The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

The priest extended his hand. Sarmiento observed that Luis took it with a sardonic glance in his direction, and in that glance, he saw that his cousin was less changed than he had first appeared.

  “A pleasure, Padre,” he said. To Alicia, he said, “Doña Alicia, I have so often wanted to stand before you and beg your forgiveness for every cruel remark I made about you, for my drunkenness at your wedding, and for failing to appreciate your virtues and your kindness.”

  She embraced him. “You owe me no apology, Cousin. I am so happy to see you healthy and sound.” She stepped back. “There is a young man in the garden. Is he your friend?”

  “Yes,” Luis said. “His name is Ángel, an Indian boy from Coahuila who travels with me.”

  “You must both stay and eat with us,” Cáceres said. “Our fare is simple, but we would be pleased to share it with you.”

  “Yes,” Alicia said. “Please stay. We have so much to talk about.”

  “On some subjects,” Luis replied quietly. “There are others that I need to discuss with my cousin alone. You understand, I hope.”

  “Of course,” Alicia said. “You have been away for a long time. You and Miguel must have much to say to each other.”

  Over a meal of chicken stewed in red chili sauce, squash cooked with tomato and queso fresco, beans, and tortillas, Luis told lighthearted stories of his travels in Europe and the United States, turning his hardships into amusing anecdotes. For, as he explained, after his father died, his allowance was discontinued by his stepmother and he had been forced to earn his living.

  “My only skill was versifying,” he said with a laugh, “and Paris was not in need of another bad poet. When I was unable to pay my hotel bill, the management suggested that I work it off in the kitchen washing dishes in lieu of the city jail. What I observed about the sanitary conditions of the hotel kitchen made going hungry seem like a virtue rather than a grim necessity. Oh, and the characters I met there! The cooks screamed in French and Italian, the waiters in Russian, and me in Spanish. Fortunately, some physical gestures are universally understood.”

  “How did you escape?” Alicia asked.

  “Friends liberated me. I had been too proud to ask for their help but they helped me nonetheless. Through them, I went to England and fell in with a circle of vigorous, mutton-eating Englishmen who thought nothing of brisk walks that took them halfway across their island and back between luncheon and tea. They were very kind to me.” He paused and glanced at Sarmiento. “They turned me into a socialist.”

  “Ah,” Cáceres said. “Are you then, like your cousin, a nonbeliever?”

  “I believe that when God made man in his image he intended that there be no social distinctions among them. One man is as good as another, and all men are equally deserving of what Americans call life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—although, God knows, they themselves do not practice their creed. Still, it is my creed.”

  “You will find no quarrel in this church with those beliefs,” Cáceres said.

  “How did your association with Madero come about?” Sarmiento asked.

  “I wanted to come home, but not to resume my old life, even were that possible,” Luis said. “I went first to New York with letters of introduction from my English friends to a group of American socialists. They told me about the Flores Magón brothers, who published a radical newspaper called Liberación that they smuggled into México from their exile in the American city of St. Louis. I began to write for them about the true conditions that prevail in our country beneath Don Porfirio’s gilt. I wrote about the government’s seizure of ancestral Indian lands that reduced the Indians who had farmed them for centuries into peonage. I wrote about the extermination of the Yaquis in Sonora. I wrote about the sale of our mines and railroads and ports to foreigners who are immune from our laws, the suppression of unions, and, most of all, about the concentration of greater and greater wealth into fewer and fewer hands. After a while, it was not enough for me to write about these conditions; I wished to change them.” He lit a cigarette, passed it to Ángel, and then, on the same match, lit another for himself. “I read Madero’s book. He’s no radical. His call for constitutional government, effective suffrage, and no reelection is the typical pallid fare of bourgeois liberals. Nonetheless, I sensed an underlying passion in his words that attracted me. I made my way to Coahuila and presented myself to him. I was not disappointed by the man.” He grinned at the priest. “Intending no disrespect, Padre, I must say I did not understand sanctity until I met Madero.”

  The priest replied, “In what way is Señor Madero saintly?”

  “In the way of complete self-sacrifice,” Luis said. “Although he is a son of one of the richest families in México, he lives wholly for the benefit of others. The workers on his estate live decent, comfortable lives, and he pays for the education of their children. He has slowly been giving away his fortune to the poor, to the horror of his family. I heard him tell one of his brothers that he would not be like the rich man in the Gospels who turned his back on Jesus when Jesus commanded him to give all he had to the poor. Madero said, ‘I shall pass through the eye of that needle, Brother, and I will bring you with me.’”

  “Well,” Cáceres said, “he must be a remarkable man.”

  “He is,” Luis replied passionately. “He has bravely offered himself to speak against Don Porfirio’s despotism, knowing the danger it places him in. I personally would follow him anywhere.”

  Sarmiento listened to his cousin’s account of his transformation with growing amazement, for he remembered the effete young man who despised the Indians, worshipped all things French, and lived for pleasure. He glanced at the young Indian who had sat silently beside Luis while he spoke. There was more to this story, he thought, that Luis in his discretion had omitted in the presence of Alicia and the priest. He was impatient to speak to his cousin alone.

  At last, the meal ended, the plates were cleared, and the priest brought out a dusty bottle of brandy.

  “Gentlemen,” he said to Sarmiento and Luis. “We will leave you now. Miguel, I will see that Alicia gets home safely. Ángel, if you are tired, there is room here for both you and your master to stay the night.”

  “Thank you,” Luis said. “That is very kind.” To Ángel, he said, “Go, mijo, I will come soon.”

  When they were alone, Sarmiento asked, “What is that boy to you? You called him ‘son.’”

  Luis poured brandy into the glasses the priest had set out for them. “He is my son and my companion and … my lover.” He pushed the glass across the table. “Your expression, Primo! You had better drink this.”

  Sarmiento drank. “Thank you for not making that comment in the presence of my wife.”

  “Alicia knows,” Luis said. “I could see that she had quickly surmised the nature of my friendship with Ángel. Did you tell her about me?”

  “She listened to our conversation the night you left México,” he said. “When the police came the next day and accused you of being … a sodomite, she listened to that conversation as well. Some time later, she admitted to eavesdropping, and we discussed the meaning of what she had heard.”

  “You spoke to her of it?” Luis asked, incredulous.

  “Alicia is not like other women,” Sarmiento replied. “She is my intellectual equal and I treat her as such. In any event, she had already pieced it together.”

  “What did she make of it?”

  Sarmiento poured an inch of brandy into his glass. “Her sympathies are always with those whom she believes are treated unjustly, and she believes that about you.”

  “Notwithstanding the nature of my … offense?”

  “She thinks it is a trivial sin of the flesh, like eating or drinking too much.”

  “In that case,” Luis said, “her sympathy is greater than her understanding.”

  “That is equally true of me, Primo.” Sarmiento said sternly. “I think you should explain yourself.”

  “Explain myself?”

&nb
sp; “I knew you, Jorge Luis. You were a snob. I see you are transformed, but there is more to it than socialism,” he said. “Your conversion is personal, not political.”

  Luis sipped his brandy. “You always were astute, Miguel. It’s true that my politics are the product of my conversion, not their cause. I suppose my conversion began the night I left here disgraced and humiliated. Those first few years of exile, I wandered around Europe trying to re-create the life I had led here, but to achieve it I had to lie about who I was and why I had left México. The lies piled up like debts, creating a constant state of anxiety that drained my life of any pleasure.” He lit another hand-rolled cigarette. “Not, in any event, that the pleasures were still so pleasurable. Another ball, another dinner party, another night at the theater. As I approached thirty, I realized that my life was without purpose and meaning, squalid and pointless. I don’t suppose you would know how that feels.”

  “You would be surprised, Primo, but we are speaking of you now.”

  Luis cast a curious look at his cousin before continuing. “I was in Paris and my friends took me to meet a man who called himself Sebastian Melmoth, an Englishman living in filthy rooms at the Hôtel d’Alsace. I couldn’t imagine why they had brought me to see him until he told me his real name. He was the writer Oscar Wilde, who fled to France after he was released from prison for sodomy in England. He told me he called himself Sebastian after Saint Sebastian, the martyr. There was a poisonous atmosphere in his rooms not simply of destitution but of despair and self-pity. I went back to my own shabby hotel, and I thought, if I follow this man’s example, then I must live a life of self-hatred and die in fear.”

  “You mean, if you continued to practice … that vice?”

  “No,” Luis said. “I mean if I continued to accept the world’s condemnation of my nature. It is my nature to love other men, Miguel. That may disgust you, but that night I decided I would no longer allow it to disgust me. It no longer does. I am at peace with myself.”

  His cousin’s words were delivered so calmly and with such conviction that Sarmiento was forced to acknowledge either that they expressed a profound truth or were insane. He could not exclude the possibility of insanity, even though he saw no sign of mental illness in his cousin’s serene countenance.

  “Once I made that decision,” Luis continued, “remarkable events occurred. I met a few men in Paris who felt as I did, and they introduced me to the work of the English Uranians. I began a correspondence with their leader, a man named Edward Carpenter. He turned his back on his bourgeois family to live with his lover on a farm in a small town. I went for a brief visit and stayed for a year, as his farmhand and his student. He is an honored figure among English socialists, but his socialism is motivated by love, not theory. Love, he told me, is the true leveler of distinctions. He always said you cannot love mankind and still wish to oppress men. For we homosexuals, that axiom is doubly true. You cannot love another man and still wish to oppress man.”

  “What was that word you used?” Sarmiento asked, frowning. “‘Homosexual.’”

  “‘Homo,’ from the Greek meaning same and ‘sexual’ … well you know what that Latinism means. The word was invented by a German writer to describe men who love other men.”

  “I see,” Sarmiento replied skeptically. “Ugly word. Still, it has the virtue of clarity if not elegance.” He poured some brandy into his own glass and his cousin’s. “You really believe your behavior is normal?”

  “It is for me,” he said. He smiled. “Do you think I’m mad?”

  “The thought has crossed my mind.”

  “I could say the same of you, Miguel.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said you knew me, but I knew you, too, better than anyone. You were an intellectual snob, an atheist, and the most melancholy of men. Yet here you are, tending to the poor, breaking bread with a priest, married to the least likely woman I would have imagined for you, and you even seem happy. Well, as happy as your nature permits. Someone less charitable than me might say you have taken leave of your senses.”

  “Touché,” Sarmiento touching his glass to his cousin’s.

  “To madness,” Luis replied.

  José would always remember how he had watched from the railing as a boy—older, almost a grown-up—entered the courtyard, his eyes sweeping across the palace in awe, pushing a bicycle. José flew down the stairs and said breathlessly, “Is this your bicicleta? Will you teach me how to ride?”

  The boy had a narrow, intelligent face and a mouth that, José soon learned, was habitually curled into a sweet half-smile. His hair was longer than the fashion, straight as an Indian’s, and parted in the middle. Beneath blunt, black eyebrows, his coffee-colored eyes were warm and friendly.

  “You must be José,” the boy said. “My name is David. I am your new piano teacher.”

  “I know how to play the piano,” José replied impatiently. “But not how to ride a bicycle. Please, can I touch it?”

  David surrendered the bicycle to José, who tentatively pushed it across the courtyard.

  “You really don’t have a bicycle?” David asked. José shook his head, and David said, with a sweeping gesture of his hand, “But you have all this. This … house.”

  José did not understand. “Do you belong to a bicycle club?” he asked, returning the bicycle to the other boy, who leaned it casually against the wall. “Do you race? I saw Juan Trigueros win the Independence Day race last year. He was fast as the wind! The seat is very high. How do you get on it? I—”

  David clamped his hand over José’s mouth. “Listen, peanut,” he said with a broad, white smile, “Your mamá hired me to give you piano lessons. So if you take me to your piano and let me do my job, then maybe I will show you how to ride my bicycle. Okay?”

  When he removed his hand, José was also smiling. “What does that mean, ‘hokay’?”

  “It’s American for de acuerdo. Now, where is the piano, peanut?”

  “In the sala,” he said. Impulsively, he grabbed the older boy’s warm, soft hand. “Come on, I’ll take you.”

  When they entered the great salon, David stopped, looked around the vast room, and said, “This room is bigger than my family’s apartment. Who are the people in those paintings?”

  José glanced up at the twin portraits of the first Gaviláns.

  “Those are my ancestors,” José replied. “Don Lorenzo and Doña Teresa.”

  David ran his hand along the marble surface of the gold-and-white table at the center of the room and took in the immense Persian carpet that covered the floor in a muted explosion of reds and blues, the pink damask-covered furniture, the bronze wall scones in the form of caryatids, the Chinese vases, the vitrines displaying seventeenth-century porcelain, and a suit of armor from the time of Felipe Segundo.

  “This is like the lobby of a fancy hotel,” he said. “I can’t believe anyone really lives here. Is that your piano? It’s nicer than the one I play at the conservatory. Come on, peanut, let’s start your lesson.”

  They sat at the bench. David pointed to the sheet music and said, “‘The Raindrop Prelude’? Can you play that?”

  “Yes,” José said, running his fingers across the keys.

  “Go ahead. Play.”

  José sucked in a breath and begin to play Chopin’s piece, as his mother had taught him, touching the keys with soft fingers. He struggled with the denser passages, slowing the tempo to work through them, stopping once or twice in frustration, all the while conscious of the older boy’s intent attention. He finished with a sigh of relief.

  “Well, Josélito, you played all the notes, but I didn’t hear the music.”

  José glanced at him and asked earnestly, “Is something wrong with your ears?”

  David laughed. “Scoot over a little.”

  José moved to the edge of the bench. David glanced at the music and began to play. He touched the keys with confidence, smoothly untangling the passages that had stu
mped José. José found himself nodding in understanding as he watched David’s hands sweep across the keys. His playing was thrillingly beautiful to José and he thought he knew what David had meant when he said José had played the notes but not the music. David could play both at the same time, the separate parts and the whole, the repeating A-flat holding the piece together like the sound of rain on a rooftop. When José wasn’t watching David’s hands, he was studying his face, where he saw—lips slightly parted, eyes tender—a look of love. It was the same look that José saw on his mother’s and his grandmother’s faces—even, sometimes, on his father’s face—but he had never imagined that one could love an activity in the same way as one loved another person. As he continued to study the older boy’s face, he felt flutters of pleasure in his belly such as no one had ever made him feel before.

  “Do you understand what I mean about playing the music?” David was asking him.

  “I think so,” he said. “Can you teach me to play as well as you?”

  “I thought you wanted me to teach you how to ride a bicycle?” David said, grinning.

  “Will you teach me both?”

  David threw his arm around José and said, “I will, peanut. Do you mind that I call you ‘peanut’?”

  “No,” José said, his heart warm and happy. “I like it.”

  My feet cannot reach the pedals,” José complained.

  David, steadying the bicycle, replied, “I don’t want you to pedal yet. I just want you to get used to the motion. Put your hand on the handlebars, not my shoulder. Come on, eyes forward.”

  Holding the bicycle, David ran down the stone path into the twilit green of the Alameda, past the half-completed cenotaph to Juárez, past the iron lampposts where the electric lights had just begun to flicker on, past the mortician’s marble benches, past the bandstands and the formal gardens. José, clutching the handlebars, felt a surge of fear, then excitement, then joy.

  “I want to pedal, David!” he shouted.

  David slowed to a stop. “Next time. I have to bring a screwdriver to adjust the seat so your feet can reach the pedals. How did that feel?”