The City of Palaces (6 page)

The flowering cross, for example. Graciela the baker, with hands like leather from decades of reaching into stoves, told Alicia that the stonemason who carved the cross had been from a wild tribe in the far north called the Yaquis. “Nahautl, like us,” she explained, “but when the rest of us came to Tenochtitlán, the Yaquis stayed behind in a river valley that was like the Garden of Eden. They worshipped the deer who gave up his life to give them meat to eat and hides for clothes. When the priests came and told them about Jesus, well, to the Yaquis, Jesus and the deer were the same and they converted.

“Flowers are sacred to the Yaquis,” Alicia told Sarmiento, repeating the words Graciela had told her. “They call heaven the flower world. They say that when Jesus was on the cross, flowers sprang up where his drops of blood touched the earth. That's why the artist carved flowers on the cross. For him they are the blood and resurrection of Jesus.”

“The Yaquis?” Sarmiento said. “The same tribe the government is fighting up in the north?”

“I was not aware we were at war with them,” she said. “What caused the conflict?”

“Settlers have moved into land the Yaquis claim as their own.”

“I'm sure it is my ignorance,” she said, as they reached the immense doors of the palace, “but could the land not be apportioned in a way that would satisfy both groups?”

“A good question, Doña,” he replied. “Not one I imagine the combatants bothered to ask themselves before they took up arms. Men never do.”

From a small room attached to the palace at the side of the door, a porter emerged, and, with a suspicious glance at Sarmiento, asked, “Doña Alicia, is everything all right?”

With a smile in her voice, she said, “Yes, Pablito. I will enter in a moment.” To Sarmiento she asked, “What do you mean when you say men never do?”

“Only that men are thoughtless creatures,” he replied. “Their first impulse is always to take action, however rash or misguided. Or fatal.”

After a long, considering silence, she said, “Do you speak from experience, Señor Doctor?”

The kindness in her lovely, low voice was as palpable as a warm hand laid on his. The sadness and nostalgia he had felt since entering the church clutched at his heart and squeezed tears from him. He hastily wiped his sleeve across his face and said, “Well, one has made many mistakes in life, of course.”

He was afraid she would comment on his tears, but she said, “Yes, that is true of all of us. But one need not become imprisoned by one's errors.”

“How does one avoid that?” he asked.

“For a believer, there is confession,” she said.

“A few Hail Marys and it all goes away?” he replied.

She retreated into silence and he thought he had offended her, but then she said, “The value of confession for me is not in the penance but in saying aloud the things I would keep secret in my guilt and then having my confessor put them in their proper place for me. To give them—what is the word artists use? Perspective. For in my guilt, my sins loom large and I can see little else. Another person, disinterested but sympathetic, can look and see things as they are, not as I imagine them to be.”

Again, he felt her kindness like a physical balm and it was all he could do not to spill his secret then and there about Paquita and his son.

“But, as I said, Doña Alicia, I am a nonbeliever. Who would hear my confession?”

“I would,” she said simply. “Won't you come in and have a cup of something warm, a bit of something to eat?”

Longing and fear fought in his heart: a longing to confess his faults to her and a fear that, once she heard them, she would turn away from him in revulsion. Fear won out.

“Thank you, Doña, but I must take my leave. I have my rounds, patients to see.” Yet he found himself reluctant to go. “Perhaps,” he added, “I could call on you another time?”

“Of course,” she replied graciously. “You need only send me a message and I would be happy to receive you.” She touched his hand. “Good-bye, Doctor Sarmiento. God go with you.”

“Doña,” he said with a little bow and rushed away before she could see that the tears had reappeared in the corners of his eyes.

A
s the rest of the household slumbered, Alicia made her way into the garden, an overgrown wilderness of orange and lemon trees, heavy swags of climbing roses that spilled over the garden walls, clumps of calla and trumpet lilies, heliotrope, rose geraniums, and jasmine. A rosace-shaped pond in the center of the garden was anchored by a fountain carved with the symbols of the evangelists—a lion, an eagle, an ox, and a man. The fountain, too, was in disrepair and only a brackish trickle now reached the pond. At the far end of the garden was a mirador made of marble. The family crest and the date 1702 were carved over the entrance of the small pavilion.

She sat on the bench in the pavilion and removed her veil so that she might better inhale the heavy fragrance of the flowers in the still, autumn air. She thought of Miguel Sarmiento, and the sadness with which he had looked at the infant when she had given him the baby to hold; it was the same sadness she had seen in the birth room. She recognized it as the sadness of loss, a loss to which he remained unreconciled. That pain she saw in his eyes was not unknown to her. She closed her eyes. Mingled with the scent of flowers were the smells of the stables on the other side of the garden wall. Now and then she heard the muffled whinny of a horse or the voice of a groom or stable boy.

“Anselmo.”

Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked around the garden to see who had spoken that name. There was no one else in the garden but a little black cat hunting lizards.

“Anselmo.”

That voice, that name, again. And then, with a small gasp, she realized that it was she who had spoken. Her voice was speaking the name she had not openly uttered in many years.

She spoke his name again, consciously, deliberately. “Anselmo.”

The cat looked up, distracted from its hunt by the weeping woman.

S
he had been tolerated in the kitchen because it was the domain of women performing women's work, but when Alicia began to wander into the stables, she was brought before her father, a rare and frightening event. The
marqués
received her as if she were an errant servant. With scarcely a glance at her, he said, “Henceforth, you will stay out of the stables.”

“I only wanted to see how they braid the horses' manes.”

He looked at her sharply. “Were you asked to speak?”

Trembling, she replied, “No, Señor Marqués.”

“Go.”

She had run into the garden, weeping.

“Why are you crying?”

She looked around for the questioner. A boy's head appeared above the wall that was common to the garden and the stables. It was Anselmo, one of the grooms. He had been her guide on her excursion to the stables, telling her about the horses and how he took care of them. Now he jumped the wall and came into the garden.

“Did your
papá
hit you?” he asked.

He was two or three years older than she—fifteen or sixteen—a slender, cinnamon-colored boy with golden eyes. He smelled soothingly of straw and liniment.

“No,” she said. “He has forbidden me from visiting the stables. Now I will never see how you braid the manes.”

He sat beside her on the bench and took a strand of her long hair. “I could braid your hair. Do you want me to?”

His fingers in her hair, the whispered question, the lustrous sun, and the sweet smells of the garden produced in her a thrill that raised goose bumps on her then flawless skin and, without understanding why, but knowing she must, she pressed her lips to his. His mouth opened—her shock was quickly followed by the delicious sensation of his warm, wet tongue and the heat of his body radiating from beneath his thin shirt. As they pressed their bodies tightly together, she did not know whether it was his heart or hers that beat like a bird flapping its wings against its cage.

On the warm autumn nights, he laid his
zarape
in the clearing among the roses to dispel the chill from the earth. Then, too, their naked bodies generated a heat so intense that curlicues of steam rose from them. She learned he was from Coahuila and had come with his family to the city looking for work when their small farm was taken from them by a friend of the governor. He was vague on details, saying only, “The sheriff came with some papers. My
papá
said we had to leave.” She related her own uneventful history—she had lived her entire life within the walls of the palace, except for the hours she was at school or at church. He had four brothers and three sisters and they lived with his parents in two rooms in the
colonia
of La Merced, but he lived in the stables, visiting home only on Sunday. She told him about her three sisters, all much older than she, the two eldest married, the third engaged. He told her he missed his family, and his descriptions of his loneliness gave her a name for her own feelings of solitude.

He could not read or write. One night she brought pencil and paper. Guiding his hand, she showed him how to write his name and then he insisted that she teach him how to write hers as well. After that, he practiced by writing their names with his fingertips on her flesh. She loved his touch. His tongue rasped her small nipples and he told her she tasted like apple. The skin of his scrotum was as plush as velvet in her hands and the two stones it sheathed were fascinating to her, hard yet spongy; more than once he yelped when she pressed too firmly. Each time he penetrated her, her first feeling was of separation—his body clearly divisible from hers—but then as he continued his thrusts were like pebbles tossed into a pond. The ripples spread and deepened across and inside her body, and as they both sank into the same swamp of sensation, she could no longer tell her flesh from his. He was the first to say, “
te amo
,” but said it only sparingly after that, as if the phrase were a jewel, the only one he would ever be able to give her. She was freer with “I love you” because it resounded in her mind all day, and to prevent herself from saying it aloud when he was not present, she had to give it voice when he was. They undressed and dressed by moonlight. “Our moon,” he told her. One night he brought her a pearl, a single pearl that he said he had bought at the Monte de Piedad, the city's pawnshop. It was yellowing with age, like the autumn moon.

Alicia was neither as alone nor as insignificant in her family as she imagined. La Niña noticed the change—the combination of swooping and inexplicable happiness alternating with expressions of gnawing melancholy as she mumbled to herself. She instructed her personal maid to spy on her daughter. Manuelita followed her into the garden and watched, from a distance, as the two children made love. They were beautiful together and Manuelita pitied them for what was to come. She reported to her mistress. Anselmo was gone by nightfall. Within a month, Alicia began to show signs of pregnancy. Her mother immured her within her rooms and, borrowing from her favorite novel,
La dame aux camélias
, let word go out that Alicia suffered from consumption. When she was about to deliver, Alicia was secretly transported to the foundling home, where she gave birth to a daughter in the Departamento de Partos Ocultos—the Department of Hidden Births. It was there, as she was recovering, that she was infected with the smallpox virus, as was the child she was nursing. Her daughter died.

F
ifteen years had passed but the garden was much the same as it had been the last night she and Anselmo had parted. She dried her tears. She remembered that during the confrontation with her mother she had cried out, “But Mamá we are no different than
Romeo y Julieta
!” Her mother, narrowing her eyes, had replied, “Romeo was a nobleman, not an Indian from the slums, and at any rate, that was a fairy tale.” “But I love him, Mamá.” “I assure you, you will forget,” her mother said. “As Julieta would have forgotten Romeo, had she lived. Time defaces every memory. You will see.”

Now, reflecting upon that encounter, she thought that her mother's choice of “defaces” was deliberate. Her mother had not expected that Alicia would forget Anselmo, but rather that as she reached maturity, she would appreciate the absurdity of the romance between the princess and the stable boy. It would devolve from a tragedy into a farce, and passion would be replaced by embarrassment. Her mother was wrong.

The love she had felt for Anselmo had been the portal through which Alicia had discovered her capacity for love, and love had become her vocation. The loss of her own daughter—the only child she knew she would ever bear—had made her the mother to all children she encountered. Her mother could cruelly jest that Alicia was like La Llorona—the woman of legend who had drowned her children and, after her death, was condemned for eternity to search for them along the waterways of México, weeping and shrieking—but there was perhaps a grain of truth in her words. For in each child she encountered, Alicia saw traces of her own child, and she loved them as she would have loved her own.

Then abruptly, Alicia understood something about Miguel Sarmiento's expression of sorrow as he had held the baby Miguel in his arms and about the tears he had wiped away so she would not see them. Doctor Sarmiento had also lost a child! And if he had lost a child and was unmarried, then there had also been a woman. He had come very close to telling her the story as they stood before the gates of the palace. Would he tell her if they met again? Plainly, whatever the details, his tale had left him with a heavy burden of guilt. Too heavy for a man whose essential goodness was clear to her. Miguel Sarmiento might not believe in God, but God—her God, the God who was love—hovered around the man waiting to be invited in but prevented by his guilt and shame. Was it vain and foolish of her to believe that she might be the instrument through which God would relieve the doctor's burden and release him to do the good work he was undoubtedly intended for?
No
, she thought,
not me!
But a voice that was not hers whispered its reply.
Yes, Daughter. You
.