By Carlos Fuentes There are buildings that travel. A civilization's style moves and places its stamp, with many variations, all along an architectural constellation. Antiquity moves with the Greek style, to Italy, Sicily, Spain, Gaul… Gothic is the face, fragile yet stony, of the High Middle Ages, and baroque that of the Classical Centuries of incipient modernity. Today, from Bauhaus to Niemeyer, Pei, Philip Johnston and Ricardo Bonfil, a contemporary international style has filled the public spaces of the earth, and the private ones too. There are buildings, however, that do not know how to travel. They suffer pilgrims to come to them; they are the "high places", fixed and unrepeatable, of civilizations that grew and died by their solitude. The temples of Palenque, the pyramids of Egypt, Machu Picchu, Angkor Vat, Teotihuacan and Monte Albán, cannot give rise to traveling styles, other than as caricatures superimposed on movie palaces or private residences of doubtful taste. The National Palace of Mexico is both a traveling and an immobile construction. Traveling, because it is part of a vast movement of exploration and conquest of the New World. From Bosphorous to Sicily, through the Pillars of Hercules and the lattice-work of Cádiz, the Mediterranean culture crosses the Oceanic Sea, celebrates its carnival and is mated, through dance, with Africa and the Antilles, to come to rest in the arcades, the food, the music of Veracruz. It still has the strength to climb the plateau of another antiquity: the Mexican one. Misty noon, midnight sun; the Mediterranean finds in the Valley of Mexico the answer to immobility, the dormant volcano and the hypnotic teocalli (Main Temple). The National Palace travels from the European noon, but it is built on the Aztec heights. The face of Mexico is a building, because it cannot live without its two realities: the Spanish legacy and the Indian one. It is part of a cultural violence that brings down the political and religious center of the old Mexico; it buries it, but uses it to build itself; it denies it, but needs it to legitimate itself. Mexico is a chain of negotiations that become a series of legacies. What we deny ends up becoming manifest and part of our life, like the Aztec calendar recovered by the excavations of Viceroy Revillagigedo when he razed the square in 1789, or like Coyolxauhqui, goddess of the underground moon, who reappeared with the Main Temple in 1977. The National Palace was built with the stones of the Casas Nuevas of Moctezuma, the defeated Aztec emperor. One palace was destroyed to make room for another; the stones, as always in Mexico, are the same. The palace that came and the palace that was, thus become mingled. From the architectural mixing of their bloods, something is born that is no longer Aztec and no longer Spanish; during the journey there is an encounter that transforms us, we cease to be what was here and we cease to be what has come: we start to be by being, something new, something unheard of. Those are the lines that I read in the face of the National Palace. What have its eyes not seen, having been first the house of Moctezuma and then the house of Hernán Cortés? The life of the country has swirled, peacefully or in uprisings, before its balconies. Strange flags have flown fleetingly from its flagpole. The invading armies have left: Mexico can be invaded, but it cannot be occupied. There is too much history here, too much memory that no one else can possess. The magnitude of the memory is part of our freedom; both, independence and memory, traverse, inhabit, animate the patios, the hallways, the rooms of the National Palace. On the night of flying gold, as Ramón López Velarde would say, the night of the "Grito", the Cry for Independence, on the night of September 15th, the National Palace is the star of Mexico. There is a kind of pause of destiny when the President of the Republic gives the cry, waves the flag and rings the bell of Dolores. This pause joins, however, with the fate of the country. No foreigner had even spoken from the Palace balcony. I witnessed, in 1964, the breaking of that tradition. General Charles de Gaulle, President of France, first took a "dip in the crowd" in the Zócalo and then spoke in Spanish, from a balcony. It was a way to say to the world that a traveling friend had come to Mexico, not a conqueror, and that the country knew how to receive friends with its widest embrace, which is the National Palace and the Zócalo. I look at this scene from another, less famous, balcony at the Hotel Majestic, and I said to myself what I now write here: the National Palace of Mexico, traveling architecture built on sacred architecture, has ended up being not only a symbol of our country, but a guarantee of its vitality; a memory but also a premonition, a space in which we are all we have been, but also all we can yet be. Like faces, the National Palace is an experience, but above all, it is also a destiny.