The City of Palaces (44 page)

He sat on the bench in the front of the room, staring at the muslin sheet, still shaking from his encounter with the old woman. He realized she was a
bruja
, a witch. Chepa had told him about such people, men and women who could cast spells and speak to the dead. He had always thrilled to the cook's stories but now he remembered anxiously that she warned him never to give a
bruja
his true name or any item he had touched, and he had done both. Would the
bruja
find him and cast a spell on him? He waited for the film to start and to distract him with its magic from his fears.

The moonbeam shot across the room above him, the sheet filled with light, a black box materialized, and then the words:

This was followed by the words “
L'Inferno del gran poeta Dante
.”

The film was Italian, and as José quickly gathered, depicted the journey of the poet Dante into hell guided by the spirit of another poet named Virgil. The opening scenes were dark and ominous, but thrilling in the way that José had come to expect from films. The play of shadow and light drew him into the story so thoroughly it seemed he had left his body and was following the two poets. Every emotion and sensation they experienced ran through him as well. So completely had he surrendered to the film that when he followed the poets into the circle of gluttons, a spasm of shock passed through him.

Naked men writhed and twisted on the stony ground beneath torrents of rain and clouds of mist. José had never seen a naked man before, but as he watched, he felt that some corner of his mind had longed for these images. He did not understand why the sight of their muscled chests and thighs, lean buttocks, and the mysterious triangles of hair that cloaked their genitals both mesmerized and mortified him. All he knew was that his skin prickled with excitement and shame.

The poets descended further. The images of hell became darker and more frightening. He felt himself sinking into their horror as if water were closing over his head. The two men entered the Wood of the Suicides. The bare trees and the filthy bird creatures hopping along the blasted ground rose up in his imagination like vomit he could not expel. Having surrendered to the power of the film, he could not stop it as he could close a book that frightened him, nor could he control the images that flooded the screen as he could control his own imagination. He was as beguiled, as hypnotized by the flickering images of hell as he had been by Tetrazzini's voice when she sang
Aida
. Some part of him knew this hell was as illusory as Aida's Egypt, but the illusion was like a threshold that, once crossed, drew him into a reality so saturated with emotion it consumed him.

So, unwillingly but unblinkingly, he followed the poets into the trenches of hell, to the flaming tombs in which the heretics burned for eternity and to where the blasphemers lay beneath a rain of fire. The poets crossed a narrow bridge across a gorge where, in the river of filth below, the dissolute tried in vain to wash away their sins. José watched the poets approach the slow procession of hypocrites weighed down by robes of lead, past Caiaphas, Jesus's condemner, now himself crucified on the floor of hell. The lake of ice was like a vast chessboard where the treasonous were frozen to their necks. It was here that José, surfeited by the images of horror, was aghast at the sight of one man feasting on the brains of another and at last had to turn his head aside. When he could finally bring himself to look at the screen again, it was filled with the three-headed image of Satan, himself frozen in the lake. In one of his mouths was the wriggling body of Judas. José watched the enormous jaws bite down on the struggling legs and torso. Satan's eyes, beneath eyebrows as thick as malevolent caterpillars, looked surprised at Judas's resistance to being eaten. His clawlike fingers tore at Judas's parts, like a man dismembering a roasted chicken. The poets climbed his hairy hide to the surface of the earth, where, their backs turned to the mouth of hell, they beheld the stars. The film ended.

It was dusk when José left the theater, the sky above El Carmen shading into the darker blue of evening. He stumbled home, frightened by the shadows deepening in the doorways, by the gaunt faces of the beggars who approached him with outstretched hands crying, “
por Dios, por Dios
,” by the skeletal burros shaking beneath their heavy burdens, and by the painted faces of the women who accosted him from the alleys with lewd hisses. By the time he arrived home, his heart was like a bird beating its wings against its cage. He ran to his mother and confessed that he had disobeyed her, willing to risk punishment in exchange for consolation. That night the nightmares began.

H
is mother kissed his forehead and again reminded him, “What you saw was not real, José.”

He wanted to believe her, and yet he wondered how could hell have been imagined in such detail if someone—Dante or the man who made the film—had not been there? “But there is a hell, isn't there, where bad people go? I don't want to go there. Please don't let me go there.”

“Are you a bad boy, José?” she asked gently.

He sniffled. “No,” he said, but the image of the naked men passed through his head with the shameful memory of his excitement. “I'm not a bad boy, am I?”

“No,
mijo
, you are a good and gentle child. You do not have to worry about hell. Now, say your prayers and ask God to help you cast these images out of your head. Think, instead, of the sweetness of his heaven.”

“Will you stay with me?” he pleaded.

“Of course,” she said. “Always.”

T
he renovated Senate chamber was one of Don Porfirio's more ironic public works because in his time the Senate was a collection of elderly sycophants so responsive to his whims he called it his
caballada
, his stable. In the dowdy old chamber, furnished with spittoons, moth-eaten drapes, and frayed carpets, ancient ex-comrades-in-arms of the president enjoyed a peaceful retirement rubber-stamping his decrees between naps. The potted palms, it was said, were livelier than the solons, and when one senator quietly died at his desk, it was several hours before anyone noticed. With the approach of the Centenario, it was decided to renovate the chamber in anticipation of the foreigners who might wish to observe Mexican democracy in action.

The spittoons were gone, the drapes and carpets replaced. The marble dais from which the president of the Senate presided over his colleagues was cleaned and polished. The old battered desks were replaced with new ones complete with sterling silver ink sets—these quickly disappeared—and red, white, and green bunting was hung along the edges of the ceiling.

When Sarmiento entered the Senate, it was no longer a place of repose but one of buzzing, even violent, activity aimed primarily against Madero's government. Opposition senators heaped scorn and calumny on Madero in vicious speeches that were faithfully reprinted in antigovernment newspapers and accompanied by scabrous cartoons. Madero's Senate enemies, partisans of the old regime, were emboldened as Madero's inability to satisfy the competing demands of his partisans destroyed his popular support. The opposition senators were determined to depose Madero and reinstate, if not old Don Porfirio, another strong man who could govern México with the iron hand they believed it required. Some opposition senators favored General Huerta, recently returned in triumph from Chihuahua, where he had put down Pascual Orozco's rebellion. The old Indian killer, however, continued to profess his allegiance to Madero. Others had encouraged General Bernardo Reyes, Díaz's minister of war. He had launched a rebellion that was quickly quashed, and Reyes now awaited trial for treason in a military prison in the capital. What had drawn the Senate into special session was yet another rebellion.

Sarmiento slipped into the chamber just as the president of the Senate had begun to speak. “We are informed by the government that Señor Félix Díaz, nephew of the former dictator, has landed at the port of Veracruz at the head of a rebel army and declares himself the provisional president of the Republic.”

Cheers from the opposition were immediately drowned out by cries of “Treason!” from Madero's partisans. On the dais the president slammed his gavel ineffectively as the clamor grew, accusations and counteraccusations filling the air. A hand clasped Sarmiento's shoulder. He spun around and faced his cousin.

“Come,” Luis said. “There's a meeting. Madero asks you to attend.”

He followed his cousin out of the chamber and through the labyrinthine corridor of the National Palace to the president's offices. Luis walked briskly and said nothing. His hair, Sarmiento observed, was threaded with gray and his suit draped a thinner body. He had left the Ministry of Government and been assigned to the Ministry of War, where he operated what was called the counterrebellion division. It kept him busier than ever, snuffing out rebellions large and small against the first democratically elected president of México in almost fifty years. As for Sarmiento, he had hoped to enter the Senate inconspicuously, serve Madero quietly until his term expired in 1914, and return to private life. His suspicious election, however, had immediately made him a target of Madero's Senate enemies and the opposition press. Moreover, as Madero's fair-weather supporters abandoned him, he clung all the more closely to those, including Sarmiento, who had been with him in the desert. Inevitably, Sarmiento had been tugged into Madero's inner circle.

He followed Luis into the yellow room where Madero, his brother Gustavo, a few other civilians, and a battery of uniformed army officers stood around the conference table covered with maps. Sarmiento recognized the minister of war and the leader of Madero's faction in the Chamber of Deputies, but of the generals, he knew only Huerta, who glared at him briefly from behind his blue-tinted glasses. He felt out of place among the soldiers whom he instinctively distrusted, even as Madero's government was increasingly reliant on the military for its survival. The maps, he observed, showed the topography of the city of Veracruz and its environs.

One of the generals, pointing to a spot above the city, said, “We could move our artillery here, fire on the barracks, and then send in a force.”

“And turn the streets of Veracruz into a battlefield,” Gustavo Madero said sharply. “Political suicide.”

“An invasion by sea, then?” another general offered.

“Don Félix commands the coastal defenses,” the minister of war said. “We couldn't get close enough to land without exposing ourselves to his guns.”

“Then we have no choice but to surround the city and lay siege,” Gustavo Madero said. “How long can they last?”

The minister of war replied, “They have enough food for weeks, but if we cut the water supply, days.”

Sarmiento said, “If you cut the water supply, you will be inviting a cholera epidemic.”

All eyes were upon him. Gustavo Madero said, “We can't take the city without some casualties. Microbes are cleaner than bullets.”

Huerta cleared his voice and growled, “A government incapable of taking one of its own cities except by siege looks weak.”

No one spoke until the president said, “I would rather look weak than soak the streets of Veracruz in the blood of its residents, General.”

The generals exchanged hooded looks before returning their attention to the maps.

“A siege by land, then,” the president said, “and a blockade of the port. Don't cut the water except on my instructions.”

“And Félix Díaz?” Huerta asked. “When he surrenders, do we shoot him on the spot?”

“No, General,” Madero said, “you bring him here for trial.”

His minister of war said, “Don Francisco, I urge you to reconsider. We don't need a trial to establish that Félix Díaz is a traitor who should be stood against a wall and shot. You bring him here and he will become a magnet for other would-be rebels.”

Gustavo Madero chimed in, “Like Bernardo Reyes. Reyes sits in his very comfortable prison cell writing long letters to his partisans justifying his treason. You can read them in the opposition papers. You should have executed him, Francisco. Shoot Díaz and show the world you have some balls!”

Even the generals seemed startled by Gustavo's audacity in expressing what they were surely thinking themselves, but Gustavo was the president's brother. Unlike them, he could speak his mind without fearing the loss of his command or a transfer to a backwater post in the jungles of the Yucatán.

Madero looked at this brother and said, “An eye for an eye ends in blindness. I will not countenance extrajudicial murder. Reyes and Díaz will be tried, convicted, and punished according to the laws I have sworn to protect and preserve. That's all, gentlemen.”

Two weeks later, Félix Díaz surrendered and was brought to the capital, where he was comfortably lodged in the new penitentiary to await trial for treason.

J
osé's school had been founded as a military academy three hundred years earlier by Spanish Jesuits who in the tradition of their founder, San Ignacio de Loyola, conceived of themselves as God's infantry. Now it was operated by French Jesuits more interested in civilizing their charges than in preparing them for holy warfare. All that remained of the school's martial traditions were the cadet's uniforms its students wore and twenty minutes of drilling each morning in the courtyard. Shouldering wooden rifles, the boys marched to the beat of a drum and fife under the gentle gaze of Frère Reynaud.

On the morning of February 2, 1913, José was treading the ancient cobblestones of the courtyard with his classmates in a disheveled formation not remotely military. The boys laughed and chattered, arms thrown around each other's shoulders, wooden rifles dragging on the ground behind them. Fatty Marquez thought it was funny to use his rifle to poke José in the butt. José turned, glared at him, and hissed, “Stop it, Fatty!”