The City of Palaces (50 page)

“No!” Sarmiento protested. “No! He can't be serious.”

“Look in your hand,” Madero said, “and tell me he is not serious.”

Sarmiento opened his hand. Gustavo Madero's glass eye stared back at him; it was both comical and horrifying. He dropped it, and the orb rolled back toward Madero, who scooped it up.

“My brother saw more clearly with one eye than I saw with two,” Madero said. He sat at the table, pulled a fresh sheet of paper, and quickly began to write out his letter of resignation.

T
he idling locomotive expelled puffs of steam that quickly dissipated in the cool night air. A small group of people huddled on the platform. There were no other trains that night, only the locomotive and two passenger cars of the Interoceanic Railway. Soldiers patrolled the empty station and prevented anyone from entering. Sarmiento glanced at his pocket watch. It was closing in on midnight and Madero had still not arrived. At the far end of the platform, Don Salvador was in an agitated, whispered conversation with Sara Madero while other members of the Madero family gathered around them. Their stiff postures indicated anxiety and anger.

More than twenty-four hours had passed since Madero had handed his letter of resignation to the ambassador. After Gossens had had his car drop Sarmiento at the palace, the ambassador had gone to present the letter to the minister of foreign affairs, Lascuráin. Huerta had been waiting and he had insisted that the ambassador hand over the letter to him, ostensibly to authenticate Madero's signature. Surrounded by Huerta's bodyguards, exhausted and in fear for his own safety, Gossens surrendered the letter. In the morning, Sarmiento had awakened to the news that Madero had resigned and Huerta was the new president; Lascuráin's presidency had lasted forty-five minutes, just long enough for him to appoint Huerta minister of the interior and then step aside. Sarmiento had hurried to the Chilean embassy, where Gossens had described the meeting with Huerta.

“I exacted his promise that Don Francisco will still be allowed to leave the city,” the ambassador said. “He has arranged for a train to depart tonight to Veracruz.”

“His promises are not exactly binding,” Sarmiento observed.

“The ambassadors of Cuba and Argentina are at Lecumberri even as we speak,” Gossens replied. “They will not let Don Francisco out of their sight until he is safely on the train. Will you come to the train station and be a witness to his safe departure?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

That was how Sarmiento had come to be standing on the platform. Madero had been expected shortly after nine. Three hours late. With every passing second, Madero's safe passage from México became less and less likely, ambassadorial escort or not. Gossens disengaged himself from the Madero family and strode to Sarmiento's side.

“I am going back to the National Palace to speak to Huerta,” he said. “Will you stay here until I return?”

Sarmiento nodded. “What will you tell our new president?”

“I will demand that he release Don Francisco from wherever he is being held and allow him to leave, as he promised, or I will make my personal mission to see to it that not a single country in Spanish America recognizes Huerta's government. I will make him a pariah.”

“Do you think he will care about his international reputation?”

“He will care about the ability of México to borrow money and export its goods,” Gossens replied. “Those things are much harder to do when your government is an international outlaw.”

Before Sarmiento could reply, they were interrupted by the screech of wheels and shouted voices outside the station. A moment later, several men dressed in the dark clothes of the diplomatic corps rushed in with soldiers on their heels. One of them, tall and bulky, came breathlessly to Gossens. Sarmiento recognized him from receptions at Chapultepec as the Cuban ambassador, Carlos Salvatierra.

“Don Salvador, we lost him.”

“What! How?”

“The military escort insisted that we travel separately from the prison,” Don Carlos replied. “Our car left first and then the car with Don Francisco. There was a barricade. We were detained, but his car continued on. I demanded that we be allowed to continue, but by the time the soldiers waved us on, he was gone.”

“When was this?” Gossens asked.

“A half hour, forty-five minutes ago,” he said. “I came as quickly as I could but the city is difficult to travel.”

“I am going to see Huerta,” Gossens said. “Come with me.”

Don Carlos nodded. “I hope it is not too late.”

The two men hurried off, Gossens calling to Sarmiento over his shoulder, “Wait here, Miguel.”

They bustled off. He sensed Sara Madero's spidery presence before he heard her demand, “What happened?”

He told her. She stared at him with her black, perpetually aggrieved eyes, as if her husband's abduction were his fault, but instead she said, “Your wife has always been kind to me.”

“Señora?”

“The rest of them, all the society women, they scorned me and closed their doors to me, but not your wife. I will not forget her kindness,” she said, stepping away from him and fading into the darkness like a wraith.

After that, the blackness seemed to deepen rather than lighten as night crawled slowly toward dawn. When he next heard the approach of vehicles outside the station, it was without the urgency of the Cuban ambassador's earlier arrival. Wheels ground to a stop, footsteps labored across the empty station, and then he saw the defeated figures of the two ambassadors as they climbed the steps to the platform, eyes downcast and faces grim. They brushed past him and went directly to Sara Madero. When she began to scream, he knew Madero was dead.

T
he casket carrying the body of Francisco Madero was gently lifted onto a funeral tram. The sides of the car were draped in black bunting, and it flew the flag of México as it made its way from the Zócalo to the Panteón de Dolores, where Madero would be laid to rest. The mob of mourners that surrounded the car shuffled slowly on the tracks, impeding the vehicle's progress. Sarmiento observed that the church bells that had clanged so jubilantly at the news of Madero's fall were silent. José clutched his hand, and he glanced down at his son. José's eyes were rimmed with red and his expression was more of shock than grief as he watched Sara Madero fall upon the casket, her small body quaking with sobs. Observing the boy's distress, he questioned his decision to bring him to the funeral. José had never experienced the death of a friend, but Sarmiento had hoped that witnessing the terrible pomp of this moment would help José understand the larger tragedy that Madero's death symbolized for México. José, however, seemed dazed and lost in his private misery, and Sarmiento did not know how to comfort his son. He wished Alicia had been well enough to come, but she was still bedridden and weak.

A group of musicians materialized out of the crowd—trumpeters, violinists, guitarists, and an accordion player—and began to play a slow, harsh, mournful ballad. It was a song about a departed lover, more appropriate in its lachrymose sentimentality—“My tears will deepen the waters of the sea”—to a corner cantina than the funeral of a Mexican president. And yet Sarmiento thought it was fitting that the common people who had embraced Madero would send him to his rest with a song from the streets. Some of the mourners, recognizing the tune, began to sing:

As the rest of the crowd picked up the song, he heard José's voice, thin at first but gathering strength as he joined it to the chorus of the mourners: “Good-bye, my love. Good-bye, forever, good-bye.”

H
is father's arm rested on his shoulder, steadying José as he watched Don Panchito's casket carried into the crypt. Then the iron gate was closed with a clang and a great key turned in the lock. Afterward, his father stooped down, murmured instructions for José to wait for him while he spoke to someone, and left José standing at the tomb as the crowd melted away.

Not far from the tomb was a stone bench. José made his way over to it. Sunlight shifted through the branches of the cypress trees, dappling the great city of the dead with its miniature Gothic cathedral mausoleums, grieving stone angels, and brightly tiled graves packed together as densely as the most crowded
colonia
of the city. Patches of weeds, thorny brambles, and a few early wildflowers were scattered across the ground. A breeze carried the smell of damp earth and vegetable decay. The chatter of the birds and the sibilant swoop of their wings as they flew among the trees echoed in the air. On many of the graves were broken vases, flowers withered to brown, the dust of offerings left from Día de los Muertos commemorations. José shed a few final tears for his friend.

That morning, taking his chocolate and
pan dulce
in the kitchen, he had asked Chepa whether Don Panchito was in heaven. The old cook had nodded vigorously and said, “He is in the highest heavens.”

“Isn't there only one heaven?” he asked her, between bites of his
concha
.

“No,
mijo
,” she replied, drinking her milky coffee. “There are thirteen heavens for God and all his saints. The good people like Don Pancho Madero, who fought bravely for México, they go to the heaven of the warriors, where they walk in the trail of the sun.”

He looked up at the sky, squinting against the sun, which was half-hidden among feathery leaves, and tried to feel Don Panchito's spirit in the beneficent warmth. He thought of the conversation he had with his mother, who told him, even though his friend was gone, José could still love him. “But, Mamá, if he's not here, he can't love me back,” he had replied, weeping.

She had murmured some consolation, but for once her consolations failed him. Loss had entered into José's heart and taken up a dwelling there. The loss was not only of his friend Don Panchito but of the world he had known before the fighting and of his faith in the grown-ups. The fighting had ended and his old routines had begun to be reestablished—even El Morito had reappeared, skinny and flea-ridden—but nothing was as it had been. He was like someone who had stepped into a long, dark, and frightening tunnel and, coming into the light, could not blink away the darkness that continued to cloud the periphery of his vision. The world was a more arbitrary and crueler place, and even though his family surrounded him, he knew now that he was essentially alone in it. This sense of his separateness had frightened him at first, but there were moments now when it felt like a kind of freedom too, a space where he could begin to dream about a future that owed nothing to the customs and expectations of his family. A future that belonged to him alone.

T
he familiar voice had whispered into Sarmiento's ear, “We must talk, Primo. No, don't turn around. There is a tomb nearby, for the Gutiérrez Ojeda family. I will wait for you there.”

Sarmiento nearly sobbed with relief at the sound of his cousin's voice. He told José to wait for him, and as inconspicuously as he could, slipped away. Luis was leaning against the back of the tomb—a small, fanciful replica of the Parthenon—smoking a cigarette. The stubs of three others on the ground belied his seeming insouciance. Dressed in a laborer's rough clothes, his goatee shaven off and his hair shorn, Luis was barely recognizable. His eyes were exhausted. He embraced Sarmiento and said, “It's good to see you, Primo.”

“Thank God you're safe,” Sarmiento answered. “I feared the worst after the president was murdered. What happened?”

“Friends hid me.”

“Why didn't you come to me?”

Luis shook his head. “Our association is too well known. They would have come looking for me. No, my fellow inverts are much better at making themselves invisible in plain sight, and they are loyal to each other as only the despised can be.”

Sarmiento bristled. “I am loyal to you, Luis. You are like my brother.”

Luis clamped his shoulder affectionately. “I don't doubt your loyalty, but your brothers-in-law are opportunists and reactionaries who would have surrendered me to gain Huerta's goodwill.” He shrugged. “In any event, here we are. I have come to say good-bye, Miguel.”

Although he had expected something like this, Sarmiento's heart fell. Luis's departure would seal the end of Madero's era. “Where will you go?”

“North, to Coahuila. The governor there, Carranza, is on the verge of declaring himself in rebellion against Huerta. Once he does, others will follow.” He lit another cigarette. “It's back to the battlefield for me, Miguel. Huerta won't fall as easily as Don Porfirio, but he can't last. The army is already divided, Zapata continues to harass him from the south, and Carranza has the state militia to do his fighting, not the ragtag army Madero put together. Six months, a year, and I will be back.”