The City of Palaces (9 page)

“I have lived less than an exemplary life,” he said. “Let's leave it at that.”

Their drinks came and they finished them and the next round in silence.

When the fourth round came, Jorge Luis said, “Listen, Miguel, let's not be glum. You want to know whether or not you are in love with the lady? Perhaps I can help you answer that question.”

“How so?”

“The president's wife is throwing a charity ball on Saturday evening. Come with me and we will see how strong your sentiment is for the Condesa Alicia when you are surrounded by all the available beauties of the city.”

“A charity ball? Which charity?”

Jorge Luis smirked. “I offer you a garden of earthly delights and you worry about which charity is being feted? Really, Miguel, first things first. In any event, the charity is entirely respectable. It's the foundling home. First Lady Carmen's pet project. You know she is as barren as the Sahara herself so she likes to go and coo at the babies that have been abandoned there by their slattern mothers. You must come.”

Sarmiento shrugged. “I do not wish to meet other women.”

“Then come because your Doña Alicia may be there.”

“How do you know that?”

“She also is a patron of the orphanage.”

“Yes,” Sarmiento acknowledged, thinking of Alicia's many godchildren. “That's true. She is.”

“I will be at your apartment Saturday night at nine on the point. Be dressed and ready.” He gulped his drink and stood up. “
Hasta sábado
, Primo.”

“Until then,” Sarmiento said.

A
licia and her three sisters took tea with their mother in her yellow salon every afternoon. Alicia always arrived first, followed by her sisters, and then her mother. So when she entered the room today, she was surprised to find La Niña already present. Under her mother's gimlet-eyed gaze, the servants nervously set out the tea service and hastily retreated. Her mother glanced up at her and said, “Who is this man in whose company you have been seen by half the city?”

Alicia sat down on a gilded chair from the reign of Louis XV. “You are referring, no doubt, to my friend Doctor Miguel Sarmiento.”

Her mother looked at her with hooded eyes, like an ancient bird of prey. “Your friend? An unmarried reprobate? Do not imagine, my good daughter, that your unfortunate condition puts you beyond the reach of scandal.”

“I assure you, Mother, Miguel Sarmiento is no reprobate,” she replied hotly. “He is a sensitive, honorable man who assists me in my charity.”

“He is a lunatic's son who was forced to leave México a decade ago under a cloud.”

“He went to study medicine in Germany and France.”

“That isn't what the gossips say,” her mother observed.

“Since when do you listen to the gossips?”

Her mother frowned. “When they are gossiping about my daughter.” She raised a hand to prevent Alicia from replying. “Listen to me, Daughter. I have permitted you unusual freedom to do your good works, but there is a limit to my liberality.”

“Will you lock me up in my room?” Alicia asked coolly.

“Don't be a fool!” her mother snapped. “You have become the laughingstock of the city, throwing yourself like a lovelorn girl at a man who has no interest in you. I am merely attempting to save you and this family from further embarrassment.”

Alicia's face burned with shame. “Is that what the gossips say? That I am throwing myself at him?”

“Like a hideous witch pursing a handsome prince,” her mother replied. “That is what they say.” La Niña sighed. “I am sorry to repeat it, but I want you to hear what is whispered behind your back.”

“But it is not true, Mother. I am not pursing him. He is my friend,” she said, sounding pitiable even to herself, like a little girl begging to be allowed to keep a stray kitten.

“Yet you have seen fit not to introduce me to this friend of yours,” her mother replied.

Alicia, remembering how carefully she had arranged Miguel's visit to the palace when her mother would be out, had no satisfactory response.

Her mother, noting her discomfiture, continued. “I do not blame you for wanting the attentions of a man. You are normal, after all, notwithstanding your misfortune. But what you are doing with this doctor is not permitted, Alicia. It is also unnecessary. Even as you are, there are men who would gladly have you as their wife in exchange for the social prestige you would bring to them.”

“Even as I am,” Alicia said bitterly. “What you are describing is not marriage but barter.”

“My dear,” she said. “Except in the novels of the Brontës, marriage is a barter. You make the best bargain you can before I die. A woman alone has no place in the world. Your brothers-in-law will undoubtedly wrest control of your inheritance, paltry as it will be, and appropriate it to their own uses. You will end up living on their sufferance.”

“My sisters would not allow that.”

“They are entirely dependent on their husbands for everything but the air they breathe. I would not look to them for help.”

“Then Christ will be my help,” Alicia said.

“Oh, him,” La Niña replied. “A man like other men. What was Jesus's mother to him but nine months' food and lodging? Seriously, Daughter, think of what I have said.”

“You know, as no one else does, where I am truly scarred,” Alicia replied. “What man knowing that would have me—even as I am?”

“He need never know.”

“On our wedding night he would know.”

The old woman raised her eyebrows. “There are plausible explanations. It is time you grew up, Alicia, and accepted the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. You need a husband and we shall procure one for you. You will accompany me to the first lady's ball wearing my finest jewels.”

“Why not simply hang a for-sale sign around my neck?”

“Don't be vulgar. You are a daughter of this ancient house, a
condesa
. Let society pay attention to that. I want you noticed, not pitied. In the meantime there will be no further assignations with this Sarmiento. Do you understand?”

Alicia bowed her head in resignation and assent.

O
n the evening of the first lady's ball, the wind blew across the surface of dead Lake Texcoco, the city's ancient sewer, creating a cloud of putrescence that descended into every nook and cranny of the city. Sarmiento and his cousin, in white tie and tails, smoking cigars to mask the excremental odor, made their way along the northern edge of the Zócalo to the Casino Español. The street lights burned in the still night and in the middle of every intersection were the red lanterns of the police, the officers themselves concealed in the shadows or slaking their thirst at a
pulquería
.

“Do you know what I love about our city?” Jorge Luis asked. “Wherever one goes, at whatever time of day or night, stone eyes watch over us.”

“What are you talking about, Primo?”

Jorge Luis stopped and gestured with the red tip of his cigar to a niche carved above an eighteenth-century doorway that held the figure of John the Baptist.

“Saints above the doors, waterspouts carved in the shapes of dragons, the capitals of columns decorated with angels and lions,” he said. “In every wall, on every roof, there is a creature in stone—man, animal, angel, saint—gazing at the passersby. I think of them as the eyes of our ancestors.”

“Our guardians?” Sarmiento said.

“Not at all,” Jorge Luis replied. “The angels, yes, of necessity, and I suppose that is also true of the saints and all the Virgins of Guadalupe that surround us. But there are other figures carved into the walls. Effigies of the dead who must watch us with envy because we are alive and they are not. Demons who would loosen the stones into which they are carved and send them crashing down on our heads. Snakes who would poison us. Lions who would consume us. The stone inhabitants of the city are no more benign than the breathing ones. Still, it greatly comforts me to know that I am never alone. Not you, Primo?”

“I am not afraid of being alone, Jorge Luis.”

His cousin shot him a pitying look and said, “That is all too evident, Miguel.”

T
hey stood before the Casino Español on the Calle Espiritu Santo. Although it was as massive as the colonial edifices that surrounded it, the Casino was new. Nonetheless, the Spanish millionaires who had commissioned the building chose an architect whose design combined elements of Spain's chief architectural legacies to its former colony, the Gothic church and the baroque palace. Between twin towers, the limestone facade featured Corinthian tipped columns, a quattrocento balustrade, and escutcheons carved with Spain's coat of arms. The dignity of the Casino was somewhat compromised by the cigar shop, the cafe, and the stationary store that occupied its ground floor. The shops were closed but the windows of the upper floors were suffused with honey-colored light. Beautifully dressed women leaned against the balustrade on the second-story balcony and fanned themselves. A door opened somewhere and a Juventino Rosas waltz spilled into the night. Sarmiento felt, almost despite himself, anticipation, excitement.

“Come, Prince Charming,” Jorge Luis said. “I hope the glass slipper is secure in your pocket. La Cenicienta is waiting for you inside.”

They passed through a passageway in the style of a nave and entered an enormous two-story atrium. They paused to admire the stained glass ceiling emblazoned with the Spanish royal crest in yellow, black, and red, and followed the music up a sweeping staircase. The ball was being held in the Salón de los Reyes, a barrel-vaulted space in which gilded columns and the terrazzo floor caught and reflected back the shimmering light of enormous crystal chandeliers creating a golden haze. On either side of the dance floor were linen-covered tables and delicate chairs painted gold. At the front of the room, on a dais, sat the president of the Republic and the first lady. Don Porfirio was flanked by a line of soldiers in dark blue dress uniforms adorned with gold braid and epaulets while Doña Carmen was attended by a group of women in pale pastel silken gowns that complemented her gown—a cloud-like pink confection of lace, pearls, and rosettes.

When Sarmiento was a child, Díaz had sometimes come to visit his father, but he had not seen Don Porfirio in the flesh for many years. He found it hard to believe that the wiry man who had sat him on his knee and told him stories of his exploits against the French and who smelled pleasantly of horses and tobacco was the same person as the waxen, white-haired, stolid figure at the far end of the room. The most striking change of all was to the man's complexion.

“Primo,” he said in a low voice to Jorge Luis. “Don Porfirio seems … rather paler than I remember him.”

Jorge Luis flashed him a smile. “You know the saying, Miguel. Power whitens and absolute power whitens absolutely.”

“Should we pay our respects?”

“Us? No, we are insects to
el presidente
.” The orchestra struck up a schottische. “Come on, Miguel, let's pick among these many feminine flowers ones that will not wilt on the dance floor.”

“I want to look for Doña Alicia,” Sarmiento said.

His cousin took his arm. “There will be time for that later, Primo. Now, we dance!”

A
fter an hour, Sarmiento excused himself from his cousin's company, intent on finding Alicia Gavilán. The marriageable girls, who were his only suitable dance partners, were years younger than he, some as young as seventeen. Although they were lovely and skillful dancers, their convent-school conversation was inane. He wandered the corridor above the atrium, taking in the Gothic arches and somber stained glass windows. They reminded him of the gloomy castles and dank monasteries of his ancestral homeland. The Spanish, he decided, had a singular gift for investing any space with the charm of a mortuary. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a door that opened to a room filled with books. He stepped inside. The library was a narrow rectangle, paneled in dark wood with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of the same material. A long table surrounded by leather-upholstered chairs occupied the center of the room. The backs of the chairs were stamped with the coats of arms of Spanish cities. On the table were electric lamps in the shapes of bronze figures from Greek mythology holding globes illuminating fine old atlases. Arrangements of club chairs and small tables in the corners suggested old men napping with books in their laps and glasses of Jerez at their elbows.

He was not alone. A woman in a three-tiered gown of iridescent plum, the tiers bordered with black ribbon, stood with her back to him. She was gazing at a medallion carved in wood in the molding along the ceiling. He noticed her fine shoulders and lovely neck. Something glittered in her right hand. He recognized her.

“Doña Alicia?” he said.

She turned. He nearly gasped at the sight of her face. Buried under layers of creams and powders, lips and cheeks rouged, it was like the face the undertaker paints on the corpse for the final viewing.