by Michael Nava
“My faith falters,” she whispered.
“Then, like the father of the sick child in the Gospel, you must pray, ‘Lord, I believe; help me in my unbelief.’”
“Yes,” she said. “I do believe. Lord, help me in my unbelief.”
The Teatro Coliseo was a shabby little music hall a few streets north of the Zócalo, where working-class audiences cheered ribald zarzuelas—comic operettas—like Chin-Chun-Chan that lampooned the nouveau riche. On the evening of June 24, 1909, the feast day of San Juan Bautista, the theater’s well-worn seats were occupied by a different crowd. Sarmiento, glancing around the smoke-filled space, recognized types rather than individuals—humble factory workers, exuberant university students, frock-coated members of the petite bourgeoisie, the younger sons of cadet branches of old families, bon vivants seeking entertainment, cigar-smoking reporters, bespectacled intellectuals with nicotine-stained fingers, and plain-clothes officers of la seguridad. The tatty curtains had been drawn open, and on the bare boards of the stage there was a podium draped in red, white, and green bunting and flanked by tall arrangements of gladiolus. Behind the podium was a banner that proclaimed, “The Anti-Reelection Club of Ciudad de México.” Sarmiento was standing at the back of the house, beneath the balcony, scanning the room for his cousin.
From behind him, Luis said, “Miguel, you’re here,” and clasped his hand on Sarmiento’s shoulder.
Sarmiento turned and the two men embraced.
“Where is the man of the hour?” Sarmiento asked.
“Downstairs,” Luis said. “Come, let me introduce you to him. I’ve told him all about you and he is eager to meet you.”
To Sarmiento’s surprise, Madero was not surrounded by the usual entourage that accompanied politicians. Rather, the little man was alone in the dingy dressing room except for an even smaller woman, who sat at a desk in the corner writing a letter. Madero was dressed simply in a dark brown suit; his hips were wider than his shoulders and he had a small potbelly. His receding hair, plastered across his head, emphasized his bulbous forehead, and his lips were lost in a luxuriant mustache and goatee. Beneath thick eyebrows his eyes were curious, intelligent, and gentle. He radiated kindness, even before he clasped his small hands over Sarmiento’s and said, in a soft voice, “You must be Doctor Miguel Sarmiento. I had the honor of meeting your father many years ago. He is a great inspiration to me.”
“Did you say this man is a doctor?” a male voice asked.
The man, who entered the room smoking a cigar, bore a family resemblance to Madero but was clearly cut of tougher cloth. He regarded Sarmiento with a fixed stare made disconcerting by Sarmiento’s realization that his left eye had the lifeless glitter of glass.
“My brother Gustavo,” Madero said. “Gustavo, Doctor Miguel Sarmiento.”
“I thought perhaps you might be an alienist come to cart my brother away to the madhouse,” Gustavo said, exhaling a plume of rich-smelling smoke.
Madero smiled. “My family thinks I have lost my mind and have commissioned my brother to be my guardian. My father says that I am like a microbe challenging an elephant. Don Porfirio being the elephant, of course.”
From her desk, the drab little woman raised her eyes, paused in her writing, and in a high, grating voice declaimed, “Jesus’s mother and brothers came and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers are outside seeking you.’ And Jesus, looking around him, said, ‘Here are my mother and brothers. For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.’”
“This is my wife, Sara,” Madero said.
Sarmiento said, “You have great faith in your husband.”
“It is not a matter of faith,” she replied. “Francisco has been chosen for the task of restoring democracy to México.”
“Chosen by the spirits,” Gustavo sneered. To Sarmiento, he said, “They communicate with them on my brother’s Ouija board.”
“You are an idiot, Gustavo,” Sara said without particular heat and resumed writing.
Sarmiento had no idea of what to make of this exchange. Madero laughed and said, “Don Miguel, you must think you really have entered an asylum. Let me explain. I am a spiritist, a disciple of the Frenchman Allan Kardec. You have heard of him?”
“I vaguely remember hearing the name when I was a student in Paris. He was a medium?”
“No,” Madero said. “He himself, as he freely acknowledged, lacked the medium’s gift, but he communicated through others with the spirit world. They taught him secrets that have, until now, been inaccessible to humans about the meaning of life and death. In summary, we are born, die, and are reborn again and again. In this manner we evolve spiritually until we are perfected and can achieve union with God. That is also the true message of Jesus of Nazareth and the meaning of his resurrection.”
“Do you communicate with the spirit world?” Sarmiento asked, scarcely believing he was addressing this absurd question to the leader of México’s opposition.
“We do, Sara and I, using a planchette. I fell into the habit after reading Kardec’s autobiography. The first message I received was ‘Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself.’ I believe it was a message from Christ himself. Later, another guide told me I must abandon my private philanthropy and enter politics for the salvation of our country. That message was conveyed to me by one ‘BJ.’”
“BJ?” Sarmiento repeated.
“Benito Juárez,” the little man said, “whom your father served as you will soon serve me, Miguel.”
The sound of heavy feet rhythmically banging on the floor of the theater shook the ceiling of the dressing room and the crowd began to shout Madero’s name over and over.
“Come on, then,” Gustavo said. “Let’s get the circus started.”
“Good-bye, Miguel,” Madero said. “We will meet again soon. I am sure of it.”
As they made their way back to the theater, Sarmiento asked his cousin, in all seriousness, “Is he insane?”
“Listen to him speak,” Luis replied, “and then answer that question for yourself.”
They arrived at the floor of the theater just as Madero was taking the stage to loud, prolonged, and almost desperate applause. With difficulty, he quieted the crowd and began to speak. His voice like a flute—soft, clear, and intimate—reached to the farthest seats. He spoke first of himself, saying he was, in his heart and soul, a farmer who loved the country, its people, and its quiet pursuits. “I am not a politician,” he told them, “but I am a man of México, and México, in her chains, has called to me, as she has called to every one of you and begs us to release her from the bonds of autocracy. Our mother México groans under the weight of foreign domination. Her children go hungry and die of disease and neglect. She cradles these dying children in her arms, and she begs us, ‘For the love of God, save me!’”
A huge cheer erupted from the crowd. Sarmiento thought it a stroke of brilliance that Madero had invoked as a metaphor for México the image of a beggar woman holding a malnourished child. The streets of the city were filled with such women. They existed at the periphery of one’s vision, a shameful sight that one ignored, quickening one’s pace as they approached, bony hands outstretched, pleading, “Sir, for the love of God.”
The beggar woman was a living reproach to the Díaz government’s centennial slogan: Order and Progress. In invoking her, Madero allowed the people in the crowd to release the repressed guilt, anger, and shame that they felt at being part of a system that tolerated such inequality. Madero, it appeared, understood that human beings could not look away from human suffering indefinitely. Whether or not people were basically good, they were inescapably connected. Sarmiento himself had often thought that the suffering of others invoked a sympathetic response, as one nerve is sympathetic to the pain of an adjacent nerve.
For forty years, Don Porfirio’s government had told its people to ignore their rea
ctions to the degradation of their fellow beings, in essence, to deny reality. In the last decade, that reality had started to close in on México, as the inequalities became every starker and the sense of personal powerlessness increased—a feeling Sarmiento himself knew all too well. To continue to deny reality required greater and greater mental and moral contortions until, Sarmiento thought, the nation must go mad. Madero obviously understood that the critical moment had arrived, and his message was to face reality. Face reality and change it. As Sarmiento joined in the thunderous applause that proceeded to nearly drown out Madero’s speech, he felt that he had been released from the web of lies that constituted the social fabric of Díaz’s México and given back the most basic freedom of all: the freedom of thought.
“Is he insane?” Luis shouted over the crowd.
“No,” Sarmiento replied. “He may be the sanest man in México.”
11
La Niña emerged from the crypt beneath the altar of the church of San Andrés to rain pounding the stained glass windows and gloomy shadows flooding the sanctuary. The smell of incense permeated the still air—the odor of sanctity, she thought with distaste. She could not wait to escape it and fill her lungs with the miasmatic air of the city, that familiar mixture of fried foods, flowers, sewage, wood smoke, charcoal, horse manure, eucalyptus, and all the other innumerable fragrances, exhalations, odors, stinks, and emanations that proclaimed life. For the past hour, she had knelt beside the tomb of her husband while the obsequious pastor of the church led her in a rosary to commemorate the anniversary of his death. She droned her way through the Five Glorious Mysteries, nauseated by the musty air and the black smoke pouring from the candles. They provided the only illumination in the final resting place of three centuries of dull-witted, haughty Gaviláns. Her own family—hacendados from Durango—buried their dead in a hillside graveyard beneath canopies of oak branches where horses grazed and lovers picnicked.
Her maid hurried to her side as she prepared to leave the church. She pushed open the door for her mistress and unfurled an enormous umbrella at the very moment La Niña left the church. She took a dozen steps to her waiting carriage. The driver, with long-perfected timing, threw back the door just as she reached the coach and assisted her inside. Her maid entered behind her, arranged a fox fur throw across her lap, and then departed to join the driver for the three-minute ride to the palace. La Niña, who had been tended to by servants since infancy, was only peripherally aware of their activity.
She was in a nostalgic mood, for as she had knelt in the crypt beside the dust that had been her husband, her thoughts wandered back to her girlhood in Durango. She had been born in 1831, ten years after Iturbide secured México’s independence from Spain. Her family’s vast holdings had been unaffected by the change in government—the cattle continued to graze, the corn and wheat continued to grow, the veins of silver still traced their delicate lines through the darkness of the mines—and hers was the childhood of a princess. Not, however, a confined princess of the city. She was a country aristocrat who, by day, rode horses, raced barefoot in the dust, and swam in the cold streams of the mountains. At night, she sat at her father’s table in silk and jewels, eating quail and fried squash blossoms off plates carried across the Pacific by the Manila galleons. Her childhood friends lived in the same careless opulence. When one of them, the son of a silver king, had married, the path from the bridal carriage to the church was paved with silver ingots. Silver was the foundation of all their fortunes and even the moonlight that filled her bedchamber seemed like a spray of silver.
It seemed, at first, that the romance would continue when she came to the city for her social debut. Her family had a fine house, a fine name, and wealth. The invitations poured in. There were candlelit balls, excursions to the Teotihuacán, where she stood at the peak of the Pyramid of the Sun, and long boat rides in the flowered canoes of Xochimilco. Although not as beautiful as other girls, she was fresh-faced and charmingly impertinent. She had a dozen suitors from which to choose a husband, but, as was the custom, her father made the choice: the dour Marqués of Gavilán, a widower fifteen years her senior. He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural, so dull in his conversation that she had to discreetly pinch herself to stay awake. She was crushed, but there was no question of defying her father. Moreover, she had loved the palace of the Gaviláns from the first time she entered it. Its immensity and decrepitude appealed to her romantic imagination and her patrician self-regard.
Forty-three years of marriage, three sons who died in childhood, four daughters who survived, and several reversals of fortune later, the marqués died. A prig to the end, he refused last rites from a priest whom he deemed unworthy of administering the sacraments to someone of his rank. She was secretly overjoyed when they sealed his casket in the crypt. Now, she thought, now she could begin to live again!
But something terrible had happened—she had become old.
The decades of her marriage had curdled her gaiety into scorn, transformed her charming impertinence into sarcasm, bent her back, whitened her hair, and withered her limbs. The spurs of life still dug into her flesh, but her flesh could not answer as it had when she rode through the forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental or danced until dawn at Chapultepec Castle. The only passions left to her were the vicarious passions of art—literature, music, opera, and theater. Art allowed her to be young and alive in her imagination, if nowhere else. As she steeped herself in those realms of the imaginary, her human connections withered and became mere social rituals. Until José was born. Her last grandchild was beautiful and sensitive, like a storybook character come to life. He awoke a passionate and protective love within her that she had not felt for her own children. She would have adored him even had he not reciprocated, but he was as devoted to her as she was to him, and he shared her passion for art. He loved nothing more than to lie in her vast bed in the morning, listening to her tales of country life while Caruso played on the phonograph. Or, at least, he had until he became infatuated with his piano teacher. Now all he spoke of was this boy, and she discovered that José had revived in her another emotion she had believed to be long entombed—jealousy.
The carriage came to a stop in the first courtyard of the palace. She waited. Her maid opened the door to the carriage and removed the throw. The driver assisted her descent as her maid held open the umbrella. She stepped through the gate into the second courtyard and began to climb the steps to her apartment when she heard the thrilling opening notes of the third movement of the “Moonlight Sonata.” She paused and listened. The hands that played the piece were more practiced, confident, and experienced than José’s. Waving her maid aside, she went to the grand sala and stood at the doorway. The musician was the boy—she could scarcely bear even to think his name, much less speak it aloud—David.
She was forced to admit that he made a charming picture, his long hair falling across his face as his fingers raced across the keyboard. He had a coarse kind of broad-shouldered good looks. She could understand why her fine-boned, delicately beautiful grandson might be drawn to him on the theory of the attraction of opposites. Of course, in ten years’ time the boy’s stolid muscularity would have turned to fat and his youthful effervescence faded into loutishness; such was the second sight of old age. But for now, she closed her eyes and allowed Beethoven’s genius to quicken her pulse. When the boy reached an emphatic finish, she reflexively applauded.
He rose so quickly from the piano bench he nearly knocked it over. “Señora Marquesa, I did not know you had entered the room.”
“I love that piece,” she said and then, recovering her imperiousness, asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Your instrument is so much finer than anything we have at the conservatory that Doña Alicia gave me permission to practice on it for the competition.”
“Competition? What competition?” she asked, seating herself.
The boy, who remained standing, replied, “The Centenario competit
ion, Señora. The winner will be given a scholarship to study at the Conservatoire de Paris for two years.”
“I see,” she said. “This is something you aspire to.”
“Oh, yes!” he exclaimed. “It is the finest conservatory in the world.”
“Do you think you will prevail?”
“I do not know, Señora Marquesa,” he said. “I started playing later than many of my classmates. That is why I need to practice, night and day.”
“You started late? Explain yourself.”
He looked down. “My family’s means are such that we could not afford a piano, and I did not start playing until I was ten years old, at school. But, like José, many of my classmates began receiving lessons when they were five or six. I lost that time and I shall never recover it. In the end, that may be the difference between winning and losing.”
A thought turned in her mind like a key opening a locked door, but to the boy she said only, “Well, in that case you had better resume your practice.”
He bowed. “Yes, Señora Marquesa. Thank you.”
“For what, boy?”
“For taking an interest in me,” he said.
“I assure you,” she said, rising to go to her room, “it was no more than a passing interest, and it has passed.”
Sarmiento sat at his desk in his office reading a report about a typhoid outbreak in La Bolsa, a notorious colonia filled with flophouses and tenements. His department had imposed a quarantine, but the residents had refused to comply because it kept them from going to their jobs. The police were called in, a minor riot ensued, and three people were killed. Ultimately, the quarantine was established and the outbreak contained. The author of the report, a district inspector under Sarmiento’s supervision, referred to the three violent deaths as “collateral damage,” a masterpiece of bureaucratic dissemblance. He tipped back his chair and sighed. The poor had always resented the health department’s agents, but in the past three years, as the economy had soured, their resentment had turned into resistance. His inspectors refused to enter certain neighborhoods without a police escort. The police themselves refused to enter the worst neighborhoods, and who knew what diseases were incubating in them.
