The City of Palaces (36 page)

“I do not understand, Don Sacramento.”

“The women of México will soon enough know for themselves the suffering their soldiers have caused my people,” he said.

He spoke without anger or malice. Before she could question him further, Tomasa came down the stairs clutching her carpet bag and went to Sacramento's side.

“Thank you, Doña,” she said.

Alicia stepped forward, embraced the girl, and kissed her forehead. “You are my daughter now, Tomasa. I will remember you in my prayers, and one day perhaps we shall meet again in a different and happier world.”

“Take this,” Sacramento said to her. He removed from his neck a string of wooden beads that held a large wooden cross. The beads were carved in the shape of an eye. “It will protect you on your journey home. Come, child.”

The man and the girl left her standing alone, her fingers attempting to decipher the meaning of the eye-shaped beads, and her mind the meaning of his quotation from the gospel.

T
he Silver Ghost came to a stop in front of a small warehouse. Painted on its facade was the faded word
mortuario
, and beneath that, in fresher paint, Teatro Palantino.

The driver turned and said to Damian, “We are here, sir.”

Damian exclaimed, “This place! Are you sure?”

Alicia removed the cheap handbill from her bag, studied it for a moment, and said, “This is the correct address.”

“You said it was a theater,” her brother-in-law said.

“Teatro Palantino,” she replied. “Just as it says on the building. It must be inside the mortuary.”

“This is absurd,” Damian said. He barked at the driver, “Go inside and see what this place is.”

But Alicia had already opened her door. “No,” she said. “I will see for myself.”

“Alicia,” he called after her.

“Mamá,” José said, scurrying down from the front seat. “Wait for me.”

She reached for José's hand and they entered the building. Aisles of plain pine coffins were stacked from floor to ceiling in a large, square room. The coffins were unlined and unpainted, except for the smallest—intended for infants and children—which were blue or pink or yellow or white. Cobwebs glittered in the dark corners and a heavy layer of dust covered the roughly planked wooden floor. The place smelled faintly like a forest. At the far end of the aisle, a lantern's glow illuminated the dimness.

“Come,” his mother said, walking toward the light. José followed, running his finger in the dust along the sides of the coffins. At the back of the room was a wall with two curtained openings, one marked
Entrada
and the other
Salida
. Between them was a table, where a gaunt man sat behind a cashbox and a pile of pink slips of paper.

“Is this the Teatro Palantino?” his mother asked.

The man rose, bowed, and said, “Yes, Doña.”

At that moment, José heard his uncle call, “Alicia!”

“This is the place,” she told him. “I was just speaking to the proprietor.” Addressing him, she asked, “The stage is behind the wall?”

“Not a stage, Doña. A stage is not required.”

She pulled the handbill from her purse. “‘Moving pictures of the Rebellion,'” she read. “Is that not the title of the performance?”

“Yes, Doña, but it is not a performance; it is the thing itself.”

“The thing itself!” Tío Damian exclaimed. “What nonsense.”

From behind the wall, a piano began to play a popular tune.

“Well, something is going on back there,” his mother said. “How much for tickets, sir?”

“Five centavos for you and the gentleman. The boy can enter free.”

She gave him some coins in exchange for three pink tickets. “Through this curtain?” she asked, indicating the
entrada
.

“Yes, Doña,” he said.

“Alicia,” his uncle said. “This is foolish. You have no idea what is in that room. We should leave now.”

She took José's hand and, looking over her shoulder, said, “Are you coming, Damian?”

He sighed, rushed forward, pushed aside the dusty curtain, and entered first. José clutched his mother's hand, his stomach fluttering, as the curtain fell shut behind them. They found themselves in a dark room. A single beam of light shot through the musty air from the rafters and illuminated a large sheet of muslin hanging from a cord stretched across the front wall. A collection of chairs and benches faced the sheet. To its right was the piano, where a corpulent woman played a love song by the light of a candle. There were perhaps a dozen other people in the room, men mostly, laughing, talking, smoking, and drinking. The air smelled of sawdust, cigarettes, and pulque. José looked upward at the beam of light and followed it to its source, a small, square opening in the wall of a tiny room built into the rafters. He looked back at the sheet of muslin, white in the darkness, lit up like a ghost, and felt a shiver of premonitory excitement.

His uncle was saying, “This is hardly the place for a respectable woman,” and he felt his mother waver. He grabbed her hand and said, “Mamá, I want to see what happens!”

After a moment, she said, “We are staying, Damian.”

“As you wish,” he replied curtly. “Let's sit apart from the rabble at least.”

As the piano player thudded away, the room filled with still more people and the air grew warmer and thicker. His uncle put his handkerchief to his mouth, and his mother fanned herself with the handbill. When the room was at capacity, the pianist began to loudly pound the opening chords of the National Hymn. José saw flickering movements cross the muslin. He thought they were shadows, but then, as they came into focus, he gasped. He saw photographs of men in a dusty town and then—

“Mamá,
mira
!” José shouted. “The pictures are moving!”

The handbill slipped from her fingers, and she murmured, “Damian, look. It's Don Francisco Madero. He's walking toward us.”

His uncle muttered, “
Fantástico
.”

Elsewhere in the audience were cries of disbelief and fear, one woman screaming, “Ghosts! Ghosts!” as she ran from the room. Others in the audience laughed with delight at the little figures of Madero and his advisors and generals. José watched raptly. The men were strolling on a wooden sidewalk beneath shop signs in English, their mouths moving in animated but silent conversation. They stopped and Madero seemed to look straight out at the audience, eliciting more gasps, for it was as if he were present. His image faded to a black square that occupied the whole of the sheet. Written in white lettering on the square were the words “
Vista de la revuelta
.” Cries of “Read it! Read it!” and “What does it say?” rose up from the illiterate audience. His mother stirred beside him, then stood up, and read in a clear, firm voice, “A view of the rebellion.”

These words faded and another line of script appeared. She read, “The second battalion leaves Chihuahua to fight the rebels.” The words died away to reveal a line of soldiers moving behind mounted officers across a desolate landscape. Visible in the background were the roofs of a small city. A horseman galloped toward the audience, growing larger and larger until he filled the sheet and it seemed that he was about to leap into the audience horse and all. There were screams and the clatter of overturned chairs as people threw themselves to the ground. José, who had remained riveted to his seat, felt his heart pounding in his throat.

Then the horseman receded, the scene faded, and another sentence appeared on the screen. As members of the audience got up from the ground and dusted themselves off, his mother read, “Rebels led by Francisco Villa prepare to fight the army.”

There appeared on the muslin screen another desert scene, also filled by a group of armed men. Unlike the straight rows of the federal soldiers, these men did not march in formation nor did they wear uniforms. They were clad in the dirty white trousers and torn
zarapes
of the poor. They tramped in a ragged line behind a small, unshaven man on horseback wearing a dusty suit and a bowler hat, his chest crisscrossed with bandoliers.

José heard his uncle murmur, “There are so many of them.”

In the back of the room, a man shouted, “
Viva la revolución!
” The pianist began to hammer out the presidential anthem, but other men in the audience took up the cry. His uncle glanced nervously around the room. On the white sheet, there was a single word.

His mother read the word. “Attack!”

A panoramic image filled the screen with the shapes of tiny men moving toward each other across a barren landscape fringed by distant mountains. The two lines of soldiers hurled themselves at one another across the desert scrub. Puffballs of smoke signified artillery shots, and men fell like puppets cut from their strings. Horses reared, tossing their riders, and galloped off toward the mountains. The audience was silent. Even the piano player had paused to watch the scene of slaughter that unfolded on the white cloth with the intimacy and the strangeness of a dream. José was transfixed. He felt as if the curtains of another world, a spirit world, had parted and offered itself to his gaze. It was a world so luminous and ephemeral he was afraid to breathe lest he dissolve it. And then the image faded, replaced by another mournful black box with another single word splashed across it.

Squeezing his hand, his mother solemnly intoned, “The dead.”

An invisible eye slowly moved its gaze among the ghastly open-eyed corpses of dead soldiers of both armies lying on the ground while vultures strutted in the background. The image faded quickly and mercifully, replaced by more words.

“Madero in defeat.”

Madero appeared in the field of dead soldiers, his face a study of sorrow. He was watching a man kneel at the side of a soldier, evidently trying to assist him. The man turned to speak to Madero and the camera recorded his face.

“Papá!” José shouted. He ran toward the sheet. “Papá!”

But, as he reached the front of the room, his arms open to embrace his father, the image faded, replaced by a final word: “
Fin
.”

S
armiento watched his wife disappear into the desert landscape. Beneath a gigantic sky, flat plains of broken, tawny earth covered by low-growing, gray-green scrub rolled like a low tide toward distant barren mountains. The monotonous vista was broken only by gigantic saguaro. They were startlingly alive, thick-scabbed limbs twisting upward as if in supplication. The winter sun turned the dust to gold. It swirled upward from the ground and sprayed itself against the train, fogging the windows, slipping in through cracks and crevices, covering every surface with a thin layer of dirt. This is not the landscape of beginnings, Sarmiento thought. He glanced down at his dusty trousers and shoes and, in a spasm of panic, wondered, “What have I done?”

His misgivings were not allayed when he reached the American city of El Paso. It was separated from Ciudad Juárez by the muddy torrent of river the Americans called the Rio Grande and the Mexicans, the Rio Bravo. Luis's last telegraph had instructed him to check into the Pickwick Hotel. Sarmiento found the place, a modest two-story building off the main street. He entered, registered, went up to his room, and waited. A day passed, two, then three. He left his room only to eat in the downstairs restaurant, sitting at a table that gave him a view of the lobby. The hotel clerk supplied him with American newspapers, which he searched for news of Madero's progress. There were a few, brief reports of skirmishes and small uprisings, interspersed with official reassurances from Díaz's government that all was well. “Was there a revolution?” he wondered with dismay. The panic he had felt on the train again gripped him. By the fourth day, he was planning his return to México. And then, as he sat at lunch, trying to force himself to take a few bites of inedible pot roast, he looked up and saw his cousin stroll into the hotel lobby, smoking a cigar. Sarmiento nearly wept with relief.

B
y nightfall, he was back in México, drinking shots of whiskey with Luis at the table of a squalid cantina on a dirt backstreet of Ciudad Juárez, as his cousin recounted the story of the first days of the revolution. Luis had been among the small band of Madero's followers when the little man had first slipped into México from Texas. Madero had expected to meet a volunteer army that would carry him in triumph to the capital. Instead, Luis told Sarmiento, they got lost and spent a miserable night wandering through the bitter cold. The following day, when they kept their rendezvous, Madero's revolutionary army consisted of two dozen peasants armed with machetes and rocks.

At that point, Luis said, many of Madero's advisors—often, like Madero himself, the younger sons of wealthy families—tired of playing at rebellion and slunk home to their families.

“Madero persisted,” Luis said. “We went from village to village all across the north, where he proclaimed the revolution, and, remarkably, Miguel, the revolution began.”

“But where is it, Luis?” Sarmiento asked. He glanced around the room. A few rough-looking men sat at other tables, drinking and talking loudly above a band of musicians led by an accordionist playing a kind of harsh, country polka. “Is this it? A roomful of men getting drunk?”

“Yes, Miguel,” Luis replied. “These men and men like them
are
the revolution. Common people with nothing to lose but their misery. They fight the same way they drink, hard and grim. They're not like the toy soldiers Don Porfirio parades down the Reforma on Independence Day. We are a people's army.”

“When does it plan to start fighting?” he asked dryly. “There was almost nothing in the American newspapers about the rebellion.”

Luis sneered. “The Americans think we are an inferior race, lazy, ignorant, and vicious. The prospect of Mexicans killing each other does not disturb them. Of course, they do not take Madero seriously. To them, he is simply another ‘greaser.'”