“We have to catch the good students—grab them away from the Law College, from humanities, from economics,” Graef advised. “I’m going to ask for their grades. It’s up to you to convince them, reassure them. You, Lencho, the relentless, let’s see if you can be as smart as old Sotero Prieto.”
Lorenzo became convinced that the young people should get their doctoral degrees outside the country: the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan if necessary. “It’s critical if we want to be competitive,” Graef had said.
Dr. Pishmish was irreplaceable when it came to preparing the best science students. She helped them determine their vocation, persuaded them. There was no postgraduate study in astronomy in Mexico. Thus there was no one who could direct a thesis except for Paris, who couldn’t do it all alone. The kids weren’t afraid of her, but they went out of their way to avoid Lorenzo in the hallways. He would have to convince them to leave Mexico, but first he would contact not only Norman Lewis at Harvard, but also Walter Baade at MIT and Martin Schwarzchild, who knew all about stellar structure and evolution. Lorenzo’s letters of recommendation carried a lot of weight, and he gave them only to the best students.
He would later invite the great astronomers to UNAM and to Tonantzintla, which had so fascinated Shapley, Chandrasekhar, Viktor Ambartsumian, and Evry Schatzman.
Each kid was a special case in which Lorenzo had to invest a considerable number of hours, laying siege and convincing them to continue their studies abroad. “But I’m going to get married, Professor.”
“Take your wife with you.”
“Doctor, my parents won’t survive if I’m gone for four years.”
“If you tell them you have to go, they’ll visit you.”
“They can’t afford it.”
“You can work in your free time; all the men do it.”
“Professor, my English is horrendous.”
“So what? Mine was too. Take an intensive course and finish learning it there.”
“I’m anti-Yankee. I hate their culture.”
“Don’t worry, I can arrange for a scholarship to England, France, Italy, or Japan. Do you want to go to the Byurakan Observatory in Armenia?” The hours it took trying to convince them wore him out. “Each mind is a world unto itself,” turned out to be an irritating commonplace refrain. So many obstacles. My Lord, they had more demands than excuses, depending on the personality of the candidate of the hour. What type of investment would this one require, Lorenzo asked himself as he listened to the oddest questions. At the moment of truth, they were all infantile.
The ones who had excelled in physics, and therefore were natural candidates, had such insolent answers. “Astronomy is the folklore of all the sciences.”
“What?” replied Lorenzo indignantly.
“It is. It’s really popular. Everyone likes it, but …”
“Listen, Graef,” he told Carlos. “What kind of candidates are these? Send me different ones.” The long, desperate conversations with the students confused Lorenzo.
Graef laughed. “You’d never make it as a psychologist, Professor.
Lorenzo talked with each one, and it was more unsettling and unbelievable each time. The candidate would begin to speak, delivering a lecture, with no compassion for the listener. Are they getting even with me? Lorenzo asked himself.
Fabio Arguelles Newman, who had a bad haircut and ripped jeans, watched him timidly, dark circles under his eyes. If it hadn’t been for the desperation in the boy’s gaze, Lorenzo would have kicked him out of his office. How many demons was the young man dealing with that made it so hard for him make a decision, in spite of the fact that he had one of the highest averages in the College of Science? Lorenzo had to control himself in order not to lose his
temper. Hadn’t he himself been depressed at Fabio’s age? As he listened to the somewhat shrill voice, he remembered his long trips throughout the country, delivering Combate. Dr. Beristain’s kind attitude was what had made the most difference.
“Listen, Professor Tena, there are only a few things I’m sure about: it’s better to love than to hate; justice is better than injustice; truth is better than a lie, although literature is a big lie well told. The universe is the same everywhere. I’ll have the same difficulties at Berkeley.”
“But not the same instruments.”
“My brain is my instrument.”
“There you’ll have information that you don’t have access to in Mexico. You’ll measure yourself against the best.”
“Professor, Plato already said it all—”
“In science? Have you read Werner Jaeger’s Paideia?”
“Of course, Professor.”
Arguelles Newman was passionate about Kant and his concept of the sublime. When man is able to make something of the infinite, the incalculable, the ineffable, and when he discovers that he is made of the same material as the universe, then he calls his experience sublime.
“But this is astronomy, Fabio.”
The young man responded, “Astronomy tries to explain the origin of the physical universe, and my concern is ontological in nature … To be or not to be?”
Lorenzo smiled. “The universe is where we are sitting.”
“Listen, Professor, astronomy attempts to resolve doubts about the physical nature of the universe, while philosophy formulates those doubts. And what if the universe is only a dream? You want to send me to Berkeley, but wasn’t it Berkeley who said that the world exists only when someone perceives it? I have more doubt than certainty.”
Lorenzo was going to respond that at that moment he did know one thing for certain, which was that he, Fabio Arguelles Newman, would go to Berkeley. But he restrained himself and agreed with the boy—who sat ruffling his hair—that the principal mystery had not been resolved, no matter how many scientific answers were found.
“What are we doing here? Do the things we believe in really exist?”
Finally Lorenzo interrupted him impatiently: “If you don’t believe that the physical is real, what in the devil are you doing in the science department?”
“It’s exactly what philosophy asks. I don’t know if this table is more real than my perception of it. And this can be extended to the entire universe. We don’t know if it is different from the images our advanced devices show us.”
Lorenzo held himself in his seat with both hands so he wouldn’t get up, while Fabio continued in an ever more shrill voice. The boy must have seen something in the director’s eyes, because he rushed ahead: “Of course, I’m not taking any merit away from scientific research. I can see what they have achieved, but it doesn’t resolve anything for me.”
Lorenzo became furious. “Ah, no?”
“Few things must be as fascinating in life, Professor, as discovering what stars are made of or if there is water on Mars. But does knowing it really eliminate our doubts about the existence of that same universe? I don’t believe so.”
This one is an asshole, Lorenzo thought, but he was careful not to say it aloud. He managed to lose himself in thought and only half listen. He was touched when Fabio said that as much as we may believe that we know what will happen within an hour or a year, we will never be able to guess “what will happen in the following instant, and paradoxically, all the rest depends on that instant.” The boy asked compellingly, “Who is in charge of the existence of that instant?”
Lorenzo remembered how he had asked Dr. Beristain in his library, “So philosophy never dares to formulate a truth?” And the answer was etched in his mind: “Not without reservations, Lorenzo. Not without first asking if we are capable of assuming it, because sometimes the truth seems to be nothing more than an unsustainable hypothesis.”
Fabio was gesticulating. “Maybe what happens is that time doesn’t pass, much less take us anywhere. We strive to progressively count the years as if this will lead us to a better place.” Defeated, he dropped his arms and looked at Lorenzo with anguish.
“In spite of all the uncertainties of the universe, Fabio, our own lives respond to an unknown order, and we are the ones responsible for finding meaning in that.” Worn out, he concluded the interview.
Later, Lorenzo, who so loved philosophy, exclaimed to Graef, “All I ask is that you give me a good physicist!”
Tena was unaware of what family ties meant to other people, and that’s what he told Graef. The family circle was becoming a knot if not a hangman’s noose. None of those boys had a spirit of adventure.
“Of course they do, Lorenzo. And you must help them find it.”
Lorenzo contended that a North American education seemed superior—taking sixteen-year-olds out of their “home sweet home,” not to return until Thanksgiving holidays. That was liberating. Here, it seemed that none was willing to break the umbilical cord. “Man, they even intend to take their grinding stones with them. It’s intolerable. Listen, the other day I lost my temper—”
“Let me interrupt. You, lost your temper? I can’t believe that!” Graef said.
Lorenzo ignored him. “‘Do you expect your grannie to go with you?’ I said to a boy, and I immediately regretted it.”
One culture was confronting another, and Lorenzo was sinking into the immense lap of Mexican society. “How are we ever going to achieve anything of our own initiative? It wouldn’t have taken Luis Enrique Erro so much work to find men and women for Tonantzintla.” But that was a different time. His recruits had considered themselves fortunate. For Lorenzo at least, Luis Enrique Erro was providential. “I never made anyone beg me like these little boys do with me,” grumbled Lorenzo.
Graef became serious. “We’re losing our idealism, Lencho. We’re no longer innocent or deluded. There’s no doubt about it; we were better off before.”
“Don’t say that. You sound like an old man.”
“You and I are cut from a different cloth than they are, brother.”
Luis Enrique Erro, bitter and disenchanted, continued publishing articles in the Excélsior newspaper, and his books could be found in most bookstores: Basic Ideas of Modern Astronomy, The
Language of Bees. His novel, Bare Feet, was the best, written during his forced bed rest in the hospital and dedicated to Emiliano Zapata, “a light in the darkness of our history.”
Visiting him at his sickbed, Lorenzo told him brusquely, “Your novel is better than Axioma and your treatises on the logical basis of mathematics.”
Growling, Erro thanked him for his visits to the cardiology ward, but his wife did not: “This boy has always made you nervous. He brings up problems that you can no longer solve. Besides, he’s arrogant.”
“Just so you know,” Erro said to Lorenzo, “I don’t want any service or corny ceremony. I don’t want a monument but rather something like a kilometer marker on the road.”
At that moment Lorenzo could have told him how much he loved him, the gratitude he felt for him—Erro, I consider myself your son. You’ve been a formidable mentor to me. But he didn’t. Nor did he confide that if he, Lorenzo, died, he would want to be right nearby, with a similar marker. What would the old man have said? No sentimentalism, Tena, my friend. Lorenzo regretted that he hadn’t expressed his feelings, because two days later Margarita Salazar Mallén called to let him know, between screams and sobs, that her husband had passed away.
Erro died at the age of fifty-eight, on January 18, 1955. Lorenzo promised to provide Doña Margarita with a small pension, and he deposited Erro’s ashes at the Tonantzintla Observatory, as he had asked.
In the end, nothing could have gratified Lorenzo more than the eventual success of the scholarship students who were studying in foreign countries. At Caltech there was one Mexican; at Berkeley, three out of six graduate astronomy students were Mexicans. Proudly, Lorenzo wrote to them to encourage them, telling them that their journey was similar to that of the medieval aspirants to the Round Table. They left to keep an armed vigil, in order to become knights. “You will compare yourselves to others, you will face your fears, and you will know who you are.”
Jorge Sanchez Gómez wrote that two of his professors had been awarded the Nobel Prize, and that of two thousand graduate students,
nine hundred and fifty were foreign. “Can you imagine, Doctor, measuring yourself against Hindus and Chinese? This really is a democratic country, because it doesn’t shut itself off to foreigners. Here I’m meeting the most intelligent people from Chile, Argentina, France, England, Japan.” Lorenzo smiled. “The competition is terrible, and I analyze and put my own intelligence, imagination, and above all, self-criticism, to the test. Sometimes I have lunch with a really short Bolivian astronomer. Can you imagine, a Bolivian woman at Caltech? I’m sending you my grades to see what you think.”