by Michael Nava
For she knew her ability to understand his character was limited by her own temperament, so different from his. In consequence, there were moments of misunderstanding between them, which she worried he took for lack of love. But she had carried him in her body and fed him with her milk, creating an intimacy between them that transient confusion could not impair for long. She knew, ultimately, that he felt secure in her devotion to him. Miguel, however, lacking that bond of body with José, could not always conceal the irritation he felt with a son so unlike his rational, methodical, and practical self. When he scolded José for his failures at school or inability to read the face of the clock, José shrunk back from his father and it pained her to see it.
“Miguel,” she told him after such an episode, “you must be patient with him. He is not willfully disobedient.”
“I know, I know,” Miguel would say with a sigh. “I’m sorry that my frustrations show. I do not wish to perpetuate my own father’s bad temper, but Alicia, he is an odd child. Almost an idiot savant, brilliant at some tasks, hopeless at others.”
“Oh, Miguel, that is cruel! We are all better at some tasks than others. It is simply that you have little interest in the things he loves, music and stories and art. But those interests come honestly through my bloodline, as you can see in my mother, who lives for art. It is no wonder they are such great friends.”
“Those interests may be acceptable in a woman who is not expected to shoulder worldly burdens, but José will have to take his place in the society of men. I would prefer he not enter it like a lamb among wolves with his head filled only with Chopin and Jules Verne.”
“He is still a child, Miguel,” she replied. “We both know the world will harden him. That is the nature of the world. Let him have his innocence while he can.”
But she thought, as she listened to the last notes of his piece, José’s innocence was not transient; it was deeply embedded in his character, the source of a freshness and vivacity that seemed more fitting for a girl than a boy. Miguel was, perhaps, justified in worrying how José would fare in the harsh world of men, but Alicia trusted that the God who had created her son as he was had a purpose he wished to express through José in the fullness of time.
“Bravo, José,” she said as she entered the drawing room.
José scooted off the piano bench and ran to her. “Mamá!” he exclaimed, embracing her.
She kissed his forehead. “You are becoming such an accomplished musician. I will find you an instructor to help you advance even further.”
“I liked it when you taught me,” he replied, still holding her.
“Yes, I enjoyed that, too, mijo, but I have nothing more to teach you. Let me sit and visit with your aunts.”
She sat on the sofa with her mother, José between them. He threaded his fingers through hers. His grandmother said, “José, stop pawing your mother so she can have a cup of tea.”
“No, that’s fine. I had tea with the first lady.”
“Was she encouraging?” La Niña asked.
“Her views of a woman’s place are very traditional,” Alicia replied. “She regards nursing as a natural function of wives and mothers and the idea of paying women to perform that function is … a novelty to her.”
She had chosen her words carefully. What Carmencita had actually said was that paying women to nurse would put them on the same moral level as prostitutes.
“She might feel differently if she had ever actually had to nurse a sick child or a sick husband,” Eulalia said.
“Will you abandon your plan?” Leticia asked anxiously.
“No,” she said adamantly. “The nursing that women do for their families is entirely different from the nursing required in hospitals. Hospital nurses are the physical senses of doctors when the doctors are absent. They must receive the same training as the physician’s own senses so that they understand what they see, hear, smell, and touch. I regret that the first lady will not help create this school, but I will talk to Miguel about who else I should approach.”
“Lovely speech,” Nilda said. “You should run for president, sister. You and Señor Madero. Or, perhaps, you should spend more time with your child so that when he sees you, he does not cling to you like an orphan.”
“You’re a fine one to talk about motherhood,” Eulalia replied. “You expelled your children from your womb directly into Swiss boarding schools.”
“Oh, shut up, both of you!” La Niña said. “I have had enough. Go home now.”
The three sisters rose, kissed their mother, and departed. As soon as they left the room, they began bickering again, their voices echoing down the corridor.
“Mamá,” José said. “What is a womb?”
“It is the place in a woman’s body where she carries her child until the child is ready to be born,” she said. She touched her abdomen. “About here.”
José put his hand on her hand. “Is that where you carried me?”
“Yes, mijo.”
“How did I get in there?”
La Niña said, “That is not a suitable question for your mother, José.”
“Your grandmother is right,” Alicia said. “That is a question you must ask your father.”
“No doubt he will give you the scientific explanation,” La Niña sniffed, “and leave you more puzzled than before.” She rose, adjusting the folds of her voluminous black dress. “Your sisters have once again exhausted me. I will take dinner in my rooms. Come and see me in the morning, José, and I will play for you my new recordings of Caruso singing arias from Rigoletto and Aida. They are marvelous!”
“Yes, Abuelita. Thank you.”
After she left, José said, “Mamá, if you carried me in your belly, could you not carry another baby there? I should like a brother.”
“Well, my dear, God, who judges these matters, decided that you were the only child I should carry.”
“I shall ask God to change his mind,” José said confidently. “When he understands how much I want a brother, I am sure he will put one inside of you.”
Alicia sat before the mirror, brushing her hair, and saw Miguel reflected on the bed reading the letter that had arrived for him that afternoon from his cousin Jorge Luis. For the past decade, Jorge Luis’s letters had arrived once or twice a year, postmarked from France and Italy, Spain and England. This one, she had observed, bore the postmark of the Mexican postal service. When she glanced at him again, Miguel had stopped reading and was watching her.
“What is it, Miguel?”
“Your face,” he said. “It continues to heal. Have you noticed?”
She stopped midstroke and examined herself. Over the years of her marriage, there had been a change. The pitting had become less pronounced and the fiery psoriasis that had covered her cheeks and forehead had faded to reveal the natural shade of her complexion, which, like José’s, was simultaneously dark and pale. She no longer caked her face with heavy powder or wore veiled hats when she went out. The pitying stares of strangers had become brief glances acknowledging the damage but not dwelling on it. The children of San Francisco Tlalco still called her feita but by rote, without understanding why she was so called.
“It is merely that age has softened the damage left by the disease,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I have seen the results of smallpox in other adults and your recovery is specific and rare. I cannot account for it medically.”
“Then it is God who has had mercy on me,” she said.
“I think it is happiness that has restored your beauty,” he replied. “You have been happy, haven’t you, Alicia?”
She rose from her mirror and went to bed, where she sat at his side and said, “It would have been enough to have been your wife and the mother of our child, but you gave me more than that. You have allowed me to be your student and a partner in your work. There is not enough space to hold my happiness. Have I made you happy, Miguel?”
“How can you even ask? I was prepared to end my life u
ntil you entered it. Each day I am still alive, I owe to you, Alicia.”
He took her hand. They looked into each other’s eyes, where they found not uxorious sentimentality but a love forged in a crucible. They knew they had saved each other. That knowledge and the accompanying gratitude each felt toward the other had created an unbreakable bond between them.
“Has Jorge Luis returned to México?” she asked as she went around the bed to her side and slipped in beside him.
“Yes,” he said. “This letter is six months old, from Coahuila, where he has befriended Madero.”
“Is it not still dangerous for him to have returned?”
“He writes that once Madero is president, he will pardon him for any offenses. He says he has explained himself to Madero and that Madero does not condemn him for who he is.”
“You mean his love for men?” she asked.
Miguel had eventually and reluctantly told her the true cause of his cousin’s departure from México without the details that she had puzzled out for herself.
“Jorge Luis has come to believe that the … aberration that inclines him toward those of own sex is not a mental disease or a moral deficiency, but that he and other men like him constitute a third gender, a male with a woman’s psyche, and as such, are perfectly natural variants of the human species.”
She sensed his distaste in the clinical tone he took.
“He thinks he is a man with a woman’s soul,” she said. “Where would he have arrived at such a notion?”
“It is a school of thought that began in Germany and was adopted by English pederasts who call themselves ‘Uranians.’ Jorge Luis spent a long time in England, where he evidently became their acolyte.” He put the letter aside. “He says he will secretly come to the city and I should be on the watch for him.”
“I would love to see him again, after all these years. He has never met his nephew.”
“I’m not sure I would want José to associate with him.”
“Oh, Miguel! He is our family.”
Miguel shrugged. “He has been gone a long time. Madero’s response to him is interesting, though.”
“Do you think Madero will be president one day?” she asked.
“Our brother Damian, who seems to know such things, says no,” he replied. “Damian says Díaz only allows Madero to make speeches against the regime to show foreigners that México is a democracy. The old man can’t hang on forever, though. This will be his last term and then, perhaps, a different government will finally meet its obligations to the poor.”
“We are all obligated to the poor,” she said.
“Private acts of charity cannot change social conditions. As long as the poor are regarded as expendable parts of the machinery of the economy, they will continue to be ground into the dust. Our world must change, my dear. These conditions where a few prosper and the many are destitute cannot continue in a modern state.”
“The Lord said the poor will always be with us,” she murmured.
“One reason I am not a Christian,” he replied. “Your Jesus should have spent less time teaching the poor to accept their lot and more time teaching the rich to share.”
“His message was for the rich and poor alike,” she said.
“What message was that?”
“As the poor stand in relation to the rich, so we all stand in relation to God. We are utterly dependent on his mercy, love, and generosity for everything we have. All he asks in return is that we love each other as he loves us. If every Christian takes that message to heart, there would be no poverty, Miguel.”
With more rue than scorn, he said, “After nineteen hundred years, my dear, I’m afraid we must conclude the message has fallen on deaf ears and the experiment has failed.”
He was obdurate on this point, so she left it and turned their conversation to a subject he would understand.
“Miguel, you must explain reproduction to José,” she said.
“Why?”
She told him about her conversation with him about his birth. “He asked me for a brother. You must help him understand why that is not possible.”
“I doubt whether the medical explanation would satisfy him,” he replied. “It would be a hard thing to tell him about the brothers and the sister who were miscarried, even if he had the wit to understand it.”
Following José’s birth, there had been three other pregnancies, each ending in a bloody miscarriage, the last nearly costing her life. After that, at Miguel’s insistence, she had submitted to a hysterectomy. There would be no other children.
“Still, you must try,” she said. “I cannot evade the question again and it makes me unbearably sad.”
“I will talk to him, I promise.”
“But gently, Miguel,” she said. “He is a sensitive child.”
“You must not coddle him,” he replied.
She opened her mouth to reply, but their disagreement about José’s temperament was as longstanding and unresolvable as their disagreement about faith, so she said nothing.
9
Across the city, church bells clanged the hour, six o’clock in the evening the second day of Lent, at the beginning of March 1909. Sarmiento was locking up his apothecary cabinet after a long day of seeing patients at San Francisco Tlalco. As was their custom, his patients received his diagnoses with grave Indian silence, took the medicines he offered them, nodded when he prescribed a plan of treatment, and walked away on dirt-encrusted feet. He knew that most of them would sell the medicine for food or pulque and return next time with the same ailments. He had long since stopped hectoring them when they did this. He simply prescribed the medicines without comment. Since most of their diseases were variations of malnourishment, food and even alcohol were as useful to them as his drugs. He thought how Liceaga’s comment had justified his misleadingly optimistic reports about the state of public health in the city—“we must do what is necessary to do what is possible.” If sycophancy could soften the hearts of the powers-that-be toward the plight of the destitute, Sarmiento would have been licking their boots too. But Liceaga’s sanguine reports only fueled the indifference of the authorities, while the situation of the poor worsened.
The evidence was all around him. Much of the beautiful garden of the old church had been converted from flowers to food. Squash, chili, melons, and corn had replaced the ancient roses to provide for the parishioners as the cost of these staples increased and their pitiful wages fell. The church, which had not been locked in the three centuries of its existence, was now sealed tight after sunset to prevent theft. When he walked through the neighborhood, the small businesses he had observed a decade earlier were shuttered because they were unable to compete with the factories that now turned out the same goods en masse. Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city’s anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks. The eighty-year-old Díaz’s refusal to name a successor created uncertainty about the future, while a series of bloody strikes in the mines and the factories seemed, even to the dullest and most self-satisfied plutocrat, a portent of things to come. It was as if, he thought, the nation was holding its breath and it was unclear whether the exhalation would be a sigh of relief or a death rattle.
“Doctor?” The voice, male, came from behind him.
“I’m sorry,” he said without turning. “The clinic is closed but I will be back tomorrow afternoon at two.”
“I don’t need treatment, Miguel,” the man said, the voice becoming familiar.
Sarmiento turned. The stranger was of medium height and stocky, his complexion darkened by the sun, his face shadowed by a broad-brimmed felt hat such as was worn in the north. He was dressed in an old but respectable suit and a collarless shirt. He removed his hat and in his broad, handsome face Sarmiento detected vestiges of his cousin’s epicene features.
“Jorge Luis!” he cried. “Is it really
you?”
“Yes, Primo, but I am only Luis now. Luis Parra.” He stepped forward tentatively. “It is so good to see you, Miguel.”
Sarmiento rushed to him and embraced him tightly. He felt the changes in his cousin’s body, the aesthetic slenderness turned to hard muscle, the once smooth face now raspy with stubble. Even his breathing was different, deeper and harder.
“My God,” he said. “You’ve become a man.”
Luis broke off their embrace and smiled at Sarmiento. “Are you surprised? Did you think I would become a woman?”
His joy at their reunion seeped away at the memory of their last meeting. “Why have you changed your name?”
“For my safety,” he replied. He reached into his pocket, removed a hand-rolled cigarette, and lit it. “And I have not really changed my name. I have simply rearranged it, taking my mother’s name as my own.”
“What are you doing in the city if it is still dangerous for you?”
“It is dangerous for Jorge Luis Sarmiento, not for Luis Parra. I have come to help organize Don Francisco Madero’s anti-reelection club in advance of his arrival in May.”
At that moment, Alicia and Padre Cáceres entered the room. For a moment, she gazed at the man beside her husband and then broke into a broad smile of recognition.
“Jorge Luis!” Alicia exclaimed, embracing him. “Thank God you are safe and well. Father,” she said to Cáceres, “this is our cousin.”
