights. “You’re going to get hit by a car on the road, Eduardo,” Lorenzo warned. Luis Enrique Erro exuded enthusiasm and, alongside Alba, followed the process until the late hours of the night. Lorenzo would lie down to sleep next to the telescope. One day they would polish the optic glass themselves, which required infinite precision. They would understand the properties of the materials—silicon, quartz, pirex—the manner in which they contract and dilate.
Erro repeated that the primary virtues of a telescope should be its power to absorb light and its resolution capacity.
During those days Lorenzo felt very close to Erro, in spite of Erro’s mood swings and his unpredictable reactions. It was wonderful that there were older men like him in Mexico. What a privilege to work with him.
Erro sent him to Mexico City to look for a missing piece. “I trust only you, Tena. I know you won’t make a mistake.” The recently founded Physics Institute at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, also boiled like a cauldron in the city.
Alba smiled. “The situation is radically improving. We’re going to publish our results in the engineering journal, but soon we’ll have our very own publication.”
“So will we,” said Erro, “for astrophysics.”
“The main thing is to send students outside the country,” maintained Graef, “so they can come back and train others, like Felix Recillas.”
The arrival of Felix Recillas and his wife, Paris Pishmish, sent Erro into seventh heaven, because Paris had advanced theoretical training. Erro knew her from Harvard. She had been educated by a German mathematician taking refuge in Turkey, a disciple of Professor Erwin Freulich, Einstein’s assistant. Sergei and Cecilia Gaposchkin were in the habit of having tea with her. Cecilia was typically English, and they didn’t invite just anybody. Paris could easily communicate with the high-level academic researchers.
Felix Recillas had a gift for adapting to any surroundings. Aside from his talent in mathematics, which was confirmed by George Birkhoff and Oscar Zariski at Harvard, he had learned to handle the telescope at Oak Ridge. The astronomers watched him with curiosity because Graef had told them that he had taken Felix out of an Indian village and, through him, was planning to demonstrate the intelligence of the Mexican Indians. An orphan, Recillas was from San Mateo and spoke Nahuatl. Graef had put him on the mathematics track and recommended him to Harvard.
Recillas identified with Juan de Tena. He said to Juan, “Listen, you don’t seem like you’re from the same family as your brother. You’re a hooligan, just like me. That’s why I like you; you and I are of the proletariat class.” Juan hadn’t surrendered to authority.
Lorenzo, on the other hand, put great effort into completing everything Erro assigned to him, unlike the academics, who considered Erro simply a good promoter.
All that Lorenzo desired was that life not swallow up his eagerness for science, that life would allow him to think about the stellar cumulus. How did the other researchers tolerate the presence of a wife, of children? Lorenzo didn’t want anything or anyone to interfere with the sky or with him.