The City of Palaces (24 page)

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 stumped 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.”

M
y 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?”

“I loved it!” José said.

“Okay, I need to get you home,” David said.

José climbed off the bicycle. David got on and then José hopped up on the handlebars.

“Ready?” David asked.

“Okay,” José said.

They plunged into the fashionable crowd promenading along the Paseo, eliciting shouts of “Hey, watch it!” and “Get off that thing and walk!” In response, David rode even faster and more recklessly, while José grasped the handlebars until his knuckles turned white.

The bells of the churches had been silenced for Holy Week, and the air was filled with the sound of the rattles that people carried to ward off evil spirits until the bells rang again on Easter morning. As they approached the Zócalo, David slowed down where the paving changed from macadam to cobblestone. The facade of the cathedral was draped in black. The streetcars jerked forward from the Zócalo station in a shower of electric sparks from the overhead wires. David darted among the
cargadores
carrying heavy trunks from the railroad station to the hotels on Calle San Francisco. He turned onto the side street that led to the palace and, too soon for José, arrived at the hulking doors, where the porter hurried out when David braked and José hopped off the handlebars.

“Won't you come and eat supper with us?” José asked.

David shook his head. “My family is expecting me. I will see you on Monday. In the meantime, I want you to practice that piece I gave you.”

“‘Claire de Lune,'” José said. “What a funny name for a song.”

“Don't concern yourself with the title; worry about the notes. Goodbye, peanut,” David said, and then he was off, disappearing into the Indian market in the
plazuela
and into the dusk.

“Come inside, Master José,” the porter was saying. “Your grandmother is waiting for you.”

Reluctantly, José went in. He found La Niña in her parlor waiting with his chocolate and plates of sweets.

“You are late, José,” she said.

“David was teaching me how to ride a bicycle in the Alameda.”

“Your piano teacher?”

“Yes,” José said.

“He is not a suitable companion for you, José,” she said. “He is only a servant, after all.”

“He is not my servant,” José said angrily. “He is my friend.”

“Drink your chocolate before it gets cold,” she said. “Next time he comes, I would like to meet this boy, your friend.”

“I will introduce you, and you will love him as much as I do,” José said.

“We shall see,” she replied.

A
licia knelt before a painting on the stone floor of the empty church of San Francisco Tlalco. She did not know how long she had been there because the bells did not toll on Good Friday. She was aware only that the light had faded and the church lay deep in the shadows of dusk. Her knees ached and pain clawed the muscles of her back and shoulders, sending shuddering spasms that brought tears to her eyes. She was not certain she could rise, even if she wanted to, but she did not yet want to. She had not intended for her devotion at the thirteenth station to become an exercise in self-mortification. However, as she gazed at the depiction of the death of Jesus that a self-taught Indian artist had painted three centuries earlier, she found herself rooted to the spot. In the background of Golgotha, the artist had painted the landscape of the Valley of México with its lakes and volcanoes and fields of blue agave. Jesus himself was no more than a half-naked Indian boy whose face was veiled with streams of blood that ran from a crown of cactus thorns. The horror and sadness of the moment of death was inscribed on his slender body, gaunt and exhausted and slack. His death cut straight to her heart, like a scythe, leveling the weeds of vanity. Her soul was naked before her God who loved her so much he had endured this death to bring her the grace of eternal life.

Miguel had once asked her what she thought about when she prayed. “Nothing,” she told him. “But you spend so many hours at it, you must be thinking of something.” “No,” she insisted quietly. “I think of nothing.” He had looked at her with the same frowning expression with which he regarded obstinate patients.

But she had spoken the truth. When she prayed, as she had for the past few hours, her prayer eventually shed the stifling cloak of language and became, instead, a pulse of yearning, grief, wonder, and gratitude. It felt, physically, as if her entire body and all its complex systems had become concentrated in her heartbeat. Mentally, where thought would have been, there was, instead, an enveloping sensation of light. Rarely was it as powerful as the light of sun. Rather, it was like the flickering of the flame of a votive candle, which, for as long as it lasted, suffused her with feelings of peace and well-being unrelated to any person or object in the world. She did not leave her body, as she had read that the saints did when they prayed. To the contrary, it seemed to her that she more deeply entered her body, until she touched the center of all existence, including her own, sometimes for no more than a moment, sometimes for a little longer. It was a place as still and quiet as the whisper that Elijah had heard on the mountain of Horeb, after the storm and the earthquake and the fire, which he recognized as the voice of God. She wondered what Miguel would have made of it had she answered his question about what went through her mind as she prayed by saying, “I listen for the whisper of God.”

A groan involuntarily escaped her lips and she knew it was time to rise. She stood, crossed herself, and rested for a moment against a column before setting out for home. As part of her Lenten practices, she gave up her carriage and walked wherever she needed to go, overruling Miguel's concerns for her safety. Behind her, near the altar, she heard the frantic shuffle of footsteps and glimpsed Ramoncito, Padre Cáceres's mute Yaqui servant, running from the sanctuary. A moment later, she saw him and Padre Cáceres enter hurriedly.

“Are you sure he's dead?” Cáceres questioned frantically.

Ramoncito made a noise of affirmation.

“Take me to him.”

They disappeared through the door behind the sanctuary that led to the room where the priest and his acolytes prepared for Mass. Alicia, stirred by concern, unthinkingly followed them, but the room was empty. It appeared that they had gone through another door, left open, through which she saw descending steps. She stood at the top of the steps, looked into darkness, and breathed the musty air of a crypt. She saw the flicker of a candle and heard Cáceres's voice again: “We can't leave him here. Let's take him to my room.”

She stepped back, into shadows. A few minutes later the priest and his servant emerged through the door, carrying the body of a man.

“Padre,” she said, stepping forward. “What is this?”

“Doña Alicia, what are you doing here!” he exclaimed.

“I was in the church and I heard you talking to Ramoncito,”

“Come,” he commanded her. “I will explain everything.”

She followed the men into the priest's cell, where they laid the corpse on his narrow bed. Cáceres lit the lamp and she saw the body was that of an emaciated young man, scarcely more than a boy. The priest knelt, laid his hands on the boy, and began to administer the sacrament of extreme unction. Alicia and Ramoncito knelt behind him. Silent tears ran down the Yaqui's face. When the sacrament was completed and the priest had covered the boy's face with a linen cloth, she asked him, “Who is he? What happened to him?”

The priest sighed, rose to his feet, and invited her to sit.

“His name was Diego. He was a tribesman of Ramoncito, another Yaqui, who had escaped from a henequen plantation in the Yucatán, where he had been enslaved. He got as far as here, but the privations he endured in slavery were too much for him.”

“Why here?” she asked.

He paused, gave her a piercing look, and said, “What I am about to tell you must not leave this room.”

“Whatever you say I will keep in the strictest confidence,” she replied.

“In the days before the Americans fought their civil war, there was a system of sanctuaries that helped the black slaves escape from the southern part of the United States to Canada, where they were free. It was called the underground railroad. The sanctuaries were established by good Christians who knew that human slavery was abhorrent to the Lord.”