The City of Palaces (23 page)

“Jorge Luis!” he cried. “Is it really you?”

“Yes, Primo, but I am only Luis now. Luis Parra.” He stepped forward tentatively. “It is so good to see you, Miguel.”

Sarmiento rushed to him and embraced him tightly. He felt the changes in his cousin's body, the aesthetic slenderness turned to hard muscle, the once smooth face now raspy with stubble. Even his breathing was different, deeper and harder.

“My God,” he said. “You've become a man.”

Luis broke off their embrace and smiled at Sarmiento. “Are you surprised? Did you think I would become a woman?”

His joy at their reunion seeped away at the memory of their last meeting. “Why have you changed your name?”

“For my safety,” he replied. He reached into his pocket, removed a hand-rolled cigarette, and lit it. “And I have not really changed my name. I have simply rearranged it, taking my mother's name as my own.”

“What are you doing in the city if it is still dangerous for you?”

“It is dangerous for Jorge Luis Sarmiento, not for Luis Parra. I have come to help organize Don Francisco Madero's anti-reelection club in advance of his arrival in May.”

At that moment, Alicia and Padre Cáceres entered the room. For a moment, she gazed at the man beside her husband and then broke into a broad smile of recognition.

“Jorge Luis!” Alicia exclaimed, embracing him. “Thank God you are safe and well. Father,” she said to Cáceres, “this is our cousin.”

The priest extended his hand. Sarmiento observed that Luis took it with a sardonic glance in his direction, and in that glance, he saw that his cousin was less changed than he had first appeared.

“A pleasure, Padre,” he said. To Alicia, he said, “Doña Alicia, I have so often wanted to stand before you and beg your forgiveness for every cruel remark I made about you, for my drunkenness at your wedding, and for failing to appreciate your virtues and your kindness.”

She embraced him. “You owe me no apology, Cousin. I am so happy to see you healthy and sound.” She stepped back. “There is a young man in the garden. Is he your friend?”

“Yes,” Luis said. “His name is Ángel, an Indian boy from Coahuila who travels with me.”

“You must both stay and eat with us,” Cáceres said. “Our fare is simple, but we would be pleased to share it with you.”

“Yes,” Alicia said. “Please stay. We have so much to talk about.”

“On some subjects,” Luis replied quietly. “There are others that I need to discuss with my cousin alone. You understand, I hope.”

“Of course,” Alicia said. “You have been away for a long time. You and Miguel must have much to say to each other.”

O
ver a meal of chicken stewed in red chili sauce, squash cooked with tomato and
queso fresco
, beans, and tortillas, Luis told lighthearted stories of his travels in Europe and the United States, turning his hardships into amusing anecdotes. For, as he explained, after his father died, his allowance was discontinued by his stepmother and he had been forced to earn his living.

“My only skill was versifying,” he said with a laugh, “and Paris was not in need of another bad poet. When I was unable to pay my hotel bill, the management suggested that I work it off in the kitchen washing dishes in lieu of the city jail. What I observed about the sanitary conditions of the hotel kitchen made going hungry seem like a virtue rather than a grim necessity. Oh, and the characters I met there! The cooks screamed in French and Italian, the waiters in Russian, and me in Spanish. Fortunately, some physical gestures are universally understood.”

“How did you escape?” Alicia asked.

“Friends liberated me. I had been too proud to ask for their help but they helped me nonetheless. Through them, I went to England and fell in with a circle of vigorous, mutton-eating Englishmen who thought nothing of brisk walks that took them halfway across their island and back between luncheon and tea. They were very kind to me.” He paused and glanced at Sarmiento. “They turned me into a socialist.”

“Ah,” Cáceres said. “Are you then, like your cousin, a nonbeliever?”

“I believe that when God made man in his image he intended that there be no social distinctions among them. One man is as good as another, and all men are equally deserving of what Americans call life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—although, God knows, they themselves do not practice their creed. Still, it is my creed.”

“You will find no quarrel in this church with those beliefs,” Cáceres said.

“How did your association with Madero come about?” Sarmiento asked.

“I wanted to come home, but not to resume my old life, even were that possible,” Luis said. “I went first to New York with letters of introduction from my English friends to a group of American socialists. They told me about the Flores Magón brothers, who published a radical newspaper called
Liberación
that they smuggled into México from their exile in the American city of St. Louis. I began to write for them about the true conditions that prevail in our country beneath Don Porfirio's gilt. I wrote about the government's seizure of ancestral Indian lands that reduced the Indians who had farmed them for centuries into peonage. I wrote about the extermination of the Yaquis in Sonora. I wrote about the sale of our mines and railroads and ports to foreigners who are immune from our laws, the suppression of unions, and, most of all, about the concentration of greater and greater wealth into fewer and fewer hands. After a while, it was not enough for me to write about these conditions; I wished to change them.” He lit a cigarette, passed it to Ángel, and then, on the same match, lit another for himself. “I read Madero's book. He's no radical. His call for constitutional government, effective suffrage, and no reelection is the typical pallid fare of bourgeois liberals. Nonetheless, I sensed an underlying passion in his words that attracted me. I made my way to Coahuila and presented myself to him. I was not disappointed by the man.” He grinned at the priest. “Intending no disrespect, Padre, I must say I did not understand sanctity until I met Madero.”

The priest replied, “In what way is Señor Madero saintly?”

“In the way of complete self-sacrifice,” Luis said. “Although he is a son of one of the richest families in México, he lives wholly for the benefit of others. The workers on his estate live decent, comfortable lives, and he pays for the education of their children. He has slowly been giving away his fortune to the poor, to the horror of his family. I heard him tell one of his brothers that he would not be like the rich man in the Gospels who turned his back on Jesus when Jesus commanded him to give all he had to the poor. Madero said, ‘I shall pass through the eye of that needle, Brother, and I will bring you with me.'”

“Well,” Cáceres said, “he must be a remarkable man.”

“He is,” Luis replied passionately. “He has bravely offered himself to speak against Don Porfirio's despotism, knowing the danger it places him in. I personally would follow him anywhere.”

Sarmiento listened to his cousin's account of his transformation with growing amazement, for he remembered the effete young man who despised the Indians, worshipped all things French, and lived for pleasure. He glanced at the young Indian who had sat silently beside Luis while he spoke. There was more to this story, he thought, that Luis in his discretion had omitted in the presence of Alicia and the priest. He was impatient to speak to his cousin alone.

At last, the meal ended, the plates were cleared, and the priest brought out a dusty bottle of brandy.

“Gentlemen,” he said to Sarmiento and Luis. “We will leave you now. Miguel, I will see that Alicia gets home safely. Ángel, if you are tired, there is room here for both you and your master to stay the night.”

“Thank you,” Luis said. “That is very kind.” To Ángel, he said, “Go,
mijo
, I will come soon.”

When they were alone, Sarmiento asked, “What is that boy to you? You called him ‘son.'”

Luis poured brandy into the glasses the priest had set out for them. “He is my son and my companion and … my lover.” He pushed the glass across the table. “Your expression, Primo! You had better drink this.”

Sarmiento drank. “Thank you for not making that comment in the presence of my wife.”

“Alicia knows,” Luis said. “I could see that she had quickly surmised the nature of my friendship with Ángel. Did you tell her about me?”

“She listened to our conversation the night you left México,” he said. “When the police came the next day and accused you of being … a sodomite, she listened to that conversation as well. Some time later, she admitted to eavesdropping, and we discussed the meaning of what she had heard.”

“You spoke to her of it?” Luis asked, incredulous.

“Alicia is not like other women,” Sarmiento replied. “She is my intellectual equal and I treat her as such. In any event, she had already pieced it together.”

“What did she make of it?”

Sarmiento poured an inch of brandy into his glass. “Her sympathies are always with those whom she believes are treated unjustly, and she believes that about you.”

“Notwithstanding the nature of my … offense?”

“She thinks it is a trivial sin of the flesh, like eating or drinking too much.”

“In that case,” Luis said, “her sympathy is greater than her understanding.”

“That is equally true of me, Primo.” Sarmiento said sternly. “I think you should explain yourself.”

“Explain myself?”

“I knew you, Jorge Luis. You were a snob. I see you are transformed, but there is more to it than socialism,” he said. “Your conversion is personal, not political.”

Luis sipped his brandy. “You always were astute, Miguel. It's true that my politics are the product of my conversion, not their cause. I suppose my conversion began the night I left here disgraced and humiliated. Those first few years of exile, I wandered around Europe trying to re-create the life I had led here, but to achieve it I had to lie about who I was and why I had left México. The lies piled up like debts, creating a constant state of anxiety that drained my life of any pleasure.” He lit another hand-rolled cigarette. “Not, in any event, that the pleasures were still so pleasurable. Another ball, another dinner party, another night at the theater. As I approached thirty, I realized that my life was without purpose and meaning, squalid and pointless. I don't suppose you would know how that feels.”

“You would be surprised, Primo, but we are speaking of you now.”

Luis cast a curious look at his cousin before continuing. “I was in Paris and my friends took me to meet a man who called himself Sebastian Melmoth, an Englishman living in filthy rooms at the Hôtel d'Alsace. I couldn't imagine why they had brought me to see him until he told me his real name. He was the writer Oscar Wilde, who fled to France after he was released from prison for sodomy in England. He told me he called himself Sebastian after Saint Sebastian, the martyr. There was a poisonous atmosphere in his rooms not simply of destitution but of despair and self-pity. I went back to my own shabby hotel, and I thought, if I follow this man's example, then I must live a life of self-hatred and die in fear.”

“You mean, if you continued to practice … that vice?”

“No,” Luis said. “I mean if I continued to accept the world's condemnation of my nature. It is my nature to love other men, Miguel. That may disgust you, but that night I decided I would no longer allow it to disgust me. It no longer does. I am at peace with myself.”

His cousin's words were delivered so calmly and with such conviction that Sarmiento was forced to acknowledge either that they expressed a profound truth or were insane. He could not exclude the possibility of insanity, even though he saw no sign of mental illness in his cousin's serene countenance.

“Once I made that decision,” Luis continued, “remarkable events occurred. I met a few men in Paris who felt as I did, and they introduced me to the work of the English Uranians. I began a correspondence with their leader, a man named Edward Carpenter. He turned his back on his bourgeois family to live with his lover on a farm in a small town. I went for a brief visit and stayed for a year, as his farmhand and his student. He is an honored figure among English socialists, but his socialism is motivated by love, not theory. Love, he told me, is the true leveler of distinctions. He always said you cannot love mankind and still wish to oppress men. For we homosexuals, that axiom is doubly true. You cannot love another man and still wish to oppress man.”

“What was that word you used?” Sarmiento asked, frowning. “‘Homosexual.'”

“‘Homo,' from the Greek meaning same and ‘sexual' … well you know what that Latinism means. The word was invented by a German writer to describe men who love other men.”

“I see,” Sarmiento replied skeptically. “Ugly word. Still, it has the virtue of clarity if not elegance.” He poured some brandy into his own glass and his cousin's. “You really believe your behavior is normal?”

“It is for me,” he said. He smiled. “Do you think I'm mad?”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

“I could say the same of you, Miguel.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said you knew me, but I knew you, too, better than anyone. You were an intellectual snob, an atheist, and the most melancholy of men. Yet here you are, tending to the poor, breaking bread with a priest, married to the least likely woman I would have imagined for you, and you even seem happy. Well, as happy as your nature permits. Someone less charitable than me might say you have taken leave of your senses.”

“Touché,” Sarmiento touching his glass to his cousin's.

“To madness,” Luis replied.

J
osé would always remember how he had watched from the railing as a boy—older, almost a grown-up—entered the courtyard, his eyes sweeping across the palace in awe, pushing a bicycle. José flew down the stairs and said breathlessly, “Is this your
bicicleta
? Will you teach me how to ride?”