The City of Palaces (4 page)

“God is love” was the answer to the question that her life had become after her illness and her child's death. “God is love” was her instruction, her vocation, her purpose, and had been so from that moment she had stumbled across those words when she was fourteen years old. She lifted her eyes to her ruined face in the mirror and thought, “What is there to regret?” Her deformity had humbled her, closed the doors to a conventional life of marriage and children, and led her to a life devoted to what her mother scornfully called her “good works.”

She knew other women in her circle, including her own sisters, wondered why she had not simply become a nun. But she had had no desire to lock herself away in a palatial cloister with the old maid daughters of other affluent families to dwell in aimless comfort. She felt called to a life of service, not contemplation. Over the years, she had created for herself a circuit that took her among the poorest of the city where she gave whatever material and spiritual assistance she could.

When she had first set out, shyly, uncertainly, she had had no idea what to expect of herself or of those whom she wished to help. Her deformity relaxed the suspicion of the poor toward people of her class because in their eyes her scars rendered her as poor, in her way, as they were in theirs. There was never any question of her being one of them—she wasn't and would never be—but in time they trusted her enough to be who they were in her presence, a wounded and vibrant people, the truest Mexicans of México. She loved them in all their imperfections. She loved the life force that sustained them even as the world—her world—ground them into the dust. She loved that they forgave her for coming from that world and accepted her as she was. She felt most alive among them and closest to the faith that had broken her open when John's letters of light had entered her heart.

And yet no matter how intensely alive she felt among these friends, how grateful she was for the love she felt for and from them, she remained a solitary woman. This sense of her solitude had grown upon her as the time slipped away when, had life been different, she would have been a wife and mother. She often felt her thoughts returning to that unlived life and sometimes, as this morning, when she had helped to deliver Lorena's child, the thoughts could not be banished with prayers for strength and acceptance.

Recalling the events of the morning, she found herself thinking with some guilt about Miguel Sarmiento. She recognized his name as soon as he said it—society women friends of her sisters were among his patients and her sisters had repeated the gossip about him. They said he was the only child of crazy Doctor Rodrigo, and he had departed México abruptly a decade earlier under a cloud. The particulars of the scandal were unknown but the subject of endless, tittering speculation, all of it involving love gone awry. He had returned a year earlier, a full-fledged physician, handsome and unmarried and as mysteriously aloof as a Heathcliff or a Mr. Darcy. The association with a character from an English romantic novel was heightened by his fair skin, pale green eyes, and chestnut-colored hair: “Pure Spanish stock,” her sisters said approvingly. “Not a drop of Indian in him.”

Gossip bored Alicia and she had only half-listened to her sisters' breathless accounts of Miguel Sarmiento. Even so, a mental picture of him had formed in the creases of her mind: a cold, proud macho; a rooster. She knew she was being unkind, but as she had no expectation of ever meeting the man except perhaps in passing, her unkindness seemed a venial sin at best. But now that she had met him, the injustice of her judgment shamed her.

When she had rushed through the courtyards of Belem to see if the midwife had arrived, all she had consciously noticed about him was that he was carrying a doctor's black leather satchel. Only later, after he had left, had she sifted through her other impressions. He was as handsome as advertised, but disheveled in a way that suggested to her an absence of vanity. His black suit was dusty, his collar had seen better days, his hair was somewhat greasy, and there were patches of stubble on his face indicating that his morning ablutions had been performed in haste or indifference. She had detected the stale smell of alcohol on his breath and his eyes were red-rimmed and weary. She also remembered the look that had flickered across his face as he stood in the doorway of Lorena's cell; it was akin to shock, as if the scene recalled some private horror. Nonetheless, once he began to attend to her, it was without hesitation or doubt. He knew what he had to do and he did it. He had saved Lorena's life and her child's life. Afterward, when he looked at the baby in Alicia's arms, another surprising expression passed across his face—sadness. Why, she wondered, would the birth of a child he had saved from death be the cause of grief?

She understood now why he inspired the gossips; there was something paradoxical about Miguel Sarmiento. He
should
have been the rooster she had imagined him to be—handsome, accomplished, arrogant—but instead he seemed like a man who was lost in the corridors of a private sorrow. She had felt her heart open spontaneously toward him, her compassion flow. She resisted. Miguel Sarmiento was not one of the poor to whom she could bring practical assistance—food, clothing, consolation. It was absurd to think she could help him and yet she could not help but hope to see him again.

S
armiento sat at a window table at the Café Royale watching a barefoot
pelado
herd a flock of turkeys down the center of Calle de los Plateros. The Indian, cinnamon-skinned and malnourished with a mop of inky hair, was, like most Indians to Sarmiento's eyes, of indeterminate age—perhaps twenty, perhaps sixty. He wore a tattered, long-tailed shirt, and in apparent ignorance of a recently passed city ordinance commanding the wearing of undergarments, a soiled breech cloth tied around his waist and loosely looped around his genitals. The bobble of his penis was disgracefully visible to passersby as he made his way down the narrow road. Expertly, he kept the squawking turkeys in a straight line with a long stick to rein them in when they began to wander. The birds were small and stringy, but their plumage was as darkly iridescent as a ball gown. Sarmiento assumed the turkeys were on their way to one of the city's markets and that day's end would find them defeathered, cut up, and boiled beneath a layer of
mole poblano
.

In Europe, where Sarmiento had lived for the past decade, the incursion of the country into the city would have been deemed picturesque. But in Ciudad de México, the reflection of a peasant in the plate glass windows of shops that sold French wines and English frock coats reproached the pretensions of the nouveau riche who shopped there and they were not amused. Even now, a police officer—whose blue uniform aped the Parisian gendarmerie right down to the short cape—bestirred himself from his corner post. A moment later, the Indian and his birds had been harshly directed to a side street and away from Sarmiento's view.

Across the capital the church bells tolled ten. The shops would not open for another hour. The city would not fully awaken until the sifted gold light that now filled its streets achieved the transparency that made a stroll through them a walk into a dream. During his exile, Sarmiento had often tried to explain México's quality of light, but words, in whichever of the four languages he spoke, always failed him. The light's lucidity was partly a matter of altitude—at eight thousand feet the air was so thin that visitors gasped for breath upon first arriving. Then too, the city lay at the lowest point in a valley ringed by volcanoes creating a canopy of the sky. Whatever the cause, the light poured down with a purity that made every object it touched seem both immediately present and illusory, like something simultaneously seen and remembered.

This effect was heightened by the phantasmagorical nature of the city itself. The ancient stones of the Spanish colonial city sat upon the even more ancient stones of the Aztec city, Tenochtitlán. The Spanish had razed the Aztecs' island capital and dumped its palaces and temples into the vast lake that had ringed it. The great native cypresses—
ahuehuetes
—still grew in the park at Chapultepec, where they had shaded the summer palace of the last Aztec emperor. When the light poured through their leaves, it was as if ten thousand green, translucent eyes looked with unimaginable grief upon the slain city of Tenochtitlán, which the Aztecs had called the navel of the earth.

This is what Sarmiento had been unable to explain to the Romans he befriended on his travels. In their city, the imperial ruins were like the abandoned rooms in the family palazzo, places where their ancestors had lived lives different only in degree, not kind. But in México, the stones beneath the hulking churches and palaces of the Spanish were the gravestones of an alien race whose men had been murdered and its women raped. The conquest had also robbed that race of its vitality. Each generation following the conquest was more servile and lethargic than the last until the Aztecs had devolved from plumed emperors to turkey herders in soiled loincloths. When Sarmiento told his Roman friends that his country was the product of rape, they had laughed gaily and replied, “But all nations are.” Perhaps so, he thought, but in México the memory was burned into the stones and the air.

“Primo, why the brown study?”

Sarmiento smiled up at his cousin, Jorge Luis. “Primo, I didn't really expect you'd awaken to meet me at such an early hour.”

The younger man sat in a quick, tight motion. It could not have been otherwise—his French-cut suit fit him like a straitjacket, constraining his movements, emphasizing his slenderness. Above the stiff collar and black-and-red silk cravat loomed his large head. His eyes were like molten chocolate flecked with cinnamon and his lips were thick and soft. His black, curling hair was only partly subdued by the liberal use of lavender-scented pomade. There was an ever-present flush beneath his dark skin; he was as lovely as a girl. Perhaps aware of this, he compensated for his prettiness with a cynical attitude, an unkind wit, and a tone of voice that implied the knowledge of scandal. Officially he held the position of secretary to his father, Sarmiento's senator uncle, Cayetano, but spent his days writing verse and his nights in what passed for debauchery in the capital—drinking, gambling at the Jockey Club, patronizing the better brothels—with a cohort of other young men whose only purpose in life was the pursuit of pleasure. Ennui was part of Jorge Luis's affectation, but sometimes Sarmiento imagined that his cousin's boredom with this pointless circuit of cheap sensations and easy amusements was real and that, beneath his cultivated image of frivolity, a man of substance was struggling to emerge.

Jorge Luis arranged himself, as best he could, in a languid posture. He withdrew an English cigarette from a silver cigarette case and lit it. “Awaken? I have not yet been to bed. Coffee!” he shouted to no one in particular. “And you? Why did you insist on meeting at this uncivilized hour?”

“I always wake early,” Sarmiento said. “A habit from my student days in Germany. Nothing clears one's head of last night's wine more quickly than cutting into a cadaver in a freezing room at seven in the morning while an elderly professor screams instructions in German.”

Jorge Luis shuddered. “I don't know what is more appalling about that story, the cadavers or the Germans. My grand tour of the continent will begin and end in Paris.”

The waitress appeared with Jorge Luis's coffee. She was a plump, pretty Indian girl who moved uncomfortably in her starched, striped shirtwaist and dark skirt; her braids were piled atop her head and her broad feet were shoved into narrow boots. She caught Sarmiento's eye and he smiled encouragingly at her. She carefully set down the cup and saucer, napkins, spoon, pot of heated milk, and a bowl of sugar cubes. When she finished, she nervously wiped her hands on her apron and murmured, “Anything else, sir?”

Jorge Luis flicked his fingers at her dismissively.

“My God,” he said to Sarmiento, “did you see her fingernails? Filthy. I don't know why you come here. The Café de l'Opera employs French waiters, not the local ‘niggers.'”

The American word dropped from his cousin's lips with a harsh contempt that amazed Sarmiento since Jorge Luis was nearly the same shade of brown as the waitress. Like most Mexicans, Jorge Luis was a mestizo, in whose veins ran a mixture of American Indian and Spanish blood. His mother, Sarmiento's aunt by marriage, had been a full-blooded Indian, a country girl whom his uncle had married during the war against the French. She died giving birth to Jorge Luis, who had, therefore, no memories of her. But Sarmiento, seven years older than his cousin, recalled her with affection. It surprised him that his quick-witted cousin seemed oblivious of the irony of his contempt for the Indian poor of the city, but, Sarmiento had observed, it was an obliviousness shared by most of the city's mestizo upper class who also disdained the
pelados
. Sarmiento imagined that Jorge Luis had imbibed this attitude with the absinthe he drank in the Frenchified bars and cafés with the other young men of his set who were desperate to be mistaken for Europeans.