The City of Palaces (20 page)

Caught up in Liceaga's enthusiasm, Sarmiento replied, “I would be honored.”

O
n September 7, 1899, Sarmiento delivered his son, José Ramon Rodrigo Gavilán Guadalupe de Sarmiento, who would be, he hoped, the first of many sons. Later that month he was inducted into his new position, Deputy Director of the Board of Public Health for Ciudad de México. As the old century came to an end in an explosion of fireworks above the skies of the city, Sarmiento, holding his child in his arms with his wife by his side, knew what it meant to be happy.

Book 2

The Apostle of Freedom

1909–1911

T
he child sat in the mirador petting a small black cat in his lap as he recovered from his exertions. He had dug a deep hole in the palace garden, showering flower beds with dirt and uprooting a rose bush planted by his great-grandmother. The boy was short and slim and dressed in the blue cadet's uniform of an exclusive Jesuit school. From his stature, it was clear that he was eight or nine, and yet he seemed not so much a child as an adult in miniature. His uniform, with its brass buttons and martial cut, broad across the chest and shoulders, narrow at the waist, imposed upon his boyish form a soldier's silhouette. Moreover, his head was large for his body, and his face revealed the fully formed features of a man, only far more delicate. From his broad, clear brow, his face narrowed to a firm, round chin cleft with a shallow dimple that deepened irresistibly when he laughed. His complexion was simultaneously pale and dark, like a gardenia in the moonlight, framed by the inky blackness of his tumbled hair. His skin was flawless, as if it had been cut from a bolt of the finest silk ever spun. His eyes were an incandescent green, like a cluster of leaves with the sunlight shining through them, and his eyelashes were so long and thick that his eyes appeared to be ringed with kohl. To his grandmother, who was observing him from the garden gate, he was as beautiful as a child in a fable. She could never look at him without thinking he was not quite entirely human but was like a sprite, an elf-child, with his otherworldly beauty and his mysterious self-possession.

She entered the garden tapping her cane loudly against the walkway—the cane was an affectation, for she liked to appear frailer than she was—and approached him in a rustle of petticoats and black silk. The little cat, watching her progress with alarm, leapt from the boy's arms and ran into the bushes.

“Hello, Abuelita,” the child said, rising and dusting the dirt from his uniform.

None of her other grandchildren would have dared address her as “granny.” But José she allowed liberties she had allowed no other human because from the moment he had first gazed at her with his leaf-green eyes he had become the great love of her old age.

“José,” she replied, “why are you destroying my garden?”

“Chepa told me there is an Aztec
teocalli
beneath our house, and inside there is a treasure room filled with gold the Aztec priests hid from the conquistadores.”

The old woman sat down. “If the cook spent more time cooking and less time filling your head with Indian superstitions, her meals might actually be edible.”

“They are not superstitions, Abuelita,” he replied with a child's innocent adamancy. “In the national museum I saw stones from Tenochtitlán they found in the ground beneath the cathedral. Why couldn't there be a temple here, too?”

“And what would you do with this Aztec gold?”

“I would give it to you,” he said.

She patted his hand. “You are a generous, foolish child. Come with me.” She led him to the back wall of the mirador, where she used her cane to indicate the foundation. Unlike the marble from which the gazebo's visible parts were constructed, the foundation stone was
tezontle
, the volcanic rock from which Tenochtitlán had been fabricated. Faintly visible were the Aztec ideographs for water, motion, and reeds. “Do you see this stone?”

“Yes, Abuelita,” he said, slipping his hand into hers.

“It comes from the Indian temple on which our residence sits. The temple was destroyed. Its rubble was thrown into the canal that once ran outside the walls of the garden, but the largest stones were used by your ancestors as the base of our house. Most of them are buried in the earth, beneath the walls, but this one you can see. Whatever gold there was in the temple would have been discovered and taken and melted down for coins. So you see, my dear, the temple was here all the time. It was not necessary for you to dig up Doña Esmeralda's roses to find it.”

José knelt on the ground, running his hand over the ideographs. “Abuelita, do you think that the priests made human sacrifices in our temple? Do you think they ate human hearts?”

“I should hope not,” she said with aristocratic disdain. “Where do you get such ideas? Come, José. You aunts will be here soon. Go and make yourself presentable.”

He stood up. “I must fill the hole I dug.”

“Leave it for the gardener. Say nothing about your excavations to your mother or father. They do not understand your romantic temperament.” She linked her arm with his and they made their way through the garden. “So you would have given me the Aztec gold?”

“Oh, yes, Abuelita!” he said. “I would give you all the gold in the world if I could.”

She kissed his head. “Silly child, you already have.”

I
n the packed courtyard of the Jockey Club—the seventeenth-century Casa de los Azulejos famous for its blue-tiled exterior—Guillermo Landa y Escandón, the mutton-chopped governor of Ciudad de México, was concluding his speech to a gathering of expensively dressed men lounging beneath the panels of the immense skylight. His theme was the upcoming Centenario—the 1910 centennial celebration of México's independence. Sarmiento stood in the crowd, feeling absurd in the white uniform that Liceaga had insisted upon. Each year it became more elaborate, with gold-braided epaulets and wider bands of gold around the sleeves, the buttons larger, shinier, and more intricately engraved with the insignia of the Superior Sanitation Council, as the rechristened Board of Public Health was now known. Liceaga, in an even more martial uniform, stood behind the governor, in the semicircle of public officials and wealthy private individuals who formed the centennial committee. September 1910 was still sixteen months away, but the planning had been going on for years, and the city was in a frenzy of construction and expansion. Scattered around the courtyard were intricate models of buildings and monuments newly completed or being rushed to completion in time for México to receive the world on its hundredth birthday.

Among the models were the recently opened post office, a Renaissance palace with a double staircase that tumbled like a waterfall of marble and brass beneath the glass-enclosed ceiling; the stately House of Deputies with its facade of Roman gravity; the cenotaph to Benito Juárez, a semicircle of columns formed from snowy Carrara marble surrounding a seated statue of the dour Indian savior of his country; and the dizzying Column of Independence, the height of a twelve-story building, going up at the foot of the Paseo de la Reforma, where it would be crowned with a gold-plated sculpture of Nike, the goddess of victory. Surrounded by these symbols of Don Porfirio's reign, the wealthy men in the room, Mexican and foreign, nodded and murmured approval as the governor concluded: “Our days of backwardness are long behind us, our progress as a modern nation is assured. México is ready to step forward and assume its rightful place in the first ranks of the family of nations!
Viva México!
” The cry echoed in the vast room and then the crowd began to push upstairs into a private banquet room where a massive U-shaped table, festooned with garlands of flowers in the colors of the Mexican flag—red, white, and green—had been set for lunch.

Carried forward in the crowd, Sarmiento found himself behind the two Princes Iturbide, descendants of the short-lived Emperor Agustín I. In 1821 their ancestor had won México's independence from Spain and then made himself, briefly, king. He had ended his days, as had so many other nineteenth-century Mexican chief executives, in front of a firing squad. His young great-grandsons were popular figures in aristocratic circles, for they were, as Sarmiento's sister-in-law Eulalia liked to say, as “beautiful and dense as a pair of Sèvres vases.”

One was saying to the other, “Don Porfirio is like the Conde de Orizaba who built this palace. His father didn't think he would amount to anything and told him, ‘You will never build a house of tiles,' but he showed the old man. He took that proverb seriously and covered his palace with a fortune in Puebla tiles. The world told Don Porfirio, México will never be anything, and look, he has made us a great nation.”

“And given us a handsome pension to build our own house of tiles,” the other twin said, laughing.

He had no sooner entered the banquet hall than he heard Liceaga calling, “Sarmiento, over here. There are some people I want you to meet!”

Sarmiento found the director with two Americans. One of them was a short, stout, bald man with a white goatee, who exuded self-importance like a cloud of flatulence. The other was a shriveled, gray-haired, gray-faced man with an alcoholic tremor in his hands.

“Miguel,” Liceaga said in English, “may I present Mr. J. Anthony King and his associate, Mr. Kieran McCarthy. They represent the interests of the Hearst family in México. This is Doctor Miguel Sarmiento, my deputy.”

The man named King glanced at him and then past him, as if looking for someone more important to talk to. Gray-skinned McCarthy offered a trembling, moist hand.

“Doctor Liceaga was telling us about the important work that you are doing in the public health department,” McCarthy said. “To prepare the city for all the visitors who will be arriving next year.”

“I trust that your plans include giving the Indians pants,” King said brusquely. “Or better yet, sweeping them off the streets altogether. The only way to deal with the Indians is what Díaz is doing with the Yaquis: round them up or wipe them out.”

“Like your government?” Sarmiento asked.

King, glaring at him, said pompously, “It's a matter of scientific fact that the white race is the superior race, and it is our obligation as white men to ensure its triumph over the lesser races.”

“As a scientist, I would have to disagree that any such fact has been established,” Sarmiento replied mildly.

“I refer you, sir, to the work of Sir Francis Galton,” King said. “England's preeminent eugenicist. Galton points out, and quite correctly, that if the morally and physically enfeebled are allowed to reproduce themselves, humanity will be dragged down.”

“Even allowing that that is true, there are enfeebled individuals of every race, Señor King. Even among white Americans.”

King's face reddened. “Sir, our subject is México, and I am telling you, until México eliminates its Indians, it will never be a first-rate power. Look, there's Rockefeller's man. Come along, McCarthy.”