songs. Lucha seems charmed, she opens the door (which was already ajar) and goes in, moving toward the little girl who is the center of attention. Lucha approaches. The girl looks at her and retreats, farther and farther back, into a dark corner of the room.
When Lucha has her cornered, the girl sits down on a hard chair. She looks as if she were being punished. Lucha tells me the little girl is there, though in reality she is very far away. She hugs a stuffed bear and covers herself with her security blanket.
“Who are you?” the girl asks Lucha. “What are you doing here? We don’t want you. Go away.”
Lucha tries to say something but can’t get the words out. Lucha doesn’t understand the reason for the girl’s rejection. She feels humiliated. She runs out. She trips over a white tricycle decorated with a flowered basket. She gets up and in the street she falls into the arms of the dark man who leads her far away.
The road descends abruptly. A gigantic night surrounds them, as irresistible as a carnival: Lucha allows her thoughts to carry her along, her thoughts carry her very far from the place where she is. The night is transforming her-she says, she tells me this morning-leading her to a world where her senses enjoy peace and sufficiency at the same time they are cruelly stirred, demanding more, always more…
Suddenly she addresses me. “You know, Savior? Pleasure is a little pride and another little bit of self-hatred. A feeling of desperation. Along with a childish sensation of eternal life…”
She says she was a member of a gang that protected her and gave her what she needed. She compared her earlier solitude and forgot the familial warmth. Now she was part of a gang.
She gave names: “Maxi Batalla. El Florido. El Tasajeado. El Cacomixtle. El Sabor de la Tierra.”
They meant nothing to me. She knew that and went on.
“You become part of a legion of outsiders, of strange people or strangers, whatever you prefer. Your life belongs to no one. During the day you sleep.”
One night-she continues-from that anonymous, faceless group, an individual emerges. A dark boy, tall and slim. She says that between the two of them a feeling is born of love, tenderness, and mutual appreciation. An attraction.
“I’m no longer a face in the nocturnal crowd, Josue.”
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 Tiepolo. 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 Tiepolo. 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,
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
