The City of Palaces (43 page)

“I know nothing about campaigning,” he said, a last weak protest.

That drew a sharp laugh from Gustavo. “You won't need to campaign, Miguel. I can guarantee your election.”

Madero grimaced, and in the look that passed between him and Gustavo, Sarmiento realized that electoral fraud was back.

“Did you not just talk about restoring democracy to México?” he said to Madero.

“Sometimes,” Madero said softly, “the ends do justify the means. I implore you, Miguel. Do this for me.”

The mask of cheerfulness had dissolved, and Sarmiento saw the fatigue and desperation eating into the little man's flesh.

“All right, Don Francisco,” he said. “I will do this for you.”

“And for México,” Madero added.

Sarmiento shook his head. “For you.”

“Forgive me,” Madero said with a sigh.

S
livers of silvery light illuminated the tangle of trees. The branches were leafless and twisted. They ended in nubs like the amputated limbs José had seen in one of his father's medical books. His heart pounded in his chest, and a spasm of nausea constricted his throat. His feet sank into soft, squishy ground. Each step released another jet of the stench of rotting meat that filled his nostrils and clung to his clothes. As he edged his way among the trees there suddenly appeared in his path a man-sized, winged creature covered in fecal-colored feathers. Its face, framed by a mane of greasy hair, was half-human, half-avian. It turned black, irisless eyes on José and croaked menacingly. José staggered back away from the creature, and, as he did, tore through the gnarled branch of a tree. From a dozen broken twigs, voices shrieked, “Why do you hurt us, boy!”

José screamed. El Morito's startled green eyes glared at him for a second and then the cat jumped off the bed. His breath was hard and shallow and his heart pounded in his chest. His bedclothes were damp with sweat. He reached to the bed table and turned on the lamp. The light flickered on, dispelling the shadows in which he half-feared the bird creatures were lurking.

His door creaked opened and his mother entered the room in her nightgown and robe. Her long, thick hair, falling loosely around her shoulders, reminded him of the birds, and he shuddered as she approached him.

“José,” she said gently. “I heard you shout. Did you have another nightmare?”

“Yes,” he said in a quavering voice. “I dreamed of the Wood of the Suicides.”

She sat at the edge of his bed and sighed. “I wish you had obeyed me and stayed away from the Palantino.”

“I'm sorry, Mamá,” he said sobbing, as he threw himself into the cradle of her arms. “I shall never disobey you again. I will never go back there.”

F
or weeks after he had gone to the coffin maker's theater, the flickering shadows on the muslin had replayed themselves obsessively in his mind. He had repeatedly asked his mother if they could return, but her only interest in the Teatro Palantino had been to learn about his father. When he asked to go alone, she told him El Carmen was not a safe neighborhood for an unaccompanied child.

“But I am not a child,” he whined. “I am almost twelve.”

“José, that is enough,” she said in a tone that brooked no further argument. “I forbid it.”

His grandmother, noticing his moping, asked him the cause. He tried to explain to her what he had seen and why it was so urgent that he return. “The pictures moved like a dream, Abuelita, and I want to see them again, but my mother says no.”

“If it is that important, I will send Santos with you,” she said, “but you are not to tell your mother.”

“Thank you, thank you,” he said, kissing her powdered cheek.

One afternoon, while his mother was away, he slipped out of the palace with Santos, his grandmother's majordomo. Santos hailed a cab and they wandered the streets of El Carmen until they found the
mortuorio
just as José had remembered it. José trotted down the coffin-stacked aisles to the table where the man sold tickets, Santos at his heels. Santos bought tickets and they went into the close, dark room that smelled, Santos complained, like the privy in a cantina. José chose a bench closest to the screen, near where the fat woman pounded away at her out-of-tune piano. As before, they waited until the room was filled and then, like the purest and most intense moonbeam, the white ray of light materialized above their heads and filled the muslin sheet.

A black box was projected upon the screen and words appeared in white lettering—
La voyage dans la lune
—and beneath those words, “Geo. Méliès, Star Films, Paris.” José had no idea what the latter words meant, but the first phrase filled him with excitement because it conjured up the title of Jules Verne's
From the Earth to the Moon
. He hoped that the similarity between the titles was not a coincidence. His hope was rewarded when the title faded. A long-haired, snowy bearded man, clad like a medieval alchemist in robes bespangled with stars and planets, appeared before a gathering of similarly dressed men. Illustrating his scheme on a blackboard, he proposed a journey to the moon. José clapped his hands, earning the suspicious stares of the sodden crowd that surrounded him.

With increasing wonder, José saw that the story unfolding on the screen was just as Verne had told it: the forging of a bullet-shaped chamber, which was loaded into an enormous cannon and fired into the night sky to carry six of the men—astronomers—to the moon. In images that words could never have captured, the moon grew larger and larger until its cratered surface filled the screen. It revealed the craggy face of the man in the moon, just as José had always imagined he would look. His astonishment turned to laughter when the projectile pierced the moon's eye. He gasped in amazement at the lunar terrain the astronomers encountered when they emerged from their vessel, arabesques of pale stone spiraling against the moonless sky. As the exhausted astronomers slept, seven stars rose in the sky above them, each with the face of a woman. The stars faded and the moon goddess appeared swinging on a crescent, while Saturn, like the Ancient of Days, looked down at the astronomers from among his rings.

In his conscious mind, José knew, as he had known at the opera, that he was looking at painted backdrops, not stars and planets, and human beings, not celestial creatures. But the flicker of shadow and light where image tumbled upon image, magically fading in and out, enchanted him. It was as if he had been carried to the screen and deposited there, unseen but present as the astronomers, fleeing a sudden snow, escaped into a tunnel that led to a subterranean landscape filled with enormous mushrooms. He shared their terror when they encountered the Selenites, insectoid moon people, moving like contortionists across the frightening topography. When the astronomers ran from the hostile Selenites to their vessel, José's heart raced as if he were running with them. When they reached their capsule, he lurched forward, silently urging them into the chamber. The capsule was poised at the edge of the cliff. One of the astronomers threw a rope over the cliff, climbed down, and loosened the vessel so that it fell from the moon and dropped like a stone through the sky. He watched it plunge into the ocean, scraping the bed of the sea. Only when the capsule floated to the surface where it was towed by a steamer to port did José expel his pent-up breath. On the screen the word “
Fin
” released him from the film's spell. Dazed, he found himself back in the loud, squalid room beside Santos, who was doubled over, eyes shut, muttering prayers.

Later, his grandmother summoned him to her bedroom and said, “Santos told me that you took him to a haunted mortuary filled with ghosts and devils! He was so frightened I asked your father to give him something to calm his nerves.”

“They were not ghosts, Abuelita, they were moving photographs that told the story of a journey to the moon.”

She looked at him with complete incomprehension. “Whatever it was, he refuses to go back. I am sorry, José, but perhaps your mother was correct to forbid you from this … activity.”

José did not protest. He knew now how to find the theater and he had every intention of returning.

J
osé,” his mother said, stroking his hair, “what you saw were only images, photographs. They are no more real than the book that first described them.”

He lifted his head from her breast. “But they
were
real. The people on the screen were real.”

“Actors,” she said. “They were only actors,
mijo
.”

He wanted to believe her, but he could not shake the residual images of the tormented souls in hell that filled his head when he shut his eyes.

S
everal weeks passed before he was able to return to the Palantino. He had set out from the palace under sunny skies, but the capricious summer weather turned stormy as he retraced his path to El Carmen. He was caught in a downpour of warm, oily rain. He sheltered in a dark, dusty shop called La Huesana. Its walls were lined with shelves that held the store's small stock of candles, religious statues,
milagros
, and jars and jars of dried herbs. He shook off the rain and read the labels on the jars. Some he recognized—rosemary, basil, spearmint,
epazote
, rue, sage. Others were strange in name and appearance—withered flowers, scaly bark, and dried twisted roots in jars labeled wolf bane, angel's trumpet, and devil's claw. Copal burned at an altar in a dim corner of the room where seven candles, each a different color, flickered before a robed and hooded statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As he approached the altar, he was conscious of the shuffle of his footsteps on the dusty floor and the pounding rain on the roof. The objects laid out on the table among the colored candles—glasses of water, vials of oily substances, hand-scrawled notes, a bottle labeled Agua de Florida—mystified him. The statue was clad in a rainbow-hued robe the same seven colors as the candles—gold, silver, copper, blue, purple, red, and green. He looked up at the hooded face, expecting the stern but loving visage of Guadalupe, and gasped when he saw, instead, a skull. Only then did he realize that the figure held a scythe in one hand and a globe in the other.

“La Santisima Muerte,” an old voice rasped, making his heart jump. “Our lady Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Dead.”

José looked at the person who had spoken, a woman dressed in the garb of the poor of the city—full calico skirt, dusty at the hem, a stained embroidered blouse, a black, frayed rebozo draped across her shoulders. She seemed ancient, older even than his grandmother, who was the oldest person he knew. Her white hair was piled into a bun and her face was creased, careworn, and dotted with moles, warts, and age spots. She studied him with rheumy eyes, glistening and damp.

“She is the most powerful of the gods,” she continued, in the same rasp that he imagined was what his cat would sound like if it could speak. “Everyone must come to her. The world is her field, the cutter is her harvesting tool.” She reached out a withered hand and touched his face appraisingly. Her fingers were as brittle as the leaves of an old book. “You are a pretty boy,” she said. “A two spirit. What is your name, child?”

“José, Señora. I came in from the rain. I did not mean to disturb you.”

“The Lady called you,” she said, gesturing toward the skeleton she had called Saint Death. “Some peril must await you, but she will protect you if you give her reverence.”

He wanted to run from the incense-scented shop, but he felt rooted to the floor.

“Give me a coin, two-spirit child,” the woman said.

José dug into his pocket and pressed a silver coin into her hand, thinking he would buy his way out. She took it and commanded, in a tone he dared not disobey, “Wait here.”

She disappeared behind a beaded curtain he had not noticed before. He heard the beating of wings, a soft cooing, and then she shuffled into the room holding a pigeon in her hands. She lifted its head to him for him to touch. Mesmerized, he stroked the tiny, feathered head. The pigeon turned its head toward him, eyes black and hard, like the beads of his grandmother's rosary.

“What is a two spirit, Señora?” José asked as he continued to nervously stroke the pigeon's head.

“The two spirit combines the male and the female in a single body and is desired by all. Men and women both will burn for your touch. To incite such desire is a dangerous thing. I will implore the Lady's protection for you, but the cost of her protection is life. Not yours, child, but someone near you.”

José was now confused and terrified. “I must go, Señora,” he said.

“You will stay until the ritual is over,” she commanded.

He wanted to leave but could not make his legs move. Horrified, he watched her take the pigeon and with a swift twist break its neck. At the altar of Santisima Muerte, she plunged a little knife into the pigeon's breast and caught its blood in a shallow dish. She began an incantation. José ran out of the shop into the rain and did not stop until he came to the theater.