by Michael Nava
His part in Paquita’s gruesome death had dispelled any notions of his own romantic capacity. He quelled his physical needs with brief, clinical visits to one of the city’s better whorehouses. It had been years since he had allowed himself to be curious about a woman, but as the day wore on he could not put Alicia Gavilán out of his mind. She was clearly a woman of breeding and quality; courageous, too, to have set foot into the squalid swamp of Belem without a male escort. Who was she? Why was she there? What husband would have allowed it? He assumed she had worn the heavy veil to avoid attracting the crude attentions of male prisoners. He found himself imagining what she must look like—a lovely face framed by abundant, dark hair, green eyes flickering, lips soft and full. He caught himself remembering the husky musicality of her voice. He wanted to hear that voice again, to know her story. If she had any status in society, there was one person who would know her, because he knew everyone: his cousin Jorge Luis.
An old but elegant rockaway, drawn by two fine horses with braided manes, carried Doña Alicia Gavilán through the narrow streets behind the Zócalo—the city’s immense central square—east to the ancient plazuela of San Andrés. In the curtained carriage, she removed her hat and veil and inspected her dress. Its dark folds were stained with blood and afterbirth, for which she would hear a lecture from the laundress, Alfonsina. She would have to return to Belem in a day or two to take Lorena’s son from her and give him to his aunt for safekeeping until such time, if ever, that Lorena was released. The thought of removing a child from his mother sent a singular pang of sadness through her as she remembered her own child. At least, she reflected, Lorena would be able to see her son, if only when he was brought to visit her in the prison. Her own child she would never see again, not in this existence.
She parted the curtain slightly and gazed out the window, finding solace in the familiar scenes of her beloved city. Beneath tattered muslin awnings, Indian women sold peanuts by the piece and slices of sweet potato grilled in small, ceramic wood-fire ovens. Aguadores pushed their way through the crowded streets, bearing the enormous clay jars filled with water that they carried from the city’s central fountains to sell in the makeshift tenements filling in the edges of the city. A cargador carried a steamer trunk on his back from the train station to a downtown hotel. The barefoot, smudged-faced children hawking lottery tickets paused in their cries to watch her sleek coach pass.
The distinctive face of the church of San Andrés, where she had been baptized, confirmed, and expected to be buried, came into view. Deep green walls—unusual in a city of reds, tans, and ochers—enclosed the carved facade that still earned the church a place in the tourist guides. Above the portal was an immense panel composed of tezontle, the light volcanic stone that had been the building blocks of the colonial city. Most of the carvings were the typical and dizzying churrigueresque ornamentations—fruits and cherubs, saints and lions, prophets and penitents, figures and forms piled one atop the other like a mad sermon in stone. But in the center of the panel was an immense cross carved with a profusion of flowers: daisies, roses, lilies, and other blossoms that had evidently existed only in the imagination of the mason. There was nothing else like this cross in the entire Ciudad de México. Her ancestor who had commissioned the facade two hundred years earlier was ordered by the archbishop to remove it. To the archbishop, the absence of the figure of the crucified Christ on so public a symbol of the Catholic faith rendered the cross suspect, if not heretical. The proud Marqués de Guadalupe Gavilán, rather than admit he was ignorant as to the meaning of the cross, refused. The archbishop—who was, after all, a cousin—eventually withdrew his writ after the marqués agreed to increase his contribution to the building of the cathedral. And so the Church of the Flowering Cross—La Iglesia de la Cruz Florecimiento—remained one of the city’s mysteries.
The rockaway came to a stop before the great doors of the palace of Gaviláns. Carved in stone above the portal was the family’s coat of arms and its motto, God Alone Commands Us. A niche above the crest held a statue of the family’s patron saint, the warrior archangel, Michael. Other decorations carved into the facade and set atop the finials continued the theme of arrogance and belligerence adopted by the first marqués. But three centuries of rain and wind had beat against the walls, cracking ornaments, chipping tiles, and covering the walls with dust and silt; floods had eaten into the wood of the great doors and earthquakes had brought down half the parapets; the king of Spain who had conferred upon the Gaviláns their lands and title when México was his property was dust in the tombs of the Escorial; the lands were long gone, sold off, abandoned, or expropriated. All that was left to the family were its titles and its residence. The palace had become the mausoleum of an antiquated kind of privilege honored solely for its ornamental value.
The porter hurried from his cell to hold open the carriage door. Alicia settled her hat on her head, drawing down the veil, and descended. The porter let her into the palace while the carriage was driven around to the stables. As soon as the doors closed behind her, Alicia again removed her hat and handed it to a servant girl who was waiting for her in the first of two large courtyards.
“Thank you, my dear,” she murmured as she stood and allowed her treasured residence to welcome her return.
Each of the two courtyards was enclosed by two floors of archways. The many rooms of the palace were set back from the courtyard by broad corridors of polished tile. Along the corridors of the bottom floor of the first courtyard were large planters in which the cooks grew herbs for the house and bamboo cages filled with songbirds. The rooms on this floor housed the kitchens, laundry, and workshops. On the second floor were the quarters where the servants lived. In the middle of the courtyard was a three-tiered cantera stone fountain reached by pathways that cut through flower beds thick with geraniums, lilies, and musk roses. The exterior walls were painted a deep pink-red and each archway was outlined in limestone. The paint was faded and the stone was pitted with age. The fountain, too, gave the appearance of great age and even the flowers seemed to issue a perfume from a distant time.
A towering wrought-iron gate separated the second courtyard from the first. Through the gate was visible a similar layout of arched corridors surrounding a garden with a fountain. The second courtyard, however, was larger than the first by half. The flower beds in its garden were more luxuriant; the fountain was taller and more ornate and it fed a pond adorned with clusters of blue-flowered papyrus and water lilies. The limestone facings around the archways were carved with acanthus leaves and on the keystone of each arch was the family crest. This was the family’s residence. The first floor held public rooms—salons, a formal dining room, the library, the chapel—while on the second floor were the private apartments of the family. Beyond the second courtyard was another gate from which could be glimpsed an enclosed garden.
At its height, the palace had vibrated like a self-contained village with the comings and goings of the servants and the lords and ladies of the house. But now, most of the rooms were unused and many were bare except for mice and cobwebs. The remaining servants performed their negligible duties in a hushed atmosphere of an infirmary.
Alicia followed the scents of spices and bread into the vast kitchen. Inside were the familiar iron wall racks holding generations of ladles, spoons, and whisks; pine cabinets filled with mortars, molds, and presses; mahogany and rosewood cabinets where the family plate was kept under lock and key; long plank tables covered with baskets holding fruits and vegetables, herbs, breads, and tortillas; and shelves of spices and preserves. The cooks and kitchen maids were busy at the brasero and the horno, where they were cooking the main meal of the day, the comida corrida for the ten servants of the house and the only remaining family members—Alicia and her mother.
Chepa, the head cook, seeing Alicia enter the room exclaimed, “Doña Alicia, I heard the carriage. Sit, let me bring you some coffee, a crust of something sweet.”
“No, my dear,” she replied. �
�I only stopped to ask if my mother is awake.”
“She called for her chocolate a few minutes ago. I was about to send the girl up with it.”
“Give me the tray,” Alicia said. “I will take it to her.”
Chepa looked dubious. “You carry food? Pues, no es costumbre! Let the girl carry the tray and you can accompany her.”
“You are correct, of course,” she said. Addressing a young maid, she continued, “Come, Dolores, let us go up and sweeten my mother’s disposition.”
From behind the door of her mother’s bedroom came a muffled, mechanical whine that, when the door was opened by Manuelita, her mother’s maid, was the voice of a woman singing. The song was an aria from Rossini’s La Cenerentola, played on her mother’s gramophone, a cylindrical device mounted on a rosewood box to which was attached a great brass horn. It had a place of honor on a marble pedestal at the foot of a capacious bed. A chambermaid stood beside the machine; her sole function was to change the tinfoil recording cylinders and turn the crank. There was a scattering of books on the great lady’s bed, the French and English romances she read far into the night. On the walls of her rooms were paintings of Venice, Paris, London, Rome—cities she had never visited except in art, music, and literature.
From a pile of luxurious linens emerged a tiny figure, Alicia’s mother, María de Jesús. Her mother’s many titles—acquired through the intermarriage of aristocratic families—were the stuff of society legend. In her own household, however, the Marquesa de Guadalupe Gavilán had always been known simply as La Niña, the girl. Propped up on a cloud of silk-sheathed pillows, in a voluminous white nightgown, tufts of white hair visible beneath a lace cap, La Niña could have been mistaken for a wizened, pink-faced child until one saw her hands, age-spotted and thick-veined, and the reptilian cast of her eyes in which childhood innocence had long ago been extinguished.
“Good morning, Mother,” Alicia said, as the kitchen maid laid her tray on the bedside table. She removed the embroidered towel to reveal a demitasse of chocolate and a slice of warm bread with butter and honey.
The old woman glanced at her daughter, picked up the cup, and sipped. “Where were you this morning? The orphanage, the hospital, or the prison?” She sniffed the air. “That smell! The prison. And what are those stains on your dress? Really, Alicia, do you care nothing at all for your family’s standing in this city?”
Alicia declined to be drawn into their old quarrel about the propriety of her charitable activities and asked, instead, “What is this music? I don’t recognize it.”
“Adelina Patti,” she said. “Your brother-in-law obtained it for me. The banker, not the baker or the candlestick maker. Of course, listening to the diva on this machine is like imagining the sound of the ocean by holding a shell to one’s ear, but still.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “When she performed at the Nacional in 1877, the president of the Republic placed a gold crown on her head. We went mad! We were still applauding the empty stage an hour after the last notes of ‘Sempre libera’ had faded.”
Alicia lifted from the pile of books on her mother’s bedside table a well-worn copy of George Sand’s novel Consuelo. “You live in dreams, Mother.”
“Perhaps,” she replied. “But certainly for women of our family better that than to haunt the poorhouses and orphanages like La Llorona searching for her children.”
“Only you know how truly unkind that statement is.”
The old woman raised her pale eyebrows. “Sometimes I think that your great display of virtue is simply a very cunning form of revenge you take on me for what I did with you and that boy.”
“I have long since forgiven you,” she replied.
“Phew! There is nothing to forgive. My actions were entirely proper.”
Alicia went to her rooms, where she changed her dress and then sat at her vanity and loosened her hair. She studied her reflection in the mirror. To the city, she was Doña Alicia Gavilán, the solterona of her noble family whose old maid eccentricity took the form of practicing to a fault the Works of Mercy required of all Christians: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, visiting the sick and the imprisoned. Her ministrations, while admirable in principle, required a level of familiarity with the destitute that her aristocratic peers found repulsive in practice. She was nothing like the fabled noble lady who, upon being accosted by a beggar as she was leaving a lavish charity ball, dismissed him without a centavo, exclaiming, “But I have already danced my feet to the bone for you!” But then, of course, it was whispered, given what had happened to her, what other path was open to Alicia Gavilán?
Alicia ran her fingers along her pitted cheek. She had once met an American girl, red-haired with fair skin, whose face was covered with freckles. Alicia had never seen freckles before and had at first imagined they were scars, like hers. But the American’s freckles were on the surface of her skin, a distinctive and charming feature of her lovely face, like her straight nose and brilliantly white teeth: something a man would remember fondly. Alicia’s scars were nearly as extensive as the American girl’s freckles, but not superficial. It was as if her face had been soft wax and the pox a seal that stamped itself deeply into her flesh over and over, obliterating all traces of the pretty child she had been.
She chided herself for indulging in self-pity. The smallpox had taken her looks, but had spared her life, unlike the infant who had died in her arms before Alicia had even had a chance to name her. For the second time that day, a tremor passed through her heart. The old sadness came so rarely now that she could almost welcome it like a long-absent friend with whom she had shared the most intense moments of pain and love that had ever wracked her soul; it was an instant when God seemed simultaneously infinitely remote and unbearably present. The God who had been deaf to her pleas to save her child had nonetheless released a torrent of love in her for that child, a love so deep, so fierce, so all-consuming that the experience had changed her forever.
Convalescing at the palace after her daughter’s death, she had felt the change but did not understand its meaning. She knew only that where she might have experienced emptiness, grief, anger, shame, there was instead peace, stillness, expectancy. She had never demonstrated more than the conventional interest in her faith, but now she asked for a Bible. She read the New Testament with a surging sense of identification that culminated when she reached the words of Saint John: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” It was as if the letters were being written in flames on her heart.
“God is love” was the answer to the question that her life had become after her illness and her child’s death. “God is love” was her instruction, her vocation, her purpose, and had been so from that moment she had stumbled across those words when she was fourteen years old. She lifted her eyes to her ruined face in the mirror and thought, “What is there to regret?” Her deformity had humbled her, closed the doors to a conventional life of marriage and children, and led her to a life devoted to what her mother scornfully called her “good works.”
She knew other women in her circle, including her own sisters, wondered why she had not simply become a nun. But she had had no desire to lock herself away in a palatial cloister with the old maid daughters of other affluent families to dwell in aimless comfort. She felt called to a life of service, not contemplation. Over the years, she had created for herself a circuit that took her among the poorest of the city where she gave whatever material and spiritual assistance she could.
When she had first set out, shyly, uncertainly, she had had no idea what to expect of herself or of those whom she wished to help. Her deformity relaxed the suspicion of the poor toward people of her class because in their eyes her scars rendered her as poor, in her way, as they were in theirs. There was never any question of her being one of them—she wasn’t and would never be—but in time they trusted her enough to
be who they were in her presence, a wounded and vibrant people, the truest Mexicans of México. She loved them in all their imperfections. She loved the life force that sustained them even as the world—her world—ground them into the dust. She loved that they forgave her for coming from that world and accepted her as she was. She felt most alive among them and closest to the faith that had broken her open when John’s letters of light had entered her heart.
And yet no matter how intensely alive she felt among these friends, how grateful she was for the love she felt for and from them, she remained a solitary woman. This sense of her solitude had grown upon her as the time slipped away when, had life been different, she would have been a wife and mother. She often felt her thoughts returning to that unlived life and sometimes, as this morning, when she had helped to deliver Lorena’s child, the thoughts could not be banished with prayers for strength and acceptance.
Recalling the events of the morning, she found herself thinking with some guilt about Miguel Sarmiento. She recognized his name as soon as he said it—society women friends of her sisters were among his patients and her sisters had repeated the gossip about him. They said he was the only child of crazy Doctor Rodrigo, and he had departed México abruptly a decade earlier under a cloud. The particulars of the scandal were unknown but the subject of endless, tittering speculation, all of it involving love gone awry. He had returned a year earlier, a full-fledged physician, handsome and unmarried and as mysteriously aloof as a Heathcliff or a Mr. Darcy. The association with a character from an English romantic novel was heightened by his fair skin, pale green eyes, and chestnut-colored hair: “Pure Spanish stock,” her sisters said approvingly. “Not a drop of Indian in him.”