by Michael Nava
The van approached the streets surrounding the Ciudadela, where the rebels remained firmly ensconced despite the government’s superior numbers and weapons. As it approached an army checkpoint, Sarmiento observed a truck flying the American flag laden with food and water. The soldiers waved it through. At first, he thought the Americans were bringing food to the starving civilians as a humanitarian gesture, but to his astonishment, the truck drove up to the gates of the Ciudadela. They were thrown open to receive it without any interference by the government soldiers. The same soldiers who had casually allowed the rebels to be provisioned with food and water detained the Red Cross wagon for an hour before they finally admitted it into the battle-torn streets. While he stood with other volunteers at the side of the road waiting to be cleared to enter, Sarmiento saw two other supply trucks admitted into the Ciudadela. He began to understand why the rebels had been able to hold out. Instead of starving them out of their citadel, government soldiers were helping to feed them. The sheer brazenness of the treason made it clear to Sarmiento that the orders to assist the rebels came from very high in the army. He needed to get a message to his cousin, but that would have to wait until he helped scour the area for the wounded or the dead.
In the long evenings, Sarmiento had been passing the time by rereading Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s account of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empires. He had last read the Spanish soldier’s eyewitness account of the destruction of Tenochtitlán as a boy. Then all his sympathies lay with Cortés’s men, who were, after all, his people. This time through the narrative he found himself mourning for the defeat of the Aztecs. Sarmiento did not sentimentalize the Aztecs—Bernal Díaz’s horror at their practice of human sacrifice was too vivid and unguarded to have been a falsehood planted by the conquerors to justify their bloody annihilation of the Indians. But Sarmiento knew something that Bernal Díaz did not know: the annihilation of the Indians would continue for centuries after the conquest, by war, disease, enslavement, and destitution, until their population had been reduced to a tenth of what it had been when Cortés reached the shores of México. Sarmiento saw in the streets of the capital that the degradation of the Indians continued to this very moment. At least, as Cáceres had argued, the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice was ritualized and had served a religious purpose, however benighted. The human sacrifice inflicted by the Spanish had been indiscriminate and pointless. Moreover, it seemed to him that the Spanish had infused their own casual cruelty and contempt for the native people into the Mexican race that emerged from the conquest. Because this Mexican race was half-Indian, this in turn created a nation permanently divided against itself, driven by a self-hatred that expressed itself in paroxysms of violence such as that which now filled the streets of the capital with corpses.
The Red Cross wagon entered the neighborhoods surrounding the Ciudadela, where bodies festered and rotted like the fallen leaves of a ghastly autumn. Gaunt survivors flitted like shadows from one ruined building to another. Sarmiento remembered the passage from Bernal Díaz describing the entry of Cortés’s soldiers into Tenochtitlán after forty-five days of siege: “When we returned to the City we found the streets full of women and children and other miserable people, thin and afflicted who were dying of hunger and we found in the streets gnawed roots and bark of trees, the most pitiable thing in the world to see.” Sarmiento could have left behind his black bag because all he did that day was help collect bodies and stack them like cordwood in the wagon for incineration.
Sarmiento asked to be let off at the Zócalo. Since it was no longer possible to penetrate the barricades that surrounded the National Palace, he and Luis had worked out a way to communicate by leaving notes in the shattered masonry of the arcade that surrounded the great plaza. He scribbled his observations of provisions passing through government checkpoints in the Ciudadela, stuck it in the crevice they had designated for the exchange of messages, and then hurried home before the fighting resumed.
José lay on his bed looking through his stereoscope at peaceful scenes of the French countryside. By habit, he reached out his hand to pet El Morito, but the cat had disappeared on the first day of the fighting and had not returned. His grandmother had assured him that El Morito was simply hiding somewhere and would emerge when the gun blasts stopped shaking the walls. José believed her, if only because the alternative was too terrible to think about. He tried not to think at all, but unlike the adults who seemed frantically occupied, José had nothing to do with the long hours of the long days. His parents were gone most of the day to help where they could. His grandmother commanded the remaining servants like a household general, keeping them at their work even as the bombs rained down a half-dozen blocks away. The people of the neighborhood who had sought shelter the first days had either returned to their homes or fled the city. José was alone. He had always enjoyed his solitary pursuits, his soldiers and books, toy theater and marionettes, but that solitude was an oasis from the routines of school and family. Those routines had been shattered, and his current solitude felt more like a prison than a garden.
He was no longer as frightened as he had been after he and his father had driven through the Zócalo and he had seen the dead bodies and the menacing soldiers. He took his cue from the grown-ups. His father was still his father, brisk and energetic; his mother had become, if anything, even gentler; and his grandmother was more imperious. It was if they were actors playing themselves, exaggerating their basic qualities to mask their fear. José imitated their attitudes as well as he could and played himself. But at a deeper level, he was enraged by the grown-ups, by all grown-ups. They had created this horror. They were the ones who slaughtered people in the streets and turned the world upside down for reasons that no one—not even his brilliant father—could satisfactorily explain to José. He could not understand why it mattered so much whether Don Porfirio or Don Panchito wore the presidential sash, that ordinary men and women should pay the price of their lives to decide the issue. For once, he knew his lack of understanding was not because he was unintelligent in adult matters—it was because the carnage in the streets was pointless. The adults had started this stupid fight and inflicted it upon him. José hated them for it. He would never again accept their words with the same credulity as before the war. He promised himself he would not grow up to be like them.
In the meantime, he pretended the sound of the guns was thunder and distracted himself from his anxiety with his toys and books and the piano. But a low, ever-present thrum of fear still ran through his body and fed itself on his thoughts. What if a bomb fell in the palace? What if the fighting never stopped? What if El Morito never returned? And worst of all, what if something happened to his parents or his grandmother? The only way he could overcome these thoughts was by imagining in exacting detail being somewhere other than where he was and removing himself completely from the present.
He put another card in his stereoscope—a hand-painted scene of the endless lavender fields of Provence. He imagined himself walking through the aisles of lavender. He felt the sun on the back of his neck, the soft ground beneath his feet. He imagined a breeze stirring the purple tips of the plants, creating a cloud of fragrance, and the smoky sweetness of lavender filling his lungs.
When Sarmiento found Alicia collapsed on the floor of their bedroom, he thought she was dead, killed by an errant bullet or bit of shrapnel. Then her body moved with her breath and he dropped to his knees beside her. Her skin was cold and clammy and she had soiled herself. He called for her maid, Catalina. Together they cleaned and changed her. He carried her to their bed.
“Alicia,” he murmured. “Darling, can you hear me?”
She opened glazed, unfocused eyes. “Miguel?”
“I found you on the floor. How long have you been like this?”
“The water was bad,” she whispered. “Cholera, I think.”
He had guessed as much. “How long have you been sick?”
“Today. It started today.” She grimaced
. “Toilet.”
He helped her up and settled her on a chamber pot, where she expelled another blast of fishy smelling ordure. When she was back in bed, he emptied the pot but kept a specimen. While she slept, he examined the specimen under his microscope and saw the rice-shaped bacterium—Vibrio cholerae—that was the agent of cholera. All he could do for now was restore fluids to her body to avoid death by dehydration. He was hopeful she would recover—she was strong, seldom ill, and he was there to nurse her—but outbreaks of cholera in the city had claimed thousands of lives so he did not deceive himself about the gravity of her condition.
After he had made her comfortable, he went into his mother-in-law’s apartment, where he found her at her desk going over the household accounts.
“Alicia is ill,” he said. “Cholera. She drank tainted water. If she drank it here, the household may be in danger of an outbreak.”
La Niña blanched. “But I instructed the servants to boil all of the drinking water as you directed.” She stood up and came around to him. “How is she?”
“She’s still in the first stage,” he said, casting about for a euphemism. Finding none, he said, “Extreme diarrhea. There is little I can do until these episodes end except to give her fluids.”
La Niña frowned. “What do you need?”
“Pure, unadulterated water,” he said.
She nodded. “I will personally supervise the boiling.”
“All of our water containers must be cleaned and purified,” he said. “The latrines should also be cleaned and scoured with carbolic acid. If anyone else begins to show any signs of the disease, you must let me know immediately. I will stay with Alicia.”
“Have you told José?”
“No,” he said. “Perhaps you can talk to him. I prefer he not visit his mother in her current state. It would be too distressing for him.”
She nodded. “Yes, but you must let him see her as soon as she can receive him. He is already badly frightened. Once I tell him his mother is ill, he will be even more fearful.”
“This barbaric rebellion!” he exclaimed. “How can civilized men in the twentieth century be tossing bombs across a city filled with their own people? What madness has poisoned México!”
She looked at him for a long moment. “In the years since you took up residence in my house, I have become very fond of you, Miguel. I am grateful for the happiness you have given my daughter and for my exquisite grandson, so what I say now I say without malice. You are not a Mexican.”
“I beg your pardon, Señora. I was born here.”
“Yes, but you are a full-blooded Spaniard like your father, a gachupín.”
“Surely, those colonial classifications are irrelevant in modern México.”
A knowing smile wrinkled her lips. “That you speak of modern México only reveals that you do not know what it is to be Mexican.”
“Then what is it to be Mexican?”
“To live in the friction of being half-civilized and half-barbaric, the one half always at war with the other. This revolution is not about politics. Nothing in México is ever about politics. The bombs that explode around us are the sound of our self-hatred.”
“You are a fatalist, Señora.”
“No. I am a Mexican,” she said. “Go and care for your woman. I will see to José and to the household.”
Sarmiento slipped his stethoscope from his ears and touched his wife’s pale face. The room filled with the pink light of dawn. Alicia slept beneath thick blankets packed with hot water bottles. Her skin was cold; her lips were cracked. Twelve hours had passed since he had discovered her collapsed on the floor. The diarrhea had abated and she had entered the second, graver stage of the disease. The loss of fluids had caused her blood pressure to drop dangerously, and her pulse was fast and weak as her heart tried to push the diminished supply of blood through her exhausted body. She had vomited the sips of water he had given her earlier. When she awakened, he would have to try another tactic to keep her alive. He slumped into a chair. He had not allowed himself to consider the possibility of her death even as it hovered in the air. When José had come to see her and burst into tears, Sarmiento had sent him away with furious words that had expressed his own terror. Life without Alicia was unimaginable, now more than ever as the world collapsed around them in the thunder of artillery shells and the rattle of machine guns.
“You must live,” he whispered.
“Miguel?” Her voice was a dry husk.
“I’m here, darling,” he said, standing, stroking her face.
“I see only white. Am I going blind?”
“No, darling, that’s the disease. It will pass.”
“The guns have stopped.”
He thought at first she was describing another symptom, a loss of hearing or cognizance, but then he realized that it had been hours since the sounds of battle had echoed in the air. Had another truce been declared? Not that that mattered. All he cared about was keeping her alive.
“Miguel, if I am dying, I require a priest.”
“You are not dying, Alicia.”
A thin smile pressed itself on her lips. “I have seen this disease before.”
“Then you know it is not invariably fatal.” He smiled back. “Place your trust in your physician.”
“More than trust … love.” Her eyes closed, then opened. “I am so thirsty.”
“You can’t keep water through the mouth, but there is another way. Unpleasant and painful, I’m afraid.”
“Do what you must,” she said. “I want to live.”
Late in the evening, a servant appeared with a plate of food for him. He wolfed down the beans and rice, his first food in more than a day. He set aside the plate and stroked Alicia’s hair. He had been giving her rectal injections of water, tannin, salt, and gum arabic. The first injection had simply flowed back out, but he had continued, reasoning that whatever she could absorb would help her. The treatment was working. The third time he injected her, she retained the fluid. Her skin was detectably less desiccated, and her breathing, once rapid and shallow, had deepened. He was exhausted, not merely from lack of sleep but from the grinding anxiety that he might lose her. He lay down beside her and closed his eyes.
He was awakened by the clamor of bells so loud it seemed as if every bell in every church in the city had been struck by lightning at precisely the same moment. He shook off his fatigue. Alicia was still sleeping. Her breath was deep and slow but that she had slept through the explosion of bells was evidence of her deathly debilitation. Her pulse, still erratic and weak, confirmed this. When she awoke, he would give her more fluids, orally if she could tolerate it. Perhaps a crust of bread? She had gone forty-eight hours without food.
The bells still clanged. He went to the door and called for Alicia’s maid, Catalina.
“Why are the bells ringing?” he asked her.
“They say the fighting is over, doctor.”
At last, he thought. The Ciudadela has been taken. He heard Alicia murmur his name. “Bring me water with a little lemon in it,” he told the maid. “Bread if there is any in the house.”
“The doña?” the maid asked hopefully.
“Yes,” he said with a tired smile. “We may have more than Madero’s victory to celebrate. And Catalina, send my son to us.”
José stepped tentatively into his parents’ room. He was still scalded by his father’s reproaches from when he had last visited his mother. When he had seen her on the bed, waxen, he thought she was dead. Convulsed by grief, he had doubled over, sobbing wildly. His tears had driven his father into a fury José had never seen before.
“Why are you whimpering like a little girl?” he had snapped. “Do you think this helps? My God, you have been treated too gently by your grandmother. She might as well put you in dresses and braid your hair. Get out of my sight until you can compose yourself like a man.” He had grabbed José by the collar, thrown him out of the room, and slammed shut the door.
It was the first
and only time his father had laid a violent hand on him, and he had slumped to the ground, weeping out of shame as well as grief. The anger and contempt in his father’s voice had seared him. Even though the words were spoken in anger, José knew they were not words his father would have used at all had he not already believed them to be true. His father was brisk, disciplined, decisive, and rational. By contrast, José knew he was lazy and soft and emotional. He and his father had had many quiet talks about José’s poor showing in school and what his father called his “daydreaming.” If what it meant to be a man was to be like his father, José knew he was a failure. He could not bear the thought that his mother might die and leave him alone to be a continual disappointment to his father. He prayed for her recovery as he had never prayed for anything else in his life.
