The City of Palaces (5 page)

“There you go again, Miguel, disappearing on me,” Jorge Luis complained. “You're the host here, remember?”

“I'm sorry, Primito,” Sarmiento replied. “Listen, I want to ask you about a woman.”

Jorge Luis widened his eyes in mock surprise. “A woman! Are you thinking of leaving the priesthood, Miguel?”

Sarmiento shook his head. “You exaggerate.”

“Do I? In all the time we have spoken since you returned, you have never before asked about a woman. Who is this paragon who tempts you from your vow of chastity?”

“Her name is Alicia Gavilán.”

This time Jorge Luis's surprise was genuine. “You're joking.”

“I am not.”

His cousin burst into laughter. “No, really, this is a joke.”

Impatiently, Sarmiento said, “If you don't know the lady, fine, but I am completely serious.”

Jorge Luis exclaimed, “But Miguel, the Gorgon!”

His face flushed with anger. “Really, Primo, you go too far.”

Jorge Luis gathered himself. “You
are
serious,” he said with wonder. “All right. I know the lady, by reputation only, for one seldom sees her out in society. Alicia Gavilán, Condesa de San Juan de Aguayo. The youngest of the four daughters of Don Alphonso, Marqués de Guadalupe Gavilán.”

Sarmiento managed a shocked gasp. “A countess? Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. The family's titles go back to colonial times. Of course, I suppose she and her family should properly be called ex-nobles since we are a proper republic now,” he said, placing a mocking hand over his heart. “After the French invasion their titles and an old palace were all they had left. The old
marqués
—that traitor—sided with the French and their puppet emperor, Maximiliano. He was lucky he wasn't shot. Instead, his properties were confiscated and he was ruined. I heard for a while they were so hard up they were eating beans off of gold plates. But the old man was able to marry off his eldest daughters to various rich friends of our beloved president,” he continued. “Nothing makes new money respectable more swiftly than a wife with a title and an old name. Sadly, he could not find any takers for the Condesa de San Juan.”

“Why was that?”

“Did you see her face?”

“She was wearing a veil.”

“I have never seen her without one,” he said. “She had smallpox as a child. Evidently she is hideously scarred.”

Sarmiento was stunned into silence.

“She devotes herself to charity,” Jorge Luis continued. “A most worthy lady, but …” He shrugged. “I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Miguel.”

“You yourself have never seen her face,” Sarmiento said. “So you are only repeating gossip.”

His cousin raised an eyebrow. “Miguel, the lady is nearly thirty, has never married, rarely goes into society, and never without covering her face. The smallpox story is universally known and accepted. If it were untrue, there would be other explanations for her unusual behavior.” He yawned. “My God, I am exhausted. Forgive me, Primo, I must go home and get some sleep. I have a full night ahead of me at the gaming tables at the Jockey Club.”

“You're incorrigible,” Sarmiento said.

With more melancholy than he had perhaps intended, his cousin replied, “Sadly, you are correct.”

H
is cousin's tale about Alicia Gavilán and her family only whetted Sarmiento's curiosity about the lady. The smallpox story was a plausible explanation for her mysterious appearance, but Sarmiento reasoned that a vaccine would have been available to a woman of her age when she was a child. He casually inquired of a few of his well-bred women patients about whether they had been vaccinated against the pox and was appalled to discover that, to a woman, they had not.

“But why?” he asked a flirtatious chatelaine in her pink-and-gold salon. “Didn't your doctor insist?”

“Dear old Don Octavio?” she replied with amusement. “
Mais non!
He was a traditional doctor. He never laid a hand on me except to take my pulse and even then my mother and a maid had to be present. That he should penetrate me with a needle was unthinkable.” Her eyes flashed naughtily. “Of course, if you wished to do so, I would willingly submit.”

“You are past the age when smallpox is a threat to your health,” he replied.

“No penetration, then?
Quel dommage!
” she said, smiling. “Now, dearest Doctor Miguelito, I am still suffering from the most excruciating headaches. Won't you give me a little more laudanum for my pain? Just a few more pills?”

As discreetly as he knew how, he asked a few of his patients about Alicia directly. They repeated the same story his cousin had told him: a catastrophic childhood encounter with smallpox had ruined her face and her prospects, so she had thrown herself into charitable works. The tone of the telling varied—some of the ladies spoke pityingly, others admiringly—but all implicitly agreed that Alicia Gavilán's fate was a sad one. He wondered about that because Alicia Gavilán's misfortune had evidently given her a license to move about in the world that none of his grand ladies enjoyed. His patients could not leave their homes except on the arm of their husbands, unless it was to attend Mass or to shop. Even then, more than one woman complained, she could not enter unescorted any of the new department stores that had sprung up in the city. Propriety demanded that she remain in her closed carriage while female clerks brought items for her inspection. It was unimaginable that he would have encountered one of his ladies roaming through the courtyards of the prison at Belem. Did Alicia Gavilán appreciate her mobility, he wondered, or did she regard the necessity of performing her good works at places like Belem yet another mark of her misfortune? That seemed unlikely. In contrast to his unhappily self-absorbed patients languishing in the lap of luxury, Alicia Gavilán had not appeared to him in their brief encounter to be unduly concerned with herself. She had completely given herself over to the messy task at hand, staining her costly gown with blood and afterbirth. The more he thought about her, the greater his desire to meet the lady again, but he could not imagine the circumstances that would permit an unmarried woman and an unmarried man to renew their accidental acquaintance without causing a scandal.

A
bemused Sarmiento stood in a corner of the anteroom in the Church of the Flowering Cross that sheltered the baptismal fount. The smells of incense, oiled wood, candle smoke, and human musk sent him back in memory to Sunday Mass with his mother, who had died when he was five. His father, a militant atheist, mocked her churchgoing and Sarmiento had eventually adopted his father's view of religion, albeit without his belligerence; faith seemed to the rational Sarmiento simply unintelligent. Still, those hours at Mass with his mother, his hand wrapped in hers, were among the warmest memories of his childhood. This was the first time since her funeral that he had been in a church for a religious service. He was aware of a faint luminosity in the scented air that, had he been religious and believed such things, he would have said was his mother's spirit hovering beside him.

He had come at the invitation of Alicia Gavilán to witness the baptism of the infant whom he had delivered at Belem prison. Her note had reminded him the child was being cared for by the mother's sister and her husband, but, she had written, the mother had chosen the boy's name to honor the man who had saved both their lives: Miguel. Doña Alicia thought Sarmiento might wish to be present at his namesake's christening. Rationally, he knew that she could have had no idea of the emotions her invitation had stirred in him, reminding him, as it did, of his own lost son. Yet he could not help but imagine that the purpose of her invitation was to assuage some part of the secret grief for his son he had carried around with him for over a decade. As he stood in the church, watching the ritual proceed, remembering his mother and his son, the sadness that clouded his heart was softened by nostalgia.

The infant's young aunt, her braided hair covered by her rebozo, held him in her arms while a bespectacled priest in an elaborate lace vestment poured water over the child's head and intoned, “Miguel Ángel, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

In a white gown and a broad-brimmed hat with a heavy white veil, Alicia stood behind the parents, acting as the boy's godmother. At the moment the water splashed the child's forehead, he howled, his cries dispersing like wisps of incense as they rose to the vaulted ceiling. His tiny dark face darkened to purple as he wailed. The priest glanced with displeasure at the child's uncle, a homely boy uncomfortable in his Sunday best. He tried to shush the child, to no avail.

Alicia said, “Father, he is frightened, let me calm him.”

“Daughter, the time,” the priest said pointedly. Sarmiento guessed the priest was thinking of his lunch and his glass of amontillado.

But Alicia had taken the wriggling infant from the aunt and carried him beneath a fresco depicting the baptism of Jesus. She began to sing to the child, but not in Spanish. Sarmiento recognized a few words of Nahuatl, the language of the
pelados
. Where, he thought wonderingly, had this aristocratic lady learned the language of the slums? After a moment, the child's cries ceased and Alicia returned the child to his aunt.

“We can continue now, Father.”

The priest completed the rite by which Miguel Ángel Trujillo was received into the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. Alicia slipped the priest a small brocade purse that he received with satisfaction. No paper currency for a Gavilán, Sarmiento thought. The old families still dealt in gold coin.

She turned to Miguel. “Señor Doctor, come and be properly introduced to your namesake.”

He stepped forward toward the family, who greeted him with downcast eyes and shy smiles.

“This is the doctor who brought your nephew into the world,” Alicia said. “Let him hold the boy, Remedios.”

The girl surrendered the now-passive infant to Sarmiento, who took him reluctantly, fearing that he would see his dead son's face and be unable to contain himself. But when he took the child and looked at him he saw only a baby with big shining eyes, stray tufts of hair, and the bland expression of an animal on a face in which human consciousness had not yet fully dawned. After a moment, Sarmiento handed the child to his aunt.

“I think I will wait outside,” he said to Alicia, “and then, if I may, I will see you to your home.”

“Yes,” she said. “I will only be a minute.”

He left her in conversation with the child's aunt and he saw her slip the girl a purse that was fuller than the one she had given the priest.

He stood on the steps of the church, which faced the
plazuela
of San Andrés. San Andrés was typical of the old colonial neighborhoods that lay northeast of the Zócalo, the great plaza anchored by the cathedral and the National Palace that was the heart of the city and the nation. In the center of the
plazuela
was an old fountain that had been the neighborhood's water source for centuries; women still came to dip their clay pots into its brackish stream. Around the fountain was an open-air market where the Indian vendors had set up their blankets and hawked their wares. Street peddlers lumbered by, their goods attached to their bodies with poles and straps—one of them carried a dozen bamboo cages filled with songbirds—singing the merits of their wares: “Such excellent sweets! The saints themselves desire them!” “Who can resist my roasted corn? Not you, not you, not you!” The
plazeula
was bounded on the south by an old mercantile arcade. Beneath its arches, men in shabby frock coats sat at rough tables that held fountain pens, jugs of ink, and sheaves of colored paper. They were the
evangelistas
, scriveners who for a few pesos composed letters for the illiterate poor of the city. To the south of the little plaza was the bulk of a massive colonial palace that Sarmiento now knew was the ancestral residence of the Gaviláns.

It was a scene that deepened the nostalgia he had felt in the church because this was the city he remembered from his childhood and the city he had carried in his heart during the years of his exile. Yet now that he was back, he felt like a tourist, a stranger, as if his long sojourn in Europe had irreparably broken the cord that had tethered him to home. He drifted through old neighborhoods like this one and the flashy new neighborhoods of Don Porfirio's modern city feeling like a ghost.

He sensed her presence before he heard her speak. “Thank you for coming, Doctor,” she said, pausing beside him. “I do not think you are a regular churchgoer.”

“No, I'm not a believer, Doña Alicia,” he said. He glanced upward at the massive, flower-covered cross. “I must say, though, I have seen many churches but never one with this particular decoration.”

“The flowering cross? It is unique, in the city at least,” she replied. “One of my ancestors commissioned it, and even he did not understand its meaning.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I will tell you as you walk me to my residence.”

He extended his arm, and she slipped hers through it. He was aware of the scent of rose water. The white veil was more translucent than the dark veil she had worn at the prison and he could more clearly make out the contours of her face, which seemed covered by a thick layer of powder. He turned his eyes away, not wishing to stare.

A
licia was aware that he was making an effort not to stare at her. Perhaps, she thought, she should simply raise the veil and let him look, but then all he would see was the white mask she had fashioned from creams and powders. She felt a pang of sadness but then composed herself and told him the story of the flowering cross that she had first heard as a child in the kitchens of the palace.

She could not remember a time when she had not sought out the dark, fragrant warmth of the kitchens and the company of the women and girls who labored there at the tiled stoves and ovens and the big tables where chickens were plucked, corn was ground, and fruit and vegetables chopped. When she had first begun to appear in the kitchen as a child in pigtails, the cooks tried to bribe her to leave with sweets, and when that failed, she was scolded, ignored, and reported to her mother. “
No es la costumbre
,” her mother told her—it is not customary—in what would become a refrain of her childhood. She did not argue or defend herself, but simply returned to the kitchen again and again until, by sheer, silent persistence, she overcame all objections. Her post was a tall, three-legged stool near where the head cook, Chepa, commanded her realm. Although she was not allowed to do any of the work—that was far beyond the pale for a daughter of the house—she learned by watching. One morning, the
molendera
failed to appear, causing consternation as she was the only one who knew the exact formula of the morning chocolate for the lady of the house. Alicia took up the mortar and pestle, ground the cocoa herself, and added the proper amounts of cinnamon and sugar. The maid returning with the empty cup also brought a coin from the mistress to the
molendera
. Alicia gave the coin to the maid. After that, although her rank was never forgotten, it no longer created an inviolable distance between her and the other women. They no longer talked around her, but with her, and to her, and they shared their stories, which were as old and complex as the stories of her own family.