Lorenzo took the bus back to Tonantzintla that same afternoon, rage in his heart. He thought about Juan for a while, but halfway through the trip, the T Tauri stars recovered their empire. Surely, in spite of Alba’s pessimism, there had to be someone at the observatory to talk to about stars. “If you concentrate on the study of the planetary nebula, Tena, my friend,” Bok had told him at Harvard, “you’ll determine the abundance of heavy elements like argon and sulfur, as well as the pre-galactic quotient of helium to hydrogen. This is so very important!”
My God, it seemed like time had stopped in Tonantzintla. The stillness of the observatory grieved him. In the sleeping town, the Toxqui family had not moved ahead either. Even the children had stayed the same. After Cambridge, they all seemed tiny to him. The potholes on the street were still there, and the same metal rods were still exposed on houses that waited for a second floor. There were demolished or half-constructed fences—everything half finished. “What happened to the idea of growing flowers?” Lorenzo asked Don Honorio Tecuatl.
“Well, we’ll see,” was the halfhearted response.
That was it! Inertia had conquered them all. Lorenzo’s irritation grew and beat furiously against his temples. My science is useless, since I’m the only one who is discouraged by all this.
He got into one of his endless discussions with Erro and noticed that Erro’s left ear, his good one, was hearing less. The effort to hear made his face contract as if in pain. The convincing polemist no longer had the same drive.
Enveloped in smoke from his chain of cigarettes, Lorenzo confided his anxiety about Mexico’s falling behind. It was visible in the valley before them. How was it possible that the celestial dome had
more movement than this tiny fragment of Earth? When would the sky influence the lives of men?
“The heavens and the Earth are one. What is up there is part of what is down here,” Erro had told him with a smile. It brought back the memory of the time when Erro had asked him to be his assistant—the teacher who had spoken to him on the roof at calle Pilares.
“Tena, would you like to occupy one of the bungalows here rather than live in town?”
“A bungalow for just one person? That doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s right, Comrade Tena. It’s time for you to look for a wife. Haven’t you thought of marrying?”
“I want to work,” grumbled Lorenzo.
“It won’t interfere with your work.”
“I’m perfectly fine living with the Toxqui family.”
Possessed by his galaxies and his blue stars, Lorenzo had no one to discuss them with. Erro had aged. At Harvard, Bok was his best sounding board, but here … Who? Diego would listen to him like a good friend, but he wouldn’t be able to respond. He missed the ferocious discussions of Harvard. Oh, Norman, where are you?
But on Lorenzo’s first night in front of the Schmidt camera, Mexico immediately recovered its magical spell. The sky was his skin, his bones, his blood, his breath—the only thing he would give his life for.
“I don’t think there is anything that makes me happier than the Tonantzintla sky,” he told Erro.
“Then dive into it. It is your salvation.”
“Things really do happen there.”
They both knew that Juan stood between them, victim and ghost. Lorenzo blamed Erro for ruining his brother’s life, for the loss of the team of people, and for the inertia of the observatory, the same inertia that was mirrored in the country.
“I could leave for ten years and come back to find the same fruit rotting under the trees.”
“Why are you admonishing me? I’m not responsible for man’s inconsistency,” said Erro.
The best mathematicians and physicists, trained by Sotero
Prieto, were absorbed by UNAM, whose colleges were dispersed throughout Mexico City: the biology building in Chapultepec, geology in Santa Maria la Ribera, the Physics and Mathematics Institute in the Palacio de Minería, philosophy in Mascarones.
Those who had been at Harvard and MIT during the Second World War returned to teach subjects that were previously unknown in Mexico. Raúl Marzal took charge of promoting the College of Engineering; Alberto Barajas, mathematics. Leopoldo Nieto taught mechanical vibrations, although Alberto J. Flores, the future director of the College of Engineering, was the chair. The young Marcos Mazari took physics and engineering classes. Lorenzo visited Marzal’s class and then stopped in at Raphael Carrillo’s. “Professor, why don’t you teach the theory of consolidation?” asked a student. What enthusiasm there was. That was how the professors who would later teach at the College of Science began to strengthen their course work.
In Mexico City, the colleges planned to join together on the immense expanse of the volcanic land of the south. “It’s beautiful, brother, just beautiful,” Graef said ecstatically. It would be called University City, and the campus would surpass that of any Ivy League university. “Join us. We don’t have an astronomy program yet. You could start it. Your place is here, not in that village.”
“I’m going to make it work. You wait and see,” Lorenzo responded angrily.
“Don’t be blind. You don’t have any people. Who’s going to want to get all dusty out there?”
With Graef, the College of Science would lead the country’s progress. The artists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Juan O’Gorman walked around the campus. O’Gorman had been entrusted with painting the library. Alfaro Siqueiros was doing a super-dynamic mural for the tower of the dean’s office with materials that had never been used before. Rivera was painting the stadium. Three works of art, as well as the university museum, the botanical gardens, the Olympic pool, and the athletic fields.
The beautiful edifices built on the sea of lava, the immense windows,
the space, and the nobility of the landscape enthralled Graef. “What a campus! Even unfinished, this University City is magnificent. Especially with the pyramid of Cuicuilco over to one side!” The incomplete murals shimmered. Recently bleached roofs shone. Some of the colleges were just being designed. The masons with their buckets of mortar looked like pigeons fluttering around crumbs of bread. “It’s all ours”—Carrillo motioned good-heartedly—“but we are more than willing to share.” Graef listed the subjects that were now to be taught at the College of Science. He said that they would soon have a nuclear reactor and a Van der Graaf accelerator to study atoms. Standing next to Graef, Marcos Moshinsky, a tall, younger man with black hair, made several brilliant comments.
“Graef, have you noticed that our university is as frail as a house of cards?” Lorenzo said. “Do you realize that this country’s education is Third World? Not even twenty percent—what am I saying? —not even ten percent attend elementary school. In the United States it’s eighty percent. Our dropout rate is extremely high.”
“Lencho, don’t be so negative. What’s important is that we get scientific and higher education started. We’ve received several requests from North American universities to collaborate with us.”
“Of course, because our scientific activity is so limited that it isn’t a threat to them. The number of scientists in the United States is almost one hundred times higher than here, so it’s convenient for them if we do scientific studies, because we’re far from competing politically or economically.”
“You’re the competitive one, Lencho, and your pessimism is going to kill you.”
“We don’t have an elite. To achieve that, we have to increase education at all levels.”
“I assure you, Lencho, that we’re going to develop top-class people.”
While the development of science was flourishing in the city, Tonantzintla was being extinguished, along with Lorenzo’s spirit. How
many times he wished he had stayed at Harvard for three more years. “How can you discuss that if you don’t have a doctoral degree ?” Juan Manuel Lozano had retorted once. Lorenzo could only discuss the subject of his degree with Norman Lewis. He kept a hostile silence with his colleagues, thinking, My country has betrayed me. A large majority of the young people cared nothing about the invention of models or of hypotheses that explained what happened to the Earth and to the sky. Not everyone could make an equation, and all preferred to do what was safe. Besides, where were the laboratories, the equipment, the instruments, the scholarships? Certainly not in Tonantzintla. Not a single politician would ever even glance in this direction, no matter how well intentioned he was.
Before, pedestrians on the street could raise their eyes to the night sky and locate Sirius, the brightest star in the celestial dome. Now, not only streetlamps but automobile headlights obscured the stars. In their zeal for modernization, men had erased the sky from their lives. Who was even aware of planets, stars, meteorites, or comets except for a number of scientists?
Tonantzintla, a village lost on the map, was also assailed by the light from the city of Puebla de los Angeles. A halo of light rose from the buildings and the advertisements, a sort of fine orange dust covered the sky, impeding observation, when before it had been black and clear. There was not a single protest. Braulio Iriarte, Luis Rivera Terrazas, and Lorenzo Tena confronted the apathy alone.
When Lorenzo had wanted to build an elementary school in Tonantzintla, Don Lucas Toxqui said indifferently, “There isn’t any interest or any means. The government officials never show their faces around here.”
Lorenzo had become indignant. “Couldn’t the children study outside, under a tree? If it’s so urgent, the physical location is the least important part.”
“We want a formal school.”
Thanks to Lorenzo’s efforts, they now had a school. But what a toll it had taken on him. I’m going to die young, he’d say to himself. But I don’t care. Let come what may.
Tonantzintla and Tacubaya’s backwardness was becoming more evident to Lorenzo while his former teacher and friends, Alba, Graef, and Barajas, worked enthusiastically at University City. They had drawn students who previously preferred to follow safer paths in law, accounting, or medicine. The sciences no longer seemed unappealing, incomprehensible, or uncertain.
In the months that followed, Lorenzo absorbed himself in the nocturnal sky, as Erro had suggested, but he then found that the Schmidt camera did not respond. Oak Ridge, where are you? The telescope had an alarming defect. Could it be the tube, or the structure that held the powerful lens?
“Lorenzo, Felix Recillas is coming to the University of Puebla next week. Why don’t you speak with him?” Rivera Terrazas suggested.
The meeting with Recillas in Puebla confirmed Lorenzo’s suspicions. “Listen, Tena, gringo or not, the telescope at Tonantzintla is a piece of garbage. No one has been able to do anything with it. It’s either the design of the tube, or else the mechanism is inadequate. You remember, craftsmen made it manually, and it was set up by inexperienced people whom Erro picked up here and there. The Schmidt camera was not working correctly when you left for Harvard. They’ve never been able to work with it. That’s why everyone left. The only solution would be to send it back to Harvard.”
On the bus from Puebla to Tonantzintla, Lorenzo repeated Recillas’s last sentence to himself: No one has ever been able to do anything with the Schmidt. The mechanism doesn’t respond because the people who set it up were amateurs. The optic lens wasn’t defective; it was the structure, which was made with hammer and nails, that was defective. They needed an ultramodern design, the product of the minds of first-class engineers and mechanics, which Mexico had not yet produced.
Lorenzo remembered the fervor of Erro and his friends and the ingenuity and enthusiasm they had put into assembling and soldering the parts under George Dimitroff’s strict supervision. Lorenzo hysterically repeated to himself that a machine would not beat him: What do I need to do here? I have to beat it. No matter how
long it takes, I’m going to find a way. This determination set his nerves on edge. It was impossible to think of anything else. It was a duel to the death. “I’ll die before I let this camera beat me.” He said it aloud, with fury, scolding himself. He was incapable of leaving the ferrous empire of the Schmidt. You son of a bitch!
He climbed the hill in double time, seeing nothing but the Schmidt. Day after day, one aspirin after another, one moment of impotence defeating another, Lorenzo kept watching for the Schmidt to respond. How was it possible that he had so many projects, so many ideas, but he couldn’t rely on a good instrument? Call Shapley? Leave Mexico? I don’t have anything else, he repeated to himself. I don’t have another country either!
One night, after he opened the doors to the cupola and aimed the telescope at the sky, he realized that the tube was wearing out. The construction may be deficient, he thought, but the optic glass is spectacular. That night he didn’t take a single plate. His analytical mind calculated and calculated again, and finally, at five in the morning, Lorenzo went down to the village to sleep. He had barely opened his eyes when he was overcome with anguish. How could he work with this device to obtain the profundity of observation he desired? “This must be how mathematicians work on theorems, clearing the underbrush from the path until they reach the essence, the last step, the definitive, the solutions,” he said aloud to give himself courage.
Without the least regard for his personal needs, Lorenzo made calculations, set up tables. Three packs of Delicados a day were not enough. At the general store, Don Crispin said to him, “I have your four packs here, my doc, so you can work better.” Each night his determination took him further. He wrote down in a black linoleum booklet the inclination at which the telescope had responded, and he continued to make assumptions. If the tube wears out at twenty degrees and I readjust it, taking into account its flexibility, I’ll get this result. By the end of two weeks he didn’t need to take notes. He had it all in his head—the different variants, the steps to follow, and above all, Recillas’s words.
He had already spent ninety days working fourteen hours each moonless night, obtaining new results, millimeter by millimeter,
when he realized he could control the Schmidt. “Here we go, piece-of-shit telescope; let’s prove that you do work.” When he developed his plates, he was certain that he had reached as far as he had at Oak Ridge, and maybe even farther.
The distance from the Earth to the sky was unimaginable to the human mind. Some planets and stars were fixed, static, but many had changed during his time in Cambridge, almost in front of his eyes. At least that’s what Lorenzo believed. They had moved in the southern sky. Proving it helped him tolerate the consequences. He confronted the telescope. He spoke to it out loud. He knew exactly how to maneuver it. And once he found the location, he took his plates without a single hesitation. Each night, he deciphered a new enigma, but then others emerged, and others and others. The flashing stars in the Orion nebula had entrapped him and led him to the T Tauri stars, whose strong emission intensity presented the red line of the Balmer series, red from the hydrogen.
When he showed Erro his first results, the astronomer hugged him. “Tena, you are everything I would have wanted to be.”
And Felix Recillas admiringly addressed him informally, like a colleague: “I don’t know if you made charts or if you have it all in your head, but the fact is, you have obtained a perfection of observation that no one else has achieved. Tena, you’ve gotten ten times more out of the Schmidt than the people in Cleveland and Wisconsin have. The gringos gave up too soon; they have used it less than half the time you have used here.”
Recillas’s words were good for him. It was a shame about the notes. He felt badly that he hadn’t kept them, because that damned Schmidt had caused the disorderly flight of students and theoreticians who had waited for results in vain. “With such a fine lens, you have to find a real telescope,” Recillas had declared.
Erro, nationalist as he was, believed that the telescope was a miracle of Mexican technology. “Neither in Holland nor in the United States would they have done any better!”
But something had failed. The same thing had happened in Cleveland, because their Schmidt wouldn’t respond either. As a result of patience and mettle, Lorenzo had made it function.
“Devil of a boy,” said Erro. “His prodigious intelligence would
make him a genius in any First World country. They don’t recognize his value here.”
One afternoon Lorenzo decided to visit the chapel of Santa Maria Tonantzintla again, to see if the artisans had created their own cosmic order there.
At the general store, he picked up the keys from Don Crispin, who served as sexton, and when he opened the chapel door, sunny and warm juice oozed from the golden slices of orange, the honey of the pineapples, the red of the watermelons sculpted on the walls. Gluttony swelled the fruit bowl that spilled over from above-pineapples and melons, grapes so oversized that they looked like figs, bananas standing erect in their brazenness, carnivorous flowers with voracious petals. But there were also fixed points and an order decreed by mathematical law.
The chapel was enchanting. The people from the town were angels, and their mother was the Virgin, the consoler, the one who loved them and covered them with flowers and fruit in abundance. Glorifying her childlikeness, the Virgin had shrouded the inhabitants. Children of all eternity, like a great balancing force, they fluttered around inside this chapel that did them justice. The chapel had something of Leticia. “I couldn’t care less,” Leticia would have said. The cherubs would have greeted her with a round of applause. Leticia was part of the irresponsible, disorderly sky of the chapel, and for that reason, because of its lack of restraint and its abundance, it exercised the omnipotence that the faithful and the curious revered.
When Lorenzo noticed that it had gotten dark, he locked up the lascivious angels with relief and returned the key. The Schmidt camera was waiting for him, and as he climbed the hill toward the telescope, he thought about Lisa. Had she been in front of that altar, she would surely have said “Too much!”