by Michael Nava
Sarmiento stared at the bloody cuffs. “She is already weak, recovering from a serious illness. Even a minor infection will kill her.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I did all I could. I did my best.”
Sarmiento nodded. “Thank you.”
He turned his back to the others and wept.
The numbness in her fingertips was slowly spreading through her fingers and soon she would be deprived of the sense of touch. The other senses would follow—taste, smell, hearing, sight—and she would leave the world blind, deaf, and insensate. Her anxiety was mitigated by her subtle awareness of doors opening—the same doors through which she had tumbled in her vision of unity. They opened now more slowly, deliberately, inviting her to step across their thresholds. She hesitated, knowing that once those thresholds were crossed, there would be no turning back. So this was dying—the pause between two realms of existence that allowed the soul a moment to compose itself before death, like gravity, tugged the leaf from the branch.
A fleshy blur above her resolved itself into the features of Pedro Cáceres. The priest’s careworn face and white hair were luminous. He squeezed a bit of sensation into her failing hand.
“Daughter,” he murmured. “My dearest daughter.”
She heard herself croak, “Where is Miguel?”
“Safe at the church. I will go and bring him here.”
“First, confess me,” she whispered.
“Of course.”
“Father, forgive me for I have sinned,” she said, but she abandoned the familiar formula and cried, “Pedro, I am afraid of dying!”
“That’s no sin, Alicia. Even Christ in the garden was afraid of dying. I assure you, mija, you should have no more fear of damnation than he did.”
“I am not afraid of hell,” she whispered. “I am afraid of heaven.”
She saw his confusion and wished she had the strength to explain that the source of her anxiety was the annihilating purification that awaited her.
“The body,” she said laboriously. “Everything it loved, gone. What will be left of me?”
He smiled lovingly. “The cup that holds the water and the lantern that shelters the flame are only vessels, Alicia. Discard them and water is water, fire remains fire. The part of you that loves has never been your body. It is your soul and that will not be extinguished.”
She nodded. “Yes, yes. Of course.”
“I will bring Miguel. Will you wait for him?”
“Yes,” she said. “But bring him quickly.”
The familiar scent of lavender and roses and the rustle of silks stirred her into consciousness, and she opened her eyes. Her mother sat beside her. Her face, unlike the priest’s, was not illuminated but desolate and withered. It was the face of an ancient animal trapped, uncomprehendingly, in old age and infirmity. She knew, looking into the other woman’s bleary eyes, that death was already sinking its tendrils into her mother’s flesh and would not be kept waiting for long. Her heart surged with compassion.
“Mother,” she said, lifting her hand to La Niña’s face.
“You fool,” La Niña said bitterly. “Did you think Santos has more value to me than you? Servants can be replaced. Not my child.” Tears streamed from her eyes. “You had no right to martyr yourself. You should have stood aside.”
“Forgive me,” she said, taking her mother’s hand. “I could not.”
“Do not die and there will be nothing to forgive.”
“If God wills it …”
“If you had listened less to God and more to me,” her mother said with some asperity, “you would not be lying here. One does not make old bones by being virtuous. Could you not have spared a thought for your own well-being, Daughter? Did you have to open your purse to every beggar who stretched out his hand to you?” Grief crumpled her face. “What did you achieve?”
“I have been happy,” Alicia replied.
La Niña sighed. “Happy? Does that matter so much?”
“It is everything, Mother.”
Alicia? Can you hear me?”
His voice was warm and soft, like a drizzle of honey.
“Miguel!” She opened her eyes. His face was furrowed with worry. He stroked her face tenderly, biting back tears. “Thank God, you are safe.”
“I came as soon as I could.” He stood and pulled back the covers. “Let me look at the wound.”
She heard him gasp when he undid the bandages and saw where the bullet had entered her. She could smell her putrefying flesh. He had explained septicemia to her—an uncontrollable bacterial infection that often followed traumatic wounds. She had already guessed from her failing body that something like this was happening to her, but his shock confirmed it. He carefully rebandaged her.
“How much time is left to me?” she asked him.
“Don’t talk like that,” he said, avoiding her eyes.
“We have always been honest with each other, Miguel.”
“Not long,” he said reluctantly. “A day or two. How do you feel? Are you in pain? I could give you morphine.”
She shook her head. “Morphine dulls the senses. I would rather bear the pain.”
“Oh God, Alicia, this is my fault,” he said, breaking down. “I brought this upon us.” He sobbed. “I am so sorry.”
She stroked his hair, now threaded with gray, coarser than it was the first time she had touched it so many years earlier. The beloved body, she thought, once so hard and strong. Time’s depredations had begun to soften it, loosening the skin on his neck, rounding his shoulders, raising the veins in his hands. The realization that she would not grow old with him stabbed at her heart.
“We agreed,” she said softly. “You did the right thing.”
“Then I should bear the consequences,” he said, lifting his head. “Not you.” He was like a little boy, entreating his mother.
“You will have your own cross to bear, Miguel,” she told him.
He nodded. “This was not what I expected.”
“God does not care about our expectations,” she said. “He sends us the suffering we need, not the suffering we are prepared to endure.”
“How can you speak of God when he is going to take you away from me?” he said bitterly.
She kissed his fingers. “After Anselmo, after my disfigurement, I did not think another man would ever love me or that I would bear another child. What a miracle you have been for me, Miguel! Still, even in our happiness, we were fated to part. Only the moment of parting was unknown. Now that it is here, I prefer to be grateful for the miracle rather than angry it is over. It makes our separation more bearable.” She stirred; the pain was great. “You must take José and leave México. You aren’t safe here.”
“Without you, there would be no reason to remain, in any event.”
“You must marry again,” she said quietly.
“Never!” he cried.
“My dear,” she said. “You need a woman to soften your solitude. You must also think of José. He is a sensitive and gentle child. He needs a mother.”
She saw from his face that only now was he thinking about the effect her death would have on their son. It was a look of terror.
“He will look to you when I am gone,” she said. “Be brave for him.”
He pressed his face into her breast like a child seeking comfort and wept fresh tears. She kissed the top of his head. Her words had failed to assuage his grief, but they had quelled her own lingering fears because their truth had resonated in the depths of her heart. Parting had always been inevitable and now that the moment had arrived, there was nothing to be done about it except to be grateful for what had been and for what was to be. Jesus on the cross must have felt such release, she thought, turning his eyes at the end from the suffering of the world at his feet to the limitless serenity of the sky where his father awaited him like the father in the parable of the prodigal son: “For this son of mine was dead, and now he is alive again!” She heard a voice in her head, slow and sweet as honey on the tong
ue: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives, give I to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” As he sobbed, tears sprang to her eyes too, quick and hot, but while his were tears of sorrow, hers were tears of joy.
José Ramon!”
Frère Martin’s sharp tone woke José from his daydream and brought him back into his geometry class, to the itchy wool of his uniform against the skin of his thighs, to Fatty Marquez’s smirking assumption that José was in trouble again for his inattention. José readied himself for the teacher’s reproach, but instead, in a softer voice, Frère Martin continued, “Come, José. The rest of you, keep working.”
José followed his teacher into the courtyard, where Tío Damian was waiting for him.
“José,” he said, in a strained voice, quite unlike his usual amused tones, “I have come to take you home.”
José’s confusion was increased when Frère Martin crouched down so that they were eye to eye. He took José’s shoulders in his hands and said gravely, “God bless you, child.”
“Come, José,” Damian said, extending his hand.
“What’s wrong?” José blurted out.
“We will speak in the car,” Damian replied.
But as Damian’s driver negotiated the dozen blocks between José’s school and the palace, his uncle remained silent until the Rolls-Royce had stopped at the palace gate. A crowd was gathered in front of it. Damian turned to José and said, “Your mother was injured this morning when some men invaded your home looking for your father.”
Nothing in that sentence made sense to José, who, only a few hours earlier, had left the palace with his mother’s kiss lingering on his lips and his father’s admonition to concentrate on his studies echoing in his ears. As he passed through the crowd to enter the palace, José heard sympathetic murmurs of “Pobrecito.” In the first courtyard, one of the housemaids was on her knees scrubbing dark stains from the cobblestone. She glanced up at him, her face streaked with tears. Chepa came running from out of the kitchen. Her head was bandaged. She squeezed him in a tight embrace. She, too, was weeping. Damian separated him from the cook. By now, José was terrified.
“Where’s my mother!” he demanded.
Chepa drew a shaky breath. “The doctor just finished. She is in her room.”
“What doctor? Where’s my father?”
“Come along, José,” Damian said. To Chepa, he said, “Bring two brandies, would you?”
They stepped past the maid on her knees—José glanced into the pail beside her, its water red—into the second courtyard and sat on a bench facing the fountain. The warm sun, the familiar fragrance of roses, the trickle of water from the stone tiers of the cantera fountain into the pond calmed him a little. He waited for his uncle to speak.
“Your father went into the Senate this morning and made a very dangerous speech,” Damian said. Chepa came with the brandy; he took one and gave one to José. “Take a sip, boy.”
He made a face at the liquid’s sour taste. “What did my papá say?”
“He called the president of the Republic a murderer,” Damian replied. “It is nothing less than the truth, of course, but you don’t walk into the lion’s cage to taunt the lion and expect to walk out uninjured.” He gulped his brandy. “Your father knew he was risking his life by speaking out—”
“Then why did he?” José cried.
Damian gazed at him appraisingly. “You are nothing like him, are you?”
José looked down and prodded the moss that grew between the cobblestones with the tip of his shoe. “I disappoint him.”
“You must continue to do so,” his uncle replied. “It may save your life one day.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” Damian said. “After he made the speech, he disappeared. Huerta sent men here to find him. They came into the house and were going to shoot one of the servants when your mother tried to stop them. She was shot instead. She was not killed, José, but she was seriously injured. The doctor removed the bullet, and she is resting now. I will take you to see her, but you must be brave.” He tugged at the collar of José’s cadet’s uniform. “Can you be brave, little soldier? For your mamá?”
José, biting back tears, nodded. “Where is my abuelita?”
“I think we will find her and your aunts with your mother. Come on, then.”
His mother was lying in bed, encircled by his aunts and his grandmother. When he entered the room, they lifted their heads and looked at him, their faces raw with grief. His grandmother held him in her thin arms, and he was aware of her fragility. His aunts moved away slightly from the bed to make room for him. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his mother’s sleeping face. He touched the faded scars she had once told him were God’s gift to cure her of vanity, stroked her thick, soft hair, and listened to her ragged breathing. She seemed small and spent, like an exhausted child.
She is dying.
The words formed in his mind with a certainty that left no room for fear. Instead, he was enshrouded by a strange calm, not the calm of acceptance, but the bleaker calm of fate. When she had been ill before, and he had thought she might die, he had been wild with fear and grief because her death would have ruptured his reality—the reality of a cosseted child, a little prince living in a palace whose greatest challenge was the boredom of surfeit. Since then, however, his city had disintegrated around him, shattered buildings and the glassy-eyed dead transforming familiar landscapes into a circle of hell. He had felt the fear of the adults whom he had once believed were impervious to fear and invincible in their certainties. The world had taught him there are no certainties and ultimately no safety. Terrible things happened without warning or explanation. His mother could die.
He blinked back his tears. He was not yet a man, at least not like his father or Tió Damian, but he could no longer be a child. As he watched his dying mother, he felt the world’s enmity and he responded not with a child’s grief but a man’s defiance, as if his blood were being infiltrated with threads of iron.
He sat there for a long time until she opened her eyes, which were clouded with pain, and whispered, “Mijo.”
He clasped her hand and smiled. “Mamá.”
Dinner was morose, the servant girls unable to hide their tears as they served the courses and cleared the dishes. Exasperated, Gonzalo muttered, “How can I enjoy my food with all this sobbing?” and was met by a cold stare from his sister-in-law Nilda and an admonitory one from his wife, Leticia. The ordinarily gay Eulalia quietly rearranged the food on her plate without eating. Damian simply drank through the meal, waving away the platters of food offered to him. At the head of the table, the wizened marquesa sat sphinx-like, casting unfriendly glances at her family as if they were uncouth strangers whose company had been inflicted upon her. Sarmiento observed the table silently, lifting forkfuls of food into his mouth but tasting nothing.
“This is all your fault,” Nilda said to him, not raising her eyes from her plate. “You killed our sister.”
“Alicia’s not dead!” Leticia cried.
Now Nilda looked up, not at him but at her sister. “She will die and he is to blame.”
No one spoke in his defense and the truth struck like a slap. He had no friends at this table. His connection to the family had been entirely through Alicia, and once she was gone, the connection would be severed. Without excusing himself, he rose from the table.
“Stay,” La Niña commanded.
“I am not welcome here,” he said stiffly. “I will go to my wife.”
“The rest of you, go,” she said. “You sit, Doctor. There are matters we must discuss.”
In a clatter of silverware and heavy chairs skidding resentfully across tile, the room cleared and he was left alone with his mother-in-law. She indicated her wineglass and he filled it and then sat beside her.
“Nilda is a fool,” she said. “Alicia has achieved what she has always wanted.”
“W
hat is that, Señora?”
She sipped her wine, grimaced, and spat out, “Martyrdom,” as if it were a curse.
His remonstration died on his lips—her anger was her way of grief. Instead he said quietly, “Her actions were consistent with her character.”
“As were yours!” La Niña barked. “The two of you, peas in a pod, she looking to heaven in the sky and you to heaven on earth. Striving after things that do not exist and never will. Had either of your feet touched the ground instead of walking on clouds, we would not be sitting here. Why could this life not be enough for you?”
“We dreamed of a better world,” he said.
“A better world? For whom? Not for me,” she said. “This world is quite sufficient to my needs. I do not wish for it to change.” In a softer voice, she said, “You think I am a selfish old woman, but the truth, Doctor, is that I have seen the disasters dreamers like you inflict upon the rest of us. Do not forget, I lived through the civil wars that followed independence, the French invasion, the coups, and the countercoups after Juárez died. Bloodshed and misery, and all of it in the cause of someone’s idea of a better world. Díaz was a peasant with an appalling accent, but he was a realist who understood México. He imposed peace and order. You and your friend Madero have only succeeded in bringing down the roof.”
“It was not Madero,” he mumbled, “but the forces of reaction. He never had a chance.”
She shrugged. “I have said my piece. Now we must be practical. You must leave soon, to protect yourself and this house.”
“Yes, I know. I will.” He paused, expecting an argument, then added, “José must come with me.”
She nodded slowly. “You are his father.” With a bleak smile, she asked, “Did you think I would demand that he remain?”
“I know how much you love him.”
“It is because I love him that I would send him away,” she replied. “If he remained here, he would become the family’s poor relation after I die. He would only end up in some miserable marriage arranged by one of his uncles to bring money into the family. Take him to Europe or the United States, where he will be free to become himself, whatever that may be.” She creaked out of her chair. “I only regret I will not live long enough to see him become a man.”