The Last Supper

Por Aura R. Cruz Aburto

Master is the one who changes your life

A small notebook that fits in your pocket so you'll never be without a place to draw. A simple shirt, ready to carry your metallic mechanical pencil. Despite the smoke, I remember it very well: the little "logbook" was more graphite than cellulose, so full was your booklet, so full was your story. Filled, not with objects, but with the forces of space, landscape and traces of vital encounters. It was a notebook that, once opened, seemed to breathe and beat.

The black rough cardboard pastes, without much detail, would disappear, consumed by the heat of the oven. The taste of graphite and charcoal would end up mixed, but the taste of your life would be unmissable: we would end up mutating with you: it would seem that the forces captured there would infiltrate our bloodstreams. It was at that unforeseen dinner when I took the first bite because, forgive me, we had already waited too long for you and we were "dying" of hunger. You know it well, everything that does not consume, that which is not consumed, paradoxically kills and dies.

Obviously, the taste of that "cochinita pibil" was worthy of gods. What's more: NEVER, not even in your best parties, had I tasted something so unique and unforgettable. As unforgettable, as singular as you, my beloved maestro, my crazy maestro.

I still remember very well the day I met you. They had told me a lot about you, they said you were the best, but they also told me about the amount of insults and rudeness you used to utter. So, to tell the truth, I was between fear, distrust and yes, it must be said: fascination to meet you. 

That day, when I learned of the death of my most beloved teachers of my adolescence, I felt like an orphan. Sunk in my sad musings, suddenly your histrionic voice captured me when, in the middle of that museum room, you narrated an amazing story of strength and experience crystallized in the Danteum of Giuseppe Terragni to which you would summon us to draw while you did it with all your vitality. At that moment I knew, you would change my life, although I never thought it would happen the way it did years later.

The call

I remember very well the call summoning your disciples (your favorites?). It was not unusual for you to call us, it was normal for you to do so from time to time and, if we were in the mood to "open ourselves to the unexpected" -which always included difficult moments and the occasional insult- we would come to meet you. Only that time, the reason for your summons would be completely unimaginable and, just for that reason, its outcome as well. Who would have imagined that you, the teacher, and not just a professor, would be fired from the university to which you had given your life. Although it is true, always with your excesses, with your life that did not understand limits or boundaries, nor what we conventionally call respect, many who did not know you could understand and support it perfectly. But for us -those whom you would have (de)formed- it would be inconceivable, and we, the most (de)formed, would be the ones who would go to meet you. Still, I never thought it would end up being so unprecedented: I always knew you would have changed us, but I never understood how far you would take your legacy.

• Well, where are you... motherfuckers?! 

Hahaha, always so refined, you dear Master. Even if you were talking about the only twenty-one pay phone left in the city and whose number we would obviously not have registered, you were unmistakable: always making us angry and laugh at the same time. After such a "loving" entrance, ha, you would immediately tell us that you had been fired from the university. We, far from any equanimity, would jump angrily at such news: how was it possible! However, far from your usual tendency to savor the gossip -which would intrigue us supremely-, you would avoid giving more details and you would quote us in that "magical" rooftop of the Tower that not long ago Adalberto, the Maesztro K! would have inaugurated... a masterpiece, by the way. You would take the time to tell us that we had to go prepared, as always, to draw: we could not call ourselves architects without being ready to capture the genius of "Master K" as one learns in architecture: drawing, always drawing... we would go prepared then. Lucy, dressed in neutral and elegant colors, would carry a refined black logbook and a beautiful silver-gray mechanical pencil. I, Alba, would bring a slightly larger notebook (my notebooks were always too big for my height), a standard blue mechanical pencil (yes, with an 8B lead, because I have always liked to scratch hard) and a small watercolor kit that I had since school: I would never have adapted to the minimalist monochromatic imperatives of the elegant and neutral architects. In that sense, Lucy, though critical, intelligent and no doubt sensitive, had always been more attentive to your imperatives. I, although I believe I was your number one fan, could not bear to align myself to those mandates loaded with sophistication and elitism that, oh dear master, how you loved them: you know, you were a descendant of "the divine caste"... clown!

The broken tower

After a ride in the heavy traffic of this city, we arrived at the famous Tower descending by a supposed fast lane which, in this metropolis, was already far from being so. Upon arrival, it was inevitable that Lucy and I remembered what happened when we met Master K, when you generously introduced him to us.

On an ordinary summer day, we went to eat at one of your favorite places: of course, a canteen! where else? By then I was already completely upset by you, dear Master, I had never met such a vital madman, never someone with such an absolute zest for life. It is true that you were crazy, that you were rude and that overreaching was your modus vivendi and, nowadays, when it is so fashionable to judge from supposed moral superiorities, you would have been, no doubt, skinned alive -obviously metaphorically, because what decent being would dare to really tear off a piece of skin?What this current moralizing vision lacks is to grasp the living force that only some people have to get involved in and with life: they are the ones who teach us to love it in spite of everything. They are the ones who also exemplify what it means to take risks: to throw oneself into the abyss, not without fear, but ready to encounter the unexpected. Well, that day, you decided to share with us another of those vital forces, the master K, the dear and strange Adalberto. 

That day, Adalberto arrived with his eyes always exaggeratedly wide open, all dressed in black. I could say that I imagined that a similar sensation must have been provoked by Johanes Itten at the famous Bauhaus school: a strange specimen, somewhat antisocial but tremendously attractive, a kind of medium of the forces of life -those kind of people (geniuses they call them) who involuntarily express something that exceeds them and that, sometimes, they don't even fully understand. 

That day the conversation flowed, as well as the beers and tequilas. Finally, I vaguely remember that Adalberto laughed mockingly, but at the same time touched, because he heard me call you "Master"... then he thought of calling you "Master... of disaster" -excellent name, like that song I learned many years later "My suitor". 

I think he liked us and invited us, not without your urging, to work for him. So, a few days later we showed up at his office and started working for what was undoubtedly the best living architect in Mexico. 

Arriving at the office was completely hallucinating, I had never witnessed the sublime made living work: plasticine and corrugated models, fascinating perspectives not finely drawn, but painted with full force, gigantic models of obelisk towers... and a large map of the Basin of the Valley of Mexico obsessively scratched to return it to its being-lake. I'm sure that even the most phlegmatic outsider would want to be an architect when witnessing a work of such strength. Adalberto does not design buildings, the space is alive, it moves, it is that other thing that looks at us when he designs it. So is the Tower that we would come to dinner the day of your call Master, as much as that Tower model that we broke on the day of our debut in the office of Master K and that strangely, did not culminate in our dismissal. 

- Well, here we are, Alba," said Lucy. We were both nervous because all the way we remembered the story of the broken Tower (for us) thinking that now we would go to the debut of a new Tower but on a real scale: hopefully this time nothing will break, we thought.

We rang the doorbell which, by the way, was always hidden as if Adalberto anticipated the arrival of visitors whom he always preferred to be far away. We entered and were greeted by a mystical garden overflowing with vegetation that grew wildly, wild as the one who had projected it. We went up and little by little a Tower was revealed to us where, in spite of its apparently simple and clear structure if we would only look at the plans - and even at the model - no floor seemed to correspond to the next one. It had a rather strange effect: it was as if it were alive and moving: a labyrinth in height, a true ziggurat of apparently discreet geometry. 

However, the best was yet to come: that rooftop space of immoderation, the place where the weeds are sucked up and where the incredible Chapultepec Forest is revealed and the sky opens up. Pinche K! you spread out and became a tower here: apparent sobriety, apparent stoicism that, in reality, is a Dionysian party that ends only when the architecture has disappeared in favor of the landscape. We had finally arrived at the place of the dinner.