by Michael Nava
Damian burst out laughing. “You are incorrigible.”
At the fish course, Sarmiento said, “Don Saturino, you mentioned business. What did you mean?”
The three men exchanged quick glances. Damian said, “Our wives are very protective of their sister. They asked us to explore your intentions.”
“My intention is to marry Alicia,” Sarmiento replied.
“Why?” Saturino demanded.
“What our brother means,” Gonzalo said smoothly, “is that we cannot help wondering why a man like you, un macho, would make such a match?”
Sarmiento waited until their plates had been cleared and the waiter had departed before he replied. “Doña Alicia is the finest woman I have ever met. I am humbled that she would accept me as her husband.”
“Your sentiments do you credit,” Damian said, “but—”
“She is hideous,” Saturino said coldly. “If you are marrying her because you believe she has money, I assure you she does not. It is we who support her and her mother and their ridiculously expensive residence.”
“You think I am a ‘fortune hunter’?” Sarmiento asked, using the English phrase.
“We like you very much, Miguel,” Gonzalo replied quickly. “We would welcome you into the family, but we wanted to make clear to you your lady’s financial position.”
“Of course no one thinks you are a ‘fortune hunter,’” Damian added soothingly. “But Miguel, with all due respect to my virtuous sister-in-law, you must admit it is an odd union.”
“Gentlemen, that you cannot conceive of a marriage that is not mercenary is more a reflection of your character than mine. I can support my wife without your help.” He stood up from the table. “Indeed, after our marriage you can keep your money and continue to spend it on oysters and whores.”
Damian gripped his arm with a restraining hand. “Miguel, please, sit. As unpleasant as this conversation must be for you, you cannot imagine how much worse it would have been had we left it to our wives. I speak for all of us when I say that we apologize for any offense.”
“Yes, Miguel, sit and finish your meal,” Gonzalo said. “Let us put this behind us and have another glass of champagne. Right, Saturino?”
The banker shrugged. “You understand us. We understand you.”
“That wasn’t much of a toast,” Damian said. He raised his glass. “To our brother Miguel, a long and happy marriage to our beloved sister.”
The last plate was cleared. Saturino clamped his homburg on his head and left in a cloud of disapproval and Gonzalo went off to his bordello. Damian asked Sarmiento to stay behind with him for brandy and cigars.
“I hope you have forgiven us, Miguel,” Damian said, waving away smoke.
“Did your wives really put you up to this, or was it the banker’s idea?”
“The banker’s wife,” Damian replied. “Nilda is … forceful. She threatened a scene if we did not speak to you.” He grinned. “And if she is not satisfied by Saturino’s account, there may still be one.” He inhaled, then slowly exhaled. “Delicious. Ironic, of course, that we should raise questions about your marriage given the states of our own. Nilda and Saturino hate each other and Gonzalo breaks Leticia’s heart with his philandering. As for Eulalia and me …”
“What, Damian?”
“We see each other so rarely that she once passed me in the street without recognizing me. And yet, of the three of us, she and I have the most agreeable marriage. We accommodate each other.”
“You don’t love her?”
“You know the English poet Kipling? ‘A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.’”
“Why did you marry her?”
He smiled. “Look at me, Miguel, a half-breed son of an army quartermaster with freakish eyes. I rose high enough on my brains, but to get through those gilded doors where the real money is made, I needed a wife like Eulalia from an old criollo family. Saturino and Gonzalo married for the same reason.” He pointed at Sarmiento with his cigar. “But you? You are a virile man, the Spanish son of a famous father, a hero, though a little cracked. What do you need with a Gavilán girl, especially one who suffered Alicia’s misfortune?”
“I believe I love her,” Sarmiento said.
For a moment, the handsome little man looked abashed, but then he raised his glass and said, “Well, then, to love, in all its mysterious forms.” When they had drunk he said, “So I hear you are working for Lalo Liceaga at Public Health.”
“Yes, you know him?”
“It’s my business to know everyone,” Damian replied with a laugh. “And to know where they stand in the hierarchy of Don Porfirio’s divine order. The butterfly catcher scarcely appears, Miguel. His department is a joke, something for foreign consumption, with no real authority or money. I could get you a real position of power in the government, or, if you want to stay at Public Health, you can have Lalo’s job.”
“Thank you, Damian, but I am happy where I am.”
“My God,” the other man exclaimed, “you and Alicia really are made for each other.”
“What is your business exactly, Damian?” Sarmiento asked, feeling the effects of the drink.
“I buy and sell,” he replied.
“What, like Gonzalo?”
Damian chuckled softly. “No, Miguel, not petticoats and pâtés. My dealings are in information, introductions, access.”
“That’s all very mysterious,” Sarmiento said, pouring himself another brandy.
“Yes, in that way we are completely unalike,” Damian said. “There is no mystery to you at all.”
He spoke pleasantly enough, but Sarmiento felt the sting of judgment in his words.
On a Sunday afternoon, he escorted Alicia on the pathways beneath the leafy bowers of the Alameda. She wore a lavender lace dress and an enormous hat that shaded her powdered face. She smelled of rose and citron.
“May we sit for a moment, Miguel?” she asked. “I wish to discuss the wedding.”
“Of course,” he said. He led her to a bench, wiped it with his handkerchief, and they sat.
“Miguel, I do not require an elaborate wedding, but I must be married in the church.”
He had anticipated this conversation. “As you know, the Ley Juárez made marriage a strictly civil contract. The church ceremony adds nothing.”
“Without the sacrament, I would not consider myself married at all.”
Sarmiento shared his father’s atheism, but without his father’s rancor. While his father had railed against the church, to Sarmiento, the Christian sky-king, the virgin impregnated by the air, and the man who came back from the dead were stories so manifestly absurd they did not merit much more than a raised eyebrow and a shrug at human credulity. Nonetheless, if Alicia required him to go through the religious ceremony, he was prepared to do so as a purely anthropological experience, like Doctor Livingston living among the Hottentots.
“Then, of course, my dear, we will marry in a church. There is just one thing I ask. Let me choose the priest.”
She looked at him curiously. “I am surprised you number any priests among your friends.”
“Only Pedro Cáceres at San Francisco Tlalco. He has been taking me around to the neighborhood and helping me in my work. I have come to admire him greatly. I would like him to marry us.”
“In his church?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you know how much it will annoy my sisters to have to come to that barrio? To venture south of the Zócalo for any reason?”
“I’m sorry, Alicia, but that is my condition for marrying in a church.”
She laughed. “No, no, Miguel, you misunderstand me. I’m not upset. I’m delighted!”
“Delighted to be married at San Francisco Tlalco, or delighted that it will annoy your sisters?”
“Both!” she said.
She had never shown even the faintest malice toward anyone and he found it so unexpected and amusing that he spontaneously kissed her. It was their
first kiss.
The priest was less understanding than Sarmiento had hoped. They had become friends and Sarmiento had learned from him a great deal about the Indians, not simply their habits, but their history and their beliefs. He had been surprised by much of what Cáceres had taught him, for in the official texts of his childhood, the history of México began with the conquest in 1519 and was a chronicle of Spanish kings and viceroys and the spread of Catholicism and European civilization. In that version of his country’s history, the Indians were ancillary—primitives to be converted or subdued. The Aztecs, whose monuments still dotted the city, could not be ignored entirely. Instead, they were held up as the consummate example of Indian barbarism: human sacrificers, cannibals, demons.
Cáceres taught him there was a purpose behind even the seemingly inexplicable practice of human sacrifice. “The Mexica,” he told Sarmiento, using the name Aztecs called themselves, “no less than we Christians believed that man was created in the image of God, but their gods made man of dust and their own blood. When they sacrificed humans, in their minds they were only returning to the gods the blood that belonged to them.”
“Surely you’re not saying you approve?”
The priest shook his head. “To understand is not to approve, Miguel. I am merely pointing out that what we condemn as evidence of the depravity of the Mexica had its reason and its purpose. It was part of a religious ritual as meaningful to them as the Eucharist is to us.”
“To you, you mean,” Sarmiento said. “But you’re talking ancient history, Pedro. There is no more human sacrifice.”
“God be praised for that,” Cáceres said. “But it’s not ancient history, Miguel. When our Spanish ancestors justified the conquest of the Mexica because of their so-called moral degeneracy, they were creating a justification for the abuse of the descendants of the Mexica that continues to this very day. Think of it, Miguel. Do you believe in your heart that the Indian you see walking down the street is your moral equal?”
After an uncomfortable pause, Sarmiento murmured, “Not if I am being completely truthful. No.”
“And you are a good man with enough grace to be ashamed of his prejudices. Imagine the actions of those who are not.”
He rattled around the room for a newspaper and spread it out on the table between them. On the front page was a drawing of a half-dozen Indians hanging from a gallows. Beneath it, the caption explained the men were Yaquis who had been caught raiding a hacienda in the northern state of Sonora.
“You see,” Cáceres said. “We still exterminate the Indians.”
“According to this story, these men were the aggressors,” Sarmiento pointed out.
Cáceres shook his head. “We are the aggressors. The Yaquis are only attempting to defend their ancestral homeland against Don Porfirio’s army. It is no different than when the Mexica resisted Cortés.”
“Would you have had the Mexica prevail?” Sarmiento asked, genuinely curious.
“What’s done is done,” Cáceres replied. “My concern is not with the Indians who were killed three hundred and eighty years ago, but with those who are dying today.”
But you are a nonbeliever,” Cáceres sputtered when Sarmiento proposed that the priest marry Alicia and him.
“What does that matter? My wife believes.”
They had been walking through the neighborhood to a tenement where a child was ill with symptoms that sounded ominously to Sarmiento like typhus.
“You can’t just mumble the words of the sacrament as if they were lines from a play, Miguel. That would be an affront to the Lord.”
“How could your God be affronted that I am doing something out of love for Alicia? God is love, isn’t that what your Saint John says?”
“The devil quotes scripture,” the priest grumbled. They walked in silence for a moment. “I will do it, on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“You must establish a clinic at the church for my children. For one year after your wedding, you will come regularly and tend to their medical needs.”
“Agreed,” Sarmiento said. They had arrived at the tenement. “Now, let’s hope I won’t be treating them for typhus.”
7
From the shaded corridor where she embroidered a tiny smock for Reina’s baby, Alicia half listened to the murmured conversation between her husband and a man with a large goiter on his neck. Reina, sitting beside her, clumsily attempted to imitate Alicia’s needlework. She pricked herself and cried out, “Fuck!” She quickly added, “Forgive me, Doña. My fingers are so clumsy, not quick like yours.”
Alicia took the cloth from the girl and examined it. “This is good work, Reina. When I first began to learn to chain stitch I stuck my fingers all the time. I can’t tell you how much cloth I ruined by bleeding on it. It’s simply a matter of practice and patience.”
She returned the cloth to the girl, who said, “Sometimes I have patience and sometimes I want to jump out of my skin.” She touched the little swell in her stomach. “Mamá says that’s the baby.”
“I’m sure your mother is right.”
“You have no children, Doña?”
“No, my dear.”
“But you are so old,” the girl said. “I thought you would have many sons and daughters.”
Alicia smiled. In the months that she had been coming to San Francisco Tlalco she had learned it was a sign of acceptance when the people of the neighborhood dispensed with extraneous gentility and spoke their minds. And to the girl, who was no more than fifteen, she realized she must seem ancient.
“I have just married,” Alicia said. “My husband and I have not yet had time to have children.”
The girl took up her sewing and said, “The doctor is much nicer now that he is married to you.”
Alicia lifted her head from her own sewing and looked down the corridor into the room Miguel used as his clinic. His patient stood motionlessly as Miguel felt his neck. Palpitation, she thought, using the term he had taught her. “Diagnosis is an art, Alicia,” he had explained, “and the doctor has four tools: inspection, palpitation, percussion, and auscultation. That is, we look, feel, thump, and listen.” He had shaken his head in disbelief when she told him that her own childhood doctor, Don Ignacio, had never laid a finger on her except to briefly take her pulse.
“Then how did he diagnose and treat you?”
“My mother told him where my pain was and he gave her medicine for me. If I was truly ill, he bled me.”
He shook his head. “That’s not medicine. It’s witchcraft.”
He was distressed to discover that the inhabitants of San Francisco Tlalco shared Don Ignacio’s ideas of professional propriety. He returned home from his first clinics with stories of the man who assaulted him when he thumped his chest to listen to his lungs, the woman who ran off at the sight of his stethoscope thinking it was made of snakes, and the little boy who clamped his teeth on the thermometer and ended up with a mouthful of mercury that nearly poisoned him. He complained that many of his patients spoke Nahuatl and that Padre Cáceres was too busy to translate for him. “Those people are impossible!” he concluded.
“Let me come with you,” she said. “I speak some Nahuatl and I know many of the people in the parish, and if you have your wife with you they may be less inclined to assault you.”
He resisted, but when he came home with a blackened eye given to him by the husband of a pregnant woman after he had touched her belly, he agreed.
“However,” he said, “I insist on teaching you some basic principles of anatomy and physiology so that you will understand what I am doing.” He smiled. “I need to knock Don Nacho out of your head.”
Her classroom was the room in their suite at the palace that he had converted into his office and laboratory, much to her mother’s horror. Miguel had reluctantly acceded to La Niña’s insistence that they live with her after their marriage. “I am an old woman,” she said. “You can’t leave me to die alone in this big house.” But after h
e moved his medical equipment into their apartment, she complained, “This is a family residence, not a tradesman’s place of business.” Only when he threatened to take Alicia and move did La Niña withdraw her objection.
For Alicia, however, the hours they spent in his office, where he instructed her in the body and its workings, were among the happiest of her marriage. He was a patient and kind teacher and she discovered in herself a thirst for knowledge. More than that, though, an intimacy arose between them that dispelled the awkwardness of having to play the roles of husband and wife and allowed them to resume their friendship, which had always been the strongest bond between them. Using his charts and models, he taught her the structure and parts of the body from skin to cells, explained the digestive and circulatory systems, and showed her a drop of his own blood beneath the microscope. He explained to her the causes and symptoms of various diseases and their treatments.
“Was this taught to you in the same way you teach me?” she asked.
“Ah, well, no,” he said. “I attended many hours of lectures, of course, but the deeper understanding of disease came from the clinicals where we learned to match symptoms to causes by observing sickness in our patients and then studying their bodies after they died.”
“You opened the bodies of the dead?” she asked, shocked.
He nodded. “We examined organs and tissues for disease. Only in that way could we confirm that our diagnoses were correct.” Her distress must have been evident because he added, “Alicia, this is how medicine must proceed for new knowledge to arise.”
She did not reply but thought that Miguel was virtually a different species than white-whiskered Don Ignacio.
One afternoon, as they examined a beautiful papier-mâché model of the brain, and he explained how its folds and convolutions contained the whole of human personality, she asked, “But in which part does the soul reside?”
“My dear,” he said. “You know my views on that subject. Does this study of the body in all of its gross materiality shake your faith at all?”
