by Michael Nava
Sarmiento’s first words to them were “Let me see your libretas.”
From within their voluminous skirts, the two older women produced their registration books. The woman in the yellow was Esmeralda Chávez, a third-class prostitute. The woman in blue was Carmen Flores, a fourth-class prostitute.
“And yours?” he asked the girl.
She jerked her chin toward the mesón and smiled. “Come inside, Señor, and I’ll show it to you.”
“Your registration, girl.”
“Listen,” she said. “I have the softest lips and the tightest hole in the city. I’ll give you a taste if you’ll forget about the book.”
“She doesn’t have a book,” Carmen said. “We’ll pay you to look the other way.”
“Is she with you?” Sarmiento asked.
“She’s my daughter, Reina,” Carmen said. “We couldn’t afford to register her.”
“Then she can’t be out here,” Sarmiento replied. He grabbed the girl’s arm. “Get off the street.”
Reina began to scream, “Leave me alone, you motherfucker! I’m not doing anything to you! Virgen de Guadalupe, help me! Mother of God, help me!”
Two of the boys who had been watching the exchange ran into the pulquería, and when they emerged, they were followed by several men. Reina continued to scream at Sarmiento, alternating curses with pleas to Guadalupe.
“That’s enough!” Sarmiento shouted. “Be quiet, girl, or I’ll call the police to take you in.”
“Hey, leave our girls alone,” one of the men shouted.
Other voices chimed in, “Yeah, leave them alone!” “This is our neighborhood, go back where you belong.” “You want a beating? Get out of here!”
Someone shoved him. He turned on his heel and faced the crowd. The men were drunk and angry, and now some of the vendors had joined them and were also screaming at him to get out of the neighborhood. Sarmiento ran through his options, none of them good. His back hit the wall, a fist struck his face, and then, abruptly, the crowd parted. The Indian whom he had seen watching him from the church was clearing a path. Behind him came a black-robed priest.
When they reached Sarmiento, the priest turned to the crowd and said, “Hijos, Hijas, what is all this commotion?”
“That guy was molesting Reina,” someone shouted.
“Yeah, and he was threatening the vendors!”
The priest turned to Sarmiento. “Sir, I am Padre Pedro Cáceres. Who might you be?”
“I am Doctor Miguel Sarmiento, the district sanitation agent for the Board of Public Health.”
The priest turned back to the crowd. “All right, children. I will talk to the gentleman. The rest of you go back to your business.” He locked arms with Sarmiento. “Better come with me, Señor Doctor.”
Sarmiento grabbed his canvas bag and allowed himself to be taken to the church as the crowd dispersed. When his heart stopped pounding, he thanked the priest, who smiled and said, “They would not have harmed you.” The priest was a short man, fair-skinned, with a fringe of white hair around his tonsure and expressive eyes the color of almonds. He spoke, Sarmiento noticed, with the same Galician accent as Sarmiento’s own father.
They did not enter the front door of the church but through a wooden gate in a side wall that led into a garden. A stone pathway forked through the flower beds heavy with sweet peas, lilies, geraniums, chrysanthemums, daisies, jasmine, dahlias, the red-leaved nochebuena, and golden poppies. In the center of the garden were rose bushes weighed down with the largest roses Sarmiento had ever seen, spilling their delicious fragrance into the air. The contrast between the dusty, impoverished streets and this oasis was so great it stopped Sarmiento in his tracks, and he exclaimed, “This is a paradise.”
The priest replied, “Flowers were sacred to the Aztecs, who are the ancestors of my flock. They maintain this garden and I allow them to gather the flowers for their homes and celebrations. The gate is always open and often the people of the neighborhood come and sit to have a moment’s rest from their cares and troubles. Come, Doctor, let me offer you some refreshment.”
Sarmiento followed him into a small, whitewashed room. There, the silent Indian who had brought the priest to Sarmiento’s rescue brought a pitcher of orange juice and two tumblers, poured the juice, and stepped back to stand against the wall. Sarmiento got his first good look at the man. He was short and wiry with the typical thatch of black hair and the black eyes of his race. His coloring was not the usual pinto-bean brown, however, but reddish, and his features were more angular than those of the Indians in the mob that had assaulted Sarmiento. Of particular interest to Sarmiento was the thick, ragged scar across the man’s throat.
“Thank you, Ramoncito,” the priest said. “You may go.”
When he left, Sarmiento asked, “Who cut his throat?”
“Ramoncito is a Yaqui, from the north. He was captured by the soldiers and put into a cattle car with his tribesmen to be taken to the south where the Yaquis are sold into slavery. When the train arrived here, he attempted to escape. A soldier slashed his throat and, thinking he had killed him, pushed him out of the train. But he was still alive. Only his voice was gone.”
“His larynx was cut? It’s a miracle he survived.”
“Yes, and it was a miracle that brought him here. He wandered the streets of the city, half-dead, and as he passed by the church, he smelled the flowers of the garden. Flowers are even more sacred to the Yaquis than to other Indians; their heaven they call the flower world. He followed the scent into the garden and collapsed. My people and I brought him back to health and he has been living here ever since.” Cáceres sipped his juice. “But now, Doctor, we should talk about you.”
“Yes, well, as I told you, I have been commissioned by the Board of Public Health as the sanitation agent for this district,” Sarmiento replied, sounding unbearably officious even to himself.
“What are your duties, Doctor?”
“To report on the health and hygienic conditions of the neighborhoods, to identify potential sources of contagious disease, and to prevent its outbreak or its spread. This neighborhood is a particular concern since there was a typhus outbreak less than two years ago.”
“I remember,” the priest said. “I buried its victims. I have been here twenty years, Doctor, and there have been many waves of disease. It is a good thing that the city wishes to improve the people’s health, but may I make a suggestion to avoid the kind of trouble you found yourself in today?”
Sarmiento bristled but said, “Certainly.”
“I am supposing that you do not have many friends among the poor.”
Sarmiento was taken aback by the remark, but, as he considered it, he realized the priest was correct. “Go on.”
“Poor people are not simply a set of diseases or potential diseases, Señor Doctor. They are human souls. If you wish to change their habits, you must learn what those habits are and why they have acquired them. You must meet the people.”
“I met them this morning.” Sarmiento replied dryly. “It did not go well.”
“You require a guide,” the priest said, smiling. “Come back and I will take you around the parish and introduce you to my children.”
“Why would you make that offer, I wonder?”
“Because,” the priest replied, the smile gone, “you will be back at any rate, with your bag and the authority of the little badge on your breast. Perhaps, after today, you will return with police officers. I only wish to prevent any harm coming to my children.”
“I accept your offer, but you must understand I will carry out my duties.”
“Of course,” Cáceres said. “Would it not be easier to carry them out with the cooperation of the people rather than their resistance?”
“Can you guarantee their cooperation?”
“No, but I can explain to them why it is to their benefit to cooperate with you and then, ya veremos.”
“All right,” Sarmiento said. “Thank you. What shall I call
you, sir? I’m not a believer.”
“Not comfortable calling me ‘Padre’?” the priest replied, smiling. “Then call me Pedro.”
“Only if you call me Miguel,” Sarmiento said. He rose. “Thank you for your help, Pedro. By the way, I believe you know my fiancée, Doña Alicia Guadalupe Gavilán?”
“Ah, yes, Doña Alicia,” he said with pleasure. “She has graced our church with her presence and brought clothes, food, and toys at Christmas. Please send her my affectionate regards.”
“I will. One last thing. You are Galician?”
“From Santiago de Campostela.”
“My father was from A Coruña,” Sarmiento said.
“Then we are countrymen, Miguel. A good sign for our future friendship.”
As destitute as it was, San Francisco Tlalco was not the worst of the barrios in Sarmiento’s district. At the edges of San Antonio Abad were massive garbage heaps scavenged by entire families who lived on-site in huts constructed of plywood and tin. In other neighborhoods, slop jars filled with human excrement were left on the roadways, where they were intermittently collected by the leaky night soil carts that rumbled through the dirt streets. One evening at dusk, he saw dozens of men, women, and children walk out of the city into the far distant fields, where, having nowhere else to sleep, they bedded down on the earth. He saw the decaying carcasses of burros, dogs, and cats left in streets where the city’s garbage collectors refused to venture; fountains that gushed slime the people used for drinking, cooking, and cleaning; and malnourished infants at the breasts of skeletal mothers.
As he made these rounds, the priest’s comment—that he had no friends among the poor—continued to reverberate within him. Liceaga’s attitude was that the poor were a boil to be lanced in order to preserve the health of the body politic. The priest was convinced that it was the souls of the poor that made them worthy of respect. Sarmiento had never systematically examined his attitudes toward the poor, but he did so now. He observed, as if recording the results of an experiment, his disgust as well as his pity, his superficial identification with the poor as a matter of their common humanity, and his profounder feeling of superiority to them.
He did not deny the guilt he felt when he saw in the faces of young women Paquita’s features, or when the grave eyes of an infant or toddler gazed at him with the eyes of his unborn son. He resurrected memories he had suppressed for years of his lover because Paquita was, after all, the poor person with whom he had been most intimate. He recalled the acrid smell of her armpits and the dirt beneath her fingernails, but also the silk of her skin and the fragrance of her hair, which was like concentrated sunlight. The memories made him sick with shame because he realized what he must have meant to her—a way out of poverty—and what he had brought her instead—her death. Ever the scientist, he tried to set aside his remorse and to use his knowledge of her to illuminate the character of the poor.
In the end, he felt anger. How, he wondered, could the poor persist in habits and customs that experience alone must have taught them were detrimental to their health and moral well-being? Why else, for example, would the men squander their pittances at filthy pulquerías while their women and children went ragged and hungry? But then rationality overcame emotion. Every human was born ignorant, he reasoned, and their habits and understanding were shaped by their environment. How could he reasonably expect those born into a cesspool from which there was no escape to acquire the habits of someone like him, born by comparison into a palace? He could not. Therefore, he concluded, his attitude toward the poor should be one of humility and understanding, not superiority or condemnation. He must meet the poor on their own ground. But then another question arose. Was it kind to reveal to those trapped in a cesspool that this was where they were condemned to live out their lives? Here the answer he came to surprised him. Yes, he owed the poor a duty to do whatever he could to improve their conditions because they were México. They were the soil on which the national edifice was constructed. They were México profundo—the bowels of the system, and if they were diseased then so, too, was the body of México. Strangely, when he thought of the poor from this perspective what he felt was a bothersome sentiment that, when he described it to Alicia, she told him was “love.”
“Come now,” he chided her. “My concern for these people is not a matter of personal affection. I don’t even know them.”
“Yet you wish to alleviate the suffering of these strangers,” she replied. “That is love.”
“No, it’s simply good public policy,” he said.
She touched his hand. “Call it what you want, Miguel. It makes me proud of you.”
This sentiment toward the poor—whatever it was—was deepened by his encounters with their counterparts, the city’s rich. Once his engagement to Alicia was announced, they dined at the houses of each of her three sisters, all of whom lived among the recently constructed mansions along the Paseo de la Reforma. The residences of Alicia’s sisters were filled with furniture imported from the Continent gathering dust in immense rooms darkened by heavy velvet drapes and walls covered with dark brocades. Beneath crystal chandeliers, at long dining tables covered with silver bowls and platters, the same French meals were served, differing only in the number of courses, by his hostesses, who had never been out of México. The richness of the food could not disguise its mediocrity—Sarmiento had eaten far better meals in the student cafés of the Left Bank than those that graced the gleaming tables of his future sisters-in-law. The chasm between the rich and the poor increasingly troubled him. Eventually, he could not look upon a Sèvres vase without thinking that, for this fussy little bibelot, a child starved in the streets of San Antonio Abad.
His future brothers-in-law announced they were taking him out for what one of them called, using the English word, a “stag” dinner at the Concordia, yet another French restaurant where the fashionable were duped into eating low-quality food off of high-quality china. In a small, private dining room with red flocked wallpaper, bronze sconces, and starched white tablecloth and napkins, the three men greeted him as he came in from the laboratory of the Board of Public Health, where his analysis of milk sold by a vendor in his district revealed it had been thickened with cow brains obtained from a local slaughterhouse.
“Miguel! We have been waiting for you,” exclaimed jovial Don Gonzalo, husband to Alicia’s second sister, the melancholy Leticia.
He owned El Palacio de México, a large department store on Calle de los Plateros at which white-gloved doormen opened bronze doors to admit the carriage trade. He had a salesman’s bonhomie and the jiggly jowls, ample belly, and roving eye of a libertine.
“Bring him champagne,” said Don Saturino, the banker, to the white-coated waiter who had entered the room through the service door. Saturino was married to Alicia’s eldest sister, Nilda, in a union that, to Sarmiento’s eyes, seemed to be cemented by their mutual loathing. He was a scrawny man who looked as if he had been squeezed out of a tube and as officious as a bank teller confronting a client about an overdraft.
“Or would you rather have some of this fine English whiskey?” asked Don Damian, husband to gay Eulalia, Alicia’s third sister.
Damian was not only the most charming of the three but he had made the sincerest attempt to befriend Sarmiento. He was a fair-skinned, exquisitely handsome little man, never a hair or thread of clothing out of place, with shockingly blue eyes. The first time they had met, Sarmiento had been unable to keep from staring. Damian, evidently used to having this effect, took him aside and explained, “My grandfather was Irish, a San Patricio. Do you know who they were?”
“Only vaguely. They fought against the Yankee invaders, didn’t they?”
“Yes, exactly so,” he said. “They were Irish immigrants impressed into the American army to fight against México when the Americans invaded in 1846. They were treated like animals by their Protestant officers. When they saw that the Mexicans went into battle behind the banner of the Virgin Mary, they
decided they were fighting for the wrong God and switched sides. They called themselves the San Patricio Battalion. My blue-eyed grandfather was one of them.”
“What happened to them?”
“The Yankees slaughtered them when they could find them. Those who survived, like my grandfather, became Mexican citizens. You see,” he said, smiling, “we have something in common, Miguel. You are Spanish; I am Irish. Outsiders, no?” He winked and added, “By the way, I’ve done business with your uncle.” Later, when Sarmiento asked his senator uncle about Damian, Cayetano told him, “Careful with that one. You never know if his schemes are going to pad your billfold or empty it.”
“The whiskey, please,” Sarmiento replied now.
The waiter went to a side table and poured a tumbler of scotch. Sarmiento tasted it—it was superb—and he tipped his glass in Damian’s direction.
“We took the liberty of ordering the meal,” Gonzalo said, “beginning with some excellent oysters.”
“Oysters, brother,” Damian said, with a laugh. “You must be planning a visit to that casita on Calle Trasquillo after dinner to see your little friend La Perla and do some pearl diving.”
“Ah, well, brother, a man must maintain his strength for whatever eventuality,” Gonzalo replied.
“Are you finished with these vulgarities?” Saturino asked. “Let’s get down to business.”
“What business is that, Don Saturino?” Sarmiento asked.
“Sit, sit,” Damian said. “This is a pleasant meal between brothers, not a police interrogation.”
They sat, wine was poured, and the oysters were presented on a bed of ice. Gonzalo’s fat hand reached for one. He sniffed it and raised a wicked eyebrow in Damian’s direction.
