by Michael Nava
Alicia also observed, with bemusement, the sudden surge in her popularity among the very friends who had turned their backs on her after Miguel had joined Madero. She was courteous but reserved toward them, deflecting their invitations to tea, listening without comment to their sotto voce jabs at Don Porfirio and intimations that, in their inmost hearts, they had been Madero sympathizers all along. “After all,” they would say, nervously, “Don Francisco’s family is very wealthy, gente decente like us, isn’t that right, Alicia?”
She passed off these little hypocrisies and tried to remind herself that the ingratitude shown to Don Porfirio by her circle was spurred by fear, not malice. The only old friend toward whom she directed any sympathetic thoughts was the first lady. There was a longstanding bond between the Gaviláns and the Rubio family. Alicia had known Carmen Rubio as a girl before she was married off to Don Porfirio when she was seventeen and he was fifty-one. Her mother had once shown Alicia a letter she had received from Carmen on the eve of the wedding seeking counsel from La Niña on how to be the wife of a man so much older than she. Alicia still remembered the large, girlish writing and the anxiety and sadness between the carefully composed lines—the choice to marry Don Porfirio had not been Carmen’s and although she did not complain, her unhappiness was plain to see.
The marriage proceeded. After thirty years, Carmen had gone from being a slender, beautiful bride to a stout matron. Her childlessness was the subject of uncharitable speculation about her fertility because Don Porfirio had had several children by his first wife. As if to compensate for her failure to give him children, Carmen became her husband’s fiercest political partisan. As he grew older and distracted, she began to openly involve herself in affairs of state, much to the displeasure of Don Porfirio’s ministers, who took exception to receiving orders from any woman, much less one with no more than a convent education.
A few weeks after the fall of Júarez, a message arrived from the first lady to La Niña informing her that the weekly luncheon of the Daughters of Jerusalem had been moved from Chapultepec Castle to the Díaz’s private residence on Calle Cadena. When Alicia asked her mother if she intended to go, La Niña had not even lifted her head from the novel she was reading.
“Of course not,” she said.
“Mother, she is an old family friend.”
“The invitation is mere bravado, Alicia,” La Niña replied. “She can’t possibly expect her friends to risk their lives by trying to get through the mob at the Zócalo to dine on chilled shrimp as if the world were not collapsing around our ears. No, I shall stay home.”
On the day of the luncheon, Alicia called for the carriage and ventured out in the direction of Calle Cadena. On Avenida de San Francisco, her brother-in-law’s department store was shuttered and guarded by armed, private police. The carriage took the narrow back streets behind the cathedral in order to avoid the protestors at the Zócalo, but their chants demanding Díaz’s resignation resounded through the entire central city. A double line of soldiers had sealed off Calle Cadena. Her carriage was stopped, and she was harshly interrogated before she was allowed to proceed to the president’s heavily guarded residence. In the foyer, at the bottom of a marble staircase where in the past she had been met by an English footman in livery, there were even more soldiers, all of them in battle dress. One of the men conducted her to the drawing room. A dozen small tables held elaborate place settings. A row of maids was lined against the wall, some of them visibly frightened. A small orchestra played a waltz behind a screen of potted palms. The room was otherwise empty. Alicia had been distracted from her feelings by the surreal journey from the palace to the residence. Now, however, she looked at the lavish, deserted room and the brilliant, unoccupied tables and the reality of the moment sank in; this was the end of Don Porfirio! The shock made her fingers tremble.
She heard the rustle of silk behind her and turned. Carmen Díaz approached in a pale green gown with ropes of pearls around her neck. Beneath an upswept crown of dark hair, her heavy, double-chinned face was tired almost beyond recognition.
Alicia embraced her, whispering, “Carmen, my dear.”
The first lady shook her off without returning the embrace. “I am surprised you would choose to show your face in this house.”
“I come as an old friend concerned for your well-being.”
“An old friend,” Carmen repeated bitterly. “Your husband would have my husband hanging from the gallows in the Zócalo, old friend.”
“No,” Alicia protested. “Not Miguel. He acts out of principle, not out of animosity toward Don Porfirio. As for me, you know I have never wished you or Don Porfirio the least harm. Can we not set aside the arguments of our husbands and be as we were before all this began?”
Carmen gave her head a weary shake. “That is not possible, Alicia, as our fates are inextricably tied to theirs. But I am wrong to visit your husband’s sins upon you. You are a good woman, probably the best in our set. You may be the only one of us who deserves to be called a Daughter of Jerusalem. You might actually have attempted to console Christ on his journey to Calvary unlike the rest of us, who would only have seen a peasant justifiably punished for his insubordination.”
“You have been tireless in your charitable work,” Alicia said.
“What else was I supposed to do?” the first lady asked. “Sit at home and knit? Sit down, Alicia, let’s have tea. You shouldn’t stay long though. It is only a matter of time before word gets out to the mob that we are here.”
They sat. A maid rushed over and poured tea.
“Why did you leave Chapultepec?” Alicia asked. “Isn’t it safer there?”
“One road up and one road out,” Carmen said. “We would’ve been trapped and then what? The mob is calling for our blood. Here, at least, there are escape routes.”
“How is the president?”
“Ill,” she said. “The doctor extracted a tooth and an infection set in. He’s been in bed for a week, leaving me to deal with all … this.”
“I am so sorry.”
A ghost of smile crossed the older woman’s face. “Porfirio felled by a toothache. It could be the title of an opera buffa, don’t you think?”
“I find the entire situation most distressing,” Alicia replied.
“It will soon be over for us,” Carmen said. “We have been negotiating with Madero since Juárez fell. Tomorrow my husband will resign. As soon as he can travel, we will leave this ungrateful country and set sail to France.”
“I hardly know what to say.”
“What is there to say? The king is dead; long live the king!” She narrowed her eyes and added bitterly, “May the reign of Francisco I be short and sour.”
Luis had been right about Ciudad Juárez. Within days of Madero’s victory, the governors of the northern Mexican states had declared themselves in revolt against Díaz and put their militias at Madero’s disposal. Meanwhile, Emiliano Zapata had continued his advance on the capital from the south. The army collapsed as battalion after battalion abandoned the government. At the beginning of June, Díaz resigned and departed from México on a German steamship. Madero began his triumphant progress to the capital. With his sense of history, Madero had decided to travel not by train but in a small black carriage like the one in which his hero Benito Juárez had entered the city following the expulsion of the French. As the long line of horse-and mule-drawn carriages and wagons passed through still another dusty Mexican village, Sarmiento administered a shot of morphine to the Apostle of Freedom in the curtained privacy of Madero’s closed carriage. The wagon bounced violently as it hit a rut in the road. Madero groaned and vomited into a chamber pot. He had begun suffering from headaches of such intensity that Sarmiento had begun to fear a brain tumor.
“Excuse me, Miguel,” Madero said, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief.
“Don’t apologize, Don Pancho. Try to make yourself comfortable. The drug should start working momentarily.”
“You didn’t giv
e me too much, did you? I have to speak later.”
“You can scarcely stand; I don’t know how you to expect to speak.”
“Nonetheless,” Madero said, arranging himself in a half-recumbent position on the seat, “I must speak. The people would be disappointed if I did not.”
Sarmiento wondered. Half the villages they stopped in were so isolated their inhabitants still thought Don Benito was president if they had any idea at all of what a president was. In others, Madero had been met more with puzzlement than enthusiasm. His stirring phrases about democracy, freedom, and universal suffrage might just as well have been addressed to the empty fields.
“Perhaps so,” Sarmiento said, “but you are ill. It would be better if you took a train into the capital immediately, where you could be properly examined.”
“These headaches, you mean? They are a gift from God to keep me humble.”
“You can’t really believe that.”
Madero smiled. “Of course I do, Miguel. Every illness, every disease, has a spiritual function. I have—what is the expression in English—a ‘swollen head’ because of our success against Don Porfirio. These headaches are merely God’s way of deflating me.”
Then, as the drug began to take effect, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
In the early morning hours of June 7, 1911, the capital was shaken by an earthquake that filled the air with the clamor of church bells. Two hundred died, crushed in the rubble of their homes, and in the poorest districts of the city, entire blocks were reduced to dust. That afternoon, behind a procession of flags and banners, Francisco Madero entered the city astride a white horse. Sarmiento was not with him. As soon as he had reached the outskirts of the city, he had left Madero’s entourage and gone home to his wife and child.
Book 3
Tragic Days
1912–1913
16
Beneath the summer sun, the air was as warm as flesh. It released the scents of earth and water as long, flat-bottomed vessels—trajineras—drifted beneath stone bridges among the ancient floating gardens on the still, green waters of the canals of Xochimilco. In La Niña’s childhood, the canopied trajineras of the great families were guided along the placid waterways by Indian gondoliers to the tiny villages that dotted the banks of the canals. Indian women rowed out on fragile skiffs selling flowers and fruit and food, and other canoes carried musicians. Back and forth, too, went the innumerable punts that carried vegetables, fruits, and flowers from the floating gardens—the chinampas—to the city’s markets. The banks of the canals were lined with ahuejote, the native junipers. The scent of flowers—for the name Xochimilco meant garden in the language of the Aztecs—was deep in the air, a sweetness that La Niña had imagined was the scent of Eden. She remembered herself on her eighteenth birthday: long, black hair loose around her slender shoulders, sinking into a pile of silk pillows while a band of floating musicians serenaded her.
She had described this scene to José so often it seemed to him that he must have been there with her. He watched his grandmother settled by her maid on a throne of cushions at the back of the trajinera. It was another birthday, her eightieth. She had commanded the family to join her on this outing. There was not enough room for everyone on her vessel, so it carried only his aunts, his mother, himself, and servants, while a second vessel carried his father and his tíos Damian and Gonzalo—Tío Saturino, the banker, had gone to Paris after Don Francisco Madero had become president and he had yet to return. In the warm air his thoughts drifted and he smiled as he recalled his friend, the funny little man whom he knew as Don Panchito.
When his father had told him that the next president of the Republic was coming to the palace for dinner, José had expected someone old and frightening, like Don Porfirio. But Don Panchito was boy-sized, scarcely taller than José himself, and he had a boy’s giggle and soft, high voice. Emboldened by the man’s small stature and kind eyes, José had offered to show him his room, as if he were a classmate. José had performed for him a version of Aida in the toy theater his grandmother had given him for his birthday until his father came to remind Don Panchito there were other guests who wished to meet him. The next time José saw Don Panchito was at a reception at Chapultepec Castle, after he had become president. The president and his sad-eyed wife, Doña Sara, were in the receiving line shaking hands with dignitaries. When he saw José, the president scooped him into an embrace and told José he still owed him the last two acts of Aida. A few days later, José had received a package from Chapultepec. Inside, he discovered an Italian-made toy theater, an exquisite miniature La Scala, with papiermâché casts of three Puccini operas. José was perplexed by the terrible things that were said about his friend in the newspapers. He asked his father, who told him they were lies.
“But why would the newspapers lie about Don Panchito?” he asked.
His father sighed and said, “Because he gave them that freedom,” an answer that left José even more perplexed.
The gondoliers dipped their oars into the canal and the water slid beneath them as the boat began to move. José was fascinated by the chinampas, the tiny plots of land built on twigs and branches that dotted the canals and were farmed by the Indians. Some held a single row of pumpkins or a solitary rose bush yielding tall columns of blood-red roses. Others were spacious enough for a small thatched hut and a pretty little garden where naked Indian babies watched their mothers harvest chilies and corn. He was dimly aware of the buzz of his aunts’ complaining voices like mosquitos in the background. His grandmother crooked her finger at him, and he joined her on her pile of pillows. He lay against her bony shoulder and watched the sunlight flash between the shaggy branches of the juniper trees.
“Abuelita, do the gardens really float?” he asked her.
“They did once,” she replied, “but now they are so old they are rooted to the canal beds. When I was little girl, some of them still drifted, and it was lovely to see. What are your aunts saying?”
“They say the water smells and the insects bite them.”
“Cows,” she commented. “I wish my sons had lived.”
“Why, Abuelita?”
“Because they would have left,” she replied. “Unlike daughters. Daughters never leave. Promise me, mijo, that you will go and see the world.”
“I do not wish to leave you,” he said.
She stroked his hair. “You are my precious boy,” she said. “But you will leave. Men cannot help it. Restlessness runs in your veins. What book is your mother reading?”
“I think it is the life of Santa Teresa de Ávila.”
“Ah,” she said. “Seeking instruction for sainthood, no doubt. Well, at least she does not complain, and she has in her own way lived.”
“What do you mean, Abuelita?”
“To visit God in his heaven is to go somewhere even if it is only in her mind. Where would you like to go, José?”
“Oh,” he murmured drowsily. “Everywhere.”
Alicia, overhearing the conversation between her mother and her son, smiled to herself. They spoke to each other like old friends across the decades that separated them. A kind of innocence united them, but while José’s was born of wonder, La Niña’s was the product of world-weariness. Alicia’s childhood memories of her mother were of a woman who labored grimly and ceaselessly at the innumerable tasks required to preserve her family’s status in the tumultuous times that followed the expulsion of the French. The Marquesa María de Jesús had been sharp-tongued and humorless, a social arbiter and a stickler for propriety who raised her daughters in the language of threats, proverbs, and admonitions. That woman had decamped, leaving in her place La Niña, an old widow who was by turns sentimental and tactless, caustic and tender, conniving and selfless, and utterly indifferent to the social mores that she had once fought to preserve. This elderly edition of her mother was easier to love, but there was no greater understanding between them than when Alicia had been the unmarriageable and pious thorn in the marquesa’s
side.
Her mother’s essential and unchanging quality was her worldliness. From her mother’s perspective, Alicia knew her religious devotion had always seemed like a way to avoid the painful reality of her disfigurement. La Niña could not understand that the point of Alicia’s faith was not to project herself into a distant heaven to escape the actualities of life on earth. To the contrary, as Jesus had insisted, the kingdom of God was to be found on earth, in the day-to-day life of flesh and blood. God had not descended from heaven and lived as a man so that men might awaken in paradise when they died. He had lived as a man to make human life sacred. She could not be a true follower of Christ without living as though every moment on earth was luminous.
