The Least of It

By Peter Nash

The Least of It tells the seemingly placid tale of a man reunited with a longtime friend after years of estrangement. At the heart of their disaffection is his friend’s ex-wife, Simin, a brilliant, headstrong woman with whom the narrator has always been in love, a love unrequited, except in the confidences she has shared with him over the years, secrets that have compromised his relationship with his friend, rendering him all but incapable of speech.

Spanning a single day in Mexico City, The Least of It is a story of jealousy and deception, of innocence and complicity, of the role of one man in the betrayal and destruction of another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Jan 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781953236098

Book preview

I met my friend Arsène, the psychiatrist, in front of Casa Luis Barragán in the old Tacubaya neighborhood of Mexico City at precisely 10 a.m. on the morning of June 3rd. It was warm, a Tuesday. We’d planned to get there early, so as to have a little time to talk before devoting our attention to our guide, a young man, a student and poet named Alberto Juárez with whom I’d spoken on the telephone the day before. There on Calle Generalissimo Francisco Ramírez, a quiet dead-end street in Colonia Daniel Garza, I found my friend reading a slender red volume in Spanish about another architect and engineer, the exiled Spaniard, Félix Candela Outeriño, best known for his development of thin shells of reinforced concrete called cascarones. It was about cascarones, and about the architectural use of reinforced concrete in general, that we found ourselves talking at once, without preamble that morning, indeed with scarcely a word of greeting, though I’d had every intention of asking him about his recently married daughter, Élise, of whom I am fond, and about the book he was writing, a pet project on the madness of Charlotte of Belgium, or Carlota, the wife of the hapless Mexican emperor, Maximilian I. He was full of ideas, my friend, in fact so excited about the book on Candela he was reading, and about the many things he wished to tell me since the last time we met, that I little suspected that three days later he would hang himself with an electrical cord in his apartment here in Condesa.

He’d been visiting Mexico City for more than twenty years, first for a week, to stay with a cousin, a painter in Del Valle, then for a month, a summer, then for a period of nearly three years, following his divorce from my childhood friend, Simin, for me a gaping, vacant spell in his life during which he’d worked as a psychiatric consultant at the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría Dr. Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz, while conducting his own lifelong research on major depressive disorder, specifically on brain metabolism and oxidative stress, neither of which he’d ever bothered to explain to me, preferring always, whenever we met, to speak of other, at most tangentially related things.

Not once had we communicated during that time, what must have been a dark and lonely period for him. I’d been so preoccupied with my work, and with my father’s failing health, a degenerative nervous disease from which he’d suffered in silence for years, that I can’t remember ever even having thought of Arsène, except perhaps vaguely, as in relation to someone or something else, a fact not unusual in our long and variable relationship. Since meeting as students in New York, when for a time we’d been inseparable, briefly sharing an apartment above a Turkish restaurant in Greenwich Village, we’d passed in and out of each other’s lives with a fluid, nearly musical regularity, so that I’d had no idea he was even here in Mexico City, that Simin had left him, that he’d confronted her at last, he must have, she must have told him everything, simply going through the motions of my life each day as if nothing in our relationship had changed. How little I’d known! How smug my assumption that, while my own fortunes had shifted almost daily, his life (at least the life I’d always ascribed to him) had remained blissfully, reliably the same.

Yet such habits die hard, for despite all he’d been through (most of which I’d only surmised), he seemed very much the same that day, at Casa Barragán, emphatically so—the same bright eyes, the same wide grin, the same fast affection for me, which he expressed in a host of warm, unwitting ways: by cocking his head to the right, by biting his lip, by squeezing my arm as we walked. Still I couldn’t help wondering what he knew, that is, how much, and studied him with a restless agitation. It was not like him to dissemble, to mask his thoughts and feelings: all the more reason to beware.

He was eager to tell me about a trip he’d just taken to see Candela’s famous chapel, Capilla Lomas de Cuernavaca, on the wide flat plain outside the city there, a city he loved especially, and to which, years earlier, we’d traveled together to see the collection at the Brady Museum.

On this occasion, he’d felt the need to make the trip there alone, he told me frankly, if with no attempt to explain himself, taking me by the arm and guiding me to the end of the quiet dead-street, past an old woman selling tlacoyos, then up onto a narrow, graffiti-covered footbridge that crossed the busy Avenida Constituyentes, where briefly we stood speechless above the roaring traffic, above the interminable flood of trucks and cars and peseros, gazing out at the vast, hazy spectacle of the city, as though it were nothing but a dream, when with a chuckle, with a pat on my arm, he continued the story of his trip, speaking quickly, fervidly, of object building, force paths, and free edges, and of the miraculous, if little-known development of ferroconcrete.

He was fascinated by Candela’s use of the hyperbolic paraboloid in the design of his chapel, a subject upon which I asked him to elaborate, once we returned to the quiet, tree-lined street, where by then a half a dozen people had gathered before the museum entrance in the pale morning light, tourists all—a young Dutch couple, three architecture students from Taiwan, a bearded Swede in sandals, and an elderly man with a portable oxygen pack, a professor of English from Peru. It was the distinctive saddle shape of the building that had most intrigued my friend, he explained to me, as we strolled the other way down the lightly dappled street, a fascination that had inspired him to spend the better part of the day there on the empty grounds, patiently examining the strange, open-air structure from every vantage, every angle, ever more impressed, as the hours passed and the light around him changed, by the sheer audacity of its dimensions, its grace.

By coincidence he’d arrived here, in Mexico City, just days before I had, having been struck one morning, while working with a patient, by the need to get away. Excited by the thought of leaving New York, a city for which he’d lost his feeling, and by the advent of summer in Chapultepec Park, he’d rushed home, packed his things, then hurried to the airport, unlocking the door to his apartment here, some six hours later, where he’d poured himself a whiskey, then collapsed on the bed.

It was late the next morning, when he was looking for something to read with his coffee, that he’d chanced upon the slender red volume on Candela in a box of books that a friend had left for him. He’d been so taken with the architect, with his umbrellas, with his fine, soaring shells, that that very day he’d rushed off without eating to see for himself some of Candela’s best-known works throughout the city: his rather disappointing Cosmic Rays Pavilion at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; his covered market and Cavalier Industries Factory (formerly the High Life Textile Factory) in Coyoacán; his Iglesia de la Virgen de la Medalla Milagrosa in Narvarte; his metro station in Venustiano Carranza, with its folded hypar shells; and finally Los Manantiales, the popular restaurant he’d designed by the floating gardens of Xochimilco, known to locals as La Flor.

He was happy to see me, pausing now and then to smile at me or to squeeze my arm, as if in apology for his ardor, his zeal, which often expressed itself in a storm, a blizzard of words.

He was dressed as usual that day in a rumpled green blazer, pale shirt, dark linen trousers, and a gray straw fedora, what in all might have seemed the trappings of a dandy, if I hadn’t known better. For there was little of the fop about him; indeed, as ever, he seemed at odds with his clothes, fussing with his sleeves and tugging at his collar like a schoolboy at a wedding or wake.

He was perhaps a little paler than I remembered him, his hair thinner, his hands, his gestures, now fitful, now grave. A fine blue vein had surfaced near the edge of one eye. As we walked he held his hat in his hand, waving it about him as he spoke, so that the children on the next block stopped what they were doing to look at him.

He’d spent most of the night reading, he told me, reading and writing and making notes. As we strolled back and forth on the quiet, dead-end street, biding our time until our tour began, he told me about the recent revisions he’d made to the fourth and finally critical chapter of his book about the empress, changes inspired by his precipitate return to Mexico City, and by some letters he’d found included in an old German study of the Second French Intervention here,