Sarmiento sat at a window table at the Café Royale watching a barefoot pelado herd a flock of turkeys down the center of Calle de los Plateros. The Indian, cinnamon-skinned and malnourished with a mop of inky hair, was, like most Indians to Sarmiento’s eyes, of indeterminate age—perhaps twenty, perhaps sixty. He wore a tattered, long-tailed shirt, and in apparent ignorance of a recently passed city ordinance commanding the wearing of undergarments, a soiled breech cloth tied around his waist and loosely looped around his genitals. The bobble of his penis was disgracefully visible to passersby as he made his way down the narrow road. Expertly, he kept the squawking turkeys in a straight line with a long stick to rein them in when they began to wander. The birds were small and stringy, but their plumage was as darkly iridescent as a ball gown. Sarmiento assumed the turkeys were on their way to one of the city’s markets and that day’s end would find them defeathered, cut up, and boiled beneath a layer of mole poblano.
In Europe, where Sarmiento had lived for the past decade, the incursion of the country into the city would have been deemed picturesque. But in Ciudad de México, the reflection of a peasant in the plate glass windows of shops that sold French wines and English frock coats reproached the pretensions of the nouveau riche who shopped there and they were not amused. Even now, a police officer—whose blue uniform aped the Parisian gendarmerie right down to the short cape—bestirred himself from his corner post. A moment later, the Indian and his birds had been harshly directed to a side street and away from Sarmiento’s view.
Across the capital the church bells tolled ten. The shops would not open for another hour. The city would not fully awaken until the sifted gold light that now filled its streets achieved the transparency that made a stroll through them a walk into a dream. During his exile, Sarmiento had often tried to explain México’s quality of light, but words, in whichever of the four languages he spoke, always failed him. The light’s lucidity was partly a matter of altitude—at eight thousand feet the air was so thin that visitors gasped for breath upon first arriving. Then too, the city lay at the lowest point in a valley ringed by volcanoes creating a canopy of the sky. Whatever the cause, the light poured down with a purity that made every object it touched seem both immediately present and illusory, like something simultaneously seen and remembered.
This effect was heightened by the phantasmagorical nature of the city itself. The ancient stones of the Spanish colonial city sat upon the even more ancient stones of the Aztec city, Tenochtitlán. The Spanish had razed the Aztecs’ island capital and dumped its palaces and temples into the vast lake that had ringed it. The great native cypresses—ahuehuetes—still grew in the park at Chapultepec, where they had shaded the summer palace of the last Aztec emperor. When the light poured through their leaves, it was as if ten thousand green, translucent eyes looked with unimaginable grief upon the slain city of Tenochtitlán, which the Aztecs had called the navel of the earth.
This is what Sarmiento had been unable to explain to the Romans he befriended on his travels. In their city, the imperial ruins were like the abandoned rooms in the family palazzo, places where their ancestors had lived lives different only in degree, not kind. But in México, the stones beneath the hulking churches and palaces of the Spanish were the gravestones of an alien race whose men had been murdered and its women raped. The conquest had also robbed that race of its vitality. Each generation following the conquest was more servile and lethargic than the last until the Aztecs had devolved from plumed emperors to turkey herders in soiled loincloths. When Sarmiento told his Roman friends that his country was the product of rape, they had laughed gaily and replied, “But all nations are.” Perhaps so, he thought, but in México the memory was burned into the stones and the air.
“Primo, why the brown study?”
Sarmiento smiled up at his cousin, Jorge Luis. “Primo, I didn’t really expect you’d awaken to meet me at such an early hour.”
The younger man sat in a quick, tight motion. It could not have been otherwise—his French-cut suit fit him like a straitjacket, constraining his movements, emphasizing his slenderness. Above the stiff collar and black-and-red silk cravat loomed his large head. His eyes were like molten chocolate flecked with cinnamon and his lips were thick and soft. His black, curling hair was only partly subdued by the liberal use of lavender-scented pomade. There was an ever-present flush beneath his dark skin; he was as lovely as a girl. Perhaps aware of this, he compensated for his prettiness with a cynical attitude, an unkind wit, and a tone of voice that implied the knowledge of scandal. Officially he held the position of secretary to his father, Sarmiento’s senator uncle, Cayetano, but spent his days writing verse and his nights in what passed for debauchery in the capital—drinking, gambling at the Jockey Club, patronizing the better brothels—with a cohort of other young men whose only purpose in life was the pursuit of pleasure. Ennui was part of Jorge Luis’s affectation, but sometimes Sarmiento imagined that his cousin’s boredom with this pointless circuit of cheap sensations and easy amusements was real and that, beneath his cultivated image of frivolity, a man of substance was struggling to emerge.
Jorge Luis arranged himself, as best he could, in a languid posture. He withdrew an English cigarette from a silver cigarette case and lit it. “Awaken? I have not yet been to bed. Coffee!” he shouted to no one in particular. “And you? Why did you insist on meeting at this uncivilized hour?”
“I always wake early,” Sarmiento said. “A habit from my student days in Germany. Nothing clears one’s head of last night’s wine more quickly than cutting into a cadaver in a freezing room at seven in the morning while an elderly professor screams instructions in German.”
Jorge Luis shuddered. “I don’t know what is more appalling about that story, the cadavers or the Germans. My grand tour of the continent will begin and end in Paris.”
The waitress appeared with Jorge Luis’s coffee. She was a plump, pretty Indian girl who moved uncomfortably in her starched, striped shirtwaist and dark skirt; her braids were piled atop her head and her broad feet were shoved into narrow boots. She caught Sarmiento’s eye and he smiled encouragingly at her. She carefully set down the cup and saucer, napkins, spoon, pot of heated milk, and a bowl of sugar cubes. When she finished, she nervously wiped her hands on her apron and murmured, “Anything else, sir?”
Jorge Luis flicked his fingers at her dismissively.
“My God,” he said to Sarmiento, “did you see her fingernails? Filthy. I don’t know why you come here. The Café de l’Opera employs French waiters, not the local ‘niggers.’”
The American word dropped from his cousin’s lips with a harsh contempt that amazed Sarmiento since Jorge Luis was nearly the same shade of brown as the waitress. Like most Mexicans, Jorge Luis was a mestizo, in whose veins ran a mixture of American Indian and Spanish blood. His mother, Sarmiento’s aunt by marriage, had been a full-blooded Indian, a country girl whom his uncle had married during the war against the French. She died giving birth to Jorge Luis, who had, therefore, no memories of her. But Sarmiento, seven years older than his cousin, recalled her with affection. It surprised him that his quick-witted cousin seemed oblivious of the irony of his contempt for the Indian poor of the city, but, Sarmiento had observed, it was an obliviousness shared by most of the city’s mestizo upper class who also disdained the pelados. Sarmiento imagined that Jorge Luis had imbibed this attitude with the absinthe he drank in the Frenchified bars and cafés with the other young men of his set who were desperate to be mistaken for Europeans.
“There you go again, Miguel, disappearing on me,” Jorge Luis complained. “You’re the host here, remember?”
“I’m sorry, Primito,” Sarmiento replied. “Listen, I want to ask you about a woman.”
Jorge Luis widened his eyes in mock surprise. “A woman! Are you thinking of leaving the priesthood, Miguel?”
Sarmiento shook his head. “You exaggerate.”
“Do I? In all the time we have spoken since you returned, you have never before asked about a woman. Who is this paragon who tempts you from your vow of chastity?”
“Her name is Alicia Gavilán.”
This time Jorge Luis’s surprise was genuine. “You’re joking.”
“I am not.”
His cousin burst into laughter. “No, really, this is a joke.”
Impatiently, Sarmiento said, “If you don’t know the lady, fine, but I am completely serious.”
Jorge Luis exclaimed, “But Miguel, the Gorgon!”
His face flushed with anger. “Really, Primo, you go too far.”
Jorge Luis gathered himself. “You are serious,” he said with wonder. “All right. I know the lady, by reputation only, for one seldom sees her out in society. Alicia Gavilán, Condesa de San Juan de Aguayo. The youngest of the four daughters of Don Alphonso, Marqués de Guadalupe Gavilán.”
Sarmiento managed a shocked gasp. “A countess? Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. The family’s titles go back to colonial times. Of course, I suppose she and her family should properly be called ex-nobles since we are a proper republic now,” he said, placing a mocking hand over his heart. “After the French invasion their titles and an old palace were all they had left. The old marqués—that traitor—sided with the French and their puppet emperor, Maximiliano. He was lucky he wasn’t shot. Instead, his properties were confiscated and he was ruined. I heard for a while they were so hard up they were eating beans off of gold plates. But the old man was able to marry off his eldest daughters to various rich friends of our beloved president,” he continued. “Nothing makes new money respectable more swiftly than a wife with a title and an old name. Sadly, he could not find any takers for the Condesa de San Juan.”
“Why was that?”
“Did you see her face?”
“She was wearing a veil.”
“I have never seen her without one,” he said. “She had smallpox as a child. Evidently she is hideously scarred.”
Sarmiento was stunned into silence.
“She devotes herself to charity,” Jorge Luis continued. “A most worthy lady, but …” He shrugged. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Miguel.”
“You yourself have never seen her face,” Sarmiento said. “So you are only repeating gossip.”
His cousin raised an eyebrow. “Miguel, the lady is nearly thirty, has never married, rarely goes into society, and never without covering her face. The smallpox story is universally known and accepted. If it were untrue, there would be other explanations for her unusual behavior.” He yawned. “My God, I am exhausted. Forgive me, Primo, I must go home and get some sleep. I have a full night ahead of me at the gaming tables at the Jockey Club.”
“You’re incorrigible,” Sarmiento said.
With more melancholy than he had perhaps intended, his cousin replied, “Sadly, you are correct.”
His cousin’s tale about Alicia Gavilán and her family only whetted Sarmiento’s curiosity about the lady. The smallpox story was a plausible explanation for her mysterious appearance, but Sarmiento reasoned that a vaccine would have been available to a woman of her age when she was a child. He casually inquired of a few of his well-bred women patients about whether they had been vaccinated against the pox and was appalled to discover that, to a woman, they had not.
“But why?” he asked a flirtatious chatelaine in her pink-and-gold salon. “Didn’t your doctor insist?”
“Dear old Don Octavio?” she replied with amusement. “Mais non! He was a traditional doctor. He never laid a hand on me except to take my pulse and even then my mother and a maid had to be present. That he should penetrate me with a needle was unthinkable.” Her eyes flashed naughtily. “Of course, if you wished to do so, I would willingly submit.”
“You are past the age when smallpox is a threat to your health,” he replied.
“No penetration, then? Quel dommage!” she said, smiling. “Now, dearest Doctor Miguelito, I am still suffering from the most excruciating headaches. Won’t you give me a little more laudanum for my pain? Just a few more pills?”
As discreetly as he knew how, he asked a few of his patients about Alicia directly. They repeated the same story his cousin had told him: a catastrophic childhood encounter with smallpox had ruined her face and her prospects, so she had thrown herself into charitable works. The tone of the telling varied—some of the ladies spoke pityingly, others admiringly—but all implicitly agreed that Alicia Gavilán’s fate was a sad one. He wondered about that because Alicia Gavilán’s misfortune had evidently given her a license to move about in the world that none of his grand ladies enjoyed. His patients could not leave their homes except on the arm of their husbands, unless it was to attend Mass or to shop. Even then, more than one woman complained, she could not enter unescorted any of the new department stores that had sprung up in the city. Propriety demanded that she remain in her closed carriage while female clerks brought items for her inspection. It was unimaginable that he would have encountered one of his ladies roaming through the courtyards of the prison at Belem. Did Alicia Gavilán appreciate her mobility, he wondered, or did she regard the necessity of performing her good works at places like Belem yet another mark of her misfortune? That seemed unlikely. In contrast to his unhappily self-absorbed patients languishing in the lap of luxury, Alicia Gavilán had not appeared to him in their brief encounter to be unduly concerned with herself. She had completely given herself over to the messy task at hand, staining her costly gown with blood and afterbirth. The more he thought about her, the greater his desire to meet the lady again, but he could not imagine the circumstances that would permit an unmarried woman and an unmarried man to renew their accidental acquaintance without causing a scandal.
A bemused Sarmiento stood in a corner of the anteroom in the Church of the Flowering Cross that sheltered the baptismal fount. The smells of incense, oiled wood, candle smoke, and human musk sent him back in memory to Sunday Mass with his mother, who had died when he was five. His father, a militant atheist, mocked her churchgoing and Sarmiento had eventually adopted his father’s view of religion, albeit without his belligerence; faith seemed to the rational Sarmiento simply unintelligent. Still, those hours at Mass with his mother, his hand wrapped in hers, were among the warmest memories of his childhood. This was the first time since her funeral that he had been in a church for a religious service. He was aware of a faint luminosity in the scented air that, had he been religious and believed such things, he would have said was his mother’s spirit hovering beside him.
He had come at the invitation of Alicia Gavilán to witness the baptism of the infant whom he had delivered at Belem prison. Her note had reminded him the child was being cared for by the mother’s sister and her husband, but, she had written, the mother had chosen the boy’s name to honor the man who had saved both their lives: Miguel. Doña Alicia thought Sarmiento might wish to be present at his namesake’s christening. Rationally, he knew that she could have had no idea of the emotions her invitation had stirred in him, reminding him, as it did, of his own lost son. Yet he could not help but imagine that the purpose of her invitation was to assuage some part of the secret grief for his son he had carried around with him for over a decade. As he stood in the church, watching the ritual proceed, remembering his mother and his son, the sadness that clouded his heart was softened by nostalgia.
The infant’s young aunt, her braided hair covered by her rebozo, held him in her arms while a bespectacled priest in an elaborate lace vestment poured water over the child’s head and intoned, “Miguel Ángel, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
In a white gown and a broad-brimmed hat with a heavy white veil, Alicia stood behind the parents, acting as the boy’s godmother. At the moment the water splashed the child’s forehead, he howled, his cries dispersing like wisps of incense as they rose to the vaulted ceiling. His tiny dark face darkened to purple as he wailed. The priest glanced with displeasure at the child’s uncle, a homely boy uncomfortable in his Sunday best. He tried to shush the child, to no avail.
Alicia said, “Father, he is frightened, let me calm him.”
“Daughter, the time,” the priest said pointedly. Sarmiento guessed the priest was thinking of his lunch and his glass of amontillado.
But Alicia had taken the wriggling infant from the aunt and carried him beneath a fresco depicting the baptism of Jesus. She began to sing to the child, but not in Spanish. Sarmiento recognized a few words of Nahuatl, the language of the pelados. Where, he thought wonderingly, had this aristocratic lady learned the language of the slums? After a moment, the child’s cries ceased and Alicia returned the child to his aunt.
“We can continue now, Father.”
The priest completed the rite by which Miguel Ángel Trujillo was received into the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. Alicia slipped the priest a small brocade purse that he received with satisfaction. No paper currency for a Gavilán, Sarmiento thought. The old families still dealt in gold coin.
She turned to Miguel. “Señor Doctor, come and be properly introduced to your namesake.”
He stepped forward toward the family, who greeted him with downcast eyes and shy smiles.
“This is the doctor who brought your nephew into the world,” Alicia said. “Let him hold the boy, Remedios.”
The girl surrendered the now-passive infant to Sarmiento, who took him reluctantly, fearing that he would see his dead son’s face and be unable to contain himself. But when he took the child and looked at him he saw only a baby with big shining eyes, stray tufts of hair, and the bland expression of an animal on a face in which human consciousness had not yet fully dawned. After a moment, Sarmiento handed the child to his aunt.
“I think I will wait outside,” he said to Alicia, “and then, if I may, I will see you to your home.”
“Yes,” she said. “I will only be a minute.”
He left her in conversation with the child’s aunt and he saw her slip the girl a purse that was fuller than the one she had given the priest.
He stood on the steps of the church, which faced the plazuela of San Andrés. San Andrés was typical of the old colonial neighborhoods that lay northeast of the Zócalo, the great plaza anchored by the cathedral and the National Palace that was the heart of the city and the nation. In the center of the plazuela was an old fountain that had been the neighborhood’s water source for centuries; women still came to dip their clay pots into its brackish stream. Around the fountain was an open-air market where the Indian vendors had set up their blankets and hawked their wares. Street peddlers lumbered by, their goods attached to their bodies with poles and straps—one of them carried a dozen bamboo cages filled with songbirds—singing the merits of their wares: “Such excellent sweets! The saints themselves desire them!” “Who can resist my roasted corn? Not you, not you, not you!” The plazeula was bounded on the south by an old mercantile arcade. Beneath its arches, men in shabby frock coats sat at rough tables that held fountain pens, jugs of ink, and sheaves of colored paper. They were the evangelistas, scriveners who for a few pesos composed letters for the illiterate poor of the city. To the south of the little plaza was the bulk of a massive colonial palace that Sarmiento now knew was the ancestral residence of the Gaviláns.
It was a scene that deepened the nostalgia he had felt in the church because this was the city he remembered from his childhood and the city he had carried in his heart during the years of his exile. Yet now that he was back, he felt like a tourist, a stranger, as if his long sojourn in Europe had irreparably broken the cord that had tethered him to home. He drifted through old neighborhoods like this one and the flashy new neighborhoods of Don Porfirio’s modern city feeling like a ghost.
He sensed her presence before he heard her speak. “Thank you for coming, Doctor,” she said, pausing beside him. “I do not think you are a regular churchgoer.”
“No, I’m not a believer, Doña Alicia,” he said. He glanced upward at the massive, flower-covered cross. “I must say, though, I have seen many churches but never one with this particular decoration.”
“The flowering cross? It is unique, in the city at least,” she replied. “One of my ancestors commissioned it, and even he did not understand its meaning.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I will tell you as you walk me to my residence.”
He extended his arm, and she slipped hers through it. He was aware of the scent of rose water. The white veil was more translucent than the dark veil she had worn at the prison and he could more clearly make out the contours of her face, which seemed covered by a thick layer of powder. He turned his eyes away, not wishing to stare.
Alicia was aware that he was making an effort not to stare at her. Perhaps, she thought, she should simply raise the veil and let him look, but then all he would see was the white mask she had fashioned from creams and powders. She felt a pang of sadness but then composed herself and told him the story of the flowering cross that she had first heard as a child in the kitchens of the palace.
She could not remember a time when she had not sought out the dark, fragrant warmth of the kitchens and the company of the women and girls who labored there at the tiled stoves and ovens and the big tables where chickens were plucked, corn was ground, and fruit and vegetables chopped. When she had first begun to appear in the kitchen as a child in pigtails, the cooks tried to bribe her to leave with sweets, and when that failed, she was scolded, ignored, and reported to her mother. “No es la costumbre,” her mother told her—it is not customary—in what would become a refrain of her childhood. She did not argue or defend herself, but simply returned to the kitchen again and again until, by sheer, silent persistence, she overcame all objections. Her post was a tall, three-legged stool near where the head cook, Chepa, commanded her realm. Although she was not allowed to do any of the work—that was far beyond the pale for a daughter of the house—she learned by watching. One morning, the molendera failed to appear, causing consternation as she was the only one who knew the exact formula of the morning chocolate for the lady of the house. Alicia took up the mortar and pestle, ground the cocoa herself, and added the proper amounts of cinnamon and sugar. The maid returning with the empty cup also brought a coin from the mistress to the molendera. Alicia gave the coin to the maid. After that, although her rank was never forgotten, it no longer created an inviolable distance between her and the other women. They no longer talked around her, but with her, and to her, and they shared their stories, which were as old and complex as the stories of her own family.
The flowering cross, for example. Graciela the baker, with hands like leather from decades of reaching into stoves, told Alicia that the stonemason who carved the cross had been from a wild tribe in the far north called the Yaquis. “Nahautl, like us,” she explained, “but when the rest of us came to Tenochtitlán, the Yaquis stayed behind in a river valley that was like the Garden of Eden. They worshipped the deer who gave up his life to give them meat to eat and hides for clothes. When the priests came and told them about Jesus, well, to the Yaquis, Jesus and the deer were the same and they converted.
“Flowers are sacred to the Yaquis,” Alicia told Sarmiento, repeating the words Graciela had told her. “They call heaven the flower world. They say that when Jesus was on the cross, flowers sprang up where his drops of blood touched the earth. That’s why the artist carved flowers on the cross. For him they are the blood and resurrection of Jesus.”
“The Yaquis?” Sarmiento said. “The same tribe the government is fighting up in the north?”
“I was not aware we were at war with them,” she said. “What caused the conflict?”
“Settlers have moved into land the Yaquis claim as their own.”
“I’m sure it is my ignorance,” she said, as they reached the immense doors of the palace, “but could the land not be apportioned in a way that would satisfy both groups?”
“A good question, Doña,” he replied. “Not one I imagine the combatants bothered to ask themselves before they took up arms. Men never do.”
From a small room attached to the palace at the side of the door, a porter emerged, and, with a suspicious glance at Sarmiento, asked, “Doña Alicia, is everything all right?”
With a smile in her voice, she said, “Yes, Pablito. I will enter in a moment.” To Sarmiento she asked, “What do you mean when you say men never do?”
“Only that men are thoughtless creatures,” he replied. “Their first impulse is always to take action, however rash or misguided. Or fatal.”
After a long, considering silence, she said, “Do you speak from experience, Señor Doctor?”
The kindness in her lovely, low voice was as palpable as a warm hand laid on his. The sadness and nostalgia he had felt since entering the church clutched at his heart and squeezed tears from him. He hastily wiped his sleeve across his face and said, “Well, one has made many mistakes in life, of course.”
He was afraid she would comment on his tears, but she said, “Yes, that is true of all of us. But one need not become imprisoned by one’s errors.”
“How does one avoid that?” he asked.
“For a believer, there is confession,” she said.
“A few Hail Marys and it all goes away?” he replied.
She retreated into silence and he thought he had offended her, but then she said, “The value of confession for me is not in the penance but in saying aloud the things I would keep secret in my guilt and then having my confessor put them in their proper place for me. To give them—what is the word artists use? Perspective. For in my guilt, my sins loom large and I can see little else. Another person, disinterested but sympathetic, can look and see things as they are, not as I imagine them to be.”
Again, he felt her kindness like a physical balm and it was all he could do not to spill his secret then and there about Paquita and his son.
“But, as I said, Doña Alicia, I am a nonbeliever. Who would hear my confession?”
“I would,” she said simply. “Won’t you come in and have a cup of something warm, a bit of something to eat?”
Longing and fear fought in his heart: a longing to confess his faults to her and a fear that, once she heard them, she would turn away from him in revulsion. Fear won out.
“Thank you, Doña, but I must take my leave. I have my rounds, patients to see.” Yet he found himself reluctant to go. “Perhaps,” he added, “I could call on you another time?”
“Of course,” she replied graciously. “You need only send me a message and I would be happy to receive you.” She touched his hand. “Good-bye, Doctor Sarmiento. God go with you.”
“Doña,” he said with a little bow and rushed away before she could see that the tears had reappeared in the corners of his eyes.
As the rest of the household slumbered, Alicia made her way into the garden, an overgrown wilderness of orange and lemon trees, heavy swags of climbing roses that spilled over the garden walls, clumps of calla and trumpet lilies, heliotrope, rose geraniums, and jasmine. A rosace-shaped pond in the center of the garden was anchored by a fountain carved with the symbols of the evangelists—a lion, an eagle, an ox, and a man. The fountain, too, was in disrepair and only a brackish trickle now reached the pond. At the far end of the garden was a mirador made of marble. The family crest and the date 1702 were carved over the entrance of the small pavilion.
She sat on the bench in the pavilion and removed her veil so that she might better inhale the heavy fragrance of the flowers in the still, autumn air. She thought of Miguel Sarmiento, and the sadness with which he had looked at the infant when she had given him the baby to hold; it was the same sadness she had seen in the birth room. She recognized it as the sadness of loss, a loss to which he remained unreconciled. That pain she saw in his eyes was not unknown to her. She closed her eyes. Mingled with the scent of flowers were the smells of the stables on the other side of the garden wall. Now and then she heard the muffled whinny of a horse or the voice of a groom or stable boy.
“Anselmo.”
Her eyelids fluttered open and she looked around the garden to see who had spoken that name. There was no one else in the garden but a little black cat hunting lizards.
“Anselmo.”
That voice, that name, again. And then, with a small gasp, she realized that it was she who had spoken. Her voice was speaking the name she had not openly uttered in many years.
She spoke his name again, consciously, deliberately. “Anselmo.”
The cat looked up, distracted from its hunt by the weeping woman.
She had been tolerated in the kitchen because it was the domain of women performing women’s work, but when Alicia began to wander into the stables, she was brought before her father, a rare and frightening event. The marqués received her as if she were an errant servant. With scarcely a glance at her, he said, “Henceforth, you will stay out of the stables.”
“I only wanted to see how they braid the horses’ manes.”
He looked at her sharply. “Were you asked to speak?”
Trembling, she replied, “No, Señor Marqués.”
“Go.”
She had run into the garden, weeping.
“Why are you crying?”
She looked around for the questioner. A boy’s head appeared above the wall that was common to the garden and the stables. It was Anselmo, one of the grooms. He had been her guide on her excursion to the stables, telling her about the horses and how he took care of them. Now he jumped the wall and came into the garden.
“Did your papá hit you?” he asked.
He was two or three years older than she—fifteen or sixteen—a slender, cinnamon-colored boy with golden eyes. He smelled soothingly of straw and liniment.
“No,” she said. “He has forbidden me from visiting the stables. Now I will never see how you braid the manes.”
He sat beside her on the bench and took a strand of her long hair. “I could braid your hair. Do you want me to?”
His fingers in her hair, the whispered question, the lustrous sun, and the sweet smells of the garden produced in her a thrill that raised goose bumps on her then flawless skin and, without understanding why, but knowing she must, she pressed her lips to his. His mouth opened—her shock was quickly followed by the delicious sensation of his warm, wet tongue and the heat of his body radiating from beneath his thin shirt. As they pressed their bodies tightly together, she did not know whether it was his heart or hers that beat like a bird flapping its wings against its cage.
On the warm autumn nights, he laid his zarape in the clearing among the roses to dispel the chill from the earth. Then, too, their naked bodies generated a heat so intense that curlicues of steam rose from them. She learned he was from Coahuila and had come with his family to the city looking for work when their small farm was taken from them by a friend of the governor. He was vague on details, saying only, “The sheriff came with some papers. My papá said we had to leave.” She related her own uneventful history—she had lived her entire life within the walls of the palace, except for the hours she was at school or at church. He had four brothers and three sisters and they lived with his parents in two rooms in the colonia of La Merced, but he lived in the stables, visiting home only on Sunday. She told him about her three sisters, all much older than she, the two eldest married, the third engaged. He told her he missed his family, and his descriptions of his loneliness gave her a name for her own feelings of solitude.
He could not read or write. One night she brought pencil and paper. Guiding his hand, she showed him how to write his name and then he insisted that she teach him how to write hers as well. After that, he practiced by writing their names with his fingertips on her flesh. She loved his touch. His tongue rasped her small nipples and he told her she tasted like apple. The skin of his scrotum was as plush as velvet in her hands and the two stones it sheathed were fascinating to her, hard yet spongy; more than once he yelped when she pressed too firmly. Each time he penetrated her, her first feeling was of separation—his body clearly divisible from hers—but then as he continued his thrusts were like pebbles tossed into a pond. The ripples spread and deepened across and inside her body, and as they both sank into the same swamp of sensation, she could no longer tell her flesh from his. He was the first to say, “te amo,” but said it only sparingly after that, as if the phrase were a jewel, the only one he would ever be able to give her. She was freer with “I love you” because it resounded in her mind all day, and to prevent herself from saying it aloud when he was not present, she had to give it voice when he was. They undressed and dressed by moonlight. “Our moon,” he told her. One night he brought her a pearl, a single pearl that he said he had bought at the Monte de Piedad, the city’s pawnshop. It was yellowing with age, like the autumn moon.
Alicia was neither as alone nor as insignificant in her family as she imagined. La Niña noticed the change—the combination of swooping and inexplicable happiness alternating with expressions of gnawing melancholy as she mumbled to herself. She instructed her personal maid to spy on her daughter. Manuelita followed her into the garden and watched, from a distance, as the two children made love. They were beautiful together and Manuelita pitied them for what was to come. She reported to her mistress. Anselmo was gone by nightfall. Within a month, Alicia began to show signs of pregnancy. Her mother immured her within her rooms and, borrowing from her favorite novel, La dame aux camélias, let word go out that Alicia suffered from consumption. When she was about to deliver, Alicia was secretly transported to the foundling home, where she gave birth to a daughter in the Departamento de Partos Ocultos—the Department of Hidden Births. It was there, as she was recovering, that she was infected with the smallpox virus, as was the child she was nursing. Her daughter died.
Fifteen years had passed but the garden was much the same as it had been the last night she and Anselmo had parted. She dried her tears. She remembered that during the confrontation with her mother she had cried out, “But Mamá we are no different than Romeo y Julieta!” Her mother, narrowing her eyes, had replied, “Romeo was a nobleman, not an Indian from the slums, and at any rate, that was a fairy tale.” “But I love him, Mamá.” “I assure you, you will forget,” her mother said. “As Julieta would have forgotten Romeo, had she lived. Time defaces every memory. You will see.”
Now, reflecting upon that encounter, she thought that her mother’s choice of “defaces” was deliberate. Her mother had not expected that Alicia would forget Anselmo, but rather that as she reached maturity, she would appreciate the absurdity of the romance between the princess and the stable boy. It would devolve from a tragedy into a farce, and passion would be replaced by embarrassment. Her mother was wrong.
The love she had felt for Anselmo had been the portal through which Alicia had discovered her capacity for love, and love had become her vocation. The loss of her own daughter—the only child she knew she would ever bear—had made her the mother to all children she encountered. Her mother could cruelly jest that Alicia was like La Llorona—the woman of legend who had drowned her children and, after her death, was condemned for eternity to search for them along the waterways of México, weeping and shrieking—but there was perhaps a grain of truth in her words. For in each child she encountered, Alicia saw traces of her own child, and she loved them as she would have loved her own.
Then abruptly, Alicia understood something about Miguel Sarmiento’s expression of sorrow as he had held the baby Miguel in his arms and about the tears he had wiped away so she would not see them. Doctor Sarmiento had also lost a child! And if he had lost a child and was unmarried, then there had also been a woman. He had come very close to telling her the story as they stood before the gates of the palace. Would he tell her if they met again? Plainly, whatever the details, his tale had left him with a heavy burden of guilt. Too heavy for a man whose essential goodness was clear to her. Miguel Sarmiento might not believe in God, but God—her God, the God who was love—hovered around the man waiting to be invited in but prevented by his guilt and shame. Was it vain and foolish of her to believe that she might be the instrument through which God would relieve the doctor’s burden and release him to do the good work he was undoubtedly intended for? No, she thought, not me! But a voice that was not hers whispered its reply. Yes, Daughter. You.