The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

  Gossip bored Alicia and she had only half-listened to her sisters’ breathless accounts of Miguel Sarmiento. Even so, a mental picture of him had formed in the creases of her mind: a cold, proud macho; a rooster. She knew she was being unkind, but as she had no expectation of ever meeting the man except perhaps in passing, her unkindness seemed a venial sin at best. But now that she had met him, the injustice of her judgment shamed her.

  When she had rushed through the courtyards of Belem to see if the midwife had arrived, all she had consciously noticed about him was that he was carrying a doctor’s black leather satchel. Only later, after he had left, had she sifted through her other impressions. He was as handsome as advertised, but disheveled in a way that suggested to her an absence of vanity. His black suit was dusty, his collar had seen better days, his hair was somewhat greasy, and there were patches of stubble on his face indicating that his morning ablutions had been performed in haste or indifference. She had detected the stale smell of alcohol on his breath and his eyes were red-rimmed and weary. She also remembered the look that had flickered across his face as he stood in the doorway of Lorena’s cell; it was akin to shock, as if the scene recalled some private horror. Nonetheless, once he began to attend to her, it was without hesitation or doubt. He knew what he had to do and he did it. He had saved Lorena’s life and her child’s life. Afterward, when he looked at the baby in Alicia’s arms, another surprising expression passed across his face—sadness. Why, she wondered, would the birth of a child he had saved from death be the cause of grief?

  She understood now why he inspired the gossips; there was something paradoxical about Miguel Sarmiento. He should have been the rooster she had imagined him to be—handsome, accomplished, arrogant—but instead he seemed like a man who was lost in the corridors of a private sorrow. She had felt her heart open spontaneously toward him, her compassion flow. She resisted. Miguel Sarmiento was not one of the poor to whom she could bring practical assistance—food, clothing, consolation. It was absurd to think she could help him and yet she could not help but hope to see him again.

  2

  Sarmiento sat at a window table at the Café Royale watching a barefoot pelado herd a flock of turkeys down the center of Calle de los Plateros. The Indian, cinnamon-skinned and malnourished with a mop of inky hair, was, like most Indians to Sarmiento’s eyes, of indeterminate age—perhaps twenty, perhaps sixty. He wore a tattered, long-tailed shirt, and in apparent ignorance of a recently passed city ordinance commanding the wearing of undergarments, a soiled breech cloth tied around his waist and loosely looped around his genitals. The bobble of his penis was disgracefully visible to passersby as he made his way down the narrow road. Expertly, he kept the squawking turkeys in a straight line with a long stick to rein them in when they began to wander. The birds were small and stringy, but their plumage was as darkly iridescent as a ball gown. Sarmiento assumed the turkeys were on their way to one of the city’s markets and that day’s end would find them defeathered, cut up, and boiled beneath a layer of mole poblano.

  In Europe, where Sarmiento had lived for the past decade, the incursion of the country into the city would have been deemed picturesque. But in Ciudad de México, the reflection of a peasant in the plate glass windows of shops that sold French wines and English frock coats reproached the pretensions of the nouveau riche who shopped there and they were not amused. Even now, a police officer—whose blue uniform aped the Parisian gendarmerie right down to the short cape—bestirred himself from his corner post. A moment later, the Indian and his birds had been harshly directed to a side street and away from Sarmiento’s view.

  Across the capital the church bells tolled ten. The shops would not open for another hour. The city would not fully awaken until the sifted gold light that now filled its streets achieved the transparency that made a stroll through them a walk into a dream. During his exile, Sarmiento had often tried to explain México’s quality of light, but words, in whichever of the four languages he spoke, always failed him. The light’s lucidity was partly a matter of altitude—at eight thousand feet the air was so thin that visitors gasped for breath upon first arriving. Then too, the city lay at the lowest point in a valley ringed by volcanoes creating a canopy of the sky. Whatever the cause, the light poured down with a purity that made every object it touched seem both immediately present and illusory, like something simultaneously seen and remembered.

  This effect was heightened by the phantasmagorical nature of the city itself. The ancient stones of the Spanish colonial city sat upon the even more ancient stones of the Aztec city, Tenochtitlán. The Spanish had razed the Aztecs’ island capital and dumped its palaces and temples into the vast lake that had ringed it. The great native cypresses—ahuehuetes—still grew in the park at Chapultepec, where they had shaded the summer palace of the last Aztec emperor. When the light poured through their leaves, it was as if ten thousand green, translucent eyes looked with unimaginable grief upon the slain city of Tenochtitlán, which the Aztecs had called the navel of the earth.

  This is what Sarmiento had been unable to explain to the Romans he befriended on his travels. In their city, the imperial ruins were like the abandoned rooms in the family palazzo, places where their ancestors had lived lives different only in degree, not kind. But in México, the stones beneath the hulking churches and palaces of the Spanish were the gravestones of an alien race whose men had been murdered and its women raped. The conquest had also robbed that race of its vitality. Each generation following the conquest was more servile and lethargic than the last until the Aztecs had devolved from plumed emperors to turkey herders in soiled loincloths. When Sarmiento told his Roman friends that his country was the product of rape, they had laughed gaily and replied, “But all nations are.” Perhaps so, he thought, but in México the memory was burned into the stones and the air.

  “Primo, why the brown study?”

  Sarmiento smiled up at his cousin, Jorge Luis. “Primo, I didn’t really expect you’d awaken to meet me at such an early hour.”

  The younger man sat in a quick, tight motion. It could not have been otherwise—his French-cut suit fit him like a straitjacket, constraining his movements, emphasizing his slenderness. Above the stiff collar and black-and-red silk cravat loomed his large head. His eyes were like molten chocolate flecked with cinnamon and his lips were thick and soft. His black, curling hair was only partly subdued by the liberal use of lavender-scented pomade. There was an ever-present flush beneath his dark skin; he was as lovely as a girl. Perhaps aware of this, he compensated for his prettiness with a cynical attitude, an unkind wit, and a tone of voice that implied the knowledge of scandal. Officially he held the position of secretary to his father, Sarmiento’s senator uncle, Cayetano, but spent his days writing verse and his nights in what passed for debauchery in the capital—drinking, gambling at the Jockey Club, patronizing the better brothels—with a cohort of other young men whose only purpose in life was the pursuit of pleasure. Ennui was part of Jorge Luis’s affectation, but sometimes Sarmiento imagined that his cousin’s boredom with this pointless circuit of cheap sensations and easy amusements was real and that, beneath his cultivated image of frivolity, a man of substance was struggling to emerge.

  Jorge Luis arranged himself, as best he could, in a languid posture. He withdrew an English cigarette from a silver cigarette case and lit it. “Awaken? I have not yet been to bed. Coffee!” he shouted to no one in particular. “And you? Why did you insist on meeting at this uncivilized hour?”

  “I always wake early,” Sarmiento said. “A habit from my student days in Germany. Nothing clears one’s head of last night’s wine more quickly than cutting into a cadaver in a freezing room at seven in the morning while an elderly professor screams instructions in German.”

  Jorge Luis shuddered. “I don’t know what is more appalling about that story, the cadavers or the Germans. My grand tour of the continent will begin and end in Paris.”

  The waitress appeared with Jorge Luis’s c
offee. She was a plump, pretty Indian girl who moved uncomfortably in her starched, striped shirtwaist and dark skirt; her braids were piled atop her head and her broad feet were shoved into narrow boots. She caught Sarmiento’s eye and he smiled encouragingly at her. She carefully set down the cup and saucer, napkins, spoon, pot of heated milk, and a bowl of sugar cubes. When she finished, she nervously wiped her hands on her apron and murmured, “Anything else, sir?”

  Jorge Luis flicked his fingers at her dismissively.

  “My God,” he said to Sarmiento, “did you see her fingernails? Filthy. I don’t know why you come here. The Café de l’Opera employs French waiters, not the local ‘niggers.’”

  The American word dropped from his cousin’s lips with a harsh contempt that amazed Sarmiento since Jorge Luis was nearly the same shade of brown as the waitress. Like most Mexicans, Jorge Luis was a mestizo, in whose veins ran a mixture of American Indian and Spanish blood. His mother, Sarmiento’s aunt by marriage, had been a full-blooded Indian, a country girl whom his uncle had married during the war against the French. She died giving birth to Jorge Luis, who had, therefore, no memories of her. But Sarmiento, seven years older than his cousin, recalled her with affection. It surprised him that his quick-witted cousin seemed oblivious of the irony of his contempt for the Indian poor of the city, but, Sarmiento had observed, it was an obliviousness shared by most of the city’s mestizo upper class who also disdained the pelados. Sarmiento imagined that Jorge Luis had imbibed this attitude with the absinthe he drank in the Frenchified bars and cafés with the other young men of his set who were desperate to be mistaken for Europeans.

  “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.”

  His 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 huma
n 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.”