When Carlos Graef informed him that the government was considering the creation of a new National Science Council that would replace the National Academy of Scientific Investigation, which was now overcrowded, and give it a previously unheard of budget, Lorenzo was astonished.
“Guess who the director is going to be and is already making the rounds. And earning a salary neither you nor I have ever dreamed of,” said Graef.
“Who?” asked Lorenzo.
“Fabio Arguelles Newman.”
“My former student? The philosopher?”
“The very same. He’s going to drop in on you one of these days. He’s been watching out for us all.”
One morning at eleven, Arguelles Newman stopped by to visit Lorenzo. Lorenzo didn’t recognize him. He wore a blue Armani suit that would have made Lorenzo’s old friend La Pipa Garciadiego green with envy. His hair smoothed down with cream, he was no longer the young existentialist with whom Lorenzo had carried on long conversations six years earlier. Fabio didn’t seem to want to remember that meeting. He explained that he had accepted the president’s nomination because he wanted to promote science, and now there would be a budget for projects as important as the one in Tonantzintla. Lorenzo had an open invitation for breakfast, lunch, or dinner anytime he wanted, and Fabio would always be available. Here was his private phone number. He lit one cigarette after another, and at one point he lit Lorenzo’s with a Hermes lighter. He took out his card and handed it to Lorenzo. FABIO ARGUELLES NEWMAN, PH.D. When he finished his long-winded speech, Lorenzo stood up.
“You are despicable, and I don’t want to see you in my office again.”
Fabio got up, terrified, and Lorenzo continued, “You were going to be a good astrophysicist, and you’ve exchanged it for a plate of lentils.”
“Doctor, don’t insult me. I’m going to continue my research. My position is not permanent. Besides, I’ll be able to spend Saturdays and Sundays working on my thesis.”
“Really? You haven’t even earned your doctoral degree, but you dare to put ‘Ph.D.’ after your name? It seemed odd to me that you would have finished it in four years. I could denounce you to the University Council, but as my colleagues know and constantly remind me, I don’t have my doctorate either. However, my disadvantage is due to unusual circumstances, not self-interest.”
“Doctor, this is neither a betrayal nor a reason for you to attack me. When the term is over, I will return to my research. In the meantime I’m going to promote many of my colleagues’ scientific projects, and they, unlike you, are pleased with my nomination.”
“Fine. There is nothing else to say. Get the hell out of here.”
Fabio was so disconcerted that he had to grab the back of the chair to keep from falling. That same expression of insecurity visible all those years ago returned, and made Lorenzo pity him.
“If you’re going to faint, sit down.”
Fabio collapsed into the chair, drying the sweat from his face, and Lorenzo suddenly felt defeated.
“The worst part, Doctor,” Fabio said, “is that you’re going to have to work with me on the budget for the institutes that you direct.”
“Well”—Lorenzo softened—“don’t worry too much about it. I’m an ogre, but I’ve lost some of my formidable momentum with age.”
Lorenzo and Arguelles Newman saw each other again in the Department of Education.
“Doctor, we’re going to redo the budgets for your institutions. Besides funding for instruments, you need to pay decent salaries, yours included.”
“What are you telling me?”
“We live in different times, and this requires a change in attitude.”
“I’m satisfied with my salary, and so are my employees.”
“They’ve complained to me, and I think they’re right. Listen, let’s go get something to eat, and I’ll explain before I give you the paperwork.”
“Give me the paperwork now. I’ll see what I can do.” It was two thirty in the afternoon, and Lorenzo didn’t want to go to lunch with Fabio, who left instead with a colleague.
When Fabio returned at five, he found the director of the Astrophysics Institute and the Tonantzintla Observatory in exactly the same place, in the same position, pen in hand, at his side an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. He hadn’t finished adding salaries.
Fabio went over to look at the list. “Doctor, since there aren’t any guidelines, take advantage of this opportunity.”
“That’s corruption.”
“Doctor, please. Follow what the National University does; they already have classifications, increases—not of three hundred or four hundred pesos but three thousand or four thousand. Allow me to convince you to give your people a substantial raise. Look, you have a miserable salary. I’ve budgeted money not only for salaries, but for the spectrograph, the electronic lab. You have to learn to spend it, and this is the moment. We’re going to get rid of the consolidated budget that is adjusted each year.”
“You haven’t convinced me, Fabio. These are the only increases I am willing to authorize as director.”
“Doctor, nobody complains when you give them a raise. It’s also a way to avoid problems with the union. If you don’t do it, you’re going to lose people. How are you going to compete with North American salaries? The first-class researchers are going to leave you. You need to modernize. Do you remember the spectrophotometer worth eleven thousand dollars that you insisted on building ourselves in one of the electronics labs in Tonantzintla rather than spending that much money? We had no idea how to do it, and it ended up costing us twelve thousand dollars. You always insisted that we make our instruments, although we were never trained
to do that. However, we obeyed you in the electronic and optic labs, and we had some successes. We received patents in micro-machinery and for solar cells, transistors and capacitors, electricity condensers. That made you proud, because Texas Instruments showed an interest in them, but in the end, we were too late. Do you know why we obeyed you, Doctor? Out of fear. In Tonantzintla, everyone except for Rivera Terrazas is afraid of you.”
Dizzy from Fabio’s criticism, Lorenzo’s only answer was to stand up and leave. He refused to allow Fabio to accompany him. He descended the grand staircase, which was surrounded by Diego Rivera’s murals, and went out into the street. He hadn’t eaten, but he didn’t feel hungry. His sadness nourished him. I’m out of touch, he thought. I don’t understand anything. It was imperative that he find another location in Mexico to establish a new observatory and install a more powerful telescope. It was no longer possible to observe with the forty inches. The construction of the new observatory would include optic and electronic laboratories. And of course, space for teaching and research. Tonantzintla had been left behind, but not the Tonantzintla and Tacubaya bulletins that had made him famous throughout the world. At least there was that.
Lorenzo’s trips abroad were the only things that alleviated the anguish his country caused him. He was invited not only to the observatories at Kitt Peak, Mount Palomar, and Mount Wilson in the United States, but also to the ones in Tololo and Córdoba in the Southern Cone. He now knew Mount Brukkaros in southeast Africa, and Bloemfontein, which he visited with emotion because he had missed becoming director there by the skin of his teeth. The current director greeted him: “So you are the great Dr. Tena!” Specialists from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, from the American Astronomical Society, and from the International Astronomical Union met periodically at conferences in the great capitals of the world. Exhilarated, Lorenzo would board a plane, remembering the phrase often quoted by astronomers: “The trips are for screwing and getting drunk.” And he would drink like a barbarian.
He was a different man. He would have thrown his wallet into the first river he came across if a girl had asked him to. The Seine, the Thames, the Danube? You choose. Several times in London he walked through Piccadilly and Downing Street in search of something, but he never did find it, and truth be told, he never even knew what he was looking for. “The heart is a lonely hunter,” wrote Carson McCullers, and Lorenzo, well armed and more capable, had shot into the air and the prey had fallen, calling him “Aztec” and begging him to please rip out its heart. Yet now he felt like the poor fawn coming down from mountainous country, as if all the shotguns of the world were aimed at him. He was crippled and badly wounded, full of memories, old, and at the same time like a newborn. His love for Fausta made him vulnerable. How many things he had learned and forgotten in the last few years. He was used to making Claudines and Colettes fall in love with him, telling them he loved them deeply. For all practical purposes, Lorenzo was a desirable bachelor, director of two scientific institutes in an exotic country that Frenchwomen, Russian women, Polish women, Czech women, and Italian women wanted to visit. Nothing seemed as romantic to them as building a life with an astronomer who would awaken them with the birth of the sun to make love, the Milky Way in the center of their bed.
The Mexican entertained them by telling them about the astronomer Tycho Brahe, a favorite of King Frederick II of Denmark in the sixteenth century. Brahe had built Uraniborg, a splendid Gothic castle, on the island of Hven, which had been a gift from the king. He studied the stars from its towers, domes, roofs, and balconies.
Although Lorenzo was much too technical, the women pretended to understand him, because he captivated them with his story. To be in love with an astronomer, to be the mistress of an island, to live in the castle of the stars, what an incredible dream. Each time the Mexican threatened to end his account, they would shout, “Noooooo!” in unison, and Tycho Brahe became as popular as John Wayne. The fact that Tycho Brahe was an accomplished observer was irrelevant compared with what he gave to his lover: the sun, the moon, planets, and comets. Brahe had a fervent disciple
named Kepler, who read and reread his fourteen volumes, but Tycho died sad, like all astronomers, on October 24, 1601.
“Why do astronomers die unhappy?” asked Elma Parsamian, a lovely Armenian astronomer.
“Because they cannot see.”
Lorenzo admired the Byurakan Observatory in Armenia, which was converted into a magnificent and rich institution, mostly owing to the efforts of Viktor Ambartsumian. When Lorenzo saw it for the first time, in 1956, it was a little smaller that Tonantzintla. Ambartsumian had built it into one of the most prosperous and active observatories in the world. The Mexicans didn’t have anything like it in any scientific field. The president of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia had also promoted an impressive chain of scientific, technical, and humanities institutions that were exactly what Lorenzo had dreamed of for Mexico: metallurgy, biology, geology, physics, astronomy, mathematics, petrochemistry, chemistry, mechanics, optics, electronics, history, and philology. All this in a small republic of barely three million inhabitants.
At Byurakan, the things that had once intoxicated Lorenzo no longer had the same meaning. Content with himself—a rare condition—he no longer felt at such a disadvantage with Ambartsumian, for whom his esteem continued to grow. This man had discovered the special distribution of galactic clouds, while also working fourteen and sixteen hours a day on his administrative responsibilities. He attended to a world of problems without considering it a waste of time—unlike Lorenzo, for whom administrative tasks were unbearable.
“What fails the most, Viktor, is the human material,” Lorenzo said. “They may or may not be smarter at Byurakan, but at least they never sabotage themselves. In Mexico they wanted to establish a union. I told them that if they worked twenty hours a day, they’d have a right to their stinking union.”
“Things go wrong here too, Tena, my friend.” Ambartsumian smiled. “You just need to have patience.”
“That’s exactly what I don’t have. Men and women infuriate me. I abhor them, and then I regret it.”
“It’s useless to regret anything,” concluded Ambartsumian.
What a shame there weren’t remarkable men like that in Mexico. Thanks to Viktor, Lorenzo’s work was known in the Soviet Union, which filled him with humble pride. If he could only accomplish in Mexico a tenth of what Viktor had achieved. Fucking country—and the men who were part of it. Fuck them all. The rhetoric and the lack of vitality forced him to conclude that Mexico was irretrievably lost. “‘We are the wretched of the Earth,’” Diego Beristain had told him, quoting from Frantz Fanon. Lorenzo argued that the most privileged contented themselves with being senators of shit, deans of second-rate universities, leaders of slums, or, worse yet, recipients of worthless awards and fame.
Byurakan, a true Tower of Babel, entertained the Europeans and the North Americans, taking droves of them to Yerevan, to archaeological sites from the fifteenth century B.C. The average income in Armenia was quite high, and the majority of the population worked in agriculture. Lorenzo couldn’t help but draw comparisons. If only we Mexicans could hope to be at this point within half a century, he thought. He boiled with rage against Mexico’s consolidating demagoguery, the hunger, the lack of education, and he dissolved into criticism of the PRI—the ruling party—and their poor form of governing.
Invited by Ambartsumian, he attended the placement of the first stone of the new institute for scientific instrumental design and construction, in Ashtarak, a town close to Byurakan. Those present were the most noted groups of the region as well as the humblest workers and peasants. It was impossible for Lorenzo to distinguish the peasants from the well to do, something that would never have happened in Mexico.
He spent hours with Jean-Claude Pecker, Evry Schatzman, and Charles Fehrenbach. Drinking Armenian wine that to him seemed sublime and to them contaminated, these French friends were hell-bent on collaborating on a project in Baja California. Fehrenbach had invented a comparative spectrum to measure radial velocities. This was one time Lorenzo was sorry he didn’t have a better command of French. The language triggered memories of the Marist school and that damned Father Laville! He told them with astonishing fury that he had closed himself off from everything French
after the priest had caressed his thighs, saying, “These little Westphalian hams …” Lorenzo broke up laughing when he saw the hilarity his story provoked. “You really are an Aztec, Lorenzo!” They would publish his articles in their entirety whether he spoke French or not. This would be his first publication in Armenian and Russian.
Lorenzo made everyone at Byurakan laugh with his soft growls, exaggerated gestures, and groans. He courageously held his own with only a few words of Armenian. After a meticulous examination of dictionaries and photographs, he was able to clarify issues. Exhausted, he tossed and turned at night in bed, trying to explain himself to the men and begging the universe for an explanation.
When the discussions ended, when they had each repeated their case two and three times, Lorenzo retired to his hotel room. He awoke at four in the morning and had to wait until eight, when the observatory restaurant opened. It was entertaining to watch him ask the servants, with gestures and faces that made them laugh, for eggs and café con leche. Maybe I chose the wrong vocation, he thought. I’m really a fantastic mime. He became one of the most popular visitors. The Armenians stood in line for him to accept their invitations to join them in a breakfast of garlic and vodka.
Having completely lost his sense of time, he had the strange impression that he was floating in a void. He didn’t know who he was, what the hell he was doing, where he came from. He wasn’t sure whether he was his own spectator or the subject of a good or a bad joke. He was neither happy nor disagreeable, just neutral, like a fragment of meteor that moves or is stationary according to laws he was not familiar with. Without a newspaper within reach, he truly believed that nothing was happening in the world, except for Byurakan, its scientists, and its silence. The work continued as if part of eternity. Why rush if the universe is infinite and time has only the meaning it is given? He dreamed, floated, remembered Fausta like a distant star with which he could not communicate. Mexico also spoke a strange language; there was no code capable of deciphering it. Did Mexico really exist? When had he lived there?
What made him Mexican? His was a message without a destination, hurled into infinity just to see if someone would find it. Maybe Fausta?
Maybe he didn’t exist. He lived inside his head. His thoughts, asleep or awake, were beautiful at times and at other times torture. How would Fausta see him? Would she remember him? Was he just a venerable old man to her? He had always wanted to abolish the kingdom of feeling. He detested intuition, but now he lived in a sort of hypnotic somnambulism that sometimes made him fear for his sanity. A strong ice-water bath would bring him back to his senses. The rest of the day would be spent floating in a fantastic world that reminded him of Tycho Brahe’s dream come true.
Suddenly, in some hotel bed, he would awaken distressed, saying, “Where am I?” As his forehead broke into a cold sweat, it was a struggle to remember. According to the clock, there was a ten-hour difference with Mexico. Therefore, Fausta needed ten hours to reach him. What desperation it was not to be able to make the little clock hands match up. I left Fausta a thousand years ago, he thought. For the first time, he felt as though he were far away, truly very far. He had sent a telegram that was unanswered: LOVE ME, FAUSTA.
When Ambartsumian asked him what was wrong, he responded that he loved Fausta ferociously. “My head is full of stupid, ugly birds,” he said. “I tend to forget much of what hurts, encircling myself in a great silence—this magnificent and egotistical silence that we protect ourselves with. All of a sudden the sharp sound of reality erupts and brutally stuns us. How is it possible to live alone so comfortably, so protected, so indifferent?”
Ashamed that he could not conceal his moodiness, he realized that he had reached his limit for staying on in Byurakan. He felt like a donkey on a treadmill, repeating the same argument a thousand times. It’s that witch who has put a spell on me. I don’t feel good anywhere, thought Lorenzo, annoyed.
Fausta’s vitality was aging him. The quickness of her movements was the final blow. When they walked through the Tonantzintla countryside, she, like a pup, got ahead of him, ran back and forth, doubled his distance. She’d take off running in front of him,
to return with her cheeks red, her hair blowing, every part of her smiling, even her sex, which he still did not possess.
As they walked, Fausta would break off little branches of rosemary, crush them between her fingers, and put them to her nose. “Smell it, Doctor. How marvelous.” She told him about fields of lavender she had bicycled through in France. When? She didn’t say. There are women who surround themselves with a halo of mystery, and Fausta was one of them. She walked a lot, frequently going to Cholula on foot.
Lorenzo teased her: “Why don’t you train to walk to Puebla and then maybe the Federal District?”
Fausta responded innocently, “Puebla isn’t far. I can walk twelve kilometers easily; the tiring part is coming back.”
“Your feet must be really tough.”
“Oh, yes. Do you want to see?”
Lorenzo did not understand the magic ingredients of her universe.
He looked at her, and her lack of awareness saddened him. “You are like your species, a moral imbecile.” He wanted to bleed her, empty her of herself, occupy that space inside her. Ah, how I hate her. Ah, how I love her! Her smallest pore, the tiniest of her down hairs was an object of irritation, of veneration. If he could ever kill anyone, it would be her.
Ever since he started dealing with her, his heart and his head were in a state of torment. Fausta hurt him in the deepest part of his being. Was that love?