The City of Palaces (39 page)

Sometime later, in the darkness of a night he thought would never fall, Luis appeared. He led Sarmiento away from the charnel house that his hospital had become. Luis took Sarmiento to his room, where he helped him clean himself up and change into fresh clothes. From there, they went to the mess, where Luis made him eat a plate of beans that he washed down with whiskey. He returned Sarmiento to his room and put him into his bed.

“No,” Sarmiento said hoarsely, trying to get up. “The wounded are still coming in.”

Luis pressed down gently on his chest, forcing him to lie down. “You'll take better care of them when you're rested,” he said. “Get some sleep. I'll wake you if you're needed.”

Sarmiento wanted to raise his voice in further protest, but his eyelids felt as if they were weighted with stones. With his fading vision he saw that Luis's shirtfront was smeared with blood.

“You are wounded,” he croaked, touching his hand to his cousin's shirt.

Luis shook his head. “No, it's not my blood. It's Ángel's. He died in my arms this morning.” Luis stroked Sarmiento's face. “Sleep now, Primito. Tomorrow will be a better day.”

“How could it be?” It was a cry of agony.

With a melancholy smile, Luis replied, “We are victorious, Miguel. Ciudad Juárez has fallen.”

A
licia could almost hear the collective gasp of shock from her circle when news reached the capital that Ciudad Júarez had fallen. In the days that followed, the shock deepened to dismay and then panic as rich refugees from the northern states began to trickle into the city with tales of marauding revolutionaries and the mass desertions of federal troops to Madero. She could not help but be affected by what looked to be the imminent collapse of Don Porfirio's regime. Such a thing was almost unimaginable to the generations of Mexicans like hers that had never known another president. He had seemed as solid in his place as the National Palace itself, but the loss of a single city had revealed him as he was, an enfeebled, old man of eighty clinging by his fingertips to his throne as a whirlwind bore down upon him. Day after day, the Zócalo was filled with protesters against whom the police and the army were vastly outnumbered. The once docile press began to publish stories about the actual conditions of the country and call for vast social and political changes. The government issued contradictory communiqués, some promising reforms, others stubbornly rejecting any need for them, that no one believed. Madero's portraits began to appear everywhere in the capital and beneath them the caption “The Apostle of Freedom,” while Don Porfirio's were discreetly removed. Meanwhile, the once conspicuous rich deserted their usual playgrounds and retired to their mansions or quietly made preparations to leave for Europe or the United States after first shipping their assets to foreign banks.

Alicia also observed, with bemusement, the sudden surge in her popularity among the very friends who had turned their backs on her after Miguel had joined Madero. She was courteous but reserved toward them, deflecting their invitations to tea, listening without comment to their sotto voce jabs at Don Porfirio and intimations that, in their inmost hearts, they had been Madero sympathizers all along. “After all,” they would say, nervously, “Don Francisco's family is very wealthy,
gente decente
like us, isn't that right, Alicia?”

She passed off these little hypocrisies and tried to remind herself that the ingratitude shown to Don Porfirio by her circle was spurred by fear, not malice. The only old friend toward whom she directed any sympathetic thoughts was the first lady. There was a longstanding bond between the Gaviláns and the Rubio family. Alicia had known Carmen Rubio as a girl before she was married off to Don Porfirio when she was seventeen and he was fifty-one. Her mother had once shown Alicia a letter she had received from Carmen on the eve of the wedding seeking counsel from La Niña on how to be the wife of a man so much older than she. Alicia still remembered the large, girlish writing and the anxiety and sadness between the carefully composed lines—the choice to marry Don Porfirio had not been Carmen's and although she did not complain, her unhappiness was plain to see.

The marriage proceeded. After thirty years, Carmen had gone from being a slender, beautiful bride to a stout matron. Her childlessness was the subject of uncharitable speculation about her fertility because Don Porfirio had had several children by his first wife. As if to compensate for her failure to give him children, Carmen became her husband's fiercest political partisan. As he grew older and distracted, she began to openly involve herself in affairs of state, much to the displeasure of Don Porfirio's ministers, who took exception to receiving orders from any woman, much less one with no more than a convent education.

A few weeks after the fall of Júarez, a message arrived from the first lady to La Niña informing her that the weekly luncheon of the Daughters of Jerusalem had been moved from Chapultepec Castle to the Díaz's private residence on Calle Cadena. When Alicia asked her mother if she intended to go, La Niña had not even lifted her head from the novel she was reading.

“Of course not,” she said.

“Mother, she is an old family friend.”

“The invitation is mere bravado, Alicia,” La Niña replied. “She can't possibly expect her friends to risk their lives by trying to get through the mob at the Zócalo to dine on chilled shrimp as if the world were not collapsing around our ears. No, I shall stay home.”

On the day of the luncheon, Alicia called for the carriage and ventured out in the direction of Calle Cadena. On Avenida de San Francisco, her brother-in-law's department store was shuttered and guarded by armed, private police. The carriage took the narrow back streets behind the cathedral in order to avoid the protestors at the Zócalo, but their chants demanding Díaz's resignation resounded through the entire central city. A double line of soldiers had sealed off Calle Cadena. Her carriage was stopped, and she was harshly interrogated before she was allowed to proceed to the president's heavily guarded residence. In the foyer, at the bottom of a marble staircase where in the past she had been met by an English footman in livery, there were even more soldiers, all of them in battle dress. One of the men conducted her to the drawing room. A dozen small tables held elaborate place settings. A row of maids was lined against the wall, some of them visibly frightened. A small orchestra played a waltz behind a screen of potted palms. The room was otherwise empty. Alicia had been distracted from her feelings by the surreal journey from the palace to the residence. Now, however, she looked at the lavish, deserted room and the brilliant, unoccupied tables and the reality of the moment sank in; this was the end of Don Porfirio! The shock made her fingers tremble.

She heard the rustle of silk behind her and turned. Carmen Díaz approached in a pale green gown with ropes of pearls around her neck. Beneath an upswept crown of dark hair, her heavy, double-chinned face was tired almost beyond recognition.

Alicia embraced her, whispering, “Carmen, my dear.”

The first lady shook her off without returning the embrace. “I am surprised you would choose to show your face in this house.”

“I come as an old friend concerned for your well-being.”

“An old friend,” Carmen repeated bitterly. “Your husband would have my husband hanging from the gallows in the Zócalo, old friend.”

“No,” Alicia protested. “Not Miguel. He acts out of principle, not out of animosity toward Don Porfirio. As for me, you know I have never wished you or Don Porfirio the least harm. Can we not set aside the arguments of our husbands and be as we were before all this began?”

Carmen gave her head a weary shake. “That is not possible, Alicia, as our fates are inextricably tied to theirs. But I am wrong to visit your husband's sins upon you. You are a good woman, probably the best in our set. You may be the only one of us who deserves to be called a Daughter of Jerusalem. You might actually have attempted to console Christ on his journey to Calvary unlike the rest of us, who would only have seen a peasant justifiably punished for his insubordination.”

“You have been tireless in your charitable work,” Alicia said.

“What else was I supposed to do?” the first lady asked. “Sit at home and knit? Sit down, Alicia, let's have tea. You shouldn't stay long though. It is only a matter of time before word gets out to the mob that we are here.”

They sat. A maid rushed over and poured tea.

“Why did you leave Chapultepec?” Alicia asked. “Isn't it safer there?”

“One road up and one road out,” Carmen said. “We would've been trapped and then what? The mob is calling for our blood. Here, at least, there are escape routes.”

“How is the president?”

“Ill,” she said. “The doctor extracted a tooth and an infection set in. He's been in bed for a week, leaving me to deal with all … this.”

“I am so sorry.”

A ghost of smile crossed the older woman's face. “Porfirio felled by a toothache. It could be the title of an opera buffa, don't you think?”

“I find the entire situation most distressing,” Alicia replied.

“It will soon be over for us,” Carmen said. “We have been negotiating with Madero since Juárez fell. Tomorrow my husband will resign. As soon as he can travel, we will leave this ungrateful country and set sail to France.”

“I hardly know what to say.”

“What is there to say? The king is dead; long live the king!” She narrowed her eyes and added bitterly, “May the reign of Francisco I be short and sour.”

L
uis had been right about Ciudad Juárez. Within days of Madero's victory, the governors of the northern Mexican states had declared themselves in revolt against Díaz and put their militias at Madero's disposal. Meanwhile, Emiliano Zapata had continued his advance on the capital from the south. The army collapsed as battalion after battalion abandoned the government. At the beginning of June, Díaz resigned and departed from México on a German steamship. Madero began his triumphant progress to the capital. With his sense of history, Madero had decided to travel not by train but in a small black carriage like the one in which his hero Benito Juárez had entered the city following the expulsion of the French. As the long line of horse-and mule-drawn carriages and wagons passed through still another dusty Mexican village, Sarmiento administered a shot of morphine to the Apostle of Freedom in the curtained privacy of Madero's closed carriage. The wagon bounced violently as it hit a rut in the road. Madero groaned and vomited into a chamber pot. He had begun suffering from headaches of such intensity that Sarmiento had begun to fear a brain tumor.

“Excuse me, Miguel,” Madero said, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief.

“Don't apologize, Don Pancho. Try to make yourself comfortable. The drug should start working momentarily.”

“You didn't give me too much, did you? I have to speak later.”

“You can scarcely stand; I don't know how you to expect to speak.”

“Nonetheless,” Madero said, arranging himself in a half-recumbent position on the seat, “I must speak. The people would be disappointed if I did not.”

Sarmiento wondered. Half the villages they stopped in were so isolated their inhabitants still thought Don Benito was president if they had any idea at all of what a president was. In others, Madero had been met more with puzzlement than enthusiasm. His stirring phrases about democracy, freedom, and universal suffrage might just as well have been addressed to the empty fields.

“Perhaps so,” Sarmiento said, “but you are ill. It would be better if you took a train into the capital immediately, where you could be properly examined.”

“These headaches, you mean? They are a gift from God to keep me humble.”

“You can't really believe that.”

Madero smiled. “Of course I do, Miguel. Every illness, every disease, has a spiritual function. I have—what is the expression in English—a ‘swollen head' because of our success against Don Porfirio. These headaches are merely God's way of deflating me.”

Then, as the drug began to take effect, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

I
n the early morning hours of June 7, 1911, the capital was shaken by an earthquake that filled the air with the clamor of church bells. Two hundred died, crushed in the rubble of their homes, and in the poorest districts of the city, entire blocks were reduced to dust. That afternoon, behind a procession of flags and banners, Francisco Madero entered the city astride a white horse. Sarmiento was not with him. As soon as he had reached the outskirts of the city, he had left Madero's entourage and gone home to his wife and child.

Book 3

Tragic Days

1912–1913