The City of Palaces (47 page)

O
n the afternoon of the seventh day of the battle, Alicia returned from visiting families who had chosen to remain in the neighborhood. She hurried to the toilet, where she gushed watery diarrhea. She composed herself and started toward the kitchen to help the cooks, but she did not get out of the room before she again had to seek the toilet. By now, with the onset of a headache and nausea, she was forced to admit she was ill. The symptoms were familiar—she had seen them among the poor of San Francisco Tlalco—but she hoped she was wrong about what they indicated. She changed into a light shift and lay down, but every few minutes, she was back on the toilet, the expulsions progressively more painful as there was less and less to expel. The headache throbbed in her temples. She thought back to the cup of tepid, muddy tea she had accepted two days earlier from a woman in Tepito to whom she had brought food. The woman—Luz, she remembered, her name was Luz—had poured her gratitude into the cup, and Alicia could not refuse to drink even though it was a near certainty the water had come from the fetid communal well she had passed earlier. A simple cup of tea, no more than two swallows—how fragile the body was, she thought. She was convulsed by abdominal cramps and staggered to the toilet. As she tried to make her way back to the bed, she was overcome with dizziness and fell to the floor. Her last conscious thought was
cholera
.

S
armiento had been working at a Red Cross field hospital set up in the Alameda, but on the morning of the seventh day, restless to see the damage to the capital, he had gone out in one of the vans. The city was a sepulchre. The police had abandoned their corner posts, the priests locked up their churches, and even the doors of the great cathedral were closed against the importuning of the faithful. The thirty boxcars of pulque that slaked the thirst of the city did not arrive at the Estación de Colonia, and the fruit-, flower-, and vegetable-laden
trajineras
did not skim the surface of La Viga. The big green and yellow
tranvías
remained parked at the station in the Zócalo. The stables were filled with restless, hungry horses. The familiar trucks of the Buen Tono cigarette factory were nowhere to be seen, and the factory was shut down. The great department stores along the Avenida San Francisco—the Port of Veracruz and the Iron House—and the lowliest dry goods shops on the dirt streets of Colonia San Sebastían were shuttered and barred against looters. Theaters were closed, the billboards of cancelled performances still splashed across their entrances. As they passed through the Colonia Guerrero, Sarmiento heard a cellist playing Bach's second cello suite, the “Sarabande.” The complex, mournful music crossed the courtyard of a once grand building, now pockmarked with bullet holes, and spilled into the clear, still air. The light, as always, was dazzlingly pure, and above the roofs and domes of the city, Popocatépetl released white puffs of smoke and Iztaccíhuatl spread her snowy body beside him.

The van approached the streets surrounding the Ciudadela, where the rebels remained firmly ensconced despite the government's superior numbers and weapons. As it approached an army checkpoint, Sarmiento observed a truck flying the American flag laden with food and water. The soldiers waved it through. At first, he thought the Americans were bringing food to the starving civilians as a humanitarian gesture, but to his astonishment, the truck drove up to the gates of the Ciudadela. They were thrown open to receive it without any interference by the government soldiers. The same soldiers who had casually allowed the rebels to be provisioned with food and water detained the Red Cross wagon for an hour before they finally admitted it into the battle-torn streets. While he stood with other volunteers at the side of the road waiting to be cleared to enter, Sarmiento saw two other supply trucks admitted into the Ciudadela. He began to understand why the rebels had been able to hold out. Instead of starving them out of their citadel, government soldiers were helping to feed them. The sheer brazenness of the treason made it clear to Sarmiento that the orders to assist the rebels came from very high in the army. He needed to get a message to his cousin, but that would have to wait until he helped scour the area for the wounded or the dead.

In the long evenings, Sarmiento had been passing the time by rereading Bernal Díaz del Castillo's account of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empires. He had last read the Spanish soldier's eyewitness account of the destruction of Tenochtitlán as a boy. Then all his sympathies lay with Cortés's men, who were, after all, his people. This time through the narrative he found himself mourning for the defeat of the Aztecs. Sarmiento did not sentimentalize the Aztecs—Bernal Díaz's horror at their practice of human sacrifice was too vivid and unguarded to have been a falsehood planted by the conquerors to justify their bloody annihilation of the Indians. But Sarmiento knew something that Bernal Díaz did not know: the annihilation of the Indians would continue for centuries after the conquest, by war, disease, enslavement, and destitution, until their population had been reduced to a tenth of what it had been when Cortés reached the shores of México. Sarmiento saw in the streets of the capital that the degradation of the Indians continued to this very moment. At least, as Cáceres had argued, the Aztecs' practice of human sacrifice was ritualized and had served a religious purpose, however benighted. The human sacrifice inflicted by the Spanish had been indiscriminate and pointless. Moreover, it seemed to him that the Spanish had infused their own casual cruelty and contempt for the native people into the Mexican race that emerged from the conquest. Because this Mexican race was half-Indian, this in turn created a nation permanently divided against itself, driven by a self-hatred that expressed itself in paroxysms of violence such as that which now filled the streets of the capital with corpses.

The Red Cross wagon entered the neighborhoods surrounding the Ciudadela, where bodies festered and rotted like the fallen leaves of a ghastly autumn. Gaunt survivors flitted like shadows from one ruined building to another. Sarmiento remembered the passage from Bernal Díaz describing the entry of Cortés's soldiers into Tenochtitlán after forty-five days of siege: “When we returned to the City we found the streets full of women and children and other miserable people, thin and afflicted who were dying of hunger and we found in the streets gnawed roots and bark of trees, the most pitiable thing in the world to see.” Sarmiento could have left behind his black bag because all he did that day was help collect bodies and stack them like cordwood in the wagon for incineration.

Sarmiento asked to be let off at the Zócalo. Since it was no longer possible to penetrate the barricades that surrounded the National Palace, he and Luis had worked out a way to communicate by leaving notes in the shattered masonry of the arcade that surrounded the great plaza. He scribbled his observations of provisions passing through government checkpoints in the Ciudadela, stuck it in the crevice they had designated for the exchange of messages, and then hurried home before the fighting resumed.

J
osé lay on his bed looking through his stereoscope at peaceful scenes of the French countryside. By habit, he reached out his hand to pet El Morito, but the cat had disappeared on the first day of the fighting and had not returned. His grandmother had assured him that El Morito was simply hiding somewhere and would emerge when the gun blasts stopped shaking the walls. José believed her, if only because the alternative was too terrible to think about. He tried not to think at all, but unlike the adults who seemed frantically occupied, José had nothing to do with the long hours of the long days. His parents were gone most of the day to help where they could. His grandmother commanded the remaining servants like a household general, keeping them at their work even as the bombs rained down a half-dozen blocks away. The people of the neighborhood who had sought shelter the first days had either returned to their homes or fled the city. José was alone. He had always enjoyed his solitary pursuits, his soldiers and books, toy theater and marionettes, but that solitude was an oasis from the routines of school and family. Those routines had been shattered, and his current solitude felt more like a prison than a garden.

He was no longer as frightened as he had been after he and his father had driven through the Zócalo and he had seen the dead bodies and the menacing soldiers. He took his cue from the grown-ups. His father was still his father, brisk and energetic; his mother had become, if anything, even gentler; and his grandmother was more imperious. It was if they were actors playing themselves, exaggerating their basic qualities to mask their fear. José imitated their attitudes as well as he could and played himself. But at a deeper level, he was enraged by the grown-ups, by all grown-ups. They had created this horror. They were the ones who slaughtered people in the streets and turned the world upside down for reasons that no one—not even his brilliant father—could satisfactorily explain to José. He could not understand why it mattered so much whether Don Porfirio or Don Panchito wore the presidential sash, that ordinary men and women should pay the price of their lives to decide the issue. For once, he knew his lack of understanding was not because he was unintelligent in adult matters—it was because the carnage in the streets was pointless. The adults had started this stupid fight and inflicted it upon him. José hated them for it. He would never again accept their words with the same credulity as before the war. He promised himself he would not grow up to be like them.

In the meantime, he pretended the sound of the guns was thunder and distracted himself from his anxiety with his toys and books and the piano. But a low, ever-present thrum of fear still ran through his body and fed itself on his thoughts. What if a bomb fell in the palace? What if the fighting never stopped? What if El Morito never returned? And worst of all, what if something happened to his parents or his grandmother? The only way he could overcome these thoughts was by imagining in exacting detail being somewhere other than where he was and removing himself completely from the present.

He put another card in his stereoscope—a hand-painted scene of the endless lavender fields of Provence. He imagined himself walking through the aisles of lavender. He felt the sun on the back of his neck, the soft ground beneath his feet. He imagined a breeze stirring the purple tips of the plants, creating a cloud of fragrance, and the smoky sweetness of lavender filling his lungs.

W
hen Sarmiento found Alicia collapsed on the floor of their bedroom, he thought she was dead, killed by an errant bullet or bit of shrapnel. Then her body moved with her breath and he dropped to his knees beside her. Her skin was cold and clammy and she had soiled herself. He called for her maid, Catalina. Together they cleaned and changed her. He carried her to their bed.

“Alicia,” he murmured. “Darling, can you hear me?”

She opened glazed, unfocused eyes. “Miguel?”

“I found you on the floor. How long have you been like this?”

“The water was bad,” she whispered. “Cholera, I think.”

He had guessed as much. “How long have you been sick?”

“Today. It started today.” She grimaced. “Toilet.”

He helped her up and settled her on a chamber pot, where she expelled another blast of fishy smelling ordure. When she was back in bed, he emptied the pot but kept a specimen. While she slept, he examined the specimen under his microscope and saw the rice-shaped bacterium—
Vibrio cholerae
—that was the agent of cholera. All he could do for now was restore fluids to her body to avoid death by dehydration. He was hopeful she would recover—she was strong, seldom ill, and he was there to nurse her—but outbreaks of cholera in the city had claimed thousands of lives so he did not deceive himself about the gravity of her condition.

After he had made her comfortable, he went into his mother-in-law's apartment, where he found her at her desk going over the household accounts.

“Alicia is ill,” he said. “Cholera. She drank tainted water. If she drank it here, the household may be in danger of an outbreak.”

La Niña blanched. “But I instructed the servants to boil all of the drinking water as you directed.” She stood up and came around to him. “How is she?”

“She's still in the first stage,” he said, casting about for a euphemism. Finding none, he said, “Extreme diarrhea. There is little I can do until these episodes end except to give her fluids.”

La Niña frowned. “What do you need?”

“Pure, unadulterated water,” he said.

She nodded. “I will personally supervise the boiling.”

“All of our water containers must be cleaned and purified,” he said. “The latrines should also be cleaned and scoured with carbolic acid. If anyone else begins to show any signs of the disease, you must let me know immediately. I will stay with Alicia.”