The Excélsior headline grabbed Lorenzo’s attention: STRANGE OBJECTS IN MEXICO’S SKY. In the article, Erro expounded triumphantly about one of those unidentified flying saucers, a UFO, and supported his discovery with a huge spread of photographs taken with the Schmidt at Tonantzintla. In the pictures, a white line passed over the surface of the moon.
Surprised, Lorenzo intercepted Erro on his morning walk: “Are you sure, Don Luis?”
“Of course I am. I’m not irresponsible.” The director became irritated.
“You know very well that the Schmidt has oscillations and that Braulio or Enrique Chavira could have moved it suddenly. Did you consider that?”
“Of course. You are insulting me, Tena.”
“You should have waited before going to the newspapers, sir.”
“Why? I know what I’m doing, Tena, and I’m sure of my discovery.”
Haughtily, Lorenzo warned him that he would take a plate of the moon that very night.
Erro shook with rage. “You are defying me, Tena!”
The next day, Lorenzo put the photograph in front of Erro’s eyes. “It’s a line. I took it over and over to prove that the light came from a slight movement of the camera. That’s what those objects are.”
Completely disturbed, Erro threatened him: “Tena, I don’t want to see you again.”
That evening, Lorenzo found him walking bent over alongside Don Juan Prenso, the librarian, who would murmur into his ear, “Nostradamus!”
“Didn’t I order you to get out of here?” Luis Enrique Erro was trembling.
“Don’t worry, I’m leaving.”
On the bus to the Federal District, Lorenzo’s conscience was eating at him. He felt sorry for the old man. Erro’s contorted face appeared before him, and he repeated to himself, I was merciless. I should control myself, but I just couldn’t let that happen. It’s too irresponsible.
After that day, he didn’t return to Tonantzintla. He couldn’t sleep at night in his hotel in Mexico City. He looked for Diego, who said, “That was suicidal. The old man loved you like a son. What are you going to do now? I can give you work here, of course, but—”
Harlow Shapley had once offered him the directorship of the Bloemfontein observatory, run by Harvard in South Africa.
“Why the hell didn’t I go to Africa? Bloemfontein is a thousand times better than this!”
They had proposed it to him again in the late forties, when he knew that Erro was getting on to such a degree that the only vigorous thing about him was his perennial bad temper. Now, after contacting Shapley, Lorenzo was on his way to pick up his ticket to fly from Mexico to Havana, Havana to Bermuda, Bermuda to the Azores, and from there to Madrid. Thirty hours in the air in a four-engine Iberia plane, making a stop in Madrid. After that he would leave for Casablanca in Morocco, then Dakar, Angola, and finally Cape Town. From there, he would reach Bloemfontein somehow—by camel if necessary. I wish I had learned to play the violin so I could be like Dr. Schweitzer, he said to himself, smiling. His footsteps resonated on the sidewalk, tap, tap, tap. He no longer wore Aunt Tana’s shoes. Today I walk through the downtown streets, but next week I’ll walk through an unfamiliar African city. He was curious about what that new life would be like.
“Lorenzo, I’ve been calling to you, and you haven’t noticed. Where are you going so deep in thought?” It was Alejandra Moreno.
“To Bloemfontein.”
“What is that?”
“South Africa. I’m going to run the observatory.”
Alejandra stopped, incredulous.
Lorenzo laughed. “You look like a piñata that’s just been hit.”
“Just listen to what you’re saying. You can’t possibly have made that decision.” Alejandra’s face was stunned under her blue beret.
The traffic and the uproar of the street vendors around them increased. “Don’t make such a face; it’s not like I’ve died.”
Alejandra pulled him toward her. “We need you in Mexico; you cannot leave.” They reached calle Tacuba, and Lorenzo was about to enter the travel agency when Alejandra stopped him brusquely. “Before you buy your ticket, come say good-bye to Salvador Zubiran.”
They walked to the dean’s office at the university, on Justo Sierra 16. Alejandra, who came and went to and from the dean’s imposing office at will, let loose her indignation. “How can we let him leave? There aren’t enough like him around as it is.” She waved her arms. “Our poor country! Really! When someone has the ability to contribute to moving it ahead, we don’t even notice. Others recognize his value and know who he is while we continue to dictate letters and bury ourselves in bureaucracy.” Her troubled eyes stared at Lorenzo, dumbfounded with disappointment.
Behind his ebony desk, Dr. Salvador Zubiran listened to Alejandra with the same benevolence he used with his patients. Although he was dressed in a dark suit, he seemed to be wearing his neat medical coat, which inspired calm in his dealings with others. He looked at the young scientist before him and at Alejandra, his defender, whom he had known for years. He wished all young people had that passion, although he wasn’t sure if Alejandra’s was for science or for that round-faced boy with red cheeks. He knew that, aside from the faulty telescope, what worked even less at Tacubaya was the human material. At this point a few amateurs still eagerly insisted on locating stars, although positional astronomy had been surpassed in all the observatories of the world: Mount Palomar, Mount Wilson, Kitt Peak, Lick. And Graef, Alba, Barajas, and
other exiled Spanish scientists agreed that the Tacubaya Observatory so close to Mexico City should be renovated. Erro himself had indicated that after twenty-six years in administration, Joaquín Gallo was becoming the Porfirio Diaz of Mexican astronomy: “My last name is Gallo (rooster), and I’ll defend my turf like a fighting cock.” It was time to correct the situation.
Standing in front of these young people, Zubiran had no doubts. “I have an opportunity right here in front of me. Astronomy must be modernized, and Gallo has to go.”
When Lorenzo and Alejandra descended the stairs of the venerable building hand in hand, Lorenzo Tena was the new director of the Tacubaya Observatory.
“Come to Donceles with me,” Alejandra said. “Come on, let’s go. Don’t be a stubborn mule.”
The only discussion in the corridors of the government buildings and among the Confederation of Mexican Workers was about industrializing the country. Talk about the new country took over like a fever. Mexico would initiate its endeavor with foreign capital and would be able to compete with the United States. From an agrarian society it would become an industrial giant. In the large pulque haciendas on the plains of Apam, where they grew maguey plants and fermented the juice into liquor, the peasants were transformed into workers who specialized in railroad-car construction.
In the United States, there were no longer men in the fields, only machines. The same would happen in Mexico. In the meantime, Mexico provided laborers to their neighbor to the north, laborers who crossed the Rio Grande out of hunger. Lorenzo was extremely irritated by the government’s sense of triumph. If he didn’t want to lose his mind, it was best to stay far away from these illusions, which were much more naïve than the song “Pretty Bubbles” that Florencia had taught them.
After his new appointment, Lorenzo Tena set himself up in the very provincial and unpopulated Tacubaya, some eight kilometers from the center of the city.
Diego visited him. “It’s a shame not to see you presiding over
the Castillo de Chapultepec Observatory, but this building is also worthy of you.”
With its wide and tree-filled interior garden, tall ceilings, and large leaded windows, the Tacubaya Observatory not only had exterior gardens for the visitors to enjoy, but a tower with a cupola that opened to the sky as well. Through the telescope, with its five-meter distance refractor lens that was thirty-eight centimeters in diameter, they were able to see Saturn and its moons, asteroids, and stars. A jacaranda stretched the luxury of its lilac branches into the air during the entire month of March. The finest things in the entire building were the fifteen stained-glass windows brought from France. They glorified Copernicus, Kepler, Herschel, with their names written on ribbons held by cherubs. A telescope on a wooden structure and a tree of good and evil with five apples completed the series of images. Save for the luxury of the leaded glass, everything else was empty boxes, dusty bookshelves, yellowed bulletins, and row after row of the annual edition of the National Astronomical Observatory bulletin that had been published since 1881. Nothing there could capture a young person’s imagination. Nevertheless, the building inspired respect in the visitors: “You can see the sky from here, my son. The star watchers go up that tower there to observe.”
In spite of all the dust, Lorenzo took his predecessors’ reports off the shelves and read the texts with interest. In 1876 Díaz Covarrubias and Francisco Bulnes, proud of their expedition to Yokohama, Japan, to observe the transit of Venus, wrote: “We presented our results to the French astronomers.” After that triumph they were invited by other countries, where there were telescopes much more powerful than the one at Tacubaya. During those years, astronomy became so popular that a cantina was even named Transit of Venus Through the Disk of the Sun.
One Monday, after seven in the evening, Lorenzo noticed the doorman allowing spectators in.
“Where are they going?” he asked.
“To see the stars.”
“There are only two visitors’ days, Saturdays and Sundays.”
“Don Joaquin ordered us to open on workdays. He said it was the way to fight ignorance and superstition.”
“Gallo is no longer the director, and visiting is no longer allowed.”
When he saw the doorman’s astonished expression, Lorenzo deigned to explain: “The telescope has to be for the use of the researchers, not for the curious.”
“Researchers?” asked the doorman.
“Have you never heard that word?”
The Tacubaya Observatory was still being run the way it had been in 1914. Elementary and high school students burst in at will to see the stars or for an illustrated lecture on comets, eclipses of the sun, and the transit of Venus. Sometimes there were five, and sometimes there were twenty-five spectators. Logarithm tables were sold at the door, having been printed by the observatory “to help itself out a little.” Lorenzo was indignant. “We might as well sell multiplication tables flyers too.” People could come in to see the astronomical photographs under glass and the old instruments that were no longer being used.
As a result, Lorenzo ran into men, women, teenagers, and children in the hallways. They would ask, “Hey, can I use your bathroom?” And without fail, someone would always plant himself on a bench in the garden to eat lunch.
“This is not a picnic ground, this is a center of higher education, of research. What is going on is inadmissible, and I will not tolerate it.”
Every morning, Lorenzo had to deal with some unexpected situation. One of the elder secretaries, Señorita Herlinda Tovar, warned him, “I am responsible for press announcements, and I also give talks on the radio. I teach in the province free of charge. My travel expenses and a small stipend for the talks are paid by order of Dr. Joaquin Gallo.”
Lorenzo then discovered the true predilection that several of Señorita Tovar’s friends had for the stars. They visited her to have their horoscope read.
“This has nothing to do with astronomy,” roared Lorenzo.
“It doesn’t hurt anyone, sir. However, your bad temper is poisoning the previously calm spirit of the observatory,” said Tovar.
The Tacubaya personnel resented Lorenzo’s impatience, and in a few weeks he earned the dislike of the librarian, who invariably arrived late. When it was brought to his attention, the man retorted that Joaquín Gallo had never reproached him. The secretaries were to be feared the most, as they formed a united front with Señorita Tovar. They wanted to institute a Secretaries’ Day.
“What this country needs is twelve-hour work shifts, not more holidays,” Lorenzo retorted. “Why don’t we institute Asshole’s Day? Everyone would be able to—”
To his surprise, Miss Tovar interrupted him: “Bastards’ Day, Doctor. Bastards’ Day.” Thunderstruck, Herlinda saw Lorenzo smile at her.
The members of the Astronomical Society, founded in 1901, also felt rejected. The new director didn’t offer them coffee as Gallo did; that great mathematician always had time to chat with them. Several businessmen had the luxury of having a telescope at home and were willing to help Tacubaya—if they received the attention they thought they deserved. Who did Tena think he was!
Only the young janitor was sympathetic to the new director, following him around. In the nocturnal solitude of Tacubaya, Lorenzo would observe, and in spite of the illumination from the city, those hours behind the telescope continued to be his best. But when there was a full moon, Lorenzo shut himself up in his office and looked at his watch hour after hour, desperately pondering the country’s backwardness and, even more, the state of science in Mexico.
Lorenzo paced like a caged lion. Calm down, wild beast, he told himself. Calm down. Every now and then he’d reproach himself for his separation from Erro. He was still ashamed of the incident, but Erro continued to publish in Excélsior as if nothing had happened.
As a remedy to his despair, Lorenzo turned to the telescope. One night, when he saw the janitor, whom Gallo had employed as a messenger, he asked him, “Would you like to come up with me?”
He very patiently showed the boy how to focus the lens toward
the stellar cumulus. Sharper than a tack, he appeared the next night at the same time. “What’s your name?” asked Lorenzo.
“Aristarco Samuel.”
“What?”
“Aristarco is my first name. Samuel is my last name.”
“Who named you Aristarco?”
“I don’t know. Probably my father.”
“Did anyone ever tell you that Aristarco de Samos was the first astronomer in the world?”
“Yes, Dr. Pishmish did. But it didn’t seem to be a big deal to her that I was named that.”
If there aren’t any astronomers, I’m going to train whoever wants to learn, Lorenzo said to himself. Maybe that’s what science was all about in an underdeveloped country—grab onto the first one who shows an interest, especially if his name is Aristarco. After all, he himself had followed Erro to the roof on calle Linares equipped only with his enthusiasm.
“Listen, Aristarco, the night must be cloudless, without mist, without fog, to be propitious for observation. You have to open the cupola first so the optical system can stabilize with the environment. Look, the thermometer is here. To move the telescope, you use this rope and you point it in the direction indicated. Here are the position circles. Each morning we’ll set up a schedule of what we’re going to observe that night.” He pointed out the exact square of the sky to observe: “Don’t move from here. We’re going to take plates. It’s just like photography.”
The next day, after developing the plates, he showed the boy how to compare them. No one was as passionate or as efficient as Aristarco Samuel.
The next night, in the waning quarter moon, they went up to the tower. They located the star they wanted in the immensity of the sky and remained taking plates at one minute, three minutes, six minutes, nine minutes, twenty-seven minutes. “You have to triple the observation time to reach the weakest magnitudes.” With an expression of indescribable amazement, Aristarco Samuel focused the telescope in the indicated region. In spite of his mere fifteen years, he stayed awake all night. He had plenty of energy.
Lorenzo explained to him, “We’re going to work on high-luminosity stars, and you’re going to help me classify them.”
“I’d like to see farther,” Aristarco said impatiently.
“Buddy, you have to wait for the light to reach you. If you had pupils that were four meters in diameter, you’d see forty times farther that this telescope, but since you don’t, you’re going to use a spectrum.”
“In other words, if you say distant, you mean young?” asked Aristarco.
Lorenzo showed him how to determine if the stars were young or old, depending on their color indexes. “From now on, you’re in charge of recording the position of the star, the type of plate, and the zone of the sky to be observed tomorrow night.”
Aristarco’s devotion was impressive. He asked how stars were made, what the dark material was, what the gaseous material was, and he became impassioned by the red stars. “I hate the moon.”
“Why?”
“Because when it’s barely a quarter crescent, we can’t observe. Now I pray to the Virgin to give us a moonless night.”
Lorenzo adapted a Rolleiflex to the telescope with a screw and adjusted it with the shutter open in order to take advantage of the movement of the telescope.
One night, sick with the flu, Lorenzo asked Aristarco if he felt capable of observing alone. Around midnight, coughing, Lorenzo climbed the stairs to check on him, and when he saw the boy work so attentively and so responsibly, he said, “Tomorrow I’ll go over your material.”
To his surprise, Aristarco responded, “I wish we had a bigger camera.
The next day Lorenzo found him sweeping in the garden. “What is your greatest ambition in life?”
“To be an astronomer.”
“If you keep it up, you will be.”
“How do you make a discovery, Doctor?”
“A great discovery is just the culmination of the work of a lot of people. At any given moment, the work of several men is concentrated in one brain that is more organized than and different from
the rest. Newton, and later Einstein, reorganized what was already known and then articulated it in a different manner. That is discovery, Aristarco. All the necessary knowledge to take that step was already there.”
Lorenzo made Aristarco write down the names: Herschel, Kant, Laplace, the English astronomer Thomas Wright, and finally Hubble, who photographed the first spectra of galaxies and demonstrated that they were very far from us—so far that they didn’t even belong to our galaxy.
“Distance, Aristarco, is measured through other smaller stars or specific luminosity. With his marvelous telescope, Hubble had access to other galaxies, and he made his measurements based on variable stars. The light takes a certain amount of time to reach us, and the distances are counted in light-years. Andromeda, which is a galaxy close to ours, is two million light-years away. We receive light from galaxies sent ten, twenty, thirty, forty million years ago. The farther the astronomer sees, the more objects he is able to see as they were at the moment they were created. The ultimate goal is to understand the first galaxies, the ones that were formed in the very beginning.”