The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

  “We shall make good little Mexicans of all of them,” he said proudly.

  She had replied, “The Yaqui children come from a heroic race with ancient traditions. If you teach them to forget who they are that would truly be the end of their people.”

  The director was scandalized. “Señora Condesa, I beg to remind you that the Yaquis have been waging a long and savage war against the innocent settlers of Sonora. To civilize that impulse for violence in their children would be a blessing for them and for us.”

  The first lady, who happened to overhear the exchange, commented, “But of course, we must civilize these poor children, Alicia.”

  “You are both quite right,” Alicia said, anxious not to call further attention to herself. “Thank you for enlightening me.”

  But later, she spoke to Padre Cáceres and told him, “If there are Yaqui children at the orphanage, they should be returned to their people. They are the only hope for the survival of their race.”

  The cleric was not encouraging. “Doña, if the children are here, their parents have been killed or imprisoned. There will be no one to return them to, even if it were possible to obtain information about their families.”

  “Yes, I have considered that,” she replied. “But we know there are a few free communities of Yaquis across the border in Arizona. Would they not be glad to take these children?”

  “Of that I have no doubt,” he said. “The Yaquis are fiercely protective of their young. But still, how would we get the children out of the orphanage and to the border?”

  “Could we not find families who would be willing to adopt them and then escort them to the border? I would, of course, pay all expenses.”

  “To put them on the underground railroad?” he said. “That is dangerous enough for full-grown men, but for children?”

  “If they can be adopted, they could travel legally to the border with their adoptive families,” she pointed out. “Quite unlike the Yaqui men who go in secret or with forged documents. As long as the children were in the care of people who could be trusted to return them to their tribe, they would be safe.”

  “Even if we can find families to adopt them, we would have to be assured that there would be someone to receive them at the border,” he said. “Someone equally trustworthy.”

  “You know the Yaquis,” she said. “You could find that person, Padre.”

  “Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully. “I can promise nothing but let me send some messages to the border. I will see what I can do.”

  “I will return to the orphanage and find the Yaqui children.”

  “How?” he asked. “You must not be too inquisitive, Doña Alicia. You will only raise suspicions.”

  “I know,” she agreed. “I will think of some plausible reason to account for my presence at the orphanage and pray for God’s help in finding these children.”

  She volunteered to give the children piano lessons. The director was dubious, but he dared not refuse a friend of the first lady. Twice a week, for three hours a day, she sat at a piano and taught whichever children appeared. The lessons often devolved into simple noisemaking, the children pounding the keys as a release from the institutional silence that enclosed them. Word spread among the children about the rich doña with the scarred face and the kind smile who let them play. The children came and went, a few even acquiring rudimentary musical skills. More often, they simply wanted to sit in a maternal lap and tell their stories, recounting, in the guileless way of children, horrors that squeezed her heart. They came from all over México, some longing for home, others happy to have found refuge in the orphanage from destitution and death by starvation. But none of them were Yaqui.

  A girl began to appear at the doorway of the music room. She stood with crossed arms, glaring at Alicia and whichever child she was teaching, but she would not enter or respond to questions. She was tall and thin, her skin the color of dried roses, and her hair black as widow’s weeds. Her face was hard and plain, but beneath her formless smock, her body was beginning to show the contours of womanhood. Alicia thought she recognized in her features, coloring, and bearing the physiognomy of a Yaqui.

  One afternoon, finding herself without students, Alicia began to play Chopin’s “Prelude in E-Minor” for her own amusement.

  “Make that music again,” a harsh young voice said in a dialect of Nahautl that she immediately recognized as Yaqui. She looked up from the piano at the tall girl standing at the doorway. Alicia smiled at her and played the piece again. As she did, the girl edged her way into the room like a skittish cat until she was standing beside the piano, the hardness of her face softening as she listened to the music.

  “Sit, Daughter,” Alicia replied in the same dialect, to the girl’s evident surprise.

  “You speak my tongue.”

  “Yes, Daughter, I have known many Yaquis, and I have been their friend. My name is Alicia. What is yours?”

  The girl hesitated, and Alicia thought she might leave, but after a moment, she said, “My name is Tomasa. I am a warrior.”

  Then she pressed her finger to a piano key and the sound it made startled a smile from her.

  José had spent much of the storm beneath the covers, clutching his tattered, one-eyed Steiff teddy bear, a gift from his father for his second birthday. When the storm abated, he had lifted his head from beneath the covers and heard El Morito meowing from the floor beside the bed.

  “Morito, come here,” he whispered.

  The cat hopped up on the bed, padded around in a circle, and then settled on José’s chest, staring sleepily at him. He ran his hand along El Morito’s back.

  “You’re wet!” he said. “Were you outside?”

  The cat purred.

  “I hope the rain doesn’t ruin the parade,” he told the cat. “Uncle Gonzalo promised to take us.” He scratched the cat beneath its chin, which produced even louder purrs. “There will be real soldiers, Morito, and cannons and fireworks over the National Palace! I wish …” He finished the thought in his head, David was here.

  He had hoped for a birthday message from his friend, but his tenth birthday had passed earlier in the month without a word. He had last heard from David in June, when he got a postcard of the Eiffel Tower and a quickly scribbled message he could only half decipher. He rarely touched the piano now, because playing alone made him sad. When his father had offered to give him a bicycle for his birthday, he had asked for skates instead because they were the rage among his classmates.

  After David left for Paris, José’s classmates began to invite him to their houses and birthday parties and on weekend excursions to Chapultepec Park to watch béisbol matches and look at girls and paddle the swan boats across the lake. He suspected their newfound interest in him had something to do with his mother’s friendships with their mothers. At first, he was panicked to find himself among his classmates outside of school, where the Jesuits enforced silence and discipline and the boys were indistinguishable in their blue uniforms. Away from school, the other boys were alarmingly loud, profane, and physical. He quickly learned to become an unobjectionable companion by imitating them. He observed their gestures and figures of speech and practiced them when he was alone. He noticed their interests and pretended to share them so he could trade stories about the exploits of their favorite matadores and their béisbol heroes. His deceptions did not seem very convincing to him, but his classmates seemed willing to be deceived. They accepted him as one of them as long as he kept concealed from them the things he truly loved—his grandmother, opera recordings, his make-believe battles with his toy soldiers, Chopin and “Claire de Lune,” his little black cat, his mother’s embrace, Chepa the cook’s stories about the Aztecs, marionette shows, the flower market beside the cathedral, walking through the Panteón Francés on the Day of the Dead, drinking chocolate with his gossipy aunts, his teddy bear, looking through his stereoscope at scenes of the Rhine and the Danube and the Nile, and David. Even as he acquired these new acquaintances—a
pack of boys with which to skate along the paths of the Alameda on Sunday afternoons—his yearning for a true friend, a boy to whom to whisper confidences at night in a shared bed, was undiminished, and in the midst of his schoolmates he felt more alone than ever.

  The sixteenth dawned clear and bright. José was up at sunrise, dressed and waiting for the clatter of horseshoes that announced the arrival of Tío Gonzalo and Tía Leticia. He ran downstairs through the gate and into the courtyard, where a knot of admiring servants was gathered around his uncle’s custom-made vehicle. The white carriage was drawn by two white English stallions, tall and muscular, unlike the lighter, smaller horses of México. The white ostrich plumes they wore in their green velvet browbands would have seemed absurd on creatures less dignified. The seats of the carriage were upholstered in crushed velvet the same deep green as the uniform of the driver, a flame-haired, freckled young man. On the seat beside the driver was a wicker basket filled with food and drink. Enthroned in the carriage were his aunt and uncle, she thin and pale, he fat and dark, like a husband and wife from a nursery rhyme. Tía Leticia wore a white lace dress over a pale green sheath. Her hair was piled high on her head and adorned with pearls to match the ropes of pearl that hung around her scrawny neck. For once, the worry that usually pinched her face and the sadness in her eyes were absent as she fussed with Tío Gonzalo’s collar. He wore a light-gray suit with a pale green tie and an enormous emerald stick pin. The fleshy folds of his fat neck spilled over his stiff collar. His fingers, thick as chorizos, were covered with rings. His platinum watch chain glittered in the sun, and he was smiling his “twenty-four-carat smile,” as he called it, because it displayed his big gold front tooth.

  José, in his sailor’s suit, bounded into the carriage and planted himself between his aunt and uncle.

  “Who is this handsome little mariner?” said Aunt Leticia, smelling of tuberose. She kissed his forehead.

  “Yes, he’s a looker,” Uncle Gonzalo said. “Got a girl in every port, I bet.”

  “No, our little sailor is faithful to the girl he left behind,” Leticia replied primly.

  His uncle rolled his eyes, and, as was often true when he was with them, José was aware that their remarks were directed at each other, not him.

  His parents entered the courtyard, much less gaily dressed, their wan faces straining to show cheerfulness. José knew they had talked deep into the night because when he had been awakened at two in the morning with the urgent need to make water, he had heard them in the drawing room on his way to the toilet. He didn’t remember what they had been saying, but his father’s voice had the serious tone it took on when he was trying to impart to José an important lesson, the significance of which, to his father’s annoyance, José invariably failed to understand. José often misunderstood the grown-ups who surrounded him, although he could sometimes broadly surmise from their tones of voice what they were trying to communicate—humor, displeasure, curiosity, surprise—and respond to that. His father, however, had only two inflections: grave and graver. If José did not understand the meaning of his father’s words—a frequent occurrence since the usual topics of his father’s conversations, like integrity, honor, and selflessness, denoted nothing to José—he could only nod blindly and hope that assent was the right answer.

  “Are you ready to go?” Uncle Gonzalo asked. “The crowds have been gathering along the Reforma since dawn. I have the perfect place picked out, right across from Don Porfirio’s reviewing stand.”

  His father flinched. “We are both feeling slightly unwell …”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Gonzalo interrupted. “This is a once-in-alifetime event. You owe it to José so he can tell his grandchildren he saw the Centenario parade.”

  “Gonzalo is right, Miguel,” his mother said, lifting José’s heart, which had dropped like a stone at his father’s words. “José has been looking forward to the parade for weeks.”

  “Yes, yes, fine,” his father muttered. He helped her into the carriage and then climbed in himself. “Let’s go see Nero fiddle while Rome burns.”

  “Cheer up, Miguel!” Uncle Gonzalo said, slapping his father on his knee. “This is a celebration, not a funeral. Sean, go!”

  The redheaded driver shook the reins and the horses pranced out of the courtyard into the street and headed toward the Reforma.

  José had never seen so many people, ten, twenty deep on either side of the Reforma. There were men perched in the boughs of trees and boys who had shimmied up lampposts or climbed the statues of the Illustrious Men, two from each state, that lined the broad avenue. When they reached the intersection with the Reforma, the crowds of Indians parted at the sight of the plumed white horses and fairy-tale carriage. They drove to the front of the crowd, where they parked along the roadway beside other elegant carriages, many of them enclosing the families of José’s classmates. Across the wide boulevard, José saw a canopied platform raised high above the crowd. In the center of the platform was the presidential throne, its tall back surmounted by two carved eagles. An old, white-haired man in a dark suit sat in the chair as stiffly as a marionette waiting for its strings to be pulled. Beside him sat a stout woman in black, her face obscured by a heavy veil. Around them were men resplendent in military uniforms, red and blue, green and yellow, black and white, with rows of medals and sashes across their chests, wearing plumed and spiked hats. There was a tension in the crowd that José thought was like his own excitement as he waited for the parade to begin. The notes of the presidential anthem were struck by a military brass band. The old man rose, prepared to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd, but he was met by silence and then a single cry: “Viva Madero!” The roar of approval from the crowd behind José was quickly extinguished by a John Philip Sousa march and then by cries of “It’s starting! Here they come!”

  José looked in vain, but he could not see past the top of the driver’s seat. He climbed up on the seat between his aunt and uncle.

  “José, get down,” his mother chided.

  “But I cannot see!”

  “Go up and sit with the driver,” his uncle told him. “He has the best seat in the carriage. Sean, take my nephew and pass the basket down here.”

  The exchange was made, the pale, freckle-faced driver hoisting José to his seat. He was only a few years older than José, David’s age. He grinned at him and said, in bad Spanish, “So, little man, your name is José?”

  “Yes, sir,” José said politely.

  “I am named Sean,” the driver said. “Juan in your language.” His eyes were bright blue and his teeth were straight and white. A derby sat upon his thatch of red hair and his uniform, almost as tight as a matador’s suit of lights, revealed a chest of heroic width. He threw his arm around José’s shoulders, pulled him close, pointed to a group of men in the middle of the street that was slowly moving toward them, and asked, his breath grazing José’s ear, “Now, that fellow, in the feathers? Is that supposed to be Moctezuma?”

  José nodded, unable to speak, as excitement swooped through his body at the sights and sounds of the crowd, the weight of Sean’s hand on his shoulder, his leg against Sean’s leg, and the approach of the Aztecs. He was abruptly aware that his pene had become rigid and slipped through the opening of his undershorts. He looked down at his lap and saw it was sticking up beneath his trousers. He squeezed his legs together to conceal it and it rubbed against the woolly fabric of his trousers, creating a tickling sensation that was both abrasive and delicious. The air filled with the noise of drums, rattles, and whistles. Passing before him, in feathered headdresses and embroidered robes, was a group of Aztec musicians followed by warriors in even more glorious headdresses of iridescent quetzal feathers carrying feather-work shields. Behind them, on a canopied litter carried by six attendants, was an Indian representing Moctezuma.

  The Aztec emperor was seated on a bench covered with gold cloth. At his feet was a jaguar skin. He wore a purple mantle and a gold, feathered headdress. He looked neither
right nor left but straight ahead as he was carried toward the Zócalo where the National Palace occupied the site that had been his palace. José remembered Chepa the cook had told him that when the Spanish first laid eyes on the emperor, “their guts rose up and they were terrified at the sight of the god.” There was a ripple of movement in the immense crowd and then the Indians began to fall to their knees as the cortege passed, only a few at first, then by the hundreds and soon, on either side of the Reforma, thousands were kneeling silently.

  “What is this Indian madness!” his uncle exclaimed.

  “It’s not madness,” his father replied. “They are honoring their king.”

  “Their king?” His uncle laughed. “Their king is King Pulque.”

  Trumpets sounded. There was the clatter of horses on the pavement and then, trotting behind the Aztecs, came a contingent of men in suits of armor surrounding a bearded man carrying the flag of Castile—Hernán Cortés. A wave of anger rose from the still-kneeling Indians, but from the carriages of the rich came the cry, “Qué viva Cortés!”

  The armored soldiers stopped before the reviewing stand, dismounted, and bowed to Don Porfirio. He acknowledged them with a jerky wave and they continued on their way.