The City of Palaces (2 page)

“Take me to her,” he said.

He followed her through a series of squalid courtyards. Open privies spilled their reek and a few mangy dogs lapped brackish water from fountains where nuns had dipped their pails when Belem had been a wealthy convent in the seventeenth century. Ciudad de México was then the crown jewel of New Spain. So regal were the edifices the Spanish had built on the ruins of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, that a visitor had christened it the City of Palaces. Now, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the ancient palaces had been abandoned, converted to mercantile uses or, like Belem, were in near ruins. In their place were the garish new public works of the government of the dictator, Porfirio Díaz, all shiny brass and Carrara marble.

They came to a small courtyard less filthy than the others. On either side were the tiny cells that had housed the convent's servants. The veiled woman led Sarmiento into one of them where, on a straw mat, a naked woman screamed in agony while two other women held her down. The smell of blood and ordure drove him back a step, but the veiled woman plunged forward into the dimly lit room and said to him, “Please, Doctor, come.”

Sarmiento had amputated limbs and cut holes into the throats of diphtheria patients so they could breathe, but, out of preference, he had rarely delivered children. Even the sight of pregnant women stirred painful memories of the girl he had killed and now, as he entered the room, raw images of Paquita's death agonies made his fingers tremble and his heart race. He hesitated and looked wildly around the room as if for an escape hatch.

The veiled woman extended a gloved hand to him and said, in her calm, soothing voice, “Doctor, two lives hang in the balance.”

“
Claro
,” he said, shaking himself out of his paralysis.

He knelt at the feet of the screaming woman and saw a tiny, red foot emerging from her womb. He knew immediately what he must do. He opened his bag, found the bottle of antiseptic, and had the veiled woman pour it on his hands. Then he carefully pushed the tiny leg back into the womb and reached into the woman to turn the child. The woman shrieked and jerked back.

“Calm her down,” he said tightly to the veiled woman.

The veiled woman knelt beside the woman and murmured a stream of comforting words. In a moment, the woman's body relaxed a little and Sarmiento continued to probe her. With exquisite care, he moved the child so that its head faced downward.

“Now get her to push,” he said. “Yes, like that. Push! Push!”

Slowly, the child—a boy—emerged, gray-faced and silent. Sarmiento extracted him, severed the umbilical cord, and slapped his back. The child made a choking sound and then a thin wail issued from the tiny body.

“Something to wrap him in,” he commanded.

The veiled woman gave him a bundle of fine linen, incongruous in these dank surroundings. He wrapped the child and handed him to her. He gazed sadly at the infant in her arms and then examined the ashen-faced mother. She knelt beside the mother and gently placed the bundled child beside her. “See, my dear. A son.”

Sarmiento beckoned her to the doorway and in a low voice asked, “What will become of the infant? Clearly, he cannot remain here.”

“For a day or two,” the woman replied, “and then I will take him to Lorena's sister and husband, who have agreed to watch over him until she is released.”

“What is … Lorena doing in this pit?”

The woman answered quietly, “She killed the father of the child in a quarrel because he had abandoned her for another and left her begging on the streets. Will she recover?”

“Yes, she should be fine,” he said to the veiled woman. “My father is here; I must see to him. Will you be able to care for her now?”

“Yes. Thank you. God bless you. What is your name, Doctor?”

“Miguel Sarmiento,” he said. “And you, Señora, who are you?”

“Alicia Gavilán,” she replied.

At that moment a stout woman appeared at the doorway, out of breath and murmuring apologies. The midwife. She bustled into the room, shoving Sarmiento aside.

“Go to your father now, doctor,” Alicia Gavilán said. “We will be fine, here.”

Sarmiento grabbed his bag and left.

H
e found his father in a spacious room in the wing of the prison reserved for opposition politicians and journalists who criticized the government. Here they were kept for a few days or a few weeks in relative comfort until the dictator remembered them and ordered their release. There was no official censorship in México, and the Constitution of 1857, which his father had helped write, guaranteed freedom of speech. The government tolerated the minimum of dissent required to satisfy the need of foreign observers for the illusion of a democratic México. Sometimes, though, a journalist or a politician took the promise of free speech too seriously and found himself picked up by
la seguridad
, Díaz's secret police, and deposited in one of these cells, like an impertinent child sent to his room.

Sarmiento's father was sitting at a table covered with sheets of paper, scribbling fiercely with ink-stained fingers. His black suit was shiny with age, he was unshaven, and his white hair was disheveled from his habit of twisting strands of it between his fingers when he was thinking. Rodrigo Sarmiento was, like his son, a physician. He had long ago given up medicine in favor of writing manifestos against the government, printed at his own expense, that he posted all over the city. Sarmiento sometimes stopped and read one of his father's broadsheets but he rarely got to the end. While they began rationally, even eloquently, they quickly degenerated into paranoid rants against Don Porfirio and his government.

His father's fury at the despot who had governed México for almost thirty years was as much a personal vendetta as the product of an abstract allegiance to democratic principles because his father and Don Porfirio had once been comrades-in-arms. When the French had invaded México in 1862, forcing the elected president, Don Benito Juárez, from the capital, his father had accompanied him as his personal physician and close advisor. Díaz had been one of Don Benito's generals, and his string of victories against the vastly superior French army had helped finally drive them out of México. After the execution of the puppet emperor, Maximiliano, and the restoration of the Republic, Sarmiento's father had promoted Díaz as the logical successor to the presidency upon Don Benito's retirement. But Díaz had little patience and, after Juárez was reelected in 1871, unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow him. To Sarmiento's father, the failed coup was a betrayal of the democratic principles that he had believed he and Don Porfirio shared. That was to be only the beginning of his disillusionment with Díaz. In 1876, after a second revolt against the government, Díaz installed himself in the presidency to which he was later repeatedly reelected, with increasingly improbable majorities. Díaz, who continued to call his political organization the Liberal Party, paid lip service to the principles of free speech, effective suffrage, and separation of church and state while suppressing the former and ignoring the latter. Rodrigo Sarmiento had tried to reason with, cajole, and shame his old comrade, privately at first and then in opposition newspapers until these were closed, one by one, and his only recourse was through his broadsheets.

The attitude of the dictator toward Sarmiento's father was one of amused contempt. It was an attitude mirrored in the government's newspapers, where his father became an object of ridicule: deranged Doctor Rodrigo. One newspaper cartoonist caricatured him as a latter-day Martin Luther nailing a scroll to the door—of an outhouse. The caption explained that the paper on which he wrote his screeds could serve a useful purpose for those entering the facility. Yet even the most disrespectful account of his father's antics reminded its readers that he was a hero of the resistance to the French invasion. Only his heroic past kept Rodrigo Sarmiento out of even danker prisons than Belem, the nightmare facilities where the dictator's real enemies were sent to their deaths. It had also been intimated to Sarmiento by his father's remaining friends that his father was permitted to post his rants because it was useful to the regime that its most vocal opponent could be dismissed as a lunatic. He suspected that the mockery drove his father—a man of rigid integrity and a committed democrat—ever deeper into irrationality. It grieved Sarmiento that he was helpless to draw his father out of his mental darkness and he feared that it would one day overwhelm him completely.

“Father,” he said loudly, stepping into the room.

The old man looked up. “Eh, what are you doing here?”

“Your brother told me you had been arrested,” he said. “I've come to take you home.”

“My brother!” he spat. “That fathead. Bootlicker.”

Sarmiento let the statement pass. His Uncle Cayetano, unlike his father, had remained in Díaz's good graces and had been rewarded with a seat in the Senate.

His father, however, was just warming to the subject. “My brother followed me here from Spain forty years ago after I had made a place for myself and he is still riding my coattails.” He glared at his son. “I made Sarmiento an illustrious name in this country, and now my brother defiles it by collaborating with the dictator.”

At moments like this, Sarmiento had learned to detach himself and regard his father as if he were simply a particularly choleric patient. He observed that the old man's hands were trembling and his face was drawn.

“When did you last eat?” Sarmiento asked.

“When I was last fed,” his father replied sharply.

“Gather your things, Father, and I will take you home.”

“No,” he said, with more petulance than anger. “I am a prisoner of conscience and here I will remain until I am charged, tried, and vindicated.”

“Father,” Sarmiento replied patiently. “There will be no charges and no trial. You were arrested because you insist on posting your broadsheets on the doors of the National Palace. Your brother has secured your release.”

“You understand nothing,” his father said. He gestured at the paper-strewn table. “Go away, Miguel. I have work to do.” He sank back into his chair and began to write and mumble. “I must rouse México against the tyrant. This tyrant …” He stopped, looked at his hands as if he were seeing them for the first time, and then gazed at his son with the same expression. In a calm, concerned voice, he said, “I worry about you, Miguel.”

Sarmiento had become accustomed to these abrupt shifts in his father's moods, when the cloud of mental confusion dissipated for a moment and he was his old self. Looking into his father's eyes he saw not the crazy old man he had become but the parent he had once been—stern, demanding, even frightening, but always gruffly loving.

“Why is that, Father?”

“I can smell the alcohol on your breath and it's what? Ten o'clock in the morning? Your drinking accelerates and we both know why. To wash away … the memory. But that's all it is, Miguel, a memory. What cannot be changed is best forgotten.”

“How can I forget, Father? I killed that girl, that child. My child. You said so yourself. You called me a murderer.”

“I was angry,” he said regretfully. “I thought you had thrown your life away.”

“Didn't I? I spent a decade in exile. That changes a man.”

“You are still young and now that you have come home, you can start again.”

“Home?” he said. “This place does not feel like home to me. I am a stranger here, Father, as I am a stranger everywhere.” He shrugged. “I only returned to México for you, but even you refuse my help.”

“I am not in need of help. I know I am mocked, but I am mocked for a reason. A man must live his life in service of something, Miguel. Without a cause, existence is pointless. Whatever the stupid Christians may believe, the real hell is a life without purpose or meaning. You must find yours.”

“I am a criminal who evaded justice,” Sarmiento said. “A life without purpose or meaning is my punishment.”

“You could find redemption in service to a cause greater than your private sentiments.”

“Redemption is a Christian concept and, like you, Father, I am a nonbeliever.” Taking advantage of his father's lucidity, he said, “Let me take you home.”

The old man shook his head. “No, Son. I think I will stay here for a bit longer. It's quiet here. I can rest.” He put his head in his hands. “There is so much noise sometimes, Miguel, so much noise. Go. I will be fine.”

“Yes, Father,” he said reluctantly. He kissed the top of the old man's head, leaving him there to quarrel with voices only he could hear.

As Sarmiento trudged through the prison courtyards, he thought he heard female voices, but when he looked he saw they belonged to men, made up and dressed like women, hanging coquettishly on the arms of their grizzled
novios
. He thought of the veiled woman—Alicia Gavilán—of her lovely voice and the green flicker of her eyes. Since his return to México a year earlier, he had developed a practice among the society women living in the newly built baronial mansions off the Paseo de la Reforma. It suited them to have the handsome young doctor with his European medical degrees come around to their houses, where they lived lives of luxurious boredom, and listen to their imaginary ailments. Now and then, one of them would present a marriageable daughter for his inspection or, more discreetly, offer herself. Sarmiento fended off their advances as tactfully as he could. The daughters, far too young, were either facetious or coy, and the mothers lived in romantic fantasies of salvation through passion fueled by too many French novels.

His part in Paquita's gruesome death had dispelled any notions of his own romantic capacity. He quelled his physical needs with brief, clinical visits to one of the city's better whorehouses. It had been years since he had allowed himself to be curious about a woman, but as the day wore on he could not put Alicia Gavilán out of his mind. She was clearly a woman of breeding and quality; courageous, too, to have set foot into the squalid swamp of Belem without a male escort. Who was she? Why was she there? What husband would have allowed it? He assumed she had worn the heavy veil to avoid attracting the crude attentions of male prisoners. He found himself imagining what she must look like—a lovely face framed by abundant, dark hair, green eyes flickering, lips soft and full. He caught himself remembering the husky musicality of her voice. He wanted to hear that voice again, to know her story. If she had any status in society, there was one person who would know her, because he knew everyone: his cousin Jorge Luis.