The City of Palaces (53 page)

S
armiento plunged into the crowded streets behind the National Palace. When he and Alicia had discussed the possible consequences of his speech, they had agreed the likeliest outcome was his arrest and confinement in Lecumberri. She would seek him at the prison when he did not return home. Should he return home? He thought not, at least not until he had time to work out another plan. But where could he go? He glanced down the street and saw a pair of priests, deep in conversation, walking toward him. Cáceres, he thought. Cáceres would take him in. He moved swiftly and purposefully south, toward San Francisco Tlalco.

The priest was in the garden tending his remaining rose bushes. Sarmiento paused at the gate and watched him. The first time he had entered the garden it had seemed to him an unlikely slice of paradise in a blighted neighborhood. Cáceres had shown him, however, that San Francisco Tlalco was not a human refuse pile but a community. Its inhabitants were the vestigial descendants of the ancient race of the Aztecs, and the parish garden was a lingering breath of the garden city of Tenochtitlán. When he had first come into its streets in his white uniform and his citation book, Sarmiento had seen only the degradation of the Indians. Cáceres had taught him to see the triumph of their survival after centuries of violence, disease, and destitution. Sarmiento did not pretend to understand everything that the survival of the Indians meant for México, but he knew México would never achieve wholeness until it embraced the heritage they represented. It was, he thought, as the American president Lincoln had said in the passage of a speech Madero liked to quote: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Until México accepted the past that its Indians represented, it would have no peace, and without peace the future of México, like Ciudad de México itself, would be constructed on a swamp.

“Pedro,” Sarmiento called, entering the garden.

Cáceres looked up, saw him, and grinned. “Miguel, have you come to help me? If so, you are overdressed.”

“I have come to ask your help,” Sarmiento said.

The priest put down his shovel and gazed at him with concern. “You are distressed, Miguel. What has happened?”

“Can we talk in private?”

The priest wiped his hands on his trousers and approached him. “Yes, of course. Come.”

I
n her anxiety, Alicia went to the one place in the palace where she had always been happiest—the kitchen. Chepa, seeing her shuffle slowly into the big, warm, fragrant room, clucked, “
Mija
, you should be in bed! How thin you have become! What can I feed you? Graciela, bring the lady some of that fresh bread you have just taken out of the oven. Juana! Butter and honey. Quickly.”

Alicia eased herself onto the bench at the long table where the women of the kitchen plucked and chopped, ground and skinned, mixed and kneaded. Sunlight glinted off the copper pans hanging from racks near the big, tiled stove. She drew her rebozo over her thin shoulders and relaxed to the smells and noises of the kitchen. She smiled at the little altar to San Pascualito, the aproned kitchen saint, who held a wooden spoon in one hand and a bowl in the other. Instead of flowers, the altar was decorated with garlic, onions, beans, flour, and peppers. As she defeathered a chicken, one of the girls sang a song Alicia had sung as a child, “
Tengo una muñequita vestida de azul, zapatitos blancos, camisón de tul
…” Chepa brought Alicia thick slices of warm bread spread with butter and dripping honey, and a cup of sweet, milky coffee.

“You must eat!” she said fretfully.

Alicia knew the cook was thinking of the many meals she had sent up to Alicia's room during her convalescence, only to have them returned almost untouched. To appease her, Alicia picked up a slab of bread, its warmth tingling her fingers, and took a bite. It was delicious! Surely, she imagined, when Jesus broke the bread he passed to his followers at his last supper, it had tasted like this bread—dense and substantial—not like the flat, tasteless hosts the priests handed out at the Eucharist. She licked honey and butter from her fingertips to Chepa's evident delight.

“Another bite,
mija
,” the cook said. “You must regain your strength.”

She sipped her coffee, nibbled at the bread, and said, “My dear, if ever I had to leave this place, I believe I would miss you the most.”

“Leave this place?” Chepa snorted. “Why would you leave this place? What troubles you, Daughter?”

She smiled, kissed the older woman's fingertips. “Nothing. At this moment, I am very happy.”

Quarreling male voices followed by banging on the door to the palace startled the women into silence. Alicia rose from the table and went out into the courtyard, followed by the cook. The front door flew open. The porter Andres stumbled backward and fell to the ground. A group of men brandishing rifles and pistols poured into the courtyard. Although they were dressed in ordinary clothes and were neither police nor soldiers, they appeared organized and purposeful.
Ladrones
, was Alicia's first thought, but what kinds of thieves would dare such a brazen daylight assault on the palace?

“Who are you?” she demanded, swiftly barring their way forward. “What do you want?”

She was addressing an older man—the others seemed like boys, barely out their teens—who wore a black suit, sombrero, and collarless white shirt.

“Sarmiento,” he growled. “Where is he?”

“If you are referring to my husband, he is not here. Leave now, or I will call the police.”

“Move!” he said, and pushed her aside so roughly she stumbled and fell into Chepa's arms.

“Stop, you devils!” Chepa shouted. “Do you not know you are in the palace of the Marquesa de Guadalupe Gavilán?”

The leader ignored her and called out, “We want Sarmiento.”

He and the other men moved toward the second gate, into the family's courtyard. Alicia, recovering her balance, rushed ahead of them and threw herself before the gate.

“Unless you are the police, I will not allow you to enter.”

The leader drew his pistol and pointed it at her. “Lady, if you do not move, I will shoot you.”

Chepa screamed. Startled, he spun toward her, and shouted, “Shut her up!”

One of the other men struck the cook with the butt of his rifle, knocking her to the ground.

Alicia, shocked by this violence, pressed herself more tightly against the gate. “Leave, I tell you!” she commanded. “Leave my house!'

She heard footsteps running across the courtyard behind her. She glanced back to see Santos, the majordomo, running toward her with a pistol in his hand. The leader of the invaders raised his own pistol and aimed it at the servant.

“Santos, no!” she screamed and threw her body between him and the shooter. There was an explosion and she felt molten heat sear her insides. Her hand went to her belly and blood gushed between her fingers. She fell. Screams and shouting filled the courtyard. She saw the boots of her attackers as they fled the courtyard. Then she saw nothing.

C
áceres should have returned by now, Sarmiento thought anxiously, though in the dim recesses of the church crypt he had no real sense of how much time had passed since the priest had left for the palace. He sat on a cot at one end of the long, musty room. Illuminated by torches were rows of tombs. Along the walls were shelves lined with skulls and bones that reached from the stone floor to the vaulted ceiling. The tombs held the remains of three centuries of parish priests. The bones along the walls were the Indians who had been buried in the church cemetery, long since dug up as the neighborhood—once its own small village—was engulfed by the city. Ordinarily, human remains inspired neither fear nor reverence in Sarmiento, for whom death was simply a cessation of biological functions and not the portal to an afterlife. At the moment, however, with his own mortality seemingly hanging in the balance, the staring sockets of the dead, the smell of bone crumbling into dust, and the skittering of rats made him shiver from more than the damp and cold. He pulled an itchy blanket around his shoulders and resigned himself to waiting for the priest.

He had fallen asleep. His eyes fluttered open and a cobweb of images from a dream clung to his consciousness—Paquita, the girl he had killed; Alicia's face; a bloody hand, perhaps his own. Some of the torches had gone out and darkness encroached upon him like a rising tide. The priest, he thought, where was the priest! Had he been caught and detained? Was Sarmiento's hiding place being tortured out of him? Had he seen Alicia? He could wait no longer, he decided, but would go home, whatever the risk. At that moment, the door to the crypt was thrown open. A square of light appeared at the top of the stairs followed by a rush of footsteps that belonged to more than one man. He sprang up and looked for something, anything, with which to defend himself. He grabbed an iron candelabrum and prepared to swing it at the intruders, when he saw Cáceres and Damian. His brother-in-law was, as always, impeccably groomed and dressed, but he was red-faced from exertion.

“What is this?” Sarmiento demanded of the priest. “Why have you brought my brother-in-law?”

“Doña Alicia has been shot,” Cáceres gasped.

Sarmiento dropped the candlestick. “No,” he moaned. “No.”

Damian stepped forward. “Huerta's thugs invaded the palace. She tried to prevent them from shooting a servant.” He laid his hand on Sarmiento's shoulder. “She's not dead, Miguel, but she is badly wounded. You must come.”

He shook off Damian's hand. “Why are you here? You told me if I challenged Huerta you would abandon me.” He looked at Cáceres. “Is this a trap? Did he force you to bring him? Are there soldiers waiting for me upstairs?”

“No, Miguel,” Cáceres said. “I swear on my vocation. Your wife lies gravely wounded. She begged me to bring you to her and Don Damian heard. He insisted on accompanying me, to help if we were stopped.”

“Look, Miguel,” Damian said. “I know what I told you, and had it been you they had shot …” He faltered and when he spoke again his voice shook with feeling. “But it was Alicia. Please, this is no trick.”

Confused and horrified, he hesitated. Was he still dreaming?

“If you fear Huerta's men will return to the palace, don't,” Damian said. “The whole city knows what happened today. The palace is surrounded by a mob of Indians who revere your wife. They will not permit entry by anyone who would harm her. Come, there is no time to argue further.” He grabbed Sarmiento's shoulders and begged, “You must trust me, Miguel.”

He shook himself into alertness. “Take me to her.”

O
utside the palace, as Damian had said, an immense crowd thronged the gates. He recognized people from the neighborhood and from San Francisco Tlalco, but others he had never seen before. They let him pass, accompanied by Damian and Cáceres, in mournful silence. A group of nuns in white habits knelt in the first courtyard, praying the rosary. In the second courtyard, society women mingled with street vendors and maids, and richly robed cathedral priests stood with Franciscan monks in brown habits and sandals. Their murmurs of consolation followed him as he passed among them and climbed the stairs to his family's apartment. In the parlor, his sister-in-law Nilda was deep in conversation with a surgeon named Terraza. Sarmiento knew him. He was a butcher. Nilda looked at him and hissed, “You! This is all your fault.”

“Quiet, woman,” Damian said curtly.

Terraza approached, hand outstretched. The man's shirt cuffs were soaked in blood. Her blood.

“Miguel,” Terraza said, grasping his hand. “Such a tragedy.”

He jerked his hand out of the surgeon's. “How is she?”

“A bullet to the abdomen,” he said. “It perforated the bowel. There was a great loss of blood. I removed the bullet and sutured. But as you know, in these cases the real threat is sepsis.”

Sarmiento stared at the bloody cuffs. “She is already weak, recovering from a serious illness. Even a minor infection will kill her.”

“Yes. I'm sorry. I did all I could. I did my best.”

Sarmiento nodded. “Thank you.”

He turned his back to the others and wept.

T
he numbness in her fingertips was slowly spreading through her fingers and soon she would be deprived of the sense of touch. The other senses would follow—taste, smell, hearing, sight—and she would leave the world blind, deaf, and insensate. Her anxiety was mitigated by her subtle awareness of doors opening—the same doors through which she had tumbled in her vision of unity. They opened now more slowly, deliberately, inviting her to step across their thresholds. She hesitated, knowing that once those thresholds were crossed, there would be no turning back. So this was dying—the pause between two realms of existence that allowed the soul a moment to compose itself before death, like gravity, tugged the leaf from the branch.

A fleshy blur above her resolved itself into the features of Pedro Cáceres. The priest's careworn face and white hair were luminous. He squeezed a bit of sensation into her failing hand.

“Daughter,” he murmured. “My dearest daughter.”

She heard herself croak, “Where is Miguel?”

“Safe at the church. I will go and bring him here.”

“First, confess me,” she whispered.

“Of course.”

“Father, forgive me for I have sinned,” she said, but she abandoned the familiar formula and cried, “Pedro, I am afraid of dying!”

“That's no sin, Alicia. Even Christ in the garden was afraid of dying. I assure you,
mija
, you should have no more fear of damnation than he did.”

“I am not afraid of hell,” she whispered. “I am afraid of heaven.”

She saw his confusion and wished she had the strength to explain that the source of her anxiety was the annihilating purification that awaited her.