by Michael Nava
“I loved it!” José said.
“Okay, I need to get you home,” David said.
José climbed off the bicycle. David got on and then José hopped up on the handlebars.
“Ready?” David asked.
“Okay,” José said.
They plunged into the fashionable crowd promenading along the Paseo, eliciting shouts of “Hey, watch it!” and “Get off that thing and walk!” In response, David rode even faster and more recklessly, while José grasped the handlebars until his knuckles turned white.
The bells of the churches had been silenced for Holy Week, and the air was filled with the sound of the rattles that people carried to ward off evil spirits until the bells rang again on Easter morning. As they approached the Zócalo, David slowed down where the paving changed from macadam to cobblestone. The facade of the cathedral was draped in black. The streetcars jerked forward from the Zócalo station in a shower of electric sparks from the overhead wires. David darted among the cargadores carrying heavy trunks from the railroad station to the hotels on Calle San Francisco. He turned onto the side street that led to the palace and, too soon for José, arrived at the hulking doors, where the porter hurried out when David braked and José hopped off the handlebars.
“Won’t you come and eat supper with us?” José asked.
David shook his head. “My family is expecting me. I will see you on Monday. In the meantime, I want you to practice that piece I gave you.”
“‘Claire de Lune,’” José said. “What a funny name for a song.”
“Don’t concern yourself with the title; worry about the notes. Goodbye, peanut,” David said, and then he was off, disappearing into the Indian market in the plazuela and into the dusk.
“Come inside, Master José,” the porter was saying. “Your grandmother is waiting for you.”
Reluctantly, José went in. He found La Niña in her parlor waiting with his chocolate and plates of sweets.
“You are late, José,” she said.
“David was teaching me how to ride a bicycle in the Alameda.”
“Your piano teacher?”
“Yes,” José said.
“He is not a suitable companion for you, José,” she said. “He is only a servant, after all.”
“He is not my servant,” José said angrily. “He is my friend.”
“Drink your chocolate before it gets cold,” she said. “Next time he comes, I would like to meet this boy, your friend.”
“I will introduce you, and you will love him as much as I do,” José said.
“We shall see,” she replied.
Alicia knelt before a painting on the stone floor of the empty church of San Francisco Tlalco. She did not know how long she had been there because the bells did not toll on Good Friday. She was aware only that the light had faded and the church lay deep in the shadows of dusk. Her knees ached and pain clawed the muscles of her back and shoulders, sending shuddering spasms that brought tears to her eyes. She was not certain she could rise, even if she wanted to, but she did not yet want to. She had not intended for her devotion at the thirteenth station to become an exercise in self-mortification. However, as she gazed at the depiction of the death of Jesus that a self-taught Indian artist had painted three centuries earlier, she found herself rooted to the spot. In the background of Golgotha, the artist had painted the landscape of the Valley of México with its lakes and volcanoes and fields of blue agave. Jesus himself was no more than a half-naked Indian boy whose face was veiled with streams of blood that ran from a crown of cactus thorns. The horror and sadness of the moment of death was inscribed on his slender body, gaunt and exhausted and slack. His death cut straight to her heart, like a scythe, leveling the weeds of vanity. Her soul was naked before her God who loved her so much he had endured this death to bring her the grace of eternal life.
Miguel had once asked her what she thought about when she prayed. “Nothing,” she told him. “But you spend so many hours at it, you must be thinking of something.” “No,” she insisted quietly. “I think of nothing.” He had looked at her with the same frowning expression with which he regarded obstinate patients.
But she had spoken the truth. When she prayed, as she had for the past few hours, her prayer eventually shed the stifling cloak of language and became, instead, a pulse of yearning, grief, wonder, and gratitude. It felt, physically, as if her entire body and all its complex systems had become concentrated in her heartbeat. Mentally, where thought would have been, there was, instead, an enveloping sensation of light. Rarely was it as powerful as the light of sun. Rather, it was like the flickering of the flame of a votive candle, which, for as long as it lasted, suffused her with feelings of peace and well-being unrelated to any person or object in the world. She did not leave her body, as she had read that the saints did when they prayed. To the contrary, it seemed to her that she more deeply entered her body, until she touched the center of all existence, including her own, sometimes for no more than a moment, sometimes for a little longer. It was a place as still and quiet as the whisper that Elijah had heard on the mountain of Horeb, after the storm and the earthquake and the fire, which he recognized as the voice of God. She wondered what Miguel would have made of it had she answered his question about what went through her mind as she prayed by saying, “I listen for the whisper of God.”
A groan involuntarily escaped her lips and she knew it was time to rise. She stood, crossed herself, and rested for a moment against a column before setting out for home. As part of her Lenten practices, she gave up her carriage and walked wherever she needed to go, overruling Miguel’s concerns for her safety. Behind her, near the altar, she heard the frantic shuffle of footsteps and glimpsed Ramoncito, Padre Cáceres’s mute Yaqui servant, running from the sanctuary. A moment later, she saw him and Padre Cáceres enter hurriedly.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Cáceres questioned frantically.
Ramoncito made a noise of affirmation.
“Take me to him.”
They disappeared through the door behind the sanctuary that led to the room where the priest and his acolytes prepared for Mass. Alicia, stirred by concern, unthinkingly followed them, but the room was empty. It appeared that they had gone through another door, left open, through which she saw descending steps. She stood at the top of the steps, looked into darkness, and breathed the musty air of a crypt. She saw the flicker of a candle and heard Cáceres’s voice again: “We can’t leave him here. Let’s take him to my room.”
She stepped back, into shadows. A few minutes later the priest and his servant emerged through the door, carrying the body of a man.
“Padre,” she said, stepping forward. “What is this?”
“Doña Alicia, what are you doing here!” he exclaimed.
“I was in the church and I heard you talking to Ramoncito,”
“Come,” he commanded her. “I will explain everything.”
She followed the men into the priest’s cell, where they laid the corpse on his narrow bed. Cáceres lit the lamp and she saw the body was that of an emaciated young man, scarcely more than a boy. The priest knelt, laid his hands on the boy, and began to administer the sacrament of extreme unction. Alicia and Ramoncito knelt behind him. Silent tears ran down the Yaqui’s face. When the sacrament was completed and the priest had covered the boy’s face with a linen cloth, she asked him, “Who is he? What happened to him?”
The priest sighed, rose to his feet, and invited her to sit.
“His name was Diego. He was a tribesman of Ramoncito, another Yaqui, who had escaped from a henequen plantation in the Yucatán, where he had been enslaved. He got as far as here, but the privations he endured in slavery were too much for him.”
“Why here?” she asked.
He paused, gave her a piercing look, and said, “What I am about to tell you must not leave this room.”
“Whatever you say I will keep in the strictest confidence,” she replied.
“In the days before the A
mericans fought their civil war, there was a system of sanctuaries that helped the black slaves escape from the southern part of the United States to Canada, where they were free. It was called the underground railroad. The sanctuaries were established by good Christians who knew that human slavery was abhorrent to the Lord.”
She nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“For twenty years, Yaqui men have been deported from their homeland in Sonora and sold as slaves to the henequen haciendas, where they are worked to death. Over time, we have created our own sanctuaries to help those who escape reach the American border. Our own underground railroad. This church is a station on that railroad. We shelter the men in the crypt until they are well enough to travel, and then we provide them with the means to reach the next station, in Guanajuato. Ultimately, they cross the border in the American territory of Arizona, where the Yaquis have set up their communities in exile.”
She nodded. “This is commendable work, Father.”
He shook his head. “Not in the eyes of the law, Doña Alicia. Legally, men like Diego are the property of the plantation owners. By helping them escape, we are committing theft. The penalties are very harsh. If we were discovered, I would be prosecuted and thrown into jail and the church itself shut down.”
“Surely the archbishop would intervene on your behalf.”
“The archbishop knows nothing of these activities,” Cáceres said curtly. “If he did, he would personally surrender me to the civil authorities for prosecution.”
“You mean … ,” she began slowly, as the implications of his words sank in.
“Doña, power protects power. The church is no different. You see, we are quite alone in this work.”
“Then you must allow me to assist you.”
The priest shook his head. “No. You are generous and kind to offer, but the risks are too great.”
“They are far less for me than for you, Father. I belong to an old family. My husband is an official in the government. My brother-inlaw Damian is a confidant of Don Porfirio himself, and I am a friend of the first lady. I am above suspicion.”
Ramoncito, who had remained in the room, made a rough noise. She turned to look at him. He pointed to her, tapped his heart, and nodded.
“Thank you,” she told him and then addressed the priest. “If Ramoncito trusts my discretion, you should too, Father. Let me help you.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly. “Perhaps it was providential that you overheard me and discovered us. Now, our immediate concern is to give the boy a Christian burial.”
“Padre,” she said. “Do you shelter only Yaqui men? What of their women and children?”
His face turned to stone. “The children are taken from their families and placed in orphanages or given to Mexican families to adopt. The women are killed, so that they will not bear other children. It is the policy of our government to wipe these people off the face of the earth,” he said. “God help us, but they are succeeding.”
“But why?” she cried. “What is their offense?”
“Their offense?” he repeated angrily. “Their offense is that they refuse to surrender their ancient homeland to be partitioned among our president’s cronies. Their offense is that they exist at all.”
“God forgive México for this crime,” she said.
10
Before he left the city to rejoin Madero’s campaign, Luis had given Sarmiento a copy of Edward Carpenter’s book The Intermediate Sex, which purported to be an explanation of homosexuals.
“You’re a rationalist,” Luis had challenged him. “You pride yourself on your scientific objectivity, but you think of men of my type with the same ignorant contempt as the most benighted parish priest. Acquaint yourself with the facts, Primo, before you draw your conclusions.”
“A scientific fact is a conclusion based on measurable observations that can be reproduced by experimentation,” Sarmiento replied pedantically. “Will I find those kinds of facts here?”
Luis smiled. “All I ask is that you keep an open mind. Isn’t that also the way of science?”
One evening, Sarmiento opened the book and began to read. As he suspected, what Carpenter offered were not facts but a hypothesis: there existed a class of men who, although biologically male, were by temperament female—emotional, sympathetic, and kind—and, as such, were inclined to form romantic attachments with other men rather than with women. These homosexuals, Carpenter argued, were not pathological but anomalies, not mentally ill but simply a variation from the norm. As proof, Carpenter cited the historical persistence of such types, particularly among the ancient Greeks, who recognized and honored love attachments between men. He also claimed that certain famous individuals, including Michelangelo and Shakespeare, were homosexuals. These celebrated artistic personalities, Carpenter contended, typified the homosexual temperament in its highest form: passionate, sensitive, and creative. The only science he cited was a handful of studies of sex by the Germans Karl Ulrichs and Richard von Krafft-Ebing and the Englishman Havelock Ellis that, to varying degrees, supported his hypothesis.
“What are you reading so intently?” Alicia asked, coming into the sala with her embroidery.
Sarmiento’s first impulse was to hide the book, but he had always freely discussed his reading with her, whether it was a scientific monograph on public health issues or the poetry of the Nezahualcoyotl, the Texcoco philosopher-king. These conversations were invariably stimulating to him, her innate intelligence shedding a new or different light on the text.
“An Englishman’s book that Luis gave me to explain … men of his kind. What the author calls ‘homosexuals,’” he said, pronouncing the term in English. “A made-up word that means men who are attracted to one another.”
“Men who love other men?” she queried, slipping a thimble on her finger, taking her needles and hoops from her basket. She was embroidering a bedspread with roses and lilies as a wedding gift for an Indian couple who were to be married at San Francisco Tlalco. Her fingers were a marvel of agility.
“You could call it that, I suppose, although I’m not certain that ‘love’ describes their physical activities.”
“Of course that is a sin,” she said, “but if they are led to it by real, if misguided, affection, like Luis and his friend Ángel, God will not judge them too harshly, nor should we.”
“Carpenter makes the same plea for tolerance,” he said, “although he wouldn’t call what these men do a sin.” He closed the book. “He would say, as Luis does, that what they do is natural to them.”
She shook her head. “What is natural to them is the same as is natural to all men,” she said. “To marry and to make children.”
“But what of those marriages where children are not possible because of the sterility of the man or woman?” he wondered. “Is it unnatural for those spouses to have sexual relations for pleasure?”
She paused in her stitching. “If pleasure is the only reason for such relations, then they are merely expressions of lust. But for husband and wife, even those who cannot have children, those relations serve another purpose.”
“Which is?” he pressed her.
She quietly worked on the bedspread for a moment before answering. “To deepen the bond of marital love.”
“If that’s true, why wouldn’t it also be true of two men who have sexual relations out of real affection?”
“Because, my dear, two male bodies are not made for the natural expression of physical love.”
He shook his head. “Carpenter would say men’s bodies are quite capable of giving and receiving what you call physical love.”
She looked at him. “Do you think that because something is possible it’s also natural?”
“The very thought of two men attempting coitus repels me,” he replied. “So I suppose the answer is no. There are many things one can do with one’s body that could scarcely be considered natural. Still, if subscribing to Carpenter’s theory helps Luis accept his … condition and preser
ve his self-respect, then I suppose it serves a useful purpose.”
“Luis’s condition is but a small part of who he is,” she said. “And he is otherwise quite admirable.” She smiled. “So, yes, I suppose we must accept his eccentricity.”
“Even though he will go to hell for it?” Sarmiento joked.
“Don’t be absurd, Miguel. He will have to repent in purgatory, of course.” She added seriously, “But I’m certain that God will be merciful to him.”
“Will I also have to repent my atheism in purgatory before I can join you in paradise?” he asked, smiling gently.
“Oh, Miguel,” she said in exasperation, “do you think God cares that you say you don’t believe in him? He created you, doubts and all.”
At the end of May, a note arrived from Luis inviting Sarmiento to hear Madero speak in the city on San Juan’s Day, June 24. “Madero,” Luis wrote, “is anxious to meet the son of Rodrigo Sarmiento.” The postscript startled him—how would Madero know his father?—but touched him, too, and swept away his misgivings about attending so public a protest against Don Porfirio’s reign. Liceaga frequently reminded Sarmiento, sometimes jovially, sometimes with exasperation, that he was politically naive but even Sarmiento knew Madero was playing cat and mouse with the regime. Ostensibly, Madero’s campaign to limit presidential terms was directed not at Díaz and the 1910 election but at whomever might succeed Díaz in 1914. His stated intention was not to challenge Díaz in 1910 but to persuade Díaz to appoint him as vice president and his likely successor in 1914.
Nonetheless, implicit in Madero’s campaign was a devastating attack on the old man. His campaign slogan—“no reelection and effective suffrage”—was a denunciation of four decades of Díaz’s system of fixed elections at every level of government from president of the Republic to the mayor of the lowliest villages. His book, The Presidential Succession of 1910, had ventured to criticize the effects of one-man rule, however tepidly, questioning the regime’s brutal war against the Yaquis, its repression of labor unions, and its excessive concessions to foreign investors. The very mention of these topics had, for decades, sent newspaper editors to Belem jail and shut down their presses. That Madero had written about them extensively in a best-selling book was incendiary. Finally, in what was the most personal affront, were the intimations of Díaz’s mortality, the assumption that by 1914 he would either be dead or too enfeebled to seek a ninth term.
