The City of Palaces (13 page)

He crumpled into a chair and picked up the brandy, drinking from the bottle. “My father sent me away that very night to Veracruz to await his instructions.”

“That is why you left the country?”

He nodded. “My father told Paquita's parents the truth. He also told them he had sent me away and promised I would never return to México. He told me he would give me one final chance to make a man of myself before he cut me off completely. I went to Heidelberg, where I entered the medical school. After Heidelberg, I went to Paris to continue my studies. I lived like a monk, trying to atone for my crime. Trying to forget. But every morning I woke up in a foreign city, I remembered. I begged my father to let me return home, but as long as Paquita's parents were alive, he felt obliged to keep his promise to them. It was only after they were both gone that he wrote me and told me to come home.” He glanced at her and then away. “I have discovered, however, there is no home for me. Like Cain, I am marked with guilt and I carry it everywhere I go, now and until the end of my life. As long as my father was alive, there was someone to shoulder part of my burden, but now that he is gone its weight crushes me.” He looked at her. “I am a murderer, Alicia. I killed that girl and our child. There is no way to atone but with my own life.”

A chill passed through her for, in that moment, she understood what she had interrupted. “You cannot atone for one murder by committing another.”

“Not murder, execution.”

“Your despair is selfish!” she exclaimed. “If you wish to atone, atone with your life, not your death. You have seen how this city overflows with the suffering of the poor, like the girl you betrayed. Sacrifice yourself to their need. Forget yourself by serving them.”

“Like you, Alicia? Is that what you do?”

She breathed deeply, then exhaled. “I once sat before the mirror and pitied myself, lamenting the husband I would never have, the children I would never give birth to. I took to heart the cruel barbs that were directed at me and the expressions of disgust and let them hurt me. Doing so changed nothing, not my face, not my life. So I chose to step away from the mirror and to pretend not to hear or see the contempt. It brought me relief, but it was not until I lost myself in the work of aiding others that I felt peace. I am not the little plaster saint I am made out to be by the women in my circle who pity me for being a disfigured old maid. I am merely trying, like everyone else, to find some happiness in this world. The path that most women take was closed to me, so I had to find another. The first object of my charity has always been myself.”

“I have never met anyone like you,” he said. “No one so kind, so filled with love. You're right, Alicia, you're not a plaster saint. You're—”

“Stop, Miguel, please.” She looked away. “We are speaking of you. What you did to Paquita was monstrous. Your guilt is justified. But you are not unforgiveable. God forgives you, forgives you even your disbelief. I forgive you, Miguel. It does not matter if we never see each other again. Know that in my heart you are and will always be cherished.”

Overwhelmed by sentiment, she rushed from the room before he could reply. In the carriage, she pulled the curtains closed and wept, for the girl and the child Miguel had killed, for Miguel himself, and lastly for her own loss. She could not imagine, having told her his secret, he would want to see her again. She could only hope it was enough for his peace of mind that he had been able to tell her.

T
he following evening while she sat with her mother at tea, a maid entered with a calling card. It was Miguel's.

“The gentleman asks if he may enter,” the maid said.

“Yes,” Alicia said. “We are happy to receive him.”

A
fter Alicia left his rooms, Sarmiento had gone up to the roof of his building and stood there, revolver in his hand, smoking a cigarette. The sun set on the city's roofscape, the parapets, domes, bell towers, terraces and balconies, water tanks, clotheslines, and commercial signs, and the shadows of night seeped softly through the ancient streets. The last cries of the street vendors were silenced by the explosion of bells from the city's churches tolling the hour. He crushed the cigarette stub beneath his heel and made his decision. He emptied the revolver of its single round. Before Alicia had arrived, he had spun the loaded chamber twice, held it to his head and pulled the trigger. He had gone up to the roof uncertain of what he would do, but as he watched night coming on over his native city, he knew he had not come home, after so many years in exile, to kill himself. He considered what Alicia had told him. In her world of faith there was sin, forgiveness, and redemption overseen by a great, white-bearded monarch in the sky. In his world the sky was empty, the dead were without the power to forgive, and the living were lacerated by guilt for their offenses. He did not believe in atonement. But, he did believe, as his father had told him, that life needed purpose, not to store up treasures in heaven, but simply to justify the air he breathed. He would find his purpose. He would stay alive.

In the days that followed, Sarmiento considered his strengths, skills, and temperament and sought to match them to a project to which he could devote himself. One of the city's newspapers put on its front page a long story about the various public health plagues that beset the burgeoning city—an inadequate sewage system, the ever-present threat of flooding, contamination of food and water, the abject slums of the
pelados
that were incubators of disease, public drunkenness, malnutrition. The article reminded him of the suffering he had seen as he had accompanied Alicia on her visits to her godchildren. He kept in mind her words to him to sacrifice himself to the poor, to those, like Paquita, dwelling in misery, exploited, or forgotten. He could not save her life, but perhaps he could save the lives of others.

He knew he could not do this work as Alicia did, engaging the poor as a friend and confidant. His was not a warm and generous nature. Like his father, he was a scientist and a rationalist, detached, intellectually curious, and methodical. He must find a position that would allow him to apply those talents. Through the offices of his senator uncle, Jorge Luis's father, he secured a letter of introduction to the director of the Board of Public Health from Don Porfirio himself.

The director's offices were located in the municipal palace on the west side of the Zócalo. Sarmiento entered a small anteroom where a male secretary took Díaz's letter and disappeared into an office behind a door engraved with the words “Doctor Eduardo Liceaga, Director of Public Health.”

A few minutes later, the secretary came out and said, “The director wishes to know to what address your pay should be sent.”

“I beg your pardon,” Sarmiento said. “What about my duties?”

The secretary frowned, excused himself, and retreated to the director's office. When he returned, he said, “Doctor Liceaga wishes to speak to you. Please go in.”

Liceaga's office was both spacious and cluttered. There were glass-faced cabinets filled with specimen jars, bookshelves crammed with books and journals, tables laden with official-looking documents bearing the board's insignia. Covering an entire wall were engineering drawings and photographs of the massive project currently under construction to drain the city of excess water and waste through a system of canals, dams, and tunnels. On another wall was a schemata of the city's sewer system and a map of the city divided into eight numbered sectors. On the wall behind the director's desk was a chromolithograph of Louis Pasteur and a framed copy of the first page of his 1876 address to the French Academy announcing his discovery of microbes as the source of contagious disease. A large window looked out upon the red-and-brown city and, rising serenely beyond it in the blue distance, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl—the tragic lovers who in Aztec myth had metamorphosed into volcanoes. Rows of mounted butterfly specimens hung on either side of the window, and there was a collection of butterfly nets in a corner.

At the desk sat a clean-shaven, sallow-skinned man of middle age; his dark hair was streaked with gray and he was wearing a white suit. He was scribbling in a journal with ink-stained fingers. Without looking up, he asked curtly, “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I am Doctor Miguel Sarmiento,” he said. “I have come to offer my services in whatever manner may be useful to the promotion of public health.”

Liceaga paused in his writing and looked up. Behind thick pincenez spectacles, his dark eyes were skeptical. “I am on the faculty of the medical school and I have never seen you before in my life.”

“My degrees are from the University of Heidelberg and the Sorbonne. I have only been back in México for a year. My father was also a doctor and, like you, a member of the faculty of the school of medicine. Doctor Rodrigo Sarmiento.”

Liceaga touched a pensive finger to his lip, leaving a smear of ink. “Sarmiento? I knew him slightly, though he had left the faculty long before I arrived. He was your father? I am told he was a good doctor although his interests veered more toward the political than the scientific. I understand he died recently.”

“Yes,” Sarmiento said.

“My condolences. Sit down.”

“I will, sir, if you will explain to me how I have offended you.”

Liceaga handed him the unsealed letter from Díaz. Sarmiento read what the old man had written: “Put the bearer of this note on your payroll. Díaz.”

“The payroll of every department in this building is padded with phantom workers,” Liceaga said. “Naturally I assumed that you were another one of the president's friends in need of an income.”

“No, Doctor, I assure you that I am a trained medical scientist.”

“Tell me, Doctor,” Liceaga said, leaning back in his swivel chair, “do you subscribe to the miasmatic theory of contagious disease?”

“Of course not. Pasteur and Koch have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that disease is caused by microbes, and while some may be airborne, it is not the air itself, however much it stinks, that makes people sick. The miasmatic theory is simply a species of spontaneous generation, which,” he said, indicating the framed page of Pasteur's speech, “that document incontrovertibly discredited.”

Liceaga's smile erased all traces of severity and he beamed benignly at Sarmiento. “Exactly so, Doctor! And yet you would be surprised at how members of our profession here in the city cling to the belief that illness is caused by vapors in the air. Vapors! Or who still believe that health is a matter of keeping in balance the four humors. Some of the old physicians still bleed their patients! As if medical science had stopped with Galen.”

“Rest assured, Doctor, I do not subscribe to the view that the basic constituents of the human body are black and yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.”

“Excellent,” he said. “I am sorry to have misjudged you, Doctor.” He dropped his voice. “We try to do our work here unfettered by the demands of politics. That is not always possible.”

“I have no interest in politics,” Sarmiento said.

“I am glad to hear it. Let me tell you about our work.” He gestured toward the window with its serene view of the volcanoes. “We live, sir, in one of the loveliest cities on the planet and one of the unhealthiest. One could not have designed a worse location for a metropolis than the Anáhuac Valley,” he continued, almost gleefully. “Why, we are not even a true valley but a closed basin walled off by mountains and volcanoes. The city is a sinkhole at the lowest point of the basin surrounded by lakes and constructed on swampy landfill. Water, my boy! There is our curse. There is both too much and too little of it.”

Sarmiento found himself smiling, both amused and engrossed by what was clearly a lecture-hall performance for Liceaga's medical students.

“The city sits on the corpse of the lake on which the aborigines built their capital. When the rains come the old lake churns beneath us like distended guts while our three nearest lakes—Texcoco, Chalco, and Xochimilco—pour their poisonous overflow into the canals and flood the city. Meanwhile, our ancient and inadequate sewage system backs up and contaminates our drinking water. The result is disease and death.”

“Surely the new drainage system will alleviate some of these problems,” Sarmiento offered.

“Yes, but without a modern network of sewers to flush wastes into that system the city will continue to stew in its own filth,” Liceaga replied. “Part of my commission is to persuade the government to undertake that project. And of course, there is the human element.”

“What is the human element, Doctor?”

“In the last thirty years, the city's population has increased by more than a third, largely through the arrival of country folk looking for work. Unfortunately, most of these immigrants belong to the ignorant, benighted, and stubborn race of Indians. They cling to their filthy habits and customs, living like animals in tenements that have never seen the disinfectant of sunlight or soap. They empty their bowels and bladders in the streets, fill rain gutters with their wastes, and anoint their sick children with holy oil instead of bathing them occasionally. They are the human equivalent of our sewers, and like our sewers, they must be flushed out and cleaned.”

“The Indians cannot be rebuilt like the sewer system,” Sarmiento ventured.

“No, unfortunately that is not an option.” He opened a silver case on his desk and removed a cigarette, fixed it in an ivory holder, and lit it. “I and other public health advocates have long urged the government to encourage European immigration, like the North Americans and the Argentines. But we are not a port city like New York or Buenos Aires and so remain inaccessible to that better class of immigrant. Our immigration is entirely internal and from the dregs of our population. Cigarette?”

“No thank you,” he said.