The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

  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.

  Alicia 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.

  The flowering cross, for example. Graciela the baker, with hands like leather from decades of reaching into stoves, told Alicia that the stonemason who carved the cross had been from a wild tribe in the far north called the Yaquis. “Nahautl, like us,” she explained, “but when the rest of us came to Tenochtitlán, the Yaquis stayed behind in a river valley that was like the Garden of Eden. They worshipped the deer who gave up his life to give them meat to eat and hides for clothes. When the priests came and told them about Jesus, well, to the Yaquis, Jesus and the deer were the same and they converted.

  “Flowers are sacred to the Yaquis,” Alicia told Sarmiento, repeating the words Graciela had told her. “They call heaven the flower world. They say that when Jesus was on the cross, flowers sprang up where his drops of blood touched the earth. That’s why the artist carved flowers on the cross. For him they are the blood and resurrection of Jesus.”

  “The Yaquis?” Sarmiento said. “The same tribe the government is fighting up in the north?”

  “I was not aware we were at wa
r with them,” she said. “What caused the conflict?”

  “Settlers have moved into land the Yaquis claim as their own.”

  “I’m sure it is my ignorance,” she said, as they reached the immense doors of the palace, “but could the land not be apportioned in a way that would satisfy both groups?”

  “A good question, Doña,” he replied. “Not one I imagine the combatants bothered to ask themselves before they took up arms. Men never do.”

  From a small room attached to the palace at the side of the door, a porter emerged, and, with a suspicious glance at Sarmiento, asked, “Doña Alicia, is everything all right?”

  With a smile in her voice, she said, “Yes, Pablito. I will enter in a moment.” To Sarmiento she asked, “What do you mean when you say men never do?”

  “Only that men are thoughtless creatures,” he replied. “Their first impulse is always to take action, however rash or misguided. Or fatal.”

  After a long, considering silence, she said, “Do you speak from experience, Señor Doctor?”

  The kindness in her lovely, low voice was as palpable as a warm hand laid on his. The sadness and nostalgia he had felt since entering the church clutched at his heart and squeezed tears from him. He hastily wiped his sleeve across his face and said, “Well, one has made many mistakes in life, of course.”

  He was afraid she would comment on his tears, but she said, “Yes, that is true of all of us. But one need not become imprisoned by one’s errors.”

  “How does one avoid that?” he asked.

  “For a believer, there is confession,” she said.

  “A few Hail Marys and it all goes away?” he replied.

  She retreated into silence and he thought he had offended her, but then she said, “The value of confession for me is not in the penance but in saying aloud the things I would keep secret in my guilt and then having my confessor put them in their proper place for me. To give them—what is the word artists use? Perspective. For in my guilt, my sins loom large and I can see little else. Another person, disinterested but sympathetic, can look and see things as they are, not as I imagine them to be.”

  Again, he felt her kindness like a physical balm and it was all he could do not to spill his secret then and there about Paquita and his son.

  “But, as I said, Doña Alicia, I am a nonbeliever. Who would hear my confession?”

  “I would,” she said simply. “Won’t you come in and have a cup of something warm, a bit of something to eat?”

  Longing and fear fought in his heart: a longing to confess his faults to her and a fear that, once she heard them, she would turn away from him in revulsion. Fear won out.

  “Thank you, Doña, but I must take my leave. I have my rounds, patients to see.” Yet he found himself reluctant to go. “Perhaps,” he added, “I could call on you another time?”

  “Of course,” she replied graciously. “You need only send me a message and I would be happy to receive you.” She touched his hand. “Good-bye, Doctor Sarmiento. God go with you.”

  “Doña,” he said with a little bow and rushed away before she could see that the tears had reappeared in the corners of his eyes.

  As the rest of the household slumbered, Alicia made her way into the garden, an overgrown wilderness of orange and lemon trees, heavy swags of climbing roses that spilled over the garden walls, clumps of calla and trumpet lilies, heliotrope, rose geraniums, and jasmine. A rosace-shaped pond in the center of the garden was anchored by a fountain carved with the symbols of the evangelists—a lion, an eagle, an ox, and a man. The fountain, too, was in disrepair and only a brackish trickle now reached the pond. At the far end of the garden was a mirador made of marble. The family crest and the date 1702 were carved over the entrance of the small pavilion.

  She sat on the bench in the pavilion and removed her veil so that she might better inhale the heavy fragrance of the flowers in the still, autumn air. She thought of Miguel Sarmiento, and the sadness with which he had looked at the infant when she had given him the baby to hold; it was the same sadness she had seen in the birth room. She recognized it as the sadness of loss, a loss to which he remained unreconciled. That pain she saw in his eyes was not unknown to her. She closed her eyes. Mingled with the scent of flowers were the smells of the stables on the other side of the garden wall. Now and then she heard the muffled whinny of a horse or the voice of a groom or stable boy.

  “Anselmo.”

  Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked around the garden to see who had spoken that name. There was no one else in the garden but a little black cat hunting lizards.

  “Anselmo.”

  That voice, that name, again. And then, with a small gasp, she realized that it was she who had spoken. Her voice was speaking the name she had not openly uttered in many years.

  She spoke his name again, consciously, deliberately. “Anselmo.”

  The cat looked up, distracted from its hunt by the weeping woman.

  She had been tolerated in the kitchen because it was the domain of women performing women’s work, but when Alicia began to wander into the stables, she was brought before her father, a rare and frightening event. The marqués received her as if she were an errant servant. With scarcely a glance at her, he said, “Henceforth, you will stay out of the stables.”

  “I only wanted to see how they braid the horses’ manes.”

  He looked at her sharply. “Were you asked to speak?”

  Trembling, she replied, “No, Señor Marqués.”

  “Go.”

  She had run into the garden, weeping.

  “Why are you crying?”

  She looked around for the questioner. A boy’s head appeared above the wall that was common to the garden and the stables. It was Anselmo, one of the grooms. He had been her guide on her excursion to the stables, telling her about the horses and how he took care of them. Now he jumped the wall and came into the garden.

  “Did your papá hit you?” he asked.

  He was two or three years older than she—fifteen or sixteen—a slender, cinnamon-colored boy with golden eyes. He smelled soothingly of straw and liniment.

  “No,” she said. “He has forbidden me from visiting the stables. Now I will never see how you braid the manes.”

  He sat beside her on the bench and took a strand of her long hair. “I could braid your hair. Do you want me to?”

  His fingers in her hair, the whispered question, the lustrous sun, and the sweet smells of the garden produced in her a thrill that raised goose bumps on her then flawless skin and, without understanding why, but knowing she must, she pressed her lips to his. His mouth opened—her shock was quickly followed by the delicious sensation of his warm, wet tongue and the heat of his body radiating from beneath his thin shirt. As they pressed their bodies tightly together, she did not know whether it was his heart or hers that beat like a bird flapping its wings against its cage.

  On the warm autumn nights, he laid his zarape in the clearing among the roses to dispel the chill from the earth. Then, too, their naked bodies generated a heat so intense that curlicues of steam rose from them. She learned he was from Coahuila and had come with his family to the city looking for work when their small farm was taken from them by a friend of the governor. He was vague on details, saying only, “The sheriff came with some papers. My papá said we had to leave.” She related her own uneventful history—she had lived her entire life within the walls of the palace, except for the hours she was at school or at church. He had four brothers and three sisters and they lived with his parents in two rooms in the colonia of La Merced, but he lived in the stables, visiting home only on Sunday. She told him about her three sisters, all much older than she, the two eldest married, the third engaged. He told her he missed his family, and his descriptions of his loneliness gave her a name for her own feelings of solitude.

  He could not read or write. One night she brought pencil and paper. Guiding his hand, she showed him how to write his name and then he insisted th
at she teach him how to write hers as well. After that, he practiced by writing their names with his fingertips on her flesh. She loved his touch. His tongue rasped her small nipples and he told her she tasted like apple. The skin of his scrotum was as plush as velvet in her hands and the two stones it sheathed were fascinating to her, hard yet spongy; more than once he yelped when she pressed too firmly. Each time he penetrated her, her first feeling was of separation—his body clearly divisible from hers—but then as he continued his thrusts were like pebbles tossed into a pond. The ripples spread and deepened across and inside her body, and as they both sank into the same swamp of sensation, she could no longer tell her flesh from his. He was the first to say, “te amo,” but said it only sparingly after that, as if the phrase were a jewel, the only one he would ever be able to give her. She was freer with “I love you” because it resounded in her mind all day, and to prevent herself from saying it aloud when he was not present, she had to give it voice when he was. They undressed and dressed by moonlight. “Our moon,” he told her. One night he brought her a pearl, a single pearl that he said he had bought at the Monte de Piedad, the city’s pawnshop. It was yellowing with age, like the autumn moon.

  Alicia was neither as alone nor as insignificant in her family as she imagined. La Niña noticed the change—the combination of swooping and inexplicable happiness alternating with expressions of gnawing melancholy as she mumbled to herself. She instructed her personal maid to spy on her daughter. Manuelita followed her into the garden and watched, from a distance, as the two children made love. They were beautiful together and Manuelita pitied them for what was to come. She reported to her mistress. Anselmo was gone by nightfall. Within a month, Alicia began to show signs of pregnancy. Her mother immured her within her rooms and, borrowing from her favorite novel, La dame aux camélias, let word go out that Alicia suffered from consumption. When she was about to deliver, Alicia was secretly transported to the foundling home, where she gave birth to a daughter in the Departamento de Partos Ocultos—the Department of Hidden Births. It was there, as she was recovering, that she was infected with the smallpox virus, as was the child she was nursing. Her daughter died.