The first time Fausta pronounced the word bioenergy, Lorenzo guffawed cruelly, but she didn’t acknowledge him. She didn’t even glance in his direction. Fausta was convincing, even he had to admit that. Her enthusiasm went straight to the heart, touching some chord in her listeners.
“Have you heard her sing her devotional psalms? She’s a snake charmer!” Rivera Terrazas informed him. “She’s drunk water from the Ganges.”
“When?”
“Every day.”
“Every day?”
“Yes, with millions of pilgrims who wash their grimy scabs, their stumps, and their loincloths in search of purification. In Benares she helped burn cadavers with firewood on the shores of the Ganges, and she collected their ashes with a broom and threw them into the sacred river that comes down from the Himalayas and empties into the Indian Ocean. Even today she got up from her straw mat at four in the morning and practiced hatha yoga. Lord!” So when he, Lorenzo, was closing the telescope, longing for the heat of the bed, this senseless fool bathed in the icy waters after meditating?
Fausta entered the library under Lorenzo’s inquisitive gaze. “What are you reading?”
The girl showed him the jacket of The Magic Mountain and went on to say, “Settembrini’s long disquisitions bore me, and sometimes I skip them.”
She attended the conferences, sat at the table with the director, and praised the blue and black corn tortillas Tonita made with her good hands. “Do you know what Lao Tse says, Doctor? ‘To be great
is to extend yourself into space; to extend yourself into space is to reach far away; to reach far away is to return to the starting point.’”
“I don’t know who Lao Tse is,” grumbled Lorenzo.
“Ay, Doctor, lighten up!”
Fausta made him irascible. One afternoon he found her embracing the trunk of a tree, and when he asked her what she was doing, she responded with another question: Didn’t it seem amazing to him that the origin of a tree whose trunk she couldn’t wrap her arms all the way around was a minuscule seed? When Lorenzo declared, “How banal,” Fausta retorted that love could also be contained in an atom.
“And grow to become a leafy tree?” Lorenzo retorted.
“Or drown as birdseed in the mouth of the first bird that comes along,” said Fausta, and she turned and left.
What a rude, impertinent girl. What right did she have to walk away from him? Until now, he’d always had the last word. No one said good-bye first. Didn’t she realize that she risked being booted out of the observatory? Kicked out? Well, no. He smiled inside. It wasn’t a matter of physically kicking her, but that wasn’t because he didn’t want to. How could that ingrate dare to take away his calm?
Fausta offered Lorenzo a world he was totally unfamiliar with. How was it possible that she could have lived so much? Did girls live on the edge now? Her life involved more risk than that of any woman of his era, including his sisters, Emilia and Leticia, or Diego Beristain’s sisters—married, mothers of families, housewives. Fausta, on the other hand, had gone to eat peyote in San Luis Potosi, had met María Sabina, the shaman. She told Lorenzo about her months in Huautla de Jimenez, living in a hut on the edge of the abyss—not just the natural one, but her very own, of her mental state. She had memorized the spells, the litanies, the words of the distributor of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
One day she said to Lorenzo, “I am the Jesus Christ woman, I am the Jesus Christ woman, I am the Jesus Christ woman,” until he interrupted her angrily.
Once, he declared, “You are not normal, Fausta.”
The girl laughed. “Normal like those who eat three meals a day? No. Normal like those who burp with satisfaction? No. Normal like the couples who have nothing to say to each other? No. I have a little bit more imagination, and you would too, Doctor, if you let yourself. If you wanted, you could be a rose.”
A rose, me? thought Lorenzo that night on his way to the forty inches.
“That girl is tremendously lucid,” commented Rivera Terrazas, “not only with respect to astronomy, but with everything. You should have heard what she said about you. She understands everything there is to know about you.”
“Ah, really?” responded Lorenzo angrily. “Then she’ll have to hear what I think of her—and my reasons for firing her.”
Fausta didn’t worry about infringing on the rules of their communal living. She dared to interrupt him one day. “Doctor, you’re lying.” She didn’t even say, Excuse me, Doctor, but I think that you are mistaken. No. Out of the blue, that cockroach dared to challenge him.
“It’s her nature,” Luis Rivera Terrazas said. “She’s like that. You can’t change her. Take it or leave it.”
Take her? Him, take Fausta, that crazy, irresponsible … She was intelligent, yes, but what good was her intelligence? Lorenzo was repelled by anything that had to do with esoteric doctrine, transcendental meditation, gurus, the illuminated, the pious of India. Those who gave up everything to follow a master seemed mentally incompetent to him—at the very least, deluded fools. For him, the only possible India was the India of Chandrasekhar the scientist. The rest was ignorance, misery, evasion, garbage, the delirium of the starving multitude.
Fausta could also read minds. Not only did she delve into them, she also stripped them naked in such a way that, at gatherings, Lorenzo took to following her to witness the moment in which she hurled her judgment.
She gave him vertigo. Throughout his life he’d had little time to think of others, about the noise they make, the laughter they provoke, their movements as they walk. He had seen them from afar. They were an indeterminate mass in space. He had never even
asked Norman Lewis about his personal life, and Norman had never questioned him either. They had too much to talk about. He had no desire to know about what was going on with Leticia, Juan, and Santiago, and if anything happened, they would find him to tell him about it and drive him crazy. His buddies, too, moved in a separate orbit. Cut off from Mexico City, his life became infinite. Facing the two volcanoes every morning, he was accustomed to thinking about their existence, and about the sky, like a desert—yes, a desert, but of stars. Then Fausta erupted in it with her intense look.
Was it to make him lose his sanity? “You have to turn everything upside down, Doctor. To question everything, not just sit and contemplate the landscape.”
With his heart in his throat, much more alert than before, Lorenzo would wait to ambush her. I’m going to make her fall into a trap, he thought. All his life he had known how to set traps for others; he had watched them pitilessly, waiting for the exact moment when they would stumble. Distrust, and you will succeed.
But Fausta stepped around it and kept challenging him. “The moon, Dr. Tena, is a living organism, not an inert rock surrounded by gases. Selene is our friend. You should greet her seven times each time she appears in her plenitude and ask her to grant you a wish, because she will.”
“All I need is for you to give me astronomy lessons. Besides, the moon is the moon, and the Earth is not Gaia.”
“No, Doctor. I’m incapable of such irreverence. I’m talking about your relationship with the moon. I think you are categorically wrong. The truth is, you don’t know how to treat her.”
“Ah, no? And women?”
“Not them either, Doctor, not them either. You need to get with it, I’m telling you.”
Had she read Dostoevsky? What did she think of Crime and Punishment? When Fausta responded that she gave up reading his works after The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov because it seemed unhealthy, Lorenzo went into a convulsion of sarcasm. “Unhealthy? From what I’ve heard, you’re not afraid of any kind of disease.
As with the random occurrences in the atomic universe that the most refined examinations, the most exact measurements and observations, could not clarify, Lorenzo could not find an equation to define Fausta.
That’s what she was, random. He couldn’t fix or peg her. His high-frequency gamma rays were useless. At least if she would stop intriguing him, he’d be able to rest. What were her measurements? He was incapable of determining her position and her velocity or of stating the rhythm of her movements.
Seeing Fausta on the road to Puebla one day, Lorenzo stopped his car. “Fausta, would you go to Veracruz with me?”
“No way.”
“All right, then I’ll see you next week.”
When he was about to turn the corner of calle Cannon, he saw that the girl was running after him.
“Yes, I’ll go with you.” And with that, she climbed into the front seat.
“Why did you change your mind?”
“For a cosmic reason you wouldn’t be able to understand.”
“And you’re going just like that, not taking anything?”
“All that I am, I have with me.”
“Not even a toothbrush?”
“As long as there are tortillas, I don’t need a brush.”
Neither spoke again. When the landscape changed and the banana plantations filled their eyes with green, Lorenzo said, “If you want, I’ll take you back to where I found you.”
“No, Doctor, I want to go, but I don’t think we’ll make it to Veracruz by nightfall at the pace we’re going.”
“We could stay in Fortín. Do you like gardenias?”
Fausta kept quiet. Why the hell had she gotten into the director’s car? she wondered. Why did she obey impulses that got her into trouble? Right now she could be peacefully at home and not with this incomprehensible man. Rivera Terrazas, with his easygoing ways, was a thousand times better than this mule who didn’t stop scrutinizing her! Yet she knew that her relationship with Lorenzo
Tena was more important than the one with Terrazas. Man or woman, bird or chimera, animal or object, planet or comet, no one intrigued her this way, not even her father, who had been the love of her life.
Fausta knew that she could walk away from everything in an instant, without calculating the consequences. She had done it before. But she didn’t feel as happy with herself now.
“Do you want to stop and have dinner?”
Fausta felt like responding, Why don’t you stop and go fuck your mother, but she didn’t. What a coward I am, she thought.
Not in Fortín, or in Veracruz, or in Jalapa, or in Orizaba, or in the restaurant next to the river did they stop viewing each other as strange creatures.
At the hotel, Lorenzo asked for two rooms. Ceremoniously he asked, “What time would you like to have dinner? What about breakfast?” He looked unhappy.
Fausta went for a walk while he sat in the garden, his gaze fixed on the horizon, and she showed up half an hour late for dinner.
He looked at her furiously. “Why are you doing this to me?”
When they returned to the observatory, before entering the gate, Fausta asked angrily, “Why did you invite me?”
“Why did you accept?”
When she got out, Fausta slammed the car door.
Lorenzo went to Mexico City and stayed for almost ten days, and when he returned, Fausta inquired, “How are you doing since our unsuccessful honeymoon?”
Lorenzo had deliberately not come back to Tonantzintla because of this fucking bitch who made him suffer, and now this was how she greeted him, cunningly.
“Let’s work this out, Fausta.”
“How?”
“I have a cosmic solution. The collision of two planets, immersion in chaos, the circle of the true conical shadow.”
Fausta ran her fingers over Lorenzo’s lips. “We are ten thousandths
of a millimeter from the undulatory phenomenon, and I don’t know if a whitish and diffused light is what awaits me. Give my physical matter more time.”
Lorenzo took her hand from his lips and kissed it. “It will be as you say, Fausta.”
Lorenzo continued exhausting himself with ever more pressing tasks. How much time do I have left? he’d ask himself. At night while he slept, he reviewed everything he hadn’t done.
In Tonantzintla, suddenly, he asked Fausta over coffee, “Have you seen me shooting through the sky like a comet?”
When they contemplated Popocatépetl, he would take her arm and say, “My falling in love is volcanic, Fausta.” She would hold his hand. “You came and coaxed me with temptation.” On another walk he informed her, “I am Goethe’s Dr. Faust. I live locked in my laboratory and hear only the tolling of the bells.”
“But I’m the one named Fausta, Doctor.”
“That’s the mystery. Why you and not me? I’m the one who gets sick and tired of men. I’m the one who desires to know the supernatural. You’re happy in your skin. I’m a man plagued by doubt.”
“Rest, Doctor. You work too much.”
“I’ve always wanted to get out of my skin, but I’m imprisoned.”
At first, science had given him a sense of freedom, because his work depended on him. He was finally creative, and he didn’t have to deal with anyone. He didn’t have to answer to anyone. The fact that they called him “wise fool” protected him and created a singular space for him. He could understand the others—the politicians, the dentists, the administrators—but none of them understood what he did, and that isolated him in his own world. Scientific knowledge wasn’t petty; he was certain he was doing something that would benefit others, and that was a pleasing sensation. Most gratifying of all was his relationship with his colleagues throughout the world, which revolved around one theme: research. It connected them, and through it they communicated. But as the years passed, Lorenzo had lost much of his famed energy.
“Science is very demanding,” Graef had told him once. “Things change very quickly, and you can’t let an advance in your field get away from you, because otherwise you’re left out of the game.” There had been an anguish in the man’s voice that Lorenzo hadn’t understood. Now he lived it himself.