The City of Palaces (21 page)

King stalked off without another word, McCarthy trotting behind him like a little dog.

“Why is it that Americans are either bombastic or puerile, I wonder,” Liceaga said after the men had departed. “Not that I disagree with King's sentiments, however reprehensible his manner of expressing them.”

“You would also exterminate thirty percent of our population?” Sarmiento asked, taking a glass of champagne from a passing, dark-skinned waiter.

“Come, come, Miguel. That's not what I meant. But it is true that our Indians seem utterly impervious to self-improvement. Surely your decade at the department has demonstrated that over and over.”

“It is difficult to assess the Indian's capacity for self-improvement since he is never offered the opportunity for it,” Sarmiento said. “He is forced to take the worst and lowest-paying jobs, eat food unfit for human consumption, drink putrid water, and live in squalor. His children must work rather than attend school, assuming there is a school available to them, and he is caught between the church and the
pulquería
, one offering the false panacea of a future heaven and the other the false panacea of intoxication to console him for his present misery. That's what I have learned in my ten years at the department.”

Liceaga threw an affectionate arm around Sarmiento's shoulder. “You've obviously spent too much time in the field. You've ‘gone native,' as the English say. I disagree with your analysis, Miguel, but your passion does you credit.”

“Speaking of analysis, Eduardo, your report about the new waterworks implies it will deliver potable water to most of the city, but we both know that only a few neighborhoods on the west side will actually benefit.”

“The government wants to hear about progress, Miguel.”

“And you tell them what they want to hear,” Sarmiento replied.

“My dear boy,” Liceaga said, “I refuse to be drawn into a quarrel with you, but I will say that your famous integrity does not come cheaply. I know because I'm the one who pays the price for it. We both want the same thing, a better life for all of our citizens, but we must do what is necessary before we can do what is possible.” He dropped his voice. “Don Porfirio is almost eighty. This will be his last term, and then, perhaps, there will be new blood.”

“According to Francisco Madero, our country cannot afford another four years of Díaz gerontocracy,” Sarmiento said.

“Ah, I gather you read Madero's book.”

“Yes, it was an eloquent call to a true democracy in México.”

“A call that will not heard as long as the Sphinx is alive. They want us to take our places at the table. Let's pray we have not been seated with the Yankees. And don't mention Madero in this crowd.”

J
osé stood before the mirror, fresh from his bath, rubbing pomade into his hair. His room lay reflected around him, a large, high-ceilinged space with a single window, now shuttered, that opened out to a quiet side street off the
plazuela
. More than once, as a small child, he had gotten lost wandering the galleries and suites of his home. After one such adventure he had asked his grandmother, “Abuelita, do you know how many rooms there are in your house?” She had replied, “My dear, if I knew how many rooms there were, it would not be a palace.”

The centerpiece of his room was a four-poster canopy bed in which, his grandmother had told him, many of his ancestors had breathed their last breath. Her story thrilled rather than troubled him. The bed was not merely his resting place, but a prop central to his imagination. He could pull the curtains shut and it became a theater stage or a ship on the high sea or a carriage on a bandit-infested road. Most often, it was the battlefield where he pitted his armies of lead soldiers against one another for hours at a time. The armies were now scattered across the room—soldiers from every era and every country and every rank in the infantry, cavalry, and artillery. He imagined himself a brave soldier in the army of Saint Louis fighting the infidels in Jerusalem, or with Charles I battling the French in Italy, or with Napoleon in Egypt. In almost every story he told himself, there was a moment when a fellow soldier was gravely injured and José carried him to safety, and when the boy survived, he vowed to José eternal love and friendship, always with the same words: “I will never leave you.”

In actuality, José had no friends his own age. He had a solitary temperament but his solitude was not entirely temperamental. His grandmother coddled and protected him, but she also imposed her strict views of rank by which most of his schoolmates were deemed unsuitable companions for him. Those who met her high standards were boys he disliked because they were braggarts or bullies or dull. His cousins were all adults, the next youngest ten years his senior, and their children were infants.

When he was younger, his parents had taken him to the church of San Francisco Tlalco while his father held his clinic, and he had played with the children of the parish, but now he was at school during those hours. Some of those children were still his friends, but he saw them only on Sunday, after Mass. When he had proposed inviting them home, his grandmother responded with horror. He had resigned himself to living in a world of adults and to the wayward affection of his cat, El Morito, who crawled in from the garden every night and slept on his bed with him. He assuaged his loneliness with his lead soldiers, the novels of Jules Verne and Victor Hugo and Robert Louis Stevenson, and his stereopticon through which he viewed distant lands to which he hoped to one day travel with the one true friend he knew was awaiting him somewhere.

He brushed his hair back, dressed himself meticulously, and went to greet his aunts, who had gathered in his grandmother's parlor for tea. José privately thought of his aunts as the three stepsisters from
La cenicienta
dressed in their lavish gowns, faces powdered and rouged, on their way to the prince's ball. Each one had her predominant quality—Tía Nilda was caustic, Tía Leticia was melancholy, and Tía Eulalia was amusing. They had settled in their usual places in the pink-and-gold room with its enormous Velasco painting of the Valley of México on the wall above the sofa where his grandmother sat. When José entered the room, she patted the cushion, inviting him to sit beside her. Before he did, José approached each of his aunts, bowed from his waist, and kissed their hands.

“Ah, the Prince Imperial,” Nilda said. He could taste the cream she used on her hands when he lifted his head from kissing her.

“No, no,
nieto
,” Leticia said. “Give your old aunt a real kiss.” She puckered her thin lips and he touched them with his. She smelled of rose water and tears.

“José, you are so pretty that if you were a girl, we would have to lock you up in a tower to protect your virtue,” Eulalia said, but her tone, unlike Nilda's, was kind and affectionate. “As it is, you will lay waste to many female hearts before you marry.”

He smiled at her because he liked her best, and also her dashing husband, Tío Damian.

“Bring my grandson his chocolate,” La Niña ordered the young maid who hovered nervously in the corner. She took silver tongs and piled French lace cookies from a platter on the table before her onto a nearly translucent dessert plate and passed it to him. “Say nothing to your mother or I will be blamed for spoiling your appetite.”

“I hardly think Alicia can blame you for anything having to do with the child,” Nilda said. “You are more of a mother to him than she.”

“Yes, Mother, where is Alicia?” Leticia asked.

“She has gone to seek the support of the first lady for a school to teach girls to become nurses.”

“Really?” Nilda said. “Whatever for? There are more than enough nuns in this city to tend the sick.”

“Oh, what do nuns do when you are sick but stand over you with their sour faces waiting for you to die so they can begin the novena?” Eulalia said. “Alicia wants girls who are actually trained to care for the sick.”

“You seem to know rather a lot,” Nilda said.

“Damian has pledged ten thousand pesos toward her school,” she replied.

“What next?” Leticia marveled. “Women doctors?”

“Pigs will fly before that happens,” Nilda said. “Women should desist from the occupations of men. That reminds me, I saw Carmen Rubio de Díaz at Sylvan's last week. She was dining with Limantour.”

“The finance minister?” La Niña asked. “How extraordinary.”

“Oh, from what I understand it's her hand at the till of the Republic rather than her husband's,” Eulalia said. “Have you spoken to him recently? He loses his train of thought between one sentence and the next.”

“Nonsense,” Nilda said. “Don Porfirio may be eighty, but he is still
muy hombre
. As for Limantour, that man looks like he was squeezed out of a tube of ointment. And Carmen, well, I suppose she can't help meddling in affairs of state seeing how she is barren.”

“She was a lovely girl,” La Niña said. “I still think it was criminal that her father married her off to that man when she was only seventeen and he was already fifty.”

“Well,” Eulalia said quietly, “her father got a good price for her.”

The sisters were silent, each thinking of her own arranged marriage, Nilda with a frown, Leticia with downcast eyes, and Eulalia with a slight smile.

“José,” Leticia said. “Have you been practicing your piano? Won't you play for us?”

A
licia heard her son working his way through “Ave Maria” and reminded herself that she must find him a piano teacher. She had been his original instructor, but he had long since surpassed her. She paused and listened, picturing her beautiful boy's long, deliberate fingers on the keys, his face transfixed with the joy of making music. God in his infinite humor had given her a child endowed with the one disposition completely foreign to her—an artistic temperament. Her son was impractical but obsessive, distracted but disciplined, a silent, intense observer of others but completely self-absorbed. He drove his teachers mad with his inattentiveness in class, but she had watched him sit for hours maneuvering his toy soldiers in complicated formations, like actors on a stage, while quietly telling himself their story. As a small child he had often disappeared into the garden, where he picked flowers and arranged them with complete concentration by color, size, and type. He cheerfully practiced scales until the servants begged her to ask him to stop, but he could scarcely add or subtract, confused pesos and centavos, and could still not tell time or right from left. He had taken so long to speak that Miguel had worried he was deaf or feeble-minded, but then, when he did speak, it was in full sentences, not babyish babble. He still guarded his words though, a habit that made her heart ache because she wondered whether he kept silent out of fear of disappointing her and Miguel by speaking.

For she knew her ability to understand his character was limited by her own temperament, so different from his. In consequence, there were moments of misunderstanding between them, which she worried he took for lack of love. But she had carried him in her body and fed him with her milk, creating an intimacy between them that transient confusion could not impair for long. She knew, ultimately, that he felt secure in her devotion to him. Miguel, however, lacking that bond of body with José, could not always conceal the irritation he felt with a son so unlike his rational, methodical, and practical self. When he scolded José for his failures at school or inability to read the face of the clock, José shrunk back from his father and it pained her to see it.

“Miguel,” she told him after such an episode, “you must be patient with him. He is not willfully disobedient.”

“I know, I know,” Miguel would say with a sigh. “I'm sorry that my frustrations show. I do not wish to perpetuate my own father's bad temper, but Alicia, he is an odd child. Almost an idiot savant, brilliant at some tasks, hopeless at others.”

“Oh, Miguel, that is cruel! We are all better at some tasks than others. It is simply that you have little interest in the things he loves, music and stories and art. But those interests come honestly through my bloodline, as you can see in my mother, who lives for art. It is no wonder they are such great friends.”

“Those interests may be acceptable in a woman who is not expected to shoulder worldly burdens, but José will have to take his place in the society of men. I would prefer he not enter it like a lamb among wolves with his head filled only with Chopin and Jules Verne.”

“He is still a child, Miguel,” she replied. “We both know the world will harden him. That is the nature of the world. Let him have his innocence while he can.”

But she thought, as she listened to the last notes of his piece, José's innocence was not transient; it was deeply embedded in his character, the source of a freshness and vivacity that seemed more fitting for a girl than a boy. Miguel was, perhaps, justified in worrying how José would fare in the harsh world of men, but Alicia trusted that the God who had created her son as he was had a purpose he wished to express through José in the fullness of time.

“Bravo, José,” she said as she entered the drawing room.

José scooted off the piano bench and ran to her. “Mamá!” he exclaimed, embracing her.

She kissed his forehead. “You are becoming such an accomplished musician. I will find you an instructor to help you advance even further.”

“I liked it when you taught me,” he replied, still holding her.

“Yes, I enjoyed that, too,
mijo
, but I have nothing more to teach you. Let me sit and visit with your aunts.”

She sat on the sofa with her mother, José between them. He threaded his fingers through hers. His grandmother said, “José, stop pawing your mother so she can have a cup of tea.”

“No, that's fine. I had tea with the first lady.”