Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“I’m no longer a face in the nocturnal crowd, Josué.”

I don’t say anything. For the first time, she is remembering. I wouldn’t interrupt her for anything in the world. I leave assembling the pieces of the puzzle for another time. I don’t say she has met a man twice for the first time. Dreams have their own logic, and we don’t understand it. She is also wrong to call a group “anonymous” whose names she “remembers.”

“Yes.”

She said that with him she felt totally free and open. He offered her a way out. Not a return to conventional values but a movement toward her own thoughtful, creative values.

“I wanted to be sincere with him. I wanted to return with him to the lighted window in the house.”

Lucha Zapata opened her eyes and I realized that everything she had told me she had said without seeing.

“He understood. He understood where I was coming from. He understood how much of myself I had left behind and how much I owed to what I denied with so much rebellious zeal… One night, sleeping side by side, he woke and drew me to him. I don’t know if it was dawn or dusk. But I did understand that after going with me to the lighted house, he was ready to be like me, do you understand? as much as he could. He made love to me and when I came I understood that with him I could reach a compromise. We wouldn’t go back to the world I had left or the world where he found me. Together we would create our own world.”

She said that was the concession. Together the two of them would leave the desolate city. That was Lucha’s concession. His was to share with her one last night in the artificial paradise, evoking Baudelaire, “aflame with love of beauty, I cannot give my name to the abyss that will be my tomb,” because what neither of them realized was that his body, which belonged to her sexually, no longer was hers organically.

“I tried to wake him,” Lucha shouted on this morning. “I shook him, Savior. I touched him. He was the icy statue of death… And what did I do then, Savior? I abandoned him. I abandoned the corpse in the hotel room. I went down to the street. I fell into the center of the night wanting to die if that would bring him back.”

I tried to get up from the mat to seize her waving arms and the hands that scratched at her eyes and she shouted to leave her alone, she had to tear off her own skin, her own identity, savage, blind, violent, searching for death-I gave her a tight embrace-courting death-I grasped her hands-closing the curtain of nothingness over any creative purpose that could deflect her from a life more and more and forever more reckless.

She hung from my neck.

“Savior, I’m the dead sweetheart of a living memory. There’s no tomorrow tomorrow. You lose all sense of time. Each day is identical to the one that came before and the one that follows. What a fuckup, Savior!”

“If you want,” I said to her, “don’t put off your death anymore, Lucha Zapata.”

“I’m not putting it off,” she replied. “I’m speeding it up.”

NO ONE WILL deny, Brother Angelo, my good intentions. I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be a creator. I’m Venetian. I look at the tremulous light of Tiépolo. I embody it in the luminous architecture of Palladio. That light and this architecture populate the north of Italy: we have light and we have form. Being an architect after Palladio. Illuminating after Tiépolo. Brother Angelo: both things were denied me. I traveled from Venice to Rome-I was twenty years old-in the retinue of Francesco Vernier, ambassador of the city of Venice to the Pontiff. I looked at the eternity of its ruins. I looked at the fugacity of Rome in its papacy. The Pope dies. The court changes. Rome fills with new families clamoring for positions, favors, commissions. Eternal City? Fleeting, transitory city. Eternal City? Only the mute stone endures.

For that reason I wanted to be an architect, Brother. I saw the inert world and wanted to animate it with architecture. I wanted to create. The inertia of the world told me: No. There are enough works already from yesterday and today. Nobody needs another architect. Don’t think about the works you won’t be able to make. No? Ah! Then I’ll think about the works I won’t be able to make.

I did not find a Maecenas. Without a Maecenas nothing is done. And so I found a Maecenas. The city of Rome, asking me, Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, I will be your Maecenas, I, Rome, with my ruins, my unknown corners, my scavenged garbage, my devastated sarcophagi, I offer myself to you, Piranesi, on the condition that you don’t reveal my secrets, don’t show me in the light of day but in the most obscure depths of mystery…

They demand, Why don’t you study the nude more? Why do you insist on depicting hunchbacks, the maimed, cuadroni magagnazi, sponcherati storpi ? Why don’t you show esthetic truth? Why?

Because I wager on esthetic infidelity. Even if it’s ugly? No. Because it possesses another beauty. The beauty of the horrible? If horror is the condition for acceding to beauty that is unknown, latent, about to be born, if-Then do you scorn ancient beauty? No, I find the place that refuses to be ancient. And what place is that? Is there any place that doesn’t age?

I gather together my guardians. Invoke my witnesses, Brother Angelo. Stone lions, looks. Stone bridges, sighs. Stone walls, confinement. Stone blocks, prisons.

I will introduce machines and chains, ropes and stairs, towers and banners, rotting crossbars and sickly palm trees into the space of the prison. A scenography. Invisible smoke. Deceptive sky. What do we breathe, Brother? What sky illumines us? Veils. There are the sky and the smoke. But they are uncertain, untouchable, part of the scene, passing distractions, theatrical illuminations: smoke and light for a prison with no entrances or exits, the perfect prison, the prison within the prison within the prison. A profusion of escapes: They lead nowhere. What enters stays here forever. What is alive dies. It becomes excrescence. And excrescence becomes ruin.

The world is a prison? The prison is a world?

The prison frees itself from itself in the earlier design of my stewardship? I, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, say this. Or is my own image the one that imprisons the prison?

There are no human beings here. But there is the human question regarding the origin of light. And if there is no light other than the question, the question becomes the negation of destiny, as somber as these prisons, sepulchral chambers of a heaven in eternal dispute. There are no human beings in the lost heaven. There are prisoners. The prisoner is you.

They poisoned me, Fra Angelo, the acids I use for etching. My art killed me. Will my prisons survive? I believe so. Why? Because they are the works I could not make: they are the ruins of the buildings I could not construct.

Still, I died with the ambition of designing a new universe. Except no one asked me to and I had to depart with one anguished question: How does one imprison life in order to destroy death?

I ask you, my brother Angelo Piranesi, because you are a Trappist monk and cannot speak.

NO DAD, NO mom, not even a little barking dog softened the guardian of my childhood and adolescence, Doña María Egipciaca, which signified my insignificance in the vast order of human relationships, beginning with the family. Destiny, if not virtue, later provided me with relationships that were fleeting (with the nurse Elvira Ríos), more or less permanent (with the tormented Lucha Zapata), and very vulgar and at the same time mysterious (as with the whore who had a bee tattooed on her buttock).

Now, the decision (apparently unappealable) of Maestro Antonio Sanginés led me to the doors of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the brand-new, prosperous district of Santa Fe, an old abandoned wasteland on the road to Toluca, full of sandy precipices and white chalk barrens, that overnight, driven by the great bursting heart of the Mexican metropolis, was flattened out first only to have erected immediately afterward, in a vast valley of cement and glass, vertical skyscrapers, horizontal supermarkets, underground parking garages, all of it always guarded by sentries of glass and cement that were like the raised eyeglasses of an imposing sun determined to avenge the challenge of a Scandinavian architecture made to admit the sun in a country-ours-where ancestral wisdom demands thick walls, long shadows, sounds of water, and hot coffee to combat the damaging effect of excessive sunlight.