The City of Palaces (19 page)

“This is everything,” she said.

Miguel took the heavy purse, thanked her, and told her to go back to their room. Jorge Luis did not look up at her. She stepped outside the room but lingered just beyond the doorway and listened.

“Send a telegram when you have reached Veracruz to let me know you have arrived safely,” Miguel said. “Book passage on the first ship out. Send word when you arrive at Le Havre. I will wire you funds. Don't look so frightened, Jorge Luis. You always wanted to see Paris. Now you will.”

The younger man began to sob. “I've ruined my life,” he said. “Disgraced my family. If I had honor left I would shoot myself, but I am too much a coward even for that.”

“Don't be a fool,” he said. “Go now and hurry.”

“If the police come here …”

“I will take care of that. Go.”

She hurried down the hall back into their bedroom. A few minutes later, Miguel entered the room, undressed, and got into their bed.

“If the police come tomorrow,” he said, “and ask if my cousin was here, you will tell them no. Please make sure any servant who saw him provides the police with the same answer.”

“Of course,” she said. “Can you tell me what has happened?”

He was quiet for a moment. “My dear, what Jorge Luis has done is not fit for your ears.”

“Did he kill someone?”

“No,” Miguel said. “He is not a murderer. It is something worse.”

“Worse than murder? But—”

At that moment, Miguel kissed her with a passion that shocked her out of her questions. He undressed her, and for the first time while he made love to her, he stroked and kissed her face. He locked his eyes on her eyes and with her name on his lips, he emptied himself into her. She later calculated that this was the night José had been conceived.

T
he police arrived the following afternoon. Not the street officers with their little capes and billy clubs who patrolled the intersections from doorways of
pulquerías
but two plain-clothed, hard-faced officers of
la seguridad
, Don Porfirio's private police. They interrogated her and Miguel together and then dismissed her. As she had the previous night, she listened from just outside the room. Their tone, respectful while she was in the room, now became menacing.

“Do you know why we are looking for your cousin?”

“Obviously I do not,” Miguel replied.

“Your cousin is a sodomite. Did you know that?”

“That's absurd,” Miguel said. “He is a perfectly normal man.”

“Normal? We broke up a little party last night that your cousin was attending with his friends. All men, but half of them were dressed up like women. There were things going on in the bedrooms that would make you puke.”

“I know nothing about this,” Miguel said.

“You understand, Sarmiento, that if you lie to us you become an accomplice in his infamy?” one of them said.

“An accomplice to sodomy,” the second added. “The crime against nature.”

“Gentlemen,” Miguel replied, “I know very little of that practice, but I am certain that one cannot be an accomplice without also being a participant, and I can assure you I was not.”

“Don't be a smart-ass,” the first officer snapped. “This is a matter of national security. If we find out you're protecting your cousin, no one's going to be able to help you, not the old lady who lives here or your uncle.”

“Since when is sodomy a matter of national security?”

She heard the floor creak as they pushed back their chairs. “We're going to continue with our investigation,” one of them said. “If it brings us back to you, our next conversation will be in Belem.”

She hid in an alcove until they were gone and then went to Miguel and again asked him what Jorge Luis had done. He said, “The less you know the better. We will not speak of this again.”

But she could not let it go. When she next saw Padre Cáceres, she asked him to confess her. After she confessed to having listened in on her husband's private conversations, she asked, “Padre, what is sodomy?”

She could feel his shock from behind the grille of the confessional.

“Why do you ask, Doña?”

“It was the subject of the conversation between my husband and … those to whom he was speaking. They told him that someone he knows is a ‘sodomite.' I recalled the story of Sodom in scripture and I reread it, but I do not understand the meaning of the word when applied to my husband's … acquaintance.”

“This is not a subject fit for the ears of a Christian woman.”

“Padre, if it is in the Bible, then it is a subject for Christian women, if for no other reason than that I may take precautions to avoid whatever this terrible vice is.”

“Women are physically incapable of this vice,” he said.

“You will not tell me what it is.”

“I will not,” he said sternly. “I will, however, admonish you not to speak of this again to anyone as part of your penance for violating your husband's privacy. Do you understand me, Daughter?”

“Yes, Padre,” she said.

Later, she again read the story of Lot and her eye fell on the phrase used by the men of Sodom who demanded that Lot bring forth the angels he was sheltering in his house “so that we may know them,” and Lot's offer of his two virgin daughters to the crowd in response. She remembered the police officer's description of the party—all men, but half dressed as women—and his allusion to sickening acts in the bedrooms. From these fragments, she pieced together to her satisfaction an understanding of the crime Jorge Luis had committed. In some way he had either used another man as men use women or had allowed himself to be used in that manner. Her first response was not disgust so much as curiosity. How could this be? Surreptitiously, she consulted Miguel's anatomy texts examining the male body for some clue as to how two men might commit acts on each other that were similar to acts between a man and a woman. Eventually, however, she discovered her answer not in Miguel's texts but in her own forgotten experience. For she remembered now that the explorations that she and Anselmo had undertaken of each other's bodies went far beyond the bounds of propriety.

They were children, wild and curious and fearless and determined to give each other joy. She had discovered that nothing made him whimper with pleasure as much as when she took his private parts into her mouth. She remembered, too, that in his anxiety to preserve her virginity he had tried to penetrate her—and here, her face went beet-red with the memory—through her anus, but the pain was so great she had quickly demanded that he stop. Could these experimental gropings of impassioned children be the “crime against nature” that Jorge Luis had committed and for which he had had to leave México? It was too absurd and yet she could reach no other conclusion. The thought of two men engaged in these acts was repellent. Certainly God had not intended for men to abuse their bodies in that manner any more than he had intended them to become drunkards or gluttons. Nonetheless, she could not imagine any hierarchy of sin in which such acts could be deemed worse than murder. She was also surprised that her rationalist, non-believing husband would find common cause with a priest about the gravity of this indiscretion. She decided their extreme repulsion must arise from some deeper cause that was peculiarly male and, therefore, quite outside her understanding. Jorge Luis's banishment seemed to her an injustice and she pitied him his fate and prayed for his well-being and eventual safe return. As the days passed, and her pregnancy began to show, the incident faded.

T
hat night, after Jorge Luis had gone, and after he had made love to his wife, Sarmiento lay awake for a long time, attempting to make sense of the night's events and worrying about their consequences. He realized that his sudden and fierce desire for Alicia had been, in part, a reaction to the repulsion he had felt at Jorge Luis's revelations about his own sexual irregularity. The thought of Jorge Luis's squalid practices, however, was not the cause of the anxiety that kept him awake. What kept him awake was the story his cousin had told him—that the police had raided a gathering of
pedes
—Sarmiento used the French word because he could think of no Spanish equivalent—at which one of the guests was Don Ignacio de la Torre, son-in-law of the president of the Republic. Jorge Luis had escaped by climbing out of a window and fleeing across the roofs of the city, but, he confessed, sobbing, he was well known in that circle and it was simply a matter of time before the police forced his name out of one of the apprehended men.

“The police will do whatever they have to do to protect Nacho de la Torre,” he told Sarmiento. “They will throw the rest of us in prison or even kill us.”

“Listen, Jorge Luis, when I was a student in Paris I was taken to
pede
clubs simply as an anthropological experience. Could de la Torre's visit not be excused in the same way?”

“To see the creatures in the zoo, you mean?” Jorge Luis said bitterly. “No, Miguel. He was no tourist. Don Nacho is a habitué of our little sect. He has had many lovers among us.”

Sarmiento swallowed his distaste. “Your father is a senator. Surely that gives you some protection.”

“My father's position is a sinecure. He has no power to interfere with police investigations and once this gets out, he will be ruined. I have to leave México, Miguel. Now. Tonight. Will you help me?”

He hesitated, but only for an instant. “Yes, of course,” he said and they had concocted a plan.

I
n the days that followed, Sarmiento scanned the newspapers looking for reports about the raid, but found nothing. However, two weeks after the event, it was announced that Senator Cayetano Sarmiento had decided to leave public life, resigning his position in the Senate and retiring to his estate in Cuernavaca. Sarmiento went to see his uncle, who explained blandly that he had decided to spend his remaining years in the country on the advice of his physician. He said about his eldest son only that Jorge Luis had fulfilled his lifelong desire to travel in Europe and would be gone for an indefinite period. “But you probably already know that, Miguel.”

“No, Uncle, I have had no news of Jorge Luis for some time. That is why I came to see you.”

“Ah,” the old man replied, clearly disbelieving him. “Well, now you are informed.”

After a while, the vacuum of information was as anxiety-provoking to Sarmiento as the event itself. Then, at a family dinner, his brother-in-law Damian pulled him aside and said, “I hear your cousin is on a grand tour of Europe. If I were he, I would consider remaining there.”

Sarmiento had learned that Damian's information, although rarely given directly, was always credible. “Why do you say that?”

“I would imagine that the salons of Rome and Paris are more to his taste than the cells of San Juan de Ulloa,” he replied.

The name of the pestilential island prison chilled Sarmiento. “That is his alternative?”

Damian lit his cigar and puffed. “He might also be advised that Don Porfirio's agents are far-flung, and if he has any secrets that might be embarrassing to our president and his family, he should continue to keep them.”

Sarmiento said, “If I hear from him, I will certainly pass along that message.”

“Be sure that you do,” Damian said grimly. “And Miguel, that advice applies to you as well.” His brother-in-law's chilly tone was matched by the coldness in his bright blue eyes.

“There should no concern regarding my discretion,” Sarmiento replied.

“And yet there is, so take care. The officials of
la seguridad
have long memories and suspicious minds. It is best not to attract their further attention.”

T
here were no further visits from the secret police, and Sarmiento's life returned to its normal rounds, but it was only his joy at Alicia's pregnancy that finally allayed his residual fear. In Sarmiento's mind, the child they had created together would at last dispel the grief that each of them carried for the child each had lost. He threw himself into Alicia's care and into his work. Liceaga had commissioned him to write a thorough report regarding the problems of hygiene and sanitation in his district. With Cáceres's help, he interviewed dozens of residents about their medical histories, took and analyzed samples of food and water they ate and drank, measured the spaces of their hovels, and described in minute and unsparing detail the conditions in which they lived. Amassing this information, he produced an exhaustive report in which he made specific recommendations to improve the health of the residents of his district and, thereby, the health of the city as a whole. When he presented it to Liceaga, the public health director responded with characteristic ardency.

“This is exemplary, Miguel!” he said. “I will read it with great eagerness and see that it gets into the hands of those who have the authority to put your recommendations into effect.”

“I would like to help in that effort.”

“That goes without saying,” Liceaga replied. “Indeed, Miguel, I have been thinking that your talents require greater scope than district sanitation officer.” He removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a snowy handkerchief. “How would you feel about becoming my deputy?”

“What do you mean, Director?”

“I mean, I want to make you my second-in-command. You would have an office here and oversee the work of all the district sanitation officers. You would produce a comprehensive sanitation report for the entire city, not just a single district, and take the lead in its implementation. You would join me at international public health congresses and exchange ideas with our counterparts all over the world. We could turn our miasmatic city into a model of urban health and cleanliness, and then,” he continued, warming to his subject, “we could turn our attention to the rest of México. Imagine, Miguel, we could foment a public health revolution! Do you accept?”