The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

  “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.”

  They 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!”

  After 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.

  “Miguel,” she said. “I did not expect to see you here.”

  “My cousin insisted,” he replied, “but I came only because he told me you would be here. You have not asked me to join you in your charitable work for several days now. I was afraid my uselessness had become all too apparent to you.”

  “I meant to send you a note,” she said apologetically.

  “A note?”

  She sighed. “I’m afraid that I can no longer ask you to accompany me.”

  He frowned. “Why? Have I offended you in some way?”

  “Never,” she said. “But you have been away from our city for a long time and perhaps you have forgotten, as I sometimes do, its rules of propriety. An unmarried woman is not permitted to be in the company of any man who is not a relative.” She paused, twisting the diamond necklace she was holding in her hand. “I’m afraid there was been talk about us. Not very pleasant talk.”

  “I care nothing for the rules of propriety!” he protested.

  Something like a smile attempted to break through the heavy makeup. “That is the male prerogative,” she said. “I must observe those rules, if not for myself, then for my family’s sake. I am terribly sorry, but at least we part as friends.”

  He knew what he should say and what, in his heart, he wished to say—that the rules of propriety would allow him to see her as her suitor—but the words caught in his throat and before he could force them out, an old, deep voice spoke from the doorway: “Alicia, you are wanted in the salon.”

  Sarmiento looked and saw a tiny, ancient woman in a funereal ball gown of deepest black with a glittering tiara on her sparse hair.

  He bowed slightly. “Señora Marquesa.”

  She strode into the room. “Who are you, young man?”

  “I am Miguel Sarmiento, Señora Marquesa.”

  “Ah,” she said. �
��The son of Catarina Soto de la Barrera.”

  “You knew my mother?”

  “Your grandfather wanted to marry her off to my younger brother, Juan, but we still had our property then and a match with a merchant’s daughter could be refused.”

  “Mother,” Alicia said reproachfully.

  La Niña waved dismissively. “This is ancient history and both parties are dead. The first lady is about to make her little speech and requires you at her side when she does. Where are my diamonds?”

  Alicia held out the necklace. “I removed it. It has the power of making its wearer invisible.”

  “Not invisible,” the old woman said. “But it does provide another object for the eye to rest upon.”

  Sarmiento bit back a reproach.

  “You can’t carry my diamonds around as if they were a handful of alms,” the marquesa continued. “Put them on. Here, let me help with the clasp.”

  Alicia arranged the necklace around her neck and her mother fixed the clasp. The diamonds blazed against her dark gown, calling the eye to them and away from Alicia’s motionless mask of a face.

  “Please excuse me, Doctor. Carmen—the first lady—is a generous friend in her support of the Casa de Niños and if she wants me, I must go.”

  He bowed, deeply this time. “A pleasure, as always, to see you, Doña.” When she had left, he turned to the marquesa. “Your daughter—”

  “Is a woman of unquestionable probity, young man,” she said. “And so she shall remain.”

  He understood at once she was the instigator of Alicia’s decision to cut ties with him. “It was never my intention to call into question her probity.”

  “Certainly,” the marquesa said, “a gentleman would have understood how to conduct himself with an unmarried woman.”

  The implied accusation hung in the air.

  “I apologize for any offense I have given,” he said. “Your daughter is a remarkable woman. I only wished to continue our friendship.”

  “That is not possible,” the marquesa replied and swept out of the room with a curt “Good evening.”

  Sarmiento remained in the library for a few more minutes, ruminating over the turn of events. He could not get out of his mind the death-mask quality of Alicia’s painted face, which was more shocking to him than his first encounter with her scars. Her scarred face was authentically her; the mask was unnatural, the face she was required to wear to appease the conventions of her privileged class. He remembered the cruel exchange between Alicia and her mother about the diamond necklace. The marquesa wished to empty Alicia of her personality and create a simulacrum, an image of an aristocratic woman as vacuous as the other aristocratic women who filled the ballroom. He reflected that she had seemed more at home in the hovels of the poor than in the lavishly decorated rooms of the Casino Español. Alicia had told him how narrow were the confines of her life, but until tonight he had not understood how forcefully they impinged upon her, preventing her from even choosing her own friends. From choosing him. And if she could not be his friend, he would never see her again except, perhaps, in stilted social circumstances like this ball. The thought of losing her friendship was unbearable to him. The affection he felt for her had deepened with each meeting and in her presence he had felt like the man he had hoped to become, unburdened by guilt and regret. He could not lose her.

  But to keep her meant he too must bow to the conventions of their world and seek her out not as a friend but as a suitor. That meant he must be prepared to marry her. His first, shameful response to this thought was distaste. It was one thing to contemplate her ruined face as a clinician, but quite another to contemplate it as a prospective husband. He was honest enough to admit he could not enter a celibate marriage, and he could not imagine such a marriage would satisfy her, either, if only because it would be a constant reminder of her disfigurement. He did not know what to do. Perhaps, he thought, his worldly cousin could help him see his way out of the dilemma.

  His cousin was nowhere to be seen in the golden ballroom. Sarmiento went out to the balcony to smoke. As he lit his cigarette he saw Jorge Luis standing in the shadows with another man. His cousin’s back was to him. Sarmiento took a step forward, then stopped. Jorge Luis was in deep conversation with the man, whose face was hidden by darkness. They stood, not in the closeness of friends, but the closeness of intimacy, where the breath of the speaker grazes the cheek of the listener. The other man’s hand emerged from shadow and slowly stroked the back of Jorge Luis’s hand. Sarmiento turned and hurried into the salon.

  Sarmiento’s father lived in a dusty pink house on the Calle de los Parados in the old colonia that had seen better days. Sarmiento caught a tram to the Zócalo and got off at the gingerbread kiosk across from the cathedral. A few blocks’ walk from the brightly lit streets surrounding the Zócalo brought him into the darkness of the eighteenth century. The colonia had then been home to merchants, artisans, and a few old, rich families. Even in his boyhood, there had been traces of its former prosperity. Dry goods shops had lined the arcade of the plazuela and there was brisk traffic on its rutted roads. Now, however, the streets were empty and grass sprouted in the cracks between the paving stones. The fine shops were shuttered or else had been converted to cheap restaurants or pulquerías, where the men of the neighborhood drank away their paltry earnings.

  He pushed open the carved doors of his father’s house and entered the little courtyard where pitch pine lamps burned on the exterior walls illuminating an overgrown garden. The soft gurgle of water issued from the fountain in the center of the patio. The air smelled of vegetable decay. He crossed the patio and entered the house, a dozen rooms set behind a tiled corridor covered by a beamed ceiling arranged in a rectangle around the courtyard. When he was a boy, the rooms were filled with the teak and rosewood furniture his mother had brought from her wealthy merchant family, along with paintings, tapestries, silver, and fine plates from China. His father had brought to the marriage his fair skin, blond hair and green eyes, his medical degree, Spanish provenance, and a remote but verifiable connection to Castilian nobility. Despite his impecuniosity, those credentials had been enough for his mother’s family, themselves of Spanish descent and anxious to keep from their bloodlines any taint of Indian blood.

  Now the rooms were stripped bare. When he had first returned to México, he had asked his father about the family possessions. His father’s curt reply: “Your education.” In this way, Sarmiento learned that his years in Europe had been financed by the sale of almost every object of value in his father’s house. Had his mother been alive, she would have been heartbroken, but she had died when he was five and his father attached as little value to her possessions as he did to her memory.

  He came to the room that had been the library. It was still filled with books—these his father had not sold—but it was now also his father’s dwelling place, dining room, and, to judge by the smell of ordure emanating from an unseen chamber pot, his toilet. The library was illuminated by a single kerosene lamp burning on a table beside the narrow bed where his father slept. The old man lay there, his back turned to Sarmiento, motionless but for the soft shudder of his breathing. The bed was piled with books and papers.

  Sarmiento laid his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Father?”

  His father rolled onto his back, sending a cascade of books to the floor. His eyes were bleary, his gray hair disheveled, and his face unshaven: an old man in soiled clothes in a filthy house.

  “Father? Are you all right?”

  The old man sat up. “Perfectly. Move, will you, so I can get up.”

  Sarmiento stepped aside. His father stood up, spilling more books and papers, and moved around the room, lighting candles and another lamp. The room took shape in all its squalor: clothes scattered everywhere; plates of half-finished meals; the long table used as a desk, every inch of its surface covered by moldering documents, books, and sheaves of paper bestrewn with his father’s tiny script.

  “How does yo
ur book progress?” Sarmiento asked.

  After his release from Belem, his father had announced he was turning his broadsides into a single volume that would conclusively demonstrate the illegitimacy of Don Porfirio’s government.

  “As if you cared,” his father replied scornfully. “No, you are like all the other young people basking in the warmth of Díaz’s pax romana. Does it matter to you that he keeps himself in power through sham elections and with secret police? Does it matter to you that he has betrayed the very ideas of the liberal party that he pretends to promote? No, no one cares about all this … ancient history except to those of us who fought for democracy and equality. Juárez, Alvarez, Comonfort. All dead or bought off, except me. I know that a man’s honor means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life.”

  Sarmiento, as always, had no response to his father’s rants, so he changed the subject. “Let me take you out for a meal.”

  “I am perfectly capable of providing hospitality,” he said, then shouted, “Emilia!”

  The word echoed through the empty rooms. After a moment, footsteps shuffled softly across the floor, a door squeaked open, and a fat, pig-eyed Indian woman entered the room.

  “Yes, Señor Doctor?” she murmured.

  “Bring us some food.”

  “Yes, Señor Doctor. Immediately.”

  Sarmiento knew from past experience that Emilia’s “immediately” could mean in ten minutes or never, depending on how she gauged the level of his father’s irascibility. She had come into his father’s life a few months earlier, when she had simply appeared and been introduced to him by his father as “my servant.” To judge by the continuing level of squalor in which his father lived, she did very little service. She seemed to live somewhere in the house with other members of her family, whose silent shadows he sometimes saw flickering among the archways. The odds and ends of value that had remained in the house began to disappear. He had warned his father about her designs and offered to move back into the house himself to care for the old man. His concerns and offers had been rejected.