The City of Palaces (30 page)

“These men who dress like women,” he said softly to his cousin, “and this woman who dresses like a man. Your friend Carpenter claims that they represent only a small percentage of homosexuals.”

“That is true,” Luis said, “but without them, the rest of us would not know how to find each other. They are the red lights of the whorehouse, the cross on the church, the symbol of welcome.” He lifted his glass. “Our beacons.” He drank. “This is not why I asked you here. I assume you know about Corral.”

“Of course,” Sarmiento said. “It's appalling.”

“Madero anticipated something like this,” Luis said. “He will now drop the pretense that he was interested only in being Díaz's vice president and announce he is a candidate for the presidency.”

Sarmiento said, “He must know that he will never be allowed to win.”

“Yes, of course,” Luis said impatiently. “He also knows that he will eventually be arrested, as will all the rest of us who are working for him. That will become the precipitating event.”

“For what?” Sarmiento asked, though he feared he already knew the answer.

“A revolution,” Luis replied. He lifted his glass and drank. “Everywhere he goes, we gather the local leaders of the disaffected. We tell them to be prepared to lead their followers into the street when the moment comes.”

“The army will crush him,” Sarmiento said, dropping his voice.

“That would have been true once,” Luis replied. “But Don Porfirio knows only too well from his own coup that a powerful military is a threat to his security. For the last twenty years he has reduced the size of the army, decentralized its command, and paid the troops next to nothing. As a result, it is completely unprepared to stop a well-organized, well-armed rebel force.”

“I cannot picture Don Francisco at the head of an army,” Sarmiento said.

“Do not underestimate him,” Luis said sharply. “He is a man of great personal courage, and while you may think that his talk about the spirit world is claptrap, it has given him an unassailable confidence in his mission.” He looked at Sarmiento closely for a moment and then asked, “Will you be with us with the time comes, Miguel?”

“Until Don Porfirio, the history of México was a history of rebellions, invasions, civil wars, and insurrections,” he said. “Is that you want to return to, Luis? Chaos? Destruction? Death?”

“I want a democracy,” he said. “Don't you?”

“Of course, but—”

“But what, Miguel? Díaz will rig the election to secure his reelection, and we will have four more years of autocracy.”

“He can't live forever.”

“Díaz will die, but not the machinery of dictatorship. Another strongman will take over, but younger than Díaz, more energetic, and more ruthless. The moment to act is at hand.”

“You are asking me to commit myself to treason.”

“I am asking you to commit yourself to justice,” Luis said. “When the time comes,” he emphasized. “Not today or tomorrow. Not next month, but soon.”

“I cannot give you an answer.”

“But you will consider it?” Luis said. “Will you at least do that?”

Sarmiento took a deep breath. “Yes, I will consider it, as events unfold.”

Then he swigged the milky, sour liquid and drained his glass.

A
storm broke over the valley of Anáhuac on the night of September 14, 1910. Great swags of lightning illuminated the smoky sky and sheets of rain, like a downpour of darkness, blinded the city. Sarmiento sat in his study draining a bottle of brandy. Newspapers scattered on his desk proclaimed the reelection of President Porfirio Díaz with 91 percent of the vote, and previewed the Centenario parade—“a pageant of the history of México from the aborigines to the present day”—slated for September 16, Independence Day. He wondered whether Don Guillermo Landa y Escandón, the governor of the city, was also awake, wilting his costly bed linens with sweaty anxiety over whether the rain would spoil his twenty-million-peso party. As for Díaz, Sarmiento had no doubt he slept the peaceful sleep of one who knows that, whatever mishaps may occur, someone else will take the blame.

Sarmiento pictured the city's sewers overflowing and churning the dirt roads of the poor neighborhoods into a fecal stew. The floating gardens of Xochimilco would be sinking beneath the rising tide, and the heaven of saints and angels carved into the ancient facade of the cathedral weeping rainy tears. He imagined the vanquished lake on which the city was constructed rising from its grave. Good, he thought morosely, let the flood come and wash away the entire sordid enterprise that is the Republic of México!

Madero had been arrested in Monterrey just before the August 21 election. Five thousand of his supporters were also jailed, including Sarmiento's cousin, Luis. Luis was in the city at the time and was thrown into the prison at Belem with hundreds of other Maderistas. He got word to Sarmiento, who immediately went to the jail where he had met Alicia so many years earlier. Outside the crumbling walls of the prison, the makeshift village he remembered was still there. Beneath multicolored canopies, vendors sold food the families of prisoners took into the jail for the inmates and
evangelistas
wrote pleas for pardons to Don Porfirio on behalf of their illiterate clients. Sarmiento made his way past a cockfight and through a crowd of beggars and pickpockets, brushing away the graphic solicitations of drunk prostitutes. He presented his credentials to an unshaven guard, who waved him through the gate. He found his cousin in the same courtyard where Sarmiento's father had once been confined that preserved some of the serenity and loveliness of the ancient convent. It featured a small, well-tended garden and a fountain spilling clear water. The men who populated it were, like himself, clearly middle class by their dress and attitudes. They stood in small groups smoking and laughing. Among them was Luis.

“Primo,” he called, breaking away from his friends. He embraced Sarmiento. “Welcome to purgatory. Cigar? They are excellent.”

“No. Are you all right?”

“Perfectly,” Luis said. “Other than being in prison, of course. But I am, at least, in excellent company.” He waved his cigar at the men surrounding them. “We have lawyers, newspaper editors, university students, socialists, anarchists, and even a priest or two who take their faith seriously. We were all arrested at the same time.”

“On what charges?”

Luis laughed. “On what charges, indeed, Primo! Madero was arrested for insulting the president and fomenting rebellion. The rest of us were simply rounded up. I assume we will be released after the election, or maybe when the Centenario is over. My only fear is that Díaz will apply the
ley fuego
to Don Pancho—you know, shoot him in the back and claim he was trying to escape. I think his family is rich enough to protect him.”

“Under the circumstances, Luis, I admire your equanimity,” Sarmiento said.

Luis led him to the fountain, where they sat on its broad edge, the water murmuring at their backs. “This is only a temporary setback. The revolution Madero has set in motion cannot be stopped.” He grinned. “Stop looking at me as if I were delusional!”

“Aren't you, though?”

“If you had seen what I have seen in the last twelve months, Miguel, you would understand. Ten thousand welcomed Madero in Guadalajara, twenty-five thousand in Puebla. In Guanajuato, the mayor ordered the lights turned off at the railroad station, and we were met by three thousand carrying torches and candles. No matter how many thugs Díaz sent to break up our rallies, the people would not be intimidated. Madero was on fire, speaking with a passion and conviction that has not been heard in this country for forty years. They called him the Incorruptible, the Liberator, the Apostle of Freedom.”

“But Díaz remains president,” Sarmiento observed.

“No matter,” Luis said, tapping ash from his cigar. “Porfirito may have won the battle, but he has lost the war.”

“Because of the histrionics of the crowds? Come now, Luis, that's just Mexicans being Mexican. You can go to the Plaza de Toros any Sunday and see the
matadores
receive the same reception.”

“It wasn't just the crowds,” Luis said softly. “I saw with my own eyes that Díaz's México is a Potemkin village, Miguel. All facade with nothing behind it. I saw the real México. The
México profundo
where the poor are so hungry they eat grass and bark. I met Indians whose land is being devoured by Díaz's cronies, entire towns swallowed up, and the people reduced to peonage. I talked to Mexican railroad workers who are paid a fraction of what the American owners pay their own countrymen for the same work. And it's not just the poor or the laborers,” he continued. “There are two generations of university-educated men who cannot find work anywhere but on the lowest rungs of their professions because Don Porfirio's clique of eighty-year-olds squat at the top. The conditions of México are ripe for revolution.”

“Yet here you are in prison,” Miguel said.

“For the moment,” he said, smiling. “The old man will release us eventually and then the real fight will begin. Will you be with us, Miguel?”

“With you where? Back in jail? In front of a firing squad?”

Luis frowned. “Wouldn't even those fates be preferable to continuing to serve the dictator, Miguel? Or you still delude yourself that this rotting carcass of a government can be changed from within?” He stood up. “Come, let me introduce you to my fellow prisoners, the future of México.”

H
is cousin's questions hit their mark. A year had passed since Sarmiento had asked Alicia to abandon her sanctuary for the Yaquis so that he could work within the government to make some improvement in the lives of the city's destitute. In that time, he had proposed extending new sewage lines into old neighborhoods, replacing the fetid tenements that housed half the city's poor with apartments that let in air and light, and inoculating children from the preventable diseases that carried thousands of them away each year. He presented his reports to the always-enthusiastic Liceaga only to receive his responses from the Ministry of the Interior—impossible, too costly, impractical, a waste of resources, no, no, no. Instead, the government spent a million pesos on a glass curtain designed by Tiffany for the stage of the new opera house. It spent millions more to finish the cenotaph to Juárez and to erect the Column of Independence at the foot of the Paseo de la Reforma. The government paid the expenses of the thousands of dignitaries from across the world who flocked to the city to witness the apotheosis of Don Porfirio Díaz on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of México's independence. The poor were swept off the streets of the central city and kept away by battalions of police who enforced the cordon sanitaire with billy clubs and mass arrests. Luis was right—Ciudad de México was a Potemkin village, a make-believe European city designed for the tourists and the notables from abroad.

He had moved from his desk to the couch, where he lay with his eyes closed thinking about his father. He remembered the old man sitting in his cluttered room scribbling his diatribes against Don Porfirio and, for the first time, knew how he must have felt, driven into despair, half-mad with rage, and poisoned by his own ineffectuality.

“What can a man do?” he heard himself ask. There was no answer but the rain.

A
licia, awakened by the thunder, reached instinctively to Miguel's side of the bed and found it empty. She sighed. She knew she would find him in the morning asleep in his study, smelling of drink. This had been going on for weeks now, since his cousin had been arrested and imprisoned at Belem. At first she thought it was Miguel's concern over Luis's fate that kept him awake, but she had gone with him to visit Luis and found the younger man cheerful and in good health. In better health than Miguel, who subsisted on brandy and cigarettes. She knew generally the source of his distress was his frustration at his work, but not the particulars because in the last few weeks he had gone silent except for the occasional bitter remark. She worried about him, of course, but his self-absorbed misery also struck her as a form of spiritual vanity. For her, what men wanted and what God provided were often two different matters entirely. Once that was accepted, the task was to get done what was possible with the means that one had been given, not to lament the fact that those means were never enough to do everything. Miguel was a victim of his own rationality—if there was a solution to a problem, he could neither understand nor accept why it was not put in place. His inability to understand the world's irrationality drove him to despair. For her, the world was innately a fallen place—even Saint Paul had confessed, “The good I would do, I do not: but the evil which I would not do, that I do”—and redemption was a process, not a program.