“You outrageous Mexican, I hope you can show me your city. I will be staying at the Hotel Majestic,” wrote Norman Lewis. He was arriving from Harvard, wishing to spend his vacation with Lorenzo. Wonderful! They’d discuss extremely weak objects, with which Norman was very familiar. Finally, someone to talk astronomy with.
Lorenzo embraced him heartily when they met in the hotel lobby.
“I told you I’d land in Mexico, old chap,” Norman said. “It’s been ages!”
Seeing Norman, Lorenzo realized how alone he had been, in spite of Diego Beristain’s company. Norman hadn’t changed. He still had those amazing hands with long, strong fingers, his ambling pace accentuated by his unkempt beard, and his head of unruly golden curls. He’s like one of the old gold miners; he filters the universal sand to find nuggets that other civilizations have left behind in the infinity of space, thought Lorenzo.
His face pale from looking at the moon so much, a fragile figure in spite of his almost six feet and his inquisitive eyes, Norman returned Lorenzo’s hug.
They shared a passion that united them. They didn’t ask each other, how are you, but rather, what are you working on? They dealt with their recent discoveries, and all the rest seemed secondary.
“I want to learn about your art. Let’s go to the pyramids tomorrow.”
Norman was astonished by Teotihuacan. It was truly the city in which men became gods. He exhausted his friend as they tried to cover the twenty-kilometer expanse. When Lorenzo took him to
the Acolman convent, he said that he preferred his hours among the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon a thousand times over.
After Teotihuacan, Norman wanted to see the rest of the archaeological sites, to examine the codices that recorded celestial phenomena, the measurements, the cycles of villages as big as the ones of ancient Mexico. “Let’s go to Chichén Itza, to Uxmal. Let’s go to Mitla, to Tajín, to Monte Alban.”
“It looks like your measurements aren’t as good as those of the Mexicans, Norman. Haven’t you noticed the distance between one site and another?”
Amazed, Norman wasn’t even listening to him. “The counting of the years by the Indians is absolutely extraordinary. How is it possible that we don’t talk about it at Harvard?”
A guide in a straw hat was explaining that La Calzada de los Muertos, the Road of the Dead, was oriented toward the Pleiades. “Look. Before, you could see them very clearly, but they’ve moved now. Or maybe they died, because everything in the sky changes.”
Norman was surprised that a man on the street would give his interpretation of the solstices and the equinox and would inform him that “the stars disappear from the firmament; they go, like us, to the world of the dead.”
At times it seemed to Lorenzo that Norman was delirious.
“Wouldn’t your ancestors have had contact with beings from other worlds and acquired their knowledge from them?” he asked. “How would they have had the facility for abstract thinking and mathematics on their own? There must have been an encounter, don’t you think? The ability of the ancient Mexicans is out of this world.” He asked what noises from space they could have heard and if a peculiar hissing sound had reached them from the Milky Way. Could the stars and the galaxies have sent radio signals?
Norman saw the stars in everything. The first petroglyph in a wall was a map of the sky; three lines represented the constellations. An entire planetarium could be discovered, engraved in a stela. It was enough to connect it with latitudes and longitudes to discover that such a figure appeared tied to the summer solstice.
“Norman, I’m going to show you something else,” Lorenzo said. “I’m not going to allow you to leave having seen art only from the preconquest period.”
He took him to see Diego Rivera’s murals in the patio of the Department of Education. Norman commented, “He knows his job, but it’s flat.”
Lorenzo explained with much patience that Rivera was rescuing the Indian and repudiating the Conquest.
“I’m not interested in that,” Norman answered. “It looks like something you’d find on a pamphlet.”
Then, with great anticipation, Lorenzo drove him to San Idelfonso to see Orozco’s murals. As if it were his own work, he waited for his friend to be amazed.
In a cold voice Norman let loose: “It’s much worse than the other one. This is grotesque.”
“What?” shouted Lorenzo, bewildered.
“It’s descriptive, like a caricature, stupid, ugly, ugly. It’s dreadfully simplistic. I’ve never seen anything so bad. How is it possible that a village that thought so abstractly could be insulted this way?”
Lorenzo could not contain his fury. “You are the abominable one—who doesn’t understand the history of this country.”
“His figures are deliberate; the stroke is vulgar and excessive. This is absolutely gruesome,” Norman concluded.
“You will listen to me now.” Lorenzo was foaming at the mouth. He pulled his friend by the sleeve, forcing him to leave the San Idelfonso patio. As he expanded on his ideas, he calmed down, taking Norman familiarly by the arm and guiding him to the Hotel Cortés.
“Listen, Norman, you son of a bitch. The Indians were ripped to shreds, their structures trampled, their gods and their temples destroyed, their scientific and religious knowledge that you admire so much erased from the face of the earth, first by the Spanish and then by the mestizos. Tell me if anything more tragic could happen to a village. Their smile, their tenderness, their capacity for pleasure, for sharing, for helping, their animal vitality—all were stolen. Imagine what it must have been like for them to lose their gods of
fire and water and to see them replaced with a god who not only had no powers but who died like a poor wretch.”
“All colonized villages lost their past instantly.”
“Shut up, asshole gringo. It’s not the same. In our case the wound was fatal. We lost the very meaning of life. We didn’t know who we were or where we were going. Until the outbreak of the Revolution, we went from being beaten-down Indians to mestizos suffering from complexes. With the Revolution, beginning with the most defeated—the Indians—we wanted to be born again. Diego Rivera reversed the terms. He exalted the Indians and ridiculed the conquistadores—the ones on the outside and the ones on the inside. Not even the evangelists were spared. Look at them, Norman—syphilitic, drooling degenerates. After that, the Frenchified Mexicans destroyed the work of the muralists with knives.”
Lorenzo must not have been very convincing, because his friend stopped him cold: “I can’t stand this nonsense anymore. You were more intelligent at Harvard.”
“And don’t speak to me in English; we’re in my country now, you ass!”
In the patio of the Hotel Cortés, they asked for two cups of tea, and Norman assured him, “Listen, your return to Mexico has not agreed with you. You’ve become an Aztec. You’re ready to shove an obsidian knife into my chest. What’s wrong with you?”
“You gringos don’t understand Mexico.”
“I’m more English than gringo, and I didn’t come here to rip your heart out to offer it to the gods. I think you left your heart on Lisa’s sofa bed.”
“Ah, you came here to talk to me about that witch?”
“That witch is perfectly capable of handling her own affairs without my intervention. I came because I’m your friend and because you talked so much about your country that I wanted to learn about it. But if you keep this up, I’ll be traveling alone starting tomorrow. You just want to break my face. Do you know what’s wrong with you, Lorenzo? You’re falling into sentimentalism. If sentimentalism is a liberation, it is also a relaxation of emotions. Our conversations were invigorating at Harvard. You were quite different.”
“Your driving is ghastly,” Norman said on the way to Tonantzintla. “You’re going to kill yourself one of these days. Why don’t you use the university driver? You’d save an enormous amount of time.”
“I don’t want to become dependent on anything,” responded Lorenzo in an irritated tone. Becoming important hadn’t fitted in with his plans. Although giving orders was inherent to his nature, the trappings that went along with the position were repugnant to him.
Norman then told him about Pierre Curie, who had discovered polonium and radium in a wooden shed on rue Lhommond in Paris with his wife Marie. When Curie was nominated for the Legion of Honor, he responded to Paul Appel, “Please be so kind as to give my thanks to the Minister and to inform him that I don’t feel the slightest need to be bestowed with honors, but I have a greater need for a laboratory.”
“I need two laboratories as well, an optic and an electronic,” Lorenzo said.
“Maybe Harvard can help, although I can’t promise anything without asking Shapley.”
In the days that followed, under Norman’s beneficent influence, Lorenzo calmed down. They even played basketball on the old court where he had played with Erro. Norman kept putting the ball in the hoop with a single gesture of his hand. His height gave him the advantage, although Lorenzo’s jumping made him exclaim, “You really are a jumping bean!” They laughed a lot, sweated even more, and, finally, went for a long shower.
Norman met Fausta in the library, and they got along immediately. Norman pointed out to Lorenzo that aside from her daily efficiency, Fausta, unasked, took tea to his office, answered calls, made everything easier for him. Lorenzo told him that Fausta would return to the capital with them to put together the Bulletin of the Tonantzintla and Tacubaya observatories. “That’s great. Your bulletin has achieved global recognition, and there is nothing I’d like better than to go to the printer with you,” Norman said enthusiastically.
When he realized that she was an amazing proofreader, in spite of the dry subject matter, the director, who had never before trusted anyone, gave Fausta that responsibility—“the job,” as she called it.
They left for Mexico City the night before to be at the printer at seven the next morning, and Fausta corrected the galleys tirelessly. She marked the typos and then read page after page without losing patience as he always did. The typesetter preferred working with her. Fausta was fascinated by the atmosphere at the printer, the long, narrow metal tables where the type was set, the printers, and the sound of the presses, from which Lorenzo immediately grabbed each page to inspect it, carrying them in his arms to the table in a state of extreme anxiety that bordered on hysteria. Making a mistake with mathematical symbols—a plus rather than a minus in an equation—could be catastrophic, the death of a theory. Fausta knew this, and her concerned care touched Lorenzo. She was truly an exceptional proofreader. It was then, with her hair falling in her face, that Lorenzo discovered she had gray hair. “Fausta, your hair is turning white,” he told her contentedly, because as she grayed, he was rejuvenated.
At noon they had a sandwich and a bottle of soda with the typesetter and went back to correcting galleys. “The smell of ink is a much stronger drug than any weed,” said Fausta, and she smiled to calm the director. “This is a true odyssey, but unlike Penelope, I’m not staying home; I get to correct the sky and its inscrutable designs alongside Ulysses.” They finished at one in the morning, and Fausta was punch-drunk. “This lasts longer and takes more care than a night of lovemaking.” She laughed so hard that she fell over, exhausted, and Lorenzo said good night to her at the house where she was staying with a friend, saying, “Tomorrow at seven.”
The compilation and correction of the Bulletin took three to four days, and each day, Lorenzo only became himself again after the last revision. He’d say, “All right, I think that’s it …” and the printer gave the signal: “Print it.”
On the second night they all had dinner in Norman’s suite at the Hotel Majestic. Norman and Lorenzo went back to the way
things had been before, with one difference-Fausta was with them. They discussed. That’s what science was really about—interminable discussion. Neither Norman nor he had the absolute truth, but Lorenzo added his despair about the future of his country to his scientific concerns.
“Shut up, Norman. You all have a future; we don’t!” He alleged that the government’s total indifference toward science condemned them eternally. “Look at this, we’re stagnant. Look at the paralyzed fields in front of us.”
“But a president gave you the observatory.”
“He did it in deference to Erro. As he would have given a Secretary of Customs a ranch.”
“Lorenzo, don’t be a pessimist.”
“I’m not. That’s the way it is in Mexico.”
Lorenzo told him that on one occasion he stopped his car on the road to give a peasant a ride. They traveled silently, until he asked the peasant what he dreamed about, to which he responded: “You know, sir, we can’t allow ourselves the luxury of dreaming.”
Surprisingly, Fausta fiercely backed him up. “Dr. Lewis, do you think that men and women who have been frightened for centuries can really dream? It’s not only hunger. What do you know about the sexual poverty of the Mexicans? Where is the freedom over our bodies? Is there any space that isn’t controlled by power? Slavery is an example. Those girls you see carrying wood live with daily rape. Millions of women have never known pleasure. Love and marriage will never be part of their lives.”
“Rape?” asked Norman.
“Of course, Dr. Lewis. It happens to thousands in my country. Females don’t have human rights.”
Lorenzo was surprised at Fausta’s bitterness as she launched into the topic of sexuality. “The belief that reproduction is the only option for women is one of the reasons why homosexuality is punished; that’s why homosexuals are considered perverse, diminished, dirty, incompetent.”
Norman intervened. “I thought sexuality was an inviolable and intimate human decision.”
Lorenzo, startled by the twist Fausta had given the conversation,
affirmed that in Mexico the Catholic Church proclaimed that women should bear the children they had conceived. He added that this particular subject wasn’t relevant at the moment. Did she want the three of them to talk about queers?
Norman defended Fausta. No one in the United States maintained the singular idea that sexuality was solely for reproduction. Mexico, a machista country, had the reputation of mistreating its women. Thinking of homosexuality as a perversion was a form of discrimination.
Lorenzo interrupted, asking Fausta how freedom could serve these girls if they didn’t have water. They had to satisfy their basic needs first. Fausta excitedly reminded him of what he had told her one afternoon in his bungalow—the story that she was going to repeat word for word. At that moment, the actress stood up.
“I’m going to play two roles: that of Galileo and that of Cesare Cremonini.” She sat Norman and Lorenzo down, and she greeted them from the next room. “Magnificent Stargazer and Great Master and Lord of Tonantzintla, Cacique of the Valley of Mexico”—she curtsied deeply to Lorenzo. “Illustrious Visitor and Quetzalcoatl of the Twenty-first Century, Observer of Eclipses, Hearer of Radial Sounds, Cybernaut, Discoverer of Electronics.” She bowed in front of Norman, and with two leaps, like a minstrel, she continued to act out the play.
Fausta changed her voice and demeanor for each character—Galileo strong, sure of himself; Cremonini trembling and bent over, his voice exhausted. With a quilt as a cape and a towel made into a Venetian cap, she explained, “When Galileo proved with his small telescope that Jupiter had moons and that these moons had motion, he presented himself to the Roman house of Cesare Cremonini, the famous mathematician, and he said, ‘Professor, I have proof that Aristotle is wrong. Come see how the moons of Jupiter move. ’
“‘Look, Galileo,’ responded Cremonini, terrified. ‘The science of this world was built on the pillars of Aristotelian knowledge. For the last two thousand years men have lived and died with the belief that the Earth is the center and man is the master of the universe. God made us in His image and likeness. Jesus Christ came down to
Earth and gave us His gift. Christianity, which has gone far beyond Aristotle, was perfected.’”
“Everything we know today, about logic, medicine, botany, astronomy, is Aristotelian,” interjected Lorenzo. “For two thousand years the greatest minds have worked in that belief and have made a splendid and perfect unity, but we cannot forget the Jews, the Arabs, the Chinese, and the Hindus, besides the Christians.”
Norman stood up, making theatrical gestures. “And the Mesoamerican villages, the ancient Mexicas, the Olmecs, the Maya, and the Incas in South America.”
“It’s not fair for the spectators to interrupt the show, Dr. Lewis. I’m about to recite Cremonini’s answer to Galileo!”
“Pardon me. And what is that answer?”
“‘I have spent my life at the service of Christianity. Its teachings have brought me peace and happiness. Now that I am an old man and have little time left, why do you come to destroy my faith in everything that I love? Why do you want to poison my few remaining years with vacillations and conflict? Don’t wound me. I don’t want to see Jupiter or its moons.’
“‘But, the truth, Cesare, doesn’t it mean anything?’
“‘No. Leave me alone. I need peace.’
“‘How strange. For me peace and happiness have always consisted of looking for the truth and acknowledging it. The world is made up of people like you and me—Cremoninis and Galileos. You want it to stay the way it is; I want to push it ahead. You are afraid to look at the sky, because you may see something that disproves your life’s teachings, and I understand that, because our work is difficult. Unfortunately, there are many like you, but only one of us will triumph.’
“‘And if you triumph, Galileo? If you can demonstrate that our Earth is a small, miserable star like thousands of others and that humanity is only a handful of creatures thrown by chance on one of them, what will you have gained? Will you diminish man who is made in God’s image? Degrade the Master of the Earth and turn Him into a worm? Is that what Copernicus and Kepler and you want? Is that the true objective of astronomy?’
“‘I never thought of that,’ responded Galileo. ‘I search for the
truth because I’m a mathematician and I believe that whoever accepts the truth is closer to God than those who construct their human dignity on senseless errors.’
“‘Galileo, I’m eighty-three years old. I have based my life on a philosophy and an Aristotelian way of thinking. Let me die in peace.
“This was the end of Dr. Tena’s story,” Fausta said, and she closed an invisible curtain before returning to sit between the two men.
“Fausta, what a memory!” said Lorenzo, delighted. “But I don’t see how what you just acted out has to do with our discussion.”
“Of course it has to do with it. Cremonini’s ‘let me die in peace’ is cowardice. Not wanting to face the truth and wanting to keep thinking in the past, taking refuge in the dogmas of faith in order to find peace. Renewing yourself comes at a price, Dr. Tena. A scientist has to be willing to change criteria as soon as new evidence is proposed. If not, he isn’t critical or self-critical.”
“I agree with you completely, Fausta,” Lorenzo told her. “Science is an evolutionary process, and the young people now know much more than we did, because any contemporary scientist is better prepared than we were. We are the scientists of the thirties and forties.”
“Your scientific ideas are progressive, Doctor, but your other ideas are abominable. You just finished telling Norman and me that you didn’t want to talk about queers. Many essential topics evade you, or maybe you just don’t want to see them. You haven’t been able to combine the very big with the very small. Unlike Einstein, you still haven’t realized—or don’t want to—that everything is relative and that a lesbian on Earth is part of Newton’s 1666 law of universal attraction. You’re three centuries behind, Doctor. Don’t you think it’s time you brought yourself up to date? Frankly, I would have expected sounder ideas from you.”
When Fausta said goodnight to them that evening, Norman asked admiringly, “Lencho, who is this woman?”
Lorenzo explained that Fausta was a monstrous entity that he had found among the clouds of gas in the Orion nebula, which, as Norman well knew, was a nursery for young stars, located fifteen
hundred light-years away. Of the hundreds of stars that were forming, Fausta had given him a new self-awareness. Thanks to her, he was now developing the previously unknown ability to take others into account.
“So she has humanized you?” Norman laughed.
“I think I’m more tolerant,” responded Lorenzo seriously. “Although I must confess that it scares me. The stars that have just been born, like Fausta, cause what surrounds them to explode. Their torrents of ultraviolet light and their powerful stellar winds destroy their progenitor. They commit cosmic matricide. What awaits me? What will become of me in Fausta’s spiral arms?”
Lorenzo didn’t say it aloud, but for some time the rumors about her bothered him. Hadn’t Braulio Iriarte affirmed that Fausta hung out with the hippies? For her, all beings were equal—man, woman, bird, or chimera—each in its own time. Was Braulio joking? Hadn’t he said that Fausta had stripped naked at a get-together—and that she wasn’t all that great, rather skeleton-like, very thin? What did the motherfuckers who looked at her see? It was true, Fausta’s energy pulled at him. She exercised an inexorable strength over him, although he couldn’t explain it. Her force of gravity held him captive—it was the oxygen that he breathed, the calcium in his bones, the iron in his blood, the carbon of his cells. If he ever came to understand her, maybe he would understand why Florencia had died.
At the end of three days in Mexico City, Lorenzo noticed that Norman looked for Fausta’s approval. He grasps how intelligent she is, Lorenzo thought, congratulating himself. Under Lorenzo’s loving gaze, Fausta talked about how the politicians were afraid even of the word science. They hid behind the phrase “I was horrible in math; that’s why I’m a philosopher.” And Fausta quoted Lorenzo’s response: “‘In that case, you’ll never be a good philosopher.’” To this day the Communications Secretary had not forgiven his arrogance.
At dusk they drove to a place that overlooked the city. Illuminated, Mexico City looked like an immense star fallen onto the Earth. Lorenzo became indignant at the sight of more houses spiraling around the city, widening the misery belts. “What savagery!
They die of hunger in the fields; that’s why they come to pile up in those pigsties.”
At his side, Fausta drank up his words. She spoke of him respectfully: “Dr. Tena interrupted the president at a public appearance, asking him why the Fishing Ministry is located in the center of the Republic instead of at a port on the Gulf or the Pacific coast. What is Petroleos Mexicanos doing in the Federal District instead of being in Coatzacoalcos or in Poza Rica? At any conference, when he speaks at the Colegio Nacional, Dr. Tena speaks in favor of decentralization. Once, he explained, with perverse irony, how General Heriberto Jara, a hero of the Mexican Revolution, came to occupy a political post and had a shipyard built on the Lomas de Chapultepec and made cement boats.”
In Fausta’s absence, while sharing their last cup of tea for the night in the Hotel Majestic, Norman asked Lorenzo point-blank, “Why don’t you marry her? She’s extraordinary.”
“She lives inside me. I think of her all the time. The truth is, I haven’t had time for a personal life. But I’m going to find time, Norman. As soon as I catch my breath, I’ll propose marriage—”
Norman interrupted him. “You’re much more conservative than you think, Lorenzo. You’re marked by your past. I don’t have your set ideas.”
“Conservative, me?” Lorenzo was indignant, but that night, when his head was on his pillow, he realized that if he hadn’t been so conservative, he would have taken Norman to see Juan. But the very idea made his face burn with shame. Besides, in the shape his brother was in when he saw him last, would Juan have even been able to carry on a conversation with Norman?
The next day the three of them went to the printer, although Norman abandoned them after four hours to go and interview Alfonso Caso. Fausta didn’t work with her usual skill. At one point she even stopped correcting, pencil in the air, and Lorenzo asked her, “What are you thinking about, Fausta?”
“About what Norman said—that very soon all of this will be done electronically.”
When they met that evening for dinner, Lorenzo continued to harp on the same subject, and Norman tried to calm him down.
“It’s more stimulating to live in Mexico than in First World countries.”
“Then why haven’t you moved here?”
“If you give me a job, I’ll come, more so now that I’ve met your Fausta. I like yours much better than Gide’s.” Norman laughed. “It would fascinate me to not know what will happen tomorrow. Back in the States, everything is planned well in advance. I’ve never felt the need to save my country as you do with yours. There I’m lost in anonymity. I’m one of many.”
Lorenzo said sarcastically, “Is it great that you lose yourself in the words of Mexican mariachis, pop singers, and soccer? That’s all that thrives in this country. The Mexicans are truly alive when they win a match against Jamaica or Bolivia. They dream about scoring goals.”
“Great, then score a goal in science.”
“I’m going to try.”
“I think Dr. Tena already did,” Fausta came in, ready to defend him.
“You aren’t alone; we’ll help you,” said Norman, embracing Lorenzo.
“What is happening,” said Lorenzo angrily, “is that many who leave the country to get their master’s or doctoral degrees choose your country because you offer salaries that we’ve never seen. But I am going to make sure they come back. So you can help me, but it has to be on my terms.”
Norman returned to Harvard, and Lorenzo felt strangely empty. He remembered how at the airport, over the last beer as they were about to say good-bye, Fausta had sung “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” to them, her head tilted to one side, with such grace.
Where had she learned English? When? Fausta reached the depths of his soul. He wouldn’t mind spinning within her orbit, becoming one of Orion’s disks of gas, caring for her. He thought back to when he was very young and had been influenced by Heraclitus’ definition of the universe: “This universe, the same for all, is a unit
in itself. It wasn’t created by any god or any man; it has been, is, and will be an eternal fire that is lit and extinguished according to laws.”
Fausta obeyed laws that intrigued him because they were inaccessible.