The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

  Fifteen years had passed but the garden was much the same as it had been the last night she and Anselmo had parted. She dried her tears. She remembered that during the confrontation with her mother she had cried out, “But Mamá we are no different than Romeo y Julieta!” Her mother, narrowing her eyes, had replied, “Romeo was a nobleman, not an Indian from the slums, and at any rate, that was a fairy tale.” “But I love him, Mamá.” “I assure you, you will forget,” her mother said. “As Julieta would have forgotten Romeo, had she lived. Time defaces every memory. You will see.”

  Now, reflecting upon that encounter, she thought that her mother’s choice of “defaces” was deliberate. Her mother had not expected that Alicia would forget Anselmo, but rather that as she reached maturity, she would appreciate the absurdity of the romance between the princess and the stable boy. It would devolve from a tragedy into a farce, and passion would be replaced by embarrassment. Her mother was wrong.

  The love she had felt for Anselmo had been the portal through which Alicia had discovered her capacity for love, and love had become her vocation. The loss of her own daughter—the only child she knew she would ever bear—had made her the mother to all children she encountered. Her mother could cruelly jest that Alicia was like La Llorona—the woman of legend who had drowned her children and, after her death, was condemned for eternity to search for them along the waterways of México, weeping and shrieking—but there was perhaps a grain of truth in her words. For in each child she encountered, Alicia saw traces of her own child, and she loved them as she would have loved her own.

  Then abruptly, Alicia understood something about Miguel Sarmiento’s expression of sorrow as he had held the baby Miguel in his arms and about the tears he had wiped away so she would not see them. Doctor Sarmiento had also lost a child! And if he had lost a child and was unmarried, then there had also been a woman. He had come very close to telling her the story as they stood before the gates of the palace. Would he tell her if they met again? Plainly, whatever the details, his tale had left him with a heavy burden of guilt. Too heavy for a man whose essential goodness was clear to her. Miguel Sarmiento might not believe in God, but God—her God, the God who was love—hovered around the man waiting to be invited in but prevented by his guilt and shame. Was it vain and foolish of her to believe that she might be the instrument through which God would relieve the doctor’s burden and release him to do the good work he was undoubtedly intended for? No, she thought, not me! But a voice that was not hers whispered its reply. Yes, Daughter. You.

  3

  A servant led Sarmiento through the palace of the Gaviláns in stiff-shouldered, disapproving silence. In Europe, he had met members of the nobility and they had received him at their residences, which were older and more elaborate than the colonial mansions of México, but in Europe he was a tourist collecting experiences as if they were postcards. México was home and its streets and buildings were resonant for him in a way the castles and museums of Europe had never been. The colonial palaces had awed him when he was a boy, an awe that was not lessened by his republican father’s fulminations against the aristocrats who inhabited them. They might well be “parasites,” but to a small boy they were also marvelous as they swanned about the city in their beautiful carriages and led mysterious lives behind immense carved doors.

  Now he was inside one of the great houses. In contrast to the baroque palaces of Italy and France, the interior was rather plain, a reminder that it had been intended to be as much a military fortress as a residence. The decorative work—the acanthus carvings on the archways, the delicate Ionic columns that ran the length of the second floor—was exquisite, but the true luxury was simply the space itself. Amid the bustling city, whose natives jostled in forced intimacy on the streets, sidewalks, and markets, and where most of the population lived in tenements and shanties, was this stone leviathan. The noise of the city did not penetrate its thick walls, and its inhabitants breathed not the city’s miasmatic air but the perfumed scents of its gardens. Here there was light in plentitude and a contemplative stillness in which fountains murmured and doves cooed. It was their possession of privacy that was the real wealth of the rich.

  He was led into a great salon. As was the custom in Mexican houses, the furniture was pushed against the walls, leaving large, empty spaces. The accretion of three hundred years of possessions—rosewood and mahogany furnishings from the Philippines, blue-and-white Chinese porcelains, an enormous carpet woven in Persia, Spanish cabinets inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl—seemed insufficient to fill its vastness. Life-sized portraits of a ruff-collared aristocrat and his wife hung on the wall behind a long couch upholstered in pink damask.

  “Wait here,” the servant commanded before turning on his heel and marching out.

  He prowled the room nervously. At his last meeting with Alicia Gavilán he had felt she had looked into him and seen his secret. Unable to bear the scrutiny, he had run. Later, however, recalling the kindness in her low, musical voice he had been filled with a longing to see her again and to unburden himself. Impulsively, he had sent her a note asking to meet. He had been encouraged by the invitation she had extended to him when they had stood at the doors of the palace, for it had been offered without conditions and out of her kindness. But, perhaps, he thought as he penned the note, her kind impulse would cool when confronted by his actual request. For he was as aware as she must be that unless he was offering himself as her suitor or as her physician, there was no social precedent for the private meeting of an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. Nonetheless, he was heartened by her prompt reply. Yet now, as he stood in this great room, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of her aristocratic lineage and uncertain of the propriety of their meeting, he could not help but feel out of place and intimidated. He paced the room, trying to allay his urge to flee.

  “Señor Doctor.”

  He turned to greet her. She was unveiled and her face was bare of powders and cream. He was grateful for his medical training because it allowed him to suppress his shock at the extent of her scarring. Her face was a mask of lesions and pustules in which the lovely emerald eyes flickered like the eyes of one imprisoned.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you when you arrived,” she said. “Shall we sit? I’ve asked for tea and coffee to be brought.”

  She arranged herself on a settee and with an elegant wave of her hand invited him to sit beside her.

  “Thank you for receiving me,” he said. “Your residence is quite beautiful.”

  “Ah,” she said. “It is drafty and inconvenient. My ancestors stored their clothes in chests, so there are no closets, and they feared the night air, so there are few windows. And of course the only lighting is candles and oil lamps. In my sisters’ homes, you touch a button on the wall and the entire room is brilliantly illuminated.”

  He recognized the deprecation for what it was, an aristocrat’s mild reproach for his comment about the beauty of her house. He had encountered this attitude among his noble acquaintances in Europe, where to compliment such things implied surprise that they should be other than of the highest caliber. It reminded him that, for all her kindness, she was a member of an ancient nobility, which, even if superannuated in modern México, remained fully intact within itself.

  Two servants appeared, weighted down with silver trays that held urns, cups, saucers, pitchers, and plates of pastries. They set them down on a low table before Doña Alicia. As the servants arranged the repast, Sarmiento stole a glance at his hostess. The first shock had passed and he studied her with the dispassion that was not only the fruit of his medical training but in his nature as well. The scarring had not obliterated the structure of her face and he saw that she would have been beautiful. She was like a princess in a fairy tale consumed by a dragon. Her hair, piled in braids atop her head, was heavy, dark, and scented with attar of roses. Her neck was long, lovely, and to his surprise unscarred. He glanced at her hands and they, too, bore no scars. Only her face appeared to
have been affected: a medical anomaly that, under different circumstances, would have excited his professional interest. But he could not imagine asking her to submit to an examination or to the intrusive questions of a clinician.

  “I hope you are not too repulsed by my appearance,” she said quietly when the servants had left.

  “Doña Alicia, I am trained as a doctor to see past physical afflictions to the person who bears them.”

  There was sadness in her eyes when she glanced at him, but she only said, “Will you take coffee or tea?”

  “Coffee, thank you,” he said.

  She poured him a cup of coffee and added milk and sugar. Their fingers touched as she handed him the cup. “I rarely have visitors here,” she said. “Because I would feel I must spare them the shock of my appearance with veils or cosmetics, but in my own home I wish to be free of those disguises and to be myself.”

  “I am honored that you have received me,” he said.

  “All of us need a place where we are free of our burdens,” she continued. “A refuge where we are accepted as we are. This is my place. And yours, doctor? Where is the place where you lay down your cross?”

  The words of confession formed in his mind, but he could still not bring himself to say them, so he temporized. “What weight do you think I carry on my back?”

  “I think you carry the weight of a child,” she said. “And a woman.”

  He was shocked. Only his father knew Sarmiento’s secret. How could she have guessed? He shot her a look. She raised her cup to her lips calmly and sipped her tea, waiting for him to reply, but he could not. Not yet.

  “Who lives here with you?” he asked abruptly.

  “Only my mother,” she replied, concealing with perfect manners any surprise at his clumsy deflection of the conversation.

  “Where is the marquesa?”

  “On Tuesday afternoons she goes to Chapultepec Castle to attend a luncheon of the Daughters of Jerusalem, a charitable group founded by the president’s wife.”

  “You do not attend?”

  “Not today,” she said. “I thought on this occasion you might wish to speak to me alone.” When he failed to reply, she said, “Doctor, I see I have been too forward. My sincerest apology.”

  “No,” he replied hesitantly. “You need not apologize. You have offered me the opportunity to confide in you and for that I am most grateful, but if I did, Doña Alicia, you would regret your generosity. You see, there’s a difference between your burden and mine. Yours was visited on you through no fault of your own. Mine is of my own making.”

  She glanced at him. He grasped the cup in his hands so tightly she worried it would shatter. Her hand began to move impulsively toward his, but she stopped herself. Whatever troubled him would not be soothed by a friendly hand on his or a few kind words, no matter how sincerely meant. She sensed that his wounds were as deep, pervasive, and complex as the scars that disfigured her face. She chided herself for her clumsy approach because it had cornered him and left him no graceful way to retreat from the conversation. She must give him a way out.

  “I understand from my friends who are your patients that you only recently returned to México,” she said. “Where were you?”

  His fingers relaxed their grip on the cup. “I spent the last decade in Europe, studying at the medical faculties in Paris and Heidelberg.”

  “You did not study at our own school of medicine?” she prompted.

  “I began my studies here,” he replied, “and I would have continued, but …” He paused uncomfortably. “My father felt it would be beneficial for me to study in France and Germany, which are the modern centers of so much important medical research.”

  “Like Louis Pasteur?” Alicia offered.

  “Yes,” he said, evidently grateful to be at last on safe conversational ground. “Pasteur in France, Koch in Germany.”

  “Did you ever meet him? Monsieur Pasteur?”

  “I had the pleasure of attending a dinner at which he spoke two years before his untimely death,” the doctor replied reverently. “I shall never forget his remarks. He said, ‘Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch that illuminates the world.’”

  “Is that also your creed, Doctor Sarmiento?”

  “It must be the creed of every real scientist,” he said. His face was animated and even more striking than when in repose. “The principle of all existence is cause and effect. Scientific knowledge illuminates causes so that men are not condemned to go on living ignorantly in effects. In my own field of medicine, one disease after another has yielded the secrets of its causes, thus diminishing human suffering.”

  “That is a noble objective,” she said.

  His face lapsed into melancholy. “Yes, it is, but I’m afraid I do very little toward its accomplishment by spending my days prescribing laudanum to unhappy women.”

  “Are there no venues for you to do the kind of work you would find more fulfilling?” she asked.

  “Notwithstanding Don Porfirio’s superficial improvements to the city, México lags behind Europe in achieving true modernity. Electric streetlamps along the Paseo de la Reforma are one thing, but a real center for medical and scientific research is another and we do not have that, nor does it seem the government is very interested in creating one.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “Still, if you have an interest in improving the health of the people, I may be able to help you with that, at least.”

  He leaned back and looked at her. “How, Doña? Are you in need of a physician?”

  Her smile—heartbreaking, incandescent—exposed the latent beauty beneath the monstrous flesh.

  “I have only been ill once in my life,” she said. “God evidently thought once was enough. No, not for me, but for the people I try to help. Many of them suffer from the diseases of the poor and I am useless to them. But you, Señor Doctor, you could heal them and perhaps in that small way diminish the human suffering you speak of.”

  His first thought was that if he accepted her proposal he would be able to spend more time in her company. This alone would have been reason enough to accept, even without the prospect of being able to practice actual medicine, as opposed to administering panaceas and placebos to the bored rich women of Ciudad de México.

  “I would be honored,” he said.

  She remained in the salon after he left as Dolores cleared the table. The maid loaded the tray and asked, “Is there anything else you would like, Doña Alicia?”

  “No, my dear,” she replied. “Thank you.”

  “He is very handsome,” the girl said, lifting the tray. “Su novio.”

  “Yes, only he is not my suitor, but my friend,” she said. “You must be careful not to start any gossip about our meeting.”

  “Yes, Doña,” she said somewhat skeptically and left Alicia to her own thoughts.

  What she had told him was true. She did go unveiled at home, but only when family alone was present. As she had sat at her vanity before he arrived with her jars and pots of creams and powders, preparing to make her face into a mask to receive him, a thought had stayed her hand: Let him see me as I am. She had learned to distinguish between her personal thoughts and those thoughts that came to her like messages from a deeper source than her own personality. These deeper messages were sometimes consoling, but more often they had a challenging and unsettling quality. Her first impulse was always to resist them as she had when it had occurred to her she might help relieve his burden of sadness. Yet as always happened, the thought simply repeated itself until she was forced to examine her reasons for rejecting it. She looked into the mirror and searched herself.

  The reason, she discovered, was simple. She wanted him to fall in love with her and that fantasy required her to conceal her face from him. It was a fantasy not merely because she could not hide her face from his gaze forever. It was also a fantasy because her life excluded the possibility of such things. Alicia had long accepted that the usu
al path of happiness open to women—marriage and children—was closed to her. In its place she had cultivated a different path, a life of service that repaid her in love for her modest efforts to ameliorate the sufferings of others. This was her happiness. She must accept that, embrace it, and abandon the dreams of what was not possible, for in those dreams that could not be fulfilled she would find only unhappiness and ingratitude. She sealed the jars of cream and powders, rose from her vanity, and went down to meet him with her naked face.

  As he steered his buggy through the narrow streets of San Andrés, Sarmiento’s habitually lucid mind was jumbled. All that was clear to him was that no woman had ever made as powerful an impression on him as Alicia Gavilán. What confused him was whether the impression was due to her magnetism or her tragedy, if they could even be separated. Would she have been the same woman had the misfortune of a preventable disease not ruined her appearance? Was the kindness at the core of her personality so profound it would have guided her life even if she had grown into the beautiful woman he glimpsed beneath the mask of sores, scars, and lesions? Or would she have become another unhappy rich lady pacing her mansion on the Paseo de la Reforma, waiting for a handsome doctor to relieve her boredom? And why did it matter to him? Because—the thought formed hesitantly, reluctantly—he felt for her the stirrings of personal affection. But what kind of affection, that of a friend for a friend, or of a man for a woman? In Europe, where such things were permitted in society, he had had purely platonic friendships with women, but what Alicia Gavilán provoked in him was deeper than those cordial feelings. But the other, a man’s passion for a woman? With her? With her … her face as it was? He could not imagine …