by Michael Nava
The old woman sat down. “If the cook spent more time cooking and less time filling your head with Indian superstitions, her meals might actually be edible.”
“They are not superstitions, Abuelita,” he replied with a child’s innocent adamancy. “In the national museum I saw stones from Tenochtitlán they found in the ground beneath the cathedral. Why couldn’t there be a temple here, too?”
“And what would you do with this Aztec gold?”
“I would give it to you,” he said.
She patted his hand. “You are a generous, foolish child. Come with me.” She led him to the back wall of the mirador, where she used her cane to indicate the foundation. Unlike the marble from which the gazebo’s visible parts were constructed, the foundation stone was tezontle, the volcanic rock from which Tenochtitlán had been fabricated. Faintly visible were the Aztec ideographs for water, motion, and reeds. “Do you see this stone?”
“Yes, Abuelita,” he said, slipping his hand into hers.
“It comes from the Indian temple on which our residence sits. The temple was destroyed. Its rubble was thrown into the canal that once ran outside the walls of the garden, but the largest stones were used by your ancestors as the base of our house. Most of them are buried in the earth, beneath the walls, but this one you can see. Whatever gold there was in the temple would have been discovered and taken and melted down for coins. So you see, my dear, the temple was here all the time. It was not necessary for you to dig up Doña Esmeralda’s roses to find it.”
José knelt on the ground, running his hand over the ideographs. “Abuelita, do you think that the priests made human sacrifices in our temple? Do you think they ate human hearts?”
“I should hope not,” she said with aristocratic disdain. “Where do you get such ideas? Come, José. You aunts will be here soon. Go and make yourself presentable.”
He stood up. “I must fill the hole I dug.”
“Leave it for the gardener. Say nothing about your excavations to your mother or father. They do not understand your romantic temperament.” She linked her arm with his and they made their way through the garden. “So you would have given me the Aztec gold?”
“Oh, yes, Abuelita!” he said. “I would give you all the gold in the world if I could.”
She kissed his head. “Silly child, you already have.”
In the packed courtyard of the Jockey Club—the seventeenth-century Casa de los Azulejos famous for its blue-tiled exterior—Guillermo Landa y Escandón, the mutton-chopped governor of Ciudad de México, was concluding his speech to a gathering of expensively dressed men lounging beneath the panels of the immense skylight. His theme was the upcoming Centenario—the 1910 centennial celebration of México’s independence. Sarmiento stood in the crowd, feeling absurd in the white uniform that Liceaga had insisted upon. Each year it became more elaborate, with gold-braided epaulets and wider bands of gold around the sleeves, the buttons larger, shinier, and more intricately engraved with the insignia of the Superior Sanitation Council, as the rechristened Board of Public Health was now known. Liceaga, in an even more martial uniform, stood behind the governor, in the semicircle of public officials and wealthy private individuals who formed the centennial committee. September 1910 was still sixteen months away, but the planning had been going on for years, and the city was in a frenzy of construction and expansion. Scattered around the courtyard were intricate models of buildings and monuments newly completed or being rushed to completion in time for México to receive the world on its hundredth birthday.
Among the models were the recently opened post office, a Renaissance palace with a double staircase that tumbled like a waterfall of marble and brass beneath the glass-enclosed ceiling; the stately House of Deputies with its facade of Roman gravity; the cenotaph to Benito Juárez, a semicircle of columns formed from snowy Carrara marble surrounding a seated statue of the dour Indian savior of his country; and the dizzying Column of Independence, the height of a twelve-story building, going up at the foot of the Paseo de la Reforma, where it would be crowned with a gold-plated sculpture of Nike, the goddess of victory. Surrounded by these symbols of Don Porfirio’s reign, the wealthy men in the room, Mexican and foreign, nodded and murmured approval as the governor concluded: “Our days of backwardness are long behind us, our progress as a modern nation is assured. México is ready to step forward and assume its rightful place in the first ranks of the family of nations! Viva México! ” The cry echoed in the vast room and then the crowd began to push upstairs into a private banquet room where a massive U-shaped table, festooned with garlands of flowers in the colors of the Mexican flag—red, white, and green—had been set for lunch.
Carried forward in the crowd, Sarmiento found himself behind the two Princes Iturbide, descendants of the short-lived Emperor Agustín I. In 1821 their ancestor had won México’s independence from Spain and then made himself, briefly, king. He had ended his days, as had so many other nineteenth-century Mexican chief executives, in front of a firing squad. His young great-grandsons were popular figures in aristocratic circles, for they were, as Sarmiento’s sister-in-law Eulalia liked to say, as “beautiful and dense as a pair of Sèvres vases.”
One was saying to the other, “Don Porfirio is like the Conde de Orizaba who built this palace. His father didn’t think he would amount to anything and told him, ‘You will never build a house of tiles,’ but he showed the old man. He took that proverb seriously and covered his palace with a fortune in Puebla tiles. The world told Don Porfirio, México will never be anything, and look, he has made us a great nation.”
“And given us a handsome pension to build our own house of tiles,” the other twin said, laughing.
He had no sooner entered the banquet hall than he heard Liceaga calling, “Sarmiento, over here. There are some people I want you to meet!”
Sarmiento found the director with two Americans. One of them was a short, stout, bald man with a white goatee, who exuded self-importance like a cloud of flatulence. The other was a shriveled, gray-haired, gray-faced man with an alcoholic tremor in his hands.
“Miguel,” Liceaga said in English, “may I present Mr. J. Anthony King and his associate, Mr. Kieran McCarthy. They represent the interests of the Hearst family in México. This is Doctor Miguel Sarmiento, my deputy.”
The man named King glanced at him and then past him, as if looking for someone more important to talk to. Gray-skinned McCarthy offered a trembling, moist hand.
“Doctor Liceaga was telling us about the important work that you are doing in the public health department,” McCarthy said. “To prepare the city for all the visitors who will be arriving next year.”
“I trust that your plans include giving the Indians pants,” King said brusquely. “Or better yet, sweeping them off the streets altogether. The only way to deal with the Indians is what Díaz is doing with the Yaquis: round them up or wipe them out.”
“Like your government?” Sarmiento asked.
King, glaring at him, said pompously, “It’s a matter of scientific fact that the white race is the superior race, and it is our obligation as white men to ensure its triumph over the lesser races.”
“As a scientist, I would have to disagree that any such fact has been established,” Sarmiento replied mildly.
“I refer you, sir, to the work of Sir Francis Galton,” King said. “England’s preeminent eugenicist. Galton points out, and quite correctly, that if the morally and physically enfeebled are allowed to reproduce themselves, humanity will be dragged down.”
“Even allowing that that is true, there are enfeebled individuals of every race, Señor King. Even among white Americans.”
King’s face reddened. “Sir, our subject is México, and I am telling you, until México eliminates its Indians, it will never be a first-rate power. Look, there’s Rockefeller’s man. Come along, McCarthy.”
King stalked off without another word, McCarthy trotting behind him like a little dog.
“Why is it tha
t Americans are either bombastic or puerile, I wonder,” Liceaga said after the men had departed. “Not that I disagree with King’s sentiments, however reprehensible his manner of expressing them.”
“You would also exterminate thirty percent of our population?” Sarmiento asked, taking a glass of champagne from a passing, dark-skinned waiter.
“Come, come, Miguel. That’s not what I meant. But it is true that our Indians seem utterly impervious to self-improvement. Surely your decade at the department has demonstrated that over and over.”
“It is difficult to assess the Indian’s capacity for self-improvement since he is never offered the opportunity for it,” Sarmiento said. “He is forced to take the worst and lowest-paying jobs, eat food unfit for human consumption, drink putrid water, and live in squalor. His children must work rather than attend school, assuming there is a school available to them, and he is caught between the church and the pulquería, one offering the false panacea of a future heaven and the other the false panacea of intoxication to console him for his present misery. That’s what I have learned in my ten years at the department.”
Liceaga threw an affectionate arm around Sarmiento’s shoulder. “You’ve obviously spent too much time in the field. You’ve ‘gone native,’ as the English say. I disagree with your analysis, Miguel, but your passion does you credit.”
“Speaking of analysis, Eduardo, your report about the new waterworks implies it will deliver potable water to most of the city, but we both know that only a few neighborhoods on the west side will actually benefit.”
“The government wants to hear about progress, Miguel.”
“And you tell them what they want to hear,” Sarmiento replied.
“My dear boy,” Liceaga said, “I refuse to be drawn into a quarrel with you, but I will say that your famous integrity does not come cheaply. I know because I’m the one who pays the price for it. We both want the same thing, a better life for all of our citizens, but we must do what is necessary before we can do what is possible.” He dropped his voice. “Don Porfirio is almost eighty. This will be his last term, and then, perhaps, there will be new blood.”
“According to Francisco Madero, our country cannot afford another four years of Díaz gerontocracy,” Sarmiento said.
“Ah, I gather you read Madero’s book.”
“Yes, it was an eloquent call to a true democracy in México.”
“A call that will not heard as long as the Sphinx is alive. They want us to take our places at the table. Let’s pray we have not been seated with the Yankees. And don’t mention Madero in this crowd.”
José stood before the mirror, fresh from his bath, rubbing pomade into his hair. His room lay reflected around him, a large, high-ceilinged space with a single window, now shuttered, that opened out to a quiet side street off the plazuela. More than once, as a small child, he had gotten lost wandering the galleries and suites of his home. After one such adventure he had asked his grandmother, “Abuelita, do you know how many rooms there are in your house?” She had replied, “My dear, if I knew how many rooms there were, it would not be a palace.”
The centerpiece of his room was a four-poster canopy bed in which, his grandmother had told him, many of his ancestors had breathed their last breath. Her story thrilled rather than troubled him. The bed was not merely his resting place, but a prop central to his imagination. He could pull the curtains shut and it became a theater stage or a ship on the high sea or a carriage on a bandit-infested road. Most often, it was the battlefield where he pitted his armies of lead soldiers against one another for hours at a time. The armies were now scattered across the room—soldiers from every era and every country and every rank in the infantry, cavalry, and artillery. He imagined himself a brave soldier in the army of Saint Louis fighting the infidels in Jerusalem, or with Charles I battling the French in Italy, or with Napoleon in Egypt. In almost every story he told himself, there was a moment when a fellow soldier was gravely injured and José carried him to safety, and when the boy survived, he vowed to José eternal love and friendship, always with the same words: “I will never leave you.”
In actuality, José had no friends his own age. He had a solitary temperament but his solitude was not entirely temperamental. His grandmother coddled and protected him, but she also imposed her strict views of rank by which most of his schoolmates were deemed unsuitable companions for him. Those who met her high standards were boys he disliked because they were braggarts or bullies or dull. His cousins were all adults, the next youngest ten years his senior, and their children were infants.
When he was younger, his parents had taken him to the church of San Francisco Tlalco while his father held his clinic, and he had played with the children of the parish, but now he was at school during those hours. Some of those children were still his friends, but he saw them only on Sunday, after Mass. When he had proposed inviting them home, his grandmother responded with horror. He had resigned himself to living in a world of adults and to the wayward affection of his cat, El Morito, who crawled in from the garden every night and slept on his bed with him. He assuaged his loneliness with his lead soldiers, the novels of Jules Verne and Victor Hugo and Robert Louis Stevenson, and his stereopticon through which he viewed distant lands to which he hoped to one day travel with the one true friend he knew was awaiting him somewhere.
He brushed his hair back, dressed himself meticulously, and went to greet his aunts, who had gathered in his grandmother’s parlor for tea. José privately thought of his aunts as the three stepsisters from La cenicienta dressed in their lavish gowns, faces powdered and rouged, on their way to the prince’s ball. Each one had her predominant quality—Tía Nilda was caustic, Tía Leticia was melancholy, and Tía Eulalia was amusing. They had settled in their usual places in the pink-and-gold room with its enormous Velasco painting of the Valley of México on the wall above the sofa where his grandmother sat. When José entered the room, she patted the cushion, inviting him to sit beside her. Before he did, José approached each of his aunts, bowed from his waist, and kissed their hands.
“Ah, the Prince Imperial,” Nilda said. He could taste the cream she used on her hands when he lifted his head from kissing her.
“No, no, nieto,” Leticia said. “Give your old aunt a real kiss.” She puckered her thin lips and he touched them with his. She smelled of rose water and tears.
“José, you are so pretty that if you were a girl, we would have to lock you up in a tower to protect your virtue,” Eulalia said, but her tone, unlike Nilda’s, was kind and affectionate. “As it is, you will lay waste to many female hearts before you marry.”
He smiled at her because he liked her best, and also her dashing husband, Tío Damian.
“Bring my grandson his chocolate,” La Niña ordered the young maid who hovered nervously in the corner. She took silver tongs and piled French lace cookies from a platter on the table before her onto a nearly translucent dessert plate and passed it to him. “Say nothing to your mother or I will be blamed for spoiling your appetite.”
“I hardly think Alicia can blame you for anything having to do with the child,” Nilda said. “You are more of a mother to him than she.”
“Yes, Mother, where is Alicia?” Leticia asked.
“She has gone to seek the support of the first lady for a school to teach girls to become nurses.”
“Really?” Nilda said. “Whatever for? There are more than enough nuns in this city to tend the sick.”
“Oh, what do nuns do when you are sick but stand over you with their sour faces waiting for you to die so they can begin the novena?” Eulalia said. “Alicia wants girls who are actually trained to care for the sick.”
“You seem to know rather a lot,” Nilda said.
“Damian has pledged ten thousand pesos toward her school,” she replied.
“What next?” Leticia marveled. “Women doctors?”
“Pigs will fly before that happens,” Nilda said. “Women should desist from the occupati
ons of men. That reminds me, I saw Carmen Rubio de Díaz at Sylvan’s last week. She was dining with Limantour.”
“The finance minister?” La Niña asked. “How extraordinary.”
“Oh, from what I understand it’s her hand at the till of the Republic rather than her husband’s,” Eulalia said. “Have you spoken to him recently? He loses his train of thought between one sentence and the next.”
“Nonsense,” Nilda said. “Don Porfirio may be eighty, but he is still muy hombre. As for Limantour, that man looks like he was squeezed out of a tube of ointment. And Carmen, well, I suppose she can’t help meddling in affairs of state seeing how she is barren.”
“She was a lovely girl,” La Niña said. “I still think it was criminal that her father married her off to that man when she was only seventeen and he was already fifty.”
“Well,” Eulalia said quietly, “her father got a good price for her.”
The sisters were silent, each thinking of her own arranged marriage, Nilda with a frown, Leticia with downcast eyes, and Eulalia with a slight smile.
“José,” Leticia said. “Have you been practicing your piano? Won’t you play for us?”
Alicia heard her son working his way through “Ave Maria” and reminded herself that she must find him a piano teacher. She had been his original instructor, but he had long since surpassed her. She paused and listened, picturing her beautiful boy’s long, deliberate fingers on the keys, his face transfixed with the joy of making music. God in his infinite humor had given her a child endowed with the one disposition completely foreign to her—an artistic temperament. Her son was impractical but obsessive, distracted but disciplined, a silent, intense observer of others but completely self-absorbed. He drove his teachers mad with his inattentiveness in class, but she had watched him sit for hours maneuvering his toy soldiers in complicated formations, like actors on a stage, while quietly telling himself their story. As a small child he had often disappeared into the garden, where he picked flowers and arranged them with complete concentration by color, size, and type. He cheerfully practiced scales until the servants begged her to ask him to stop, but he could scarcely add or subtract, confused pesos and centavos, and could still not tell time or right from left. He had taken so long to speak that Miguel had worried he was deaf or feeble-minded, but then, when he did speak, it was in full sentences, not babyish babble. He still guarded his words though, a habit that made her heart ache because she wondered whether he kept silent out of fear of disappointing her and Miguel by speaking.
