The City of Palaces

by Michael Nava

  “Whether you live to see it or not, he will do you credit,” Sarmiento replied.

  She paused at the threshold and looked back at him. “I wish I could be as certain as you, but I cannot foresee what will become of him. His gifts are useless in the world I have known.” She sighed. “But my world is passing away and perhaps in the world to come, there will be a place for him.”

  Day gave way to night. The moon filled the window above José’s mother’s bed and then passed on. The electric lamps cast orbs of light too frail to penetrate the shadowy recesses of the big room. Chepa had come and lit candles, tall and thick and yellow. Father Pedro had arrived and administered last rites as the family gathered at the foot of the bed, their faces as still as the ancestor portraits that lined the walls of the palace. One by one they departed, even his father, but José remained at his mother’s side, refusing food or sleep. For once, his wishes were respected, and he was allowed to remain.

  His mother had not opened her eyes for a long time now. Sometimes her arms jerked into the air and then just as abruptly fell back upon the bed. Her raspy breath filled the room, subsided into a nearly imperceptible stream of air, then began again loud and labored. José had imagined death was like sleep—you closed your eyes and it was over—but dying, it appeared, was hard work. He wept silently at times, but for the most part he experienced not grief but an immeasurable compassion for his mother.

  This was a new emotion for him, deeper than the quotidian love of mother and child. That love was personal and possessive, a web spun from the filaments of their moment-to-moment intimacies that went all the way back to his first heartbeat in her womb. The love that swelled and broke his heart as he sat beside her was forged in suffering—her suffering as she lay dying, his as he maintained a helpless vigil—but it transcended the particular event and seemed, to José, to comprehend every moment of loss that had ever been suffered by anyone. It was as if he were standing at the summit of the volcano Popocatépetl and he could see, in every direction, the vast terrain of human loss. But beyond that landscape, at the far rim of his vision, there was a blur of light where, without knowing why, he knew that all suffering and all loss came to an end. Then came the startled realization: this was God. The deep sense of peace that held back his torrent of grief was the presence of God in the room.

  His mother was looking at him with tired but serene eyes.

  “Josélito, bring me the silver box on my dresser and the little pair of scissors,” she said in the calm, loving voice he had always known, as if today were like any other day, and her request like any other request.

  “Yes, Mamá,” he said and went to retrieve the items.

  She had managed, with great effort, to prop herself up on her pillows and placed the box in her lap. She took the scissors from his hand and clipped a lock of her hair. Then she cut a bit of the satin ribbon from her nightgown. Slowly, with clumsy fingers, she tied the lock of hair in the ribbon. Then she opened the box and removed a ring set with a large, yellowed pearl and a necklace formed of wooden beads and a rough cross.

  “Give me your hands, mijo,” she said.

  He put out his hands.

  “This is your inheritance from me.” She strung the necklace—which he now saw was a rosary—between his fingers. “This was given to me by a man whose people have been hunted down but who still survive because they believe God has not abandoned them. It represents faith.” She placed the lock of her hair in his palm. “This is my promise to you that you and I will be reunited through the grace of our Lord, Jesus. It represents hope.” Lastly, she gave him the ring. “This pearl was given to me by my first love, a boy named Anselmo. I looked into his eyes and saw God there, because God is love, and love is God, José. All love, mijo. Whoever you love, love fearlessly, no matter who he may be. Do you understand?”

  “No, Mamá,” he said haplessly. “I am sorry to be so stupid.”

  “You are not stupid, my dear. You will one day remember my words and understand them. Faith, hope, and love,” she whispered. “These three things remain. But the greatest of these is love.”

  “Yes, Mamá.”

  “Put these in their place,” she said, indicating the silver box and scissors.

  He took them from her lap and carried them to the dresser. When he returned to her bedside, she was gone.

  He stood beside her bed, wracked by heavy involuntary sighs, as if his soul were trying to catch its breath. When he regained his composure, he slipped the rosary over his neck, the ring on his finger, and the lock of her hair into his pocket. Then he went to find his father.

  Epilogue

  Welcome to America

  May 1913

  At every station between the capital and the border, Sarmiento saw fresh evidence that México was disintegrating. The train was running two days behind schedule as it made its way to Arizona, diverted from bad track that had not been repaired because once again the countryside was filled with robbers and rebels. The first-class tickets he had purchased for José and himself bought few amenities—the food was barely edible, the service erratic. But poor service and bad food were the least of it as the train huffed slowly north. In the northern states, where Madero’s revolution had first taken root, a new rebellion against Huerta was shaking the arid landscape. At Torreón, federal soldiers had ripped out the seats of the second-class cars and packed themselves in, on their way to reinforce vulnerable garrisons in the border towns. At dun-colored villages the train was met not with the usual food and trinket vendors but frightened crowds anxious for news from the capital. He saw telegraph poles felled by the rebels to disrupt communications, deserted ranches where the corpses of cattle lay bloated in the sun, and in the swirling dust of the Chihuahua desert, men, women, and children walking along the tracks, refugees seeking shelter in the towns. Far off, low clouds of dust kicked up against the horizon marked the movement of rebel battalions.

  Sarmiento watched it all with a weariness that sank into his bones. War was coming, if it had not already started, in the mountains, valleys, and deserts of the north. This time, though, unlike Madero’s revolution, there would be no quick resolution because Huerta was not Díaz. In the end, the old dictator had lost his taste for bloodshed and slipped away, but Huerta would soak the earth in the blood of his soldiers before he was killed or exiled. Among the rebels, there was no new Madero, no saintly figure to inspire and unite the little warlords rising up against Huerta. Carranza, Villa, Zapata. Each now fought for himself, for his own ambitions. Once they succeeded in defeating Huerta, they would turn on each other. Sarmiento could not see how this war would end, but with the memories of the Ten Tragic Days fresh in his mind, he knew it would bring a level of destruction to México not seen since the Spanish had razed Tenochtitlán. And who would suffer the most? As always, the Indians, the poor, the disenfranchised. He could have wept for his country, but the wells of pity had run dry in him when his wife had been murdered. What a fool he had been to have believed he could stir men’s consciences with his speech. He should have taken his cousin’s advice and slipped into the woodwork until the combatants had beaten each other bloody. Luis, he thought with a pang. Where was Luis? Would he ever see him again?

  It was night. He stood at the front of the car smoking a cigarette beneath the brilliant desert sky. He had left José sleeping in their compartment. He had worried that the scenes of war would send his son into a panic, but on the journey the boy had shown the same stoicism he had displayed at his mother’s funeral, where, dry-eyed, he had kissed the casket before it was slipped into the family crypt. Her death had changed José—he carried himself with a man’s gravity rather than with a child’s gaiety. He no longer prattled on but spoke only rarely and thoughtfully. Sarmiento realized that the little boy who had alternately exasperated him and endeared himself with his dreamy vagueness had transformed himself into a serious-minded, self-contained young man. A stranger, one who looked more like Alicia with each passing day. Alicia’s beauty, wh
ich the smallpox had destroyed in her, was ripening in her son, who was becoming luminously beautiful. It disturbed Sarmiento that another male should be so physically compelling. This was a gift surely intended for women, and he could not guess what purpose it could possibly serve his son.

  The train was approaching the American border town of Douglas, Arizona, the place where he had parted from Alicia in what seemed another lifetime. As the dust of México churned beneath the wheels of the train, he wondered when, and whether, he and José would ever return to their country. His heart was so filled with conflicting emotions that they had cancelled each other out, leaving him numb. He stared out into the night, through the veil of his cigarette smoke, where there appeared in the desert darkness an archway lit up with electric lights. It spelled out a greeting so simple in its unintentional arrogance he did not know whether the tears that filled his eyes were tears of anger or gratitude, but he wept them all the same as he spoke the words aloud: “Welcome to America.”

  Acknowledgments

  This is the first of a projected quartet of novels—The Children of Eve, a reference to the Salve Regina—that will follow the characters and the themes introduced here into the 1920s. I first began telling myself this story and undertaking the research required to bring it to life in the mid-1990s. The earliest draft material was written around 2000. This first book took three years to finish. I want to thank the two invaluable readers who helped me in that process, my cherished friend and fellow novelist, Katherine V. Forrest, and Michael Strickland, a more recent but equally treasured friend. I also want to thank my friend and guide in Ciudad de México, Jonas Vanruesel, for helping me find the remnants of Don Porfirio’s city in that megalopolis. I enthusiastically recommend Jonas’s services to any traveler to México.

  Over the past seventeen years, I have consulted hundreds of books, maps, photographs, videos, and other materials. On my website (http://michaelnavawriter.com) is a detailed bibliography for the interested reader, but I would be amiss if I did not acknowledge two key sources of research and inspiration: Michael Johns’s brief but excellent The City of Mexico in the Age of Díaz and Alan Knight’s magisterial two-volume history, The Mexican Revolution.

  Finally, I acknowledge my spouse, George Herzog, with whom I learned the secrets of a happy marriage that I then used in telling the story of the marriage of Miguel and Alicia.