The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

  “I’m sorry, Mamá,” he said sobbing, as he threw himself into the cradle of her arms. “I shall never disobey you again. I will never go back there.”

  For weeks after he had gone to the coffin maker’s theater, the flickering shadows on the muslin had replayed themselves obsessively in his mind. He had repeatedly asked his mother if they could return, but her only interest in the Teatro Palantino had been to learn about his father. When he asked to go alone, she told him El Carmen was not a safe neighborhood for an unaccompanied child.

  “But I am not a child,” he whined. “I am almost twelve.”

  “José, that is enough,” she said in a tone that brooked no further argument. “I forbid it.”

  His grandmother, noticing his moping, asked him the cause. He tried to explain to her what he had seen and why it was so urgent that he return. “The pictures moved like a dream, Abuelita, and I want to see them again, but my mother says no.”

  “If it is that important, I will send Santos with you,” she said, “but you are not to tell your mother.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said, kissing her powdered cheek.

  One afternoon, while his mother was away, he slipped out of the palace with Santos, his grandmother’s majordomo. Santos hailed a cab and they wandered the streets of El Carmen until they found the mortuorio just as José had remembered it. José trotted down the coffin-stacked aisles to the table where the man sold tickets, Santos at his heels. Santos bought tickets and they went into the close, dark room that smelled, Santos complained, like the privy in a cantina. José chose a bench closest to the screen, near where the fat woman pounded away at her out-of-tune piano. As before, they waited until the room was filled and then, like the purest and most intense moonbeam, the white ray of light materialized above their heads and filled the muslin sheet.

  A black box was projected upon the screen and words appeared in white lettering—La voyage dans la lune—and beneath those words, “Geo. Méliès, Star Films, Paris.” José had no idea what the latter words meant, but the first phrase filled him with excitement because it conjured up the title of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. He hoped that the similarity between the titles was not a coincidence. His hope was rewarded when the title faded. A long-haired, snowy bearded man, clad like a medieval alchemist in robes bespangled with stars and planets, appeared before a gathering of similarly dressed men. Illustrating his scheme on a blackboard, he proposed a journey to the moon. José clapped his hands, earning the suspicious stares of the sodden crowd that surrounded him.

  With increasing wonder, José saw that the story unfolding on the screen was just as Verne had told it: the forging of a bullet-shaped chamber, which was loaded into an enormous cannon and fired into the night sky to carry six of the men—astronomers—to the moon. In images that words could never have captured, the moon grew larger and larger until its cratered surface filled the screen. It revealed the craggy face of the man in the moon, just as José had always imagined he would look. His astonishment turned to laughter when the projectile pierced the moon’s eye. He gasped in amazement at the lunar terrain the astronomers encountered when they emerged from their vessel, arabesques of pale stone spiraling against the moonless sky. As the exhausted astronomers slept, seven stars rose in the sky above them, each with the face of a woman. The stars faded and the moon goddess appeared swinging on a crescent, while Saturn, like the Ancient of Days, looked down at the astronomers from among his rings.

  In his conscious mind, José knew, as he had known at the opera, that he was looking at painted backdrops, not stars and planets, and human beings, not celestial creatures. But the flicker of shadow and light where image tumbled upon image, magically fading in and out, enchanted him. It was as if he had been carried to the screen and deposited there, unseen but present as the astronomers, fleeing a sudden snow, escaped into a tunnel that led to a subterranean landscape filled with enormous mushrooms. He shared their terror when they encountered the Selenites, insectoid moon people, moving like contortionists across the frightening topography. When the astronomers ran from the hostile Selenites to their vessel, José’s heart raced as if he were running with them. When they reached their capsule, he lurched forward, silently urging them into the chamber. The capsule was poised at the edge of the cliff. One of the astronomers threw a rope over the cliff, climbed down, and loosened the vessel so that it fell from the moon and dropped like a stone through the sky. He watched it plunge into the ocean, scraping the bed of the sea. Only when the capsule floated to the surface where it was towed by a steamer to port did José expel his pent-up breath. On the screen the word “Fin” released him from the film’s spell. Dazed, he found himself back in the loud, squalid room beside Santos, who was doubled over, eyes shut, muttering prayers.

  Later, his grandmother summoned him to her bedroom and said, “Santos told me that you took him to a haunted mortuary filled with ghosts and devils! He was so frightened I asked your father to give him something to calm his nerves.”

  “They were not ghosts, Abuelita, they were moving photographs that told the story of a journey to the moon.”

  She looked at him with complete incomprehension. “Whatever it was, he refuses to go back. I am sorry, José, but perhaps your mother was correct to forbid you from this … activity.”

  José did not protest. He knew now how to find the theater and he had every intention of returning.

  José,” his mother said, stroking his hair, “what you saw were only images, photographs. They are no more real than the book that first described them.”

  He lifted his head from her breast. “But they were real. The people on the screen were real.”

  “Actors,” she said. “They were only actors, mijo.”

  He wanted to believe her, but he could not shake the residual images of the tormented souls in hell that filled his head when he shut his eyes.

  Several weeks passed before he was able to return to the Palantino. He had set out from the palace under sunny skies, but the capricious summer weather turned stormy as he retraced his path to El Carmen. He was caught in a downpour of warm, oily rain. He sheltered in a dark, dusty shop called La Huesana. Its walls were lined with shelves that held the store’s small stock of candles, religious statues, milagros, and jars and jars of dried herbs. He shook off the rain and read the labels on the jars. Some he recognized—rosemary, basil, spearmint, epazote, rue, sage. Others were strange in name and appearance—withered flowers, scaly bark, and dried twisted roots in jars labeled wolf bane, angel’s trumpet, and devil’s claw. Copal burned at an altar in a dim corner of the room where seven candles, each a different color, flickered before a robed and hooded statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As he approached the altar, he was conscious of the shuffle of his footsteps on the dusty floor and the pounding rain on the roof. The objects laid out on the table among the colored candles—glasses of water, vials of oily substances, hand-scrawled notes, a bottle labeled Agua de Florida—mystified him. The statue was clad in a rainbow-hued robe the same seven colors as the candles—gold, silver, copper, blue, purple, red, and green. He looked up at the hooded face, expecting the stern but loving visage of Guadalupe, and gasped when he saw, instead, a skull. Only then did he realize that the figure held a scythe in one hand and a globe in the other.

  “La Santisima Muerte,” an old voice rasped, making his heart jump. “Our lady Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Dead.”

  José looked at the person who had spoken, a woman dressed in the garb of the poor of the city—full calico skirt, dusty at the hem, a stained embroidered blouse, a black, frayed rebozo draped across her shoulders. She seemed ancient, older even than his grandmother, who was the oldest person he knew. Her white hair was piled into a bun and her face was creased, careworn, and dotted with moles, warts, and age spots. She studied him with rheumy eyes, glistening and damp.

  “She is the most powerful of the gods,” she continued, in the same rasp that he imagined was what his cat would s
ound like if it could speak. “Everyone must come to her. The world is her field, the cutter is her harvesting tool.” She reached out a withered hand and touched his face appraisingly. Her fingers were as brittle as the leaves of an old book. “You are a pretty boy,” she said. “A two spirit. What is your name, child?”

  “José, Señora. I came in from the rain. I did not mean to disturb you.”

  “The Lady called you,” she said, gesturing toward the skeleton she had called Saint Death. “Some peril must await you, but she will protect you if you give her reverence.”

  He wanted to run from the incense-scented shop, but he felt rooted to the floor.

  “Give me a coin, two-spirit child,” the woman said.

  José dug into his pocket and pressed a silver coin into her hand, thinking he would buy his way out. She took it and commanded, in a tone he dared not disobey, “Wait here.”

  She disappeared behind a beaded curtain he had not noticed before. He heard the beating of wings, a soft cooing, and then she shuffled into the room holding a pigeon in her hands. She lifted its head to him for him to touch. Mesmerized, he stroked the tiny, feathered head. The pigeon turned its head toward him, eyes black and hard, like the beads of his grandmother’s rosary.

  “What is a two spirit, Señora?” José asked as he continued to nervously stroke the pigeon’s head.

  “The two spirit combines the male and the female in a single body and is desired by all. Men and women both will burn for your touch. To incite such desire is a dangerous thing. I will implore the Lady’s protection for you, but the cost of her protection is life. Not yours, child, but someone near you.”

  José was now confused and terrified. “I must go, Señora,” he said.

  “You will stay until the ritual is over,” she commanded.

  He wanted to leave but could not make his legs move. Horrified, he watched her take the pigeon and with a swift twist break its neck. At the altar of Santisima Muerte, she plunged a little knife into the pigeon’s breast and caught its blood in a shallow dish. She began an incantation. José ran out of the shop into the rain and did not stop until he came to the theater.

  He sat on the bench in the front of the room, staring at the muslin sheet, still shaking from his encounter with the old woman. He realized she was a bruja, a witch. Chepa had told him about such people, men and women who could cast spells and speak to the dead. He had always thrilled to the cook’s stories but now he remembered anxiously that she warned him never to give a bruja his true name or any item he had touched, and he had done both. Would the bruja find him and cast a spell on him? He waited for the film to start and to distract him with its magic from his fears.

  The moonbeam shot across the room above him, the sheet filled with light, a black box materialized, and then the words:

  Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

  From the straight road and woke to find myself

  In a dark wood. How shall I say

  What wood it was! I never saw so drear

  So rank, so arduous a wilderness!

  Its very memory gives a shape to fear!

  This was followed by the words “L’Inferno del gran poeta Dante.”

  The film was Italian, and as José quickly gathered, depicted the journey of the poet Dante into hell guided by the spirit of another poet named Virgil. The opening scenes were dark and ominous, but thrilling in the way that José had come to expect from films. The play of shadow and light drew him into the story so thoroughly it seemed he had left his body and was following the two poets. Every emotion and sensation they experienced ran through him as well. So completely had he surrendered to the film that when he followed the poets into the circle of gluttons, a spasm of shock passed through him.

  Naked men writhed and twisted on the stony ground beneath torrents of rain and clouds of mist. José had never seen a naked man before, but as he watched, he felt that some corner of his mind had longed for these images. He did not understand why the sight of their muscled chests and thighs, lean buttocks, and the mysterious triangles of hair that cloaked their genitals both mesmerized and mortified him. All he knew was that his skin prickled with excitement and shame.

  The poets descended further. The images of hell became darker and more frightening. He felt himself sinking into their horror as if water were closing over his head. The two men entered the Wood of the Suicides. The bare trees and the filthy bird creatures hopping along the blasted ground rose up in his imagination like vomit he could not expel. Having surrendered to the power of the film, he could not stop it as he could close a book that frightened him, nor could he control the images that flooded the screen as he could control his own imagination. He was as beguiled, as hypnotized by the flickering images of hell as he had been by Tetrazzini’s voice when she sang Aida. Some part of him knew this hell was as illusory as Aida’s Egypt, but the illusion was like a threshold that, once crossed, drew him into a reality so saturated with emotion it consumed him.

  So, unwillingly but unblinkingly, he followed the poets into the trenches of hell, to the flaming tombs in which the heretics burned for eternity and to where the blasphemers lay beneath a rain of fire. The poets crossed a narrow bridge across a gorge where, in the river of filth below, the dissolute tried in vain to wash away their sins. José watched the poets approach the slow procession of hypocrites weighed down by robes of lead, past Caiaphas, Jesus’s condemner, now himself crucified on the floor of hell. The lake of ice was like a vast chessboard where the treasonous were frozen to their necks. It was here that José, surfeited by the images of horror, was aghast at the sight of one man feasting on the brains of another and at last had to turn his head aside. When he could finally bring himself to look at the screen again, it was filled with the three-headed image of Satan, himself frozen in the lake. In one of his mouths was the wriggling body of Judas. José watched the enormous jaws bite down on the struggling legs and torso. Satan’s eyes, beneath eyebrows as thick as malevolent caterpillars, looked surprised at Judas’s resistance to being eaten. His clawlike fingers tore at Judas’s parts, like a man dismembering a roasted chicken. The poets climbed his hairy hide to the surface of the earth, where, their backs turned to the mouth of hell, they beheld the stars. The film ended.

  It was dusk when José left the theater, the sky above El Carmen shading into the darker blue of evening. He stumbled home, frightened by the shadows deepening in the doorways, by the gaunt faces of the beggars who approached him with outstretched hands crying, “por Dios, por Dios,” by the skeletal burros shaking beneath their heavy burdens, and by the painted faces of the women who accosted him from the alleys with lewd hisses. By the time he arrived home, his heart was like a bird beating its wings against its cage. He ran to his mother and confessed that he had disobeyed her, willing to risk punishment in exchange for consolation. That night the nightmares began.

  His mother kissed his forehead and again reminded him, “What you saw was not real, José.”

  He wanted to believe her, and yet he wondered how could hell have been imagined in such detail if someone—Dante or the man who made the film—had not been there? “But there is a hell, isn’t there, where bad people go? I don’t want to go there. Please don’t let me go there.”

  “Are you a bad boy, José?” she asked gently.

  He sniffled. “No,” he said, but the image of the naked men passed through his head with the shameful memory of his excitement. “I’m not a bad boy, am I?”

  “No, mijo, you are a good and gentle child. You do not have to worry about hell. Now, say your prayers and ask God to help you cast these images out of your head. Think, instead, of the sweetness of his heaven.”

  “Will you stay with me?” he pleaded.

  “Of course,” she said. “Always.”

  The renovated Senate chamber was one of Don Porfirio’s more ironic public works because in his time the Senate was a collection of elderly sycophants so responsive to his whims he called it his caballada,
his stable. In the dowdy old chamber, furnished with spittoons, moth-eaten drapes, and frayed carpets, ancient ex-comrades-in-arms of the president enjoyed a peaceful retirement rubber-stamping his decrees between naps. The potted palms, it was said, were livelier than the solons, and when one senator quietly died at his desk, it was several hours before anyone noticed. With the approach of the Centenario, it was decided to renovate the chamber in anticipation of the foreigners who might wish to observe Mexican democracy in action.

  The spittoons were gone, the drapes and carpets replaced. The marble dais from which the president of the Senate presided over his colleagues was cleaned and polished. The old battered desks were replaced with new ones complete with sterling silver ink sets—these quickly disappeared—and red, white, and green bunting was hung along the edges of the ceiling.

  When Sarmiento entered the Senate, it was no longer a place of repose but one of buzzing, even violent, activity aimed primarily against Madero’s government. Opposition senators heaped scorn and calumny on Madero in vicious speeches that were faithfully reprinted in antigovernment newspapers and accompanied by scabrous cartoons. Madero’s Senate enemies, partisans of the old regime, were emboldened as Madero’s inability to satisfy the competing demands of his partisans destroyed his popular support. The opposition senators were determined to depose Madero and reinstate, if not old Don Porfirio, another strong man who could govern México with the iron hand they believed it required. Some opposition senators favored General Huerta, recently returned in triumph from Chihuahua, where he had put down Pascual Orozco’s rebellion. The old Indian killer, however, continued to profess his allegiance to Madero. Others had encouraged General Bernardo Reyes, Díaz’s minister of war. He had launched a rebellion that was quickly quashed, and Reyes now awaited trial for treason in a military prison in the capital. What had drawn the Senate into special session was yet another rebellion.