The City of Palaces (28 page)

Forty-three years of marriage, three sons who died in childhood, four daughters who survived, and several reversals of fortune later, the
marqués
died. A prig to the end, he refused last rites from a priest whom he deemed unworthy of administering the sacraments to someone of his rank. She was secretly overjoyed when they sealed his casket in the crypt. Now, she thought, now she could begin to live again!

But something terrible had happened—she had become old.

The decades of her marriage had curdled her gaiety into scorn, transformed her charming impertinence into sarcasm, bent her back, whitened her hair, and withered her limbs. The spurs of life still dug into her flesh, but her flesh could not answer as it had when she rode through the forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental or danced until dawn at Chapultepec Castle. The only passions left to her were the vicarious passions of art—literature, music, opera, and theater. Art allowed her to be young and alive in her imagination, if nowhere else. As she steeped herself in those realms of the imaginary, her human connections withered and became mere social rituals. Until José was born. Her last grandchild was beautiful and sensitive, like a storybook character come to life. He awoke a passionate and protective love within her that she had not felt for her own children. She would have adored him even had he not reciprocated, but he was as devoted to her as she was to him, and he shared her passion for art. He loved nothing more than to lie in her vast bed in the morning, listening to her tales of country life while Caruso played on the phonograph. Or, at least, he had until he became infatuated with his piano teacher. Now all he spoke of was this boy, and she discovered that José had revived in her another emotion she had believed to be long entombed—jealousy.

The carriage came to a stop in the first courtyard of the palace. She waited. Her maid opened the door to the carriage and removed the throw. The driver assisted her descent as her maid held open the umbrella. She stepped through the gate into the second courtyard and began to climb the steps to her apartment when she heard the thrilling opening notes of the third movement of the “Moonlight Sonata.” She paused and listened. The hands that played the piece were more practiced, confident, and experienced than José's. Waving her maid aside, she went to the grand
sala
and stood at the doorway. The musician was the boy—she could scarcely bear even to think his name, much less speak it aloud—David.

She was forced to admit that he made a charming picture, his long hair falling across his face as his fingers raced across the keyboard. He had a coarse kind of broad-shouldered good looks. She could understand why her fine-boned, delicately beautiful grandson might be drawn to him on the theory of the attraction of opposites. Of course, in ten years' time the boy's stolid muscularity would have turned to fat and his youthful effervescence faded into loutishness; such was the second sight of old age. But for now, she closed her eyes and allowed Beethoven's genius to quicken her pulse. When the boy reached an emphatic finish, she reflexively applauded.

He rose so quickly from the piano bench he nearly knocked it over. “Señora Marquesa, I did not know you had entered the room.”

“I love that piece,” she said and then, recovering her imperiousness, asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Your instrument is so much finer than anything we have at the conservatory that Doña Alicia gave me permission to practice on it for the competition.”

“Competition? What competition?” she asked, seating herself.

The boy, who remained standing, replied, “The Centenario competition, Señora. The winner will be given a scholarship to study at the Conservatoire de Paris for two years.”

“I see,” she said. “This is something you aspire to.”

“Oh, yes!” he exclaimed. “It is the finest conservatory in the world.”

“Do you think you will prevail?”

“I do not know, Señora Marquesa,” he said. “I started playing later than many of my classmates. That is why I need to practice, night and day.”

“You started late? Explain yourself.”

He looked down. “My family's means are such that we could not afford a piano, and I did not start playing until I was ten years old, at school. But, like José, many of my classmates began receiving lessons when they were five or six. I lost that time and I shall never recover it. In the end, that may be the difference between winning and losing.”

A thought turned in her mind like a key opening a locked door, but to the boy she said only, “Well, in that case you had better resume your practice.”

He bowed. “Yes, Señora Marquesa. Thank you.”

“For what, boy?”

“For taking an interest in me,” he said.

“I assure you,” she said, rising to go to her room, “it was no more than a passing interest, and it has passed.”

S
armiento sat at his desk in his office reading a report about a typhoid outbreak in La Bolsa, a notorious
colonia
filled with flophouses and tenements. His department had imposed a quarantine, but the residents had refused to comply because it kept them from going to their jobs. The police were called in, a minor riot ensued, and three people were killed. Ultimately, the quarantine was established and the outbreak contained. The author of the report, a district inspector under Sarmiento's supervision, referred to the three violent deaths as “collateral damage,” a masterpiece of bureaucratic dissemblance. He tipped back his chair and sighed. The poor had always resented the health department's agents, but in the past three years, as the economy had soured, their resentment had turned into resistance. His inspectors refused to enter certain neighborhoods without a police escort. The police themselves refused to enter the worst neighborhoods, and who knew what diseases were incubating in them.

An American colleague had sent him a copy of Jacob Riis's book
How the Other Half Lives
, about the tenements of New York City. It was filled with shocking descriptions and illustrated with even more shocking photographs. What was most impressive to Sarmiento, however, was that the plight of the destitute had even been deemed worthy of public exposure and discussion. He despised the Americans for their hypocrisy—defending democratic values in principle while behaving like the most retrograde colonialists—and their adolescent vulgarity. Still, he had to admit their imperfect democracy permitted, tolerated, and sometimes even rewarded scathing criticism of the status quo. A book like Riis's was unimaginable in México, where the government regarded the Indian poor as a state secret, and the upper classes dismissed their misfortunes as the fruit of racial degeneracy.

“The government?” he muttered aloud, casting a scornful glance at his big desk covered with papers bearing the seal of the Superior Sanitation Council. “I am the government.”

He got up from his desk and walked to the window, gazing at the volcanoes that floated like mirages in the distance over the domes and towers and ochre-colored roofs of Ciudad de México. How beautiful his city was, how much he loved her, how hopeless he felt about her future.

“Señor Vice Director?”

He turned and saw his secretary standing at the door. “Yes, Juan.”

“Sir, there is an Indian out here. He gave me this note to give you. The man cannot speak.”

Sarmiento took the note, opened it, and immediately recognized his wife's handwriting. It implored him to come immediately to Coyoacán and to bring his medical bag and surgical tools. Sarmiento brushed past his secretary and saw Padre Cáceres's Yaqui servant, Ramoncito, standing in the anteroom.

“Did you just come from my wife with this note?” he asked.

The man nodded.

“Is she injured?”

He shook his head.

“But someone else is?”

Ramoncito again nodded.

“Very well, let me get my things.”

She had sent her carriage and had evidently instructed the driver to race back because the journey was swift and bumpy. At last, they reached their destination, a decaying mansion at the outskirts of the village. When he alighted from the carriage, she was standing at the door to meet him.

“Alicia, what is this place? What are you doing here?”

“A family property,” she said. “The rest I will explain later, but now I need for you to come with me.”

In the overgrown courtyard, a half-dozen men were smoking and sunning themselves. They were all Indian and their kinship was obvious in their skin tone and features, but they were unlike the servile Indians of the city, for these men, even at rest, were coiled and watchful, like serpents or soldiers. They followed him with hard, wary eyes.

“Who are these people?” he asked her in a low voice.

“Yaquis,” she said.

“What are they doing here?”

“This is their sanctuary.”

Her response raised more questions than it answered, but he saw she was agitated and did not press her. They passed through a long room arranged like a hospital ward and into a smaller room where a man lay on a narrow, iron-framed bed, staring at the ceiling. His right leg beneath the knee was a swirl of searing red and putrid green. The air was foul with the smell of rot.

“Gangrene,” Alicia said. “His leg must be amputated.”

“This is why you called me? To chop off the leg of some stranger?”

“Miguel,” she pleaded. “He will die unless you help.”

“Before I agree to anything, I want an explanation of all this.”

She nodded. “Come.”

They stepped into a courtyard and sat on a stone bench beneath an ancient olive tree. She told him everything. He listened, with incredulity, then anger, and then grudging admiration at her courage and resourcefulness. When she finished he asked, “Do you have any idea of the trouble that you would bring upon yourself and our family if you are found out?”

“My rank will protect us from the harshest sanctions,” she replied. “Carmen Díaz is my friend. She would not abandon me.”

“And how long were you planning to continue this … I don't even know what to call it. Mission?”

“For as long as the government seizes these people and sells them into bondage.”

The government, he thought. That word again. “I
am
the government, Alicia. I hold a public office. My commission was signed by Díaz himself.”

“I know. That is why I kept this from you as long as I could. But you are not simply some bureaucrat, Miguel. You are a humanitarian. You could never execute orders that would cause the kind of suffering we have inflicted on the Yaquis.”

He thought about the three people killed by the police to enforce his quarantine in La Bolsa. “Hard choices are sometimes required to achieve the general good,” he said softly.

“What good is accomplished by driving the Yaquis from their land, killing their women, placing their children into orphanages, and enslaving their men?”

He was quiet for a moment. “The issue is more complicated than your question,” he said. “We can discuss it after I operate. I have no anesthetic. This will not be easy.”

“I will assist you,” she said. “And Santiago—that is his name, Miguel—he is like the other Yaquis. They pride themselves on their ability to withstand pain without a murmur.”

“Well,” he said, rising and extending his hand to her. “This will put him to the test.”

H
e explained to the Yaqui what he needed to do. The Indian gave a curt nod, took a long drink of the brandy that Alicia had brought for him, and clamped his teeth on a gag of rope. He did not flinch at the sight of Sarmiento's bow-framed saw. The operation was grisly but short and he made a clean cut. As he sutured the flap over the stump, he felt confident that his patient would make a good recovery. The Indian had endured the operation with scarcely a sound.

“You are a brave man,” Sarmiento told him.

The Indian removed the gag from his mouth. “I am a warrior,” he said in a guttural croak.

“Here,” Sarmiento said, handing him the brandy. “Drink this. It will help with the pain.”

The Indian took the bottle and, before drinking, said, “I bless you and your family for saving my life.”

A
fterward, as he and Alicia were driving back to the city, he said, “You were very good today.”

She sighed. “It was all I could do to keep from fainting when you handed me Santiago's leg.”

“But you didn't faint,” he said. “You kept your head.” He put his arm around her. “You must know that your project will be discovered. A servant will talk or the captain's superiors will become suspicious about the missing Indians. The villagers in Coyoacán will begin to wonder about your comings and goings. Or one of your patients will escape. You cannot continue this indefinitely.”

“What would you have me do, Miguel?”

“I have never commanded your obedience in anything,” he said. “I will not start now, but in this marriage we are not two people, Alicia, we are one. If you insist on continuing your work, I will have to resign my post. It is hypocrisy to take bread from Caesar with one hand and strike him with the other.”

“No one knows better than I how little you have been able to accomplish in your position.”

“Perhaps I have not done all I hoped,” he conceded. “But I have been able to accomplish a little and there is a little more I hope to achieve. Particularly now. Díaz wants the city to be a showplace for the Centenario and he has given us more money this year than in the past ten. I hope to use some of those funds to actually make the city a better place to live. Besides, Alicia, Don Porfirio's time is coming to an end. Even he must see that, and accede to the demands of the people to make Madero his vice president. Then real change can begin.” After a moment's silence, he continued. “I am asking you as your husband and your friend to give me a little longer in my work to do whatever good I still can.”