Alicia parted the curtain and looked out at the Alameda, filled at twilight with children and lovers strolling beneath the poplar trees that gave the park its name. She and Miguel had been to the park only two weeks earlier. Now that he was her suitor, the gossips could no longer insinuate scandal when they were together although their pairing continued to be mocked. The appellations they had been given were all variations of beauty and the beast; one of them, Perseus and the Gorgon, had reduced her to tears when her sister Nilda had repeated it to her. He was handsome and she was, she sighed, hideous. There were moments when her faith in their bond faltered and she would have ended it with him and returned to her old ways. Except, as the days and weeks had passed and she became accustomed to his presence in her life, she found it more and more difficult to imagine a life without him.
On that Sunday afternoon, he escorted Alicia on the pathways beneath the leafy trees. A band played waltzes in the distance and the park benches were filled with young men dressed in their best suits watching the girls in pastel-colored dresses pass by like a parade of flowers accompanied, always, by a dourly dressed chaperone. Little boys sped recklessly among the pedestrians on roller skates, and out of nowhere, a swarm of men in bowler hats rolled solemnly by on bicycles. Alicia wore a cream-colored lace dress and an enormous hat with a white veil.
“May we sit for a moment, Miguel?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said. He led her to a marble bench and wiped it with his handkerchief. He pointed out that the bench was a gift of the undertaker Eusebio Gayosso.
“Ah,” she said. “I always wondered about the philanthropist who donated the benches to the park. Now I will never be able to look at them again without thinking of tombstones.”
“They were not here when I was a boy,” he said. “Nor the wrought iron gazebos and fences. The park was not so grand then.”
“Did you come here very often?” she asked, hoping to engage him in a rare discussion of his boyhood.
“When I was a school boy I spent many indolent afternoons here with my friends eating bags of sweets we bought at the Dulcería de Celaya,” he replied, his eyes softening with remembrance. “We would sit here and flirt with the girls.” He smiled, patting her hand. “By that I mean we would steal glances at them as they passed and hope against hope that one of them would look back.”
“I’m sure they did, for you.”
He was silent for a moment. “Back then, my schoolmates called me güerito for my green eyes and fair skin, or sometimes el gachupín. I didn’t mind the first, but the second was a fighting word.”
She nodded. The word was the insult term for a Spaniard. “That was cruel.”
“Cruelty is like breath to boys,” he observed. “But being called that made me feel different, unpleasantly so. I not only looked unlike my friends, I didn’t even sound like them. No doubt you have noticed.”
“Yes, your accent is that of a Spaniard.”
“I acquired it first from my father. He considers himself puro mexicano, but even after decades of living here in México he sounds as if he’s just stepped off the boat from Cadiz. And, of course,” he went on, “living in Europe I was more likely to encounter Spaniards than Mexicans. Speaking to them only hardened my own accent. Even as a boy it was pronounced enough to be a source of amusement to my friends, who teased me about it.”
“I think your accent is charming,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Most people find it grating. In any event, I felt like an outsider, but then I noticed that my appearance and accent also had their advantages when I was with my friends in the park. They could sometimes slow the step of the girls in the Alameda as they passed us and earn me a smile.” He took her hand and smiled. “Silly now to think of how I proud I was when that happened, but it was the first power I had ever known in a life lived in the shadow of my father’s fame.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Yes,” he said, his smile fading. “He said, ‘You amuse yourself on the site of where the Inquisition burned the innocent for no other reason than that they refused to partake of the venality and ignorance of the church.’ After that, my accomplishment in getting a girl to look at me seemed quite petty.”
“That seems rather unkind,” she ventured.
“He did not intend unkindness,” Miguel replied. “My father is a man who loves humanity but who has small use for actual human beings. That is simply his way. I think I may be the only person in the world he loves. Certainly, he is the only person in the world who knows me fully and, knowing me, accepts me.”
The shadow of his sadness fell between them like a cloud crossing the sun. She had not pressed him again about the source of his melancholy and he had not been any more forthcoming.
“Come,” he said. “This reminiscing has made me hungry for the sweets of my childhood. Let me take you to the Dulcería de Celaya for their suspiros and camotes.”
When Miguel sent word his father had died, Alicia’s first thought was, Now he is alone with his secret. She had immediately written a letter expressing her sympathy and asking if she might attend his father’s funeral service. His return note thanked her and told her his father had requested no service. Ten days had passed. He had not called on her and her discreet inquiries revealed that he had not been to see his patients either. That morning she had written a second note, the one she held, expressing her concern for his well-being, but even as she wrote it she felt a growing sense of dread. She decided to deliver it herself.
La Niña was scandalized. “It is not customary for the woman to chase after her suitor because he fails to appear for tea.”
“I worry that his father’s death has unsettled him.”
“Of course it has unsettled him, but if he is like most men, he grieves in the cantinas and the brothels and neither is any place for you. Leave it, Alicia. He will return.”
“He is not like most men,” Alicia replied.
“Your faith in his virtue is touching,” her mother said dryly.
“It’s not his virtue that concerns me,” she said, “but his sorrow. His father was his only family. He must feel completely alone now. I only want to assure him that he is not.”
“Really, Alicia, you sound like a lovelorn child,” La Niña said. “Do you want to repel him? Let him be.”
Her mother’s words gnawed at her as the dirt roads gave way to the cobblestone streets of an old middle-class enclave in the impoverished colonia. Her inexperience with the ways of courtship often left her doubtful about the nature of their relations. His visits were relaxed and they spoke comfortably of his work and her charities, but the very amicability of their meetings seemed to imply friendship only. She asked her sisters whether she should behave differently toward him now that he was her suitor.
“Well, sister,” Nilda told her, “your face is not really suited to the virgin’s blushes is it? I suppose you could try some business with a fan, although at your age it might just look as if you were swatting at flies. I always told my own daughters to let the man do all the talking, but mother says you blabber away when he comes to visit, so it’s too late for that. Next time he comes, put on your best jewels, dear, and try to talk less.”
Leticia suggested she take him into the garden and strike poses among the rose bushes and the lavender. “Let him imagine you as a flower,” she said. “You might want to start wearing a veil when he visits.”
“You could play the piano for him. You do that beautifully,” Eulalia suggested. “If that fails, low lights and stronger drink than tea might inspire him.”
She dismissed these stratagems as absurd because each required her to pretend she was someone other than she was and, more relevantly, someone other than Miguel knew her to be. In the end, she applied perhaps slightly more perfume and sat away from the harshest light. She reminded herself that friendship was also a precious form of affection and took pleasure in looking at his strong body and handsome face.
The carriage came to a stop before a two-story building painted a faded rose. The driver, Alfredo, climbed down and helped her out. In the past, when she had come for Miguel to take him with her on her charitable rounds, he had awaited her outside. She, of course, had never entered his apartment, but Alfredo, who had delivered her first note of condolence to him, knew where he lived.
“His habitation is on the second floor,” Alfredo said. “I will take you there.”
She followed him through an iron door that led into a small whitewashed foyer and up a tiled staircase bordered with a wrought iron railing. On each step was a clay pot of red geraniums, which received light from an opening in the ceiling.
They came to a door just off the staircase. The driver banged his fist on it and called, “Señor Doctor, it is Alfredo from the house of the Gaviláns. I have come with Doña Alicia. She wishes to speak to you. Please, sir, out of courtesy to the gracious lady, open the door.”
Decisive footsteps crossed the floor within and then Miguel stood before her in a collarless shirt and dark trousers. She smelled alcohol on his breath, but his green eyes were clear and alert. He was freshly shaved and his thick chestnut hair was perfectly groomed except for a stray lock that fell on his forehead. He had never looked so handsome, she thought. But he was also very pale and beneath his eyes were the dark circles of sleeplessness.
“Alicia,” he said thickly. “What are you doing here?”
Her heart sank—her mother had been right. He had merely been grieving in the solitary way of men. She felt like a fool.
“I was concerned for you,” she said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” She touched Alfredo’s arm. “We will go now.”
“No,” Sarmiento said. “Please. Won’t you come in?”
The driver tried to enter before her, but she placed her hand on his shoulder and said, “Wait in the carriage.”
Alfredo, aghast, said, “Doña Alicia, you are an unmarried woman. You cannot be alone with this gentleman in his habitation.”
“The gentleman is my friend,” she answered, “and he has suffered the loss of his father. What we have to say to each other must be said privately.”
“But La Niña, what will she say?”
“I will deal with my mother,” Alicia replied.
“Sir?” the driver beseeched Sarmiento.
“I will leave the door partly open and you can wait here. If you hear anything that seems even slightly amiss, you have my permission to enter.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Miguel stepped aside. “Doña, my humble house is your house and I am at your service.”
She entered. The apartment was a single room divided by an arch. In the front was a sofa and matching chair upholstered in horsehair; between the couch and chair was a lacquered black Chinese trunk inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Along one wall was a long table covered with carefully arranged stacks of books, journals, notebooks, medical apparatus, and a brass microscope. The walls were hung with anatomical charts of parts of the body. Through the arch she saw a narrow bed, a large plain pine armoire, and a stand with a brass basin and pitcher set. Everything in the apartment was immaculately clean and orderly. It was like looking into his mind, she thought, and then, on the Chinese trunk, she noticed a bottle of brandy, a glass, and a revolver.
“Would you like some tea?” he asked. “Or a glass of Jerez? There is a bottle somewhere.”
“No, thank you,” she said, removing her hat. “May I sit?”
“Of course,” he said, leading her to the couch. He remained standing, looking uncertain. “I apologize for my dwelling. I live plainly, a habit from my student days.”
“Your rooms are charming,” she said. Indicating the brandy and the revolver, she added, “I feel that I have interrupted you.”
He sat beside her and picked up the revolver. “This was my father’s gun. He carried it with him when he accompanied Don Benito Juárez in the war against the French invaders. I found it beneath his pillow when I discovered his … his body. An old soldier’s habit, I suppose, although he was no soldier, really. He was a scientist, a healer, a democrat.” He paused to collect himself. “In every way, thoroughly admirable. I will never be even half the man he was.” Without asking her permission, he poured brandy into the glass and drank it.
“You told me once he was the only person who knew you fully and that you were the only person he loved.”
Miguel sighed. “Yes. It is strange to feel orphaned at my age, and yet I do. No one will ever know me as my father did.”
“We are all known completely to the one who created us, Miguel,” she said. “I am often comforted by the words of the psalm that say, ‘Even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as day, for darkness is as light with you.’”
“I am an atheist, Alicia, as you know. My darkness is not illuminated by a supernatural light.” He swallowed some brandy. “That is why I have decided.” He faltered, then drew a deep breath. “I have decided I can never marry. I cannot bring my darkness into your life.”
“Is that why you have not been to see me?” she asked softly. “Because you wish to break things off between us?”
“I do not wish it,” he said. “I have no choice.”
They sat for a moment and then she placed her hand on his. “I will accede to your decision, but not without knowing why. This darkness of yours, tell me its cause and let me understand so we can part as friends.”
He finished the brandy. He sighed convulsively, as if he were about to sob, grasped her hand, and said, “When I finish, you will not wish even to be my friend. Nonetheless, I will tell you so that you will know you are blameless.”
He stood up and paced the floor as he spoke. “My youth was not a credit to my family. I was heedless and self-indulgent, a disappointment to my father in my studies and in my deportment. I was expelled from the medical school for drinking and gambling, but even that disgrace was not enough to change my ways. I persisted in dishonoring my father’s name.” He paused for a moment and when he continued, his voice was filled with shame. “There was a girl, Paquita, employed as a maid in my father’s house. I led her to believe that I was in love with her to lure her into my bed. After I had taken her virginity, I turned my back on her. A sordid story,” he said, glancing at her, “but not an uncommon one for men of my class. In this case, however, she became pregnant with my child. When she told me, I panicked. I persuaded her it was best for both of us that the child not be born. I believed that my medical training would be sufficient to—” He stopped in his tracks. He looked at her. “I have never told this to anyone. Only my father knew.”
Unsteadily, she said, “Please, continue.”
“I promised her if she let me abort the child I would marry her. I took her to a room at a filthy inn to perform the procedure. But I had vastly overestimated my ability. She began … to bleed. She bled and bled. I could not stop the hemorrhaging.”
“Oh, the poor child!”
“I ran through the streets covered with her blood to my father’s house. I told him everything and begged him to come and save her life. He came, but too late. She and the child—I could see it would have been a boy—were dead.”
He crumpled into a chair and picked up the brandy, drinking from the bottle. “My father sent me away that very night to Veracruz to await his instructions.”
“That is why you left the country?”
He nodded. “My father told Paquita’s parents the truth. He also told them he had sent me away and promised I would never return to México. He told me he would give me one final chance to make a man of myself before he cut me off completely. I went to Heidelberg, where I entered the medical school. After Heidelberg, I went to Paris to continue my studies. I lived like a monk, trying to atone for my crime. Trying to forget. But every morning I woke up in a foreign city, I remembered. I begged my father to let me return home, but as long as Paquita’s parents were alive, he felt obliged to keep his promise to them. It was only after they were both gone that he wrote me and told me to come home.” He glanced at her and then away. “I have discovered, however, there is no home for me. Like Cain, I am marked with guilt and I carry it everywhere I go, now and until the end of my life. As long as my father was alive, there was someone to shoulder part of my burden, but now that he is gone its weight crushes me.” He looked at her. “I am a murderer, Alicia. I killed that girl and our child. There is no way to atone but with my own life.”
A chill passed through her for, in that moment, she understood what she had interrupted. “You cannot atone for one murder by committing another.”
“Not murder, execution.”
“Your despair is selfish!” she exclaimed. “If you wish to atone, atone with your life, not your death. You have seen how this city overflows with the suffering of the poor, like the girl you betrayed. Sacrifice yourself to their need. Forget yourself by serving them.”
“Like you, Alicia? Is that what you do?”
She breathed deeply, then exhaled. “I once sat before the mirror and pitied myself, lamenting the husband I would never have, the children I would never give birth to. I took to heart the cruel barbs that were directed at me and the expressions of disgust and let them hurt me. Doing so changed nothing, not my face, not my life. So I chose to step away from the mirror and to pretend not to hear or see the contempt. It brought me relief, but it was not until I lost myself in the work of aiding others that I felt peace. I am not the little plaster saint I am made out to be by the women in my circle who pity me for being a disfigured old maid. I am merely trying, like everyone else, to find some happiness in this world. The path that most women take was closed to me, so I had to find another. The first object of my charity has always been myself.”
“I have never met anyone like you,” he said. “No one so kind, so filled with love. You’re right, Alicia, you’re not a plaster saint. You’re—”
“Stop, Miguel, please.” She looked away. “We are speaking of you. What you did to Paquita was monstrous. Your guilt is justified. But you are not unforgiveable. God forgives you, forgives you even your disbelief. I forgive you, Miguel. It does not matter if we never see each other again. Know that in my heart you are and will always be cherished.”
Overwhelmed by sentiment, she rushed from the room before he could reply. In the carriage, she pulled the curtains closed and wept, for the girl and the child Miguel had killed, for Miguel himself, and lastly for her own loss. She could not imagine, having told her his secret, he would want to see her again. She could only hope it was enough for his peace of mind that he had been able to tell her.
The following evening while she sat with her mother at tea, a maid entered with a calling card. It was Miguel’s.
“The gentleman asks if he may enter,” the maid said.
“Yes,” Alicia said. “We are happy to receive him.”
After Alicia left his rooms, Sarmiento had gone up to the roof of his building and stood there, revolver in his hand, smoking a cigarette. The sun set on the city’s roofscape, the parapets, domes, bell towers, terraces and balconies, water tanks, clotheslines, and commercial signs, and the shadows of night seeped softly through the ancient streets. The last cries of the street vendors were silenced by the explosion of bells from the city’s churches tolling the hour. He crushed the cigarette stub beneath his heel and made his decision. He emptied the revolver of its single round. Before Alicia had arrived, he had spun the loaded chamber twice, held it to his head and pulled the trigger. He had gone up to the roof uncertain of what he would do, but as he watched night coming on over his native city, he knew he had not come home, after so many years in exile, to kill himself. He considered what Alicia had told him. In her world of faith there was sin, forgiveness, and redemption overseen by a great, white-bearded monarch in the sky. In his world the sky was empty, the dead were without the power to forgive, and the living were lacerated by guilt for their offenses. He did not believe in atonement. But, he did believe, as his father had told him, that life needed purpose, not to store up treasures in heaven, but simply to justify the air he breathed. He would find his purpose. He would stay alive.
In the days that followed, Sarmiento considered his strengths, skills, and temperament and sought to match them to a project to which he could devote himself. One of the city’s newspapers put on its front page a long story about the various public health plagues that beset the burgeoning city—an inadequate sewage system, the ever-present threat of flooding, contamination of food and water, the abject slums of the pelados that were incubators of disease, public drunkenness, malnutrition. The article reminded him of the suffering he had seen as he had accompanied Alicia on her visits to her godchildren. He kept in mind her words to him to sacrifice himself to the poor, to those, like Paquita, dwelling in misery, exploited, or forgotten. He could not save her life, but perhaps he could save the lives of others.
He knew he could not do this work as Alicia did, engaging the poor as a friend and confidant. His was not a warm and generous nature. Like his father, he was a scientist and a rationalist, detached, intellectually curious, and methodical. He must find a position that would allow him to apply those talents. Through the offices of his senator uncle, Jorge Luis’s father, he secured a letter of introduction to the director of the Board of Public Health from Don Porfirio himself.
The director’s offices were located in the municipal palace on the west side of the Zócalo. Sarmiento entered a small anteroom where a male secretary took Díaz’s letter and disappeared into an office behind a door engraved with the words “Doctor Eduardo Liceaga, Director of Public Health.”
A few minutes later, the secretary came out and said, “The director wishes to know to what address your pay should be sent.”
“I beg your pardon,” Sarmiento said. “What about my duties?”
The secretary frowned, excused himself, and retreated to the director’s office. When he returned, he said, “Doctor Liceaga wishes to speak to you. Please go in.”
Liceaga’s office was both spacious and cluttered. There were glass-faced cabinets filled with specimen jars, bookshelves crammed with books and journals, tables laden with official-looking documents bearing the board’s insignia. Covering an entire wall were engineering drawings and photographs of the massive project currently under construction to drain the city of excess water and waste through a system of canals, dams, and tunnels. On another wall was a schemata of the city’s sewer system and a map of the city divided into eight numbered sectors. On the wall behind the director’s desk was a chromolithograph of Louis Pasteur and a framed copy of the first page of his 1876 address to the French Academy announcing his discovery of microbes as the source of contagious disease. A large window looked out upon the red-and-brown city and, rising serenely beyond it in the blue distance, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl—the tragic lovers who in Aztec myth had metamorphosed into volcanoes. Rows of mounted butterfly specimens hung on either side of the window, and there was a collection of butterfly nets in a corner.
At the desk sat a clean-shaven, sallow-skinned man of middle age; his dark hair was streaked with gray and he was wearing a white suit. He was scribbling in a journal with ink-stained fingers. Without looking up, he asked curtly, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I am Doctor Miguel Sarmiento,” he said. “I have come to offer my services in whatever manner may be useful to the promotion of public health.”
Liceaga paused in his writing and looked up. Behind thick pincenez spectacles, his dark eyes were skeptical. “I am on the faculty of the medical school and I have never seen you before in my life.”
“My degrees are from the University of Heidelberg and the Sorbonne. I have only been back in México for a year. My father was also a doctor and, like you, a member of the faculty of the school of medicine. Doctor Rodrigo Sarmiento.”
Liceaga touched a pensive finger to his lip, leaving a smear of ink. “Sarmiento? I knew him slightly, though he had left the faculty long before I arrived. He was your father? I am told he was a good doctor although his interests veered more toward the political than the scientific. I understand he died recently.”
“Yes,” Sarmiento said.
“My condolences. Sit down.”
“I will, sir, if you will explain to me how I have offended you.”
Liceaga handed him the unsealed letter from Díaz. Sarmiento read what the old man had written: “Put the bearer of this note on your payroll. Díaz.”
“The payroll of every department in this building is padded with phantom workers,” Liceaga said. “Naturally I assumed that you were another one of the president’s friends in need of an income.”
“No, Doctor, I assure you that I am a trained medical scientist.”
“Tell me, Doctor,” Liceaga said, leaning back in his swivel chair, “do you subscribe to the miasmatic theory of contagious disease?”
“Of course not. Pasteur and Koch have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that disease is caused by microbes, and while some may be airborne, it is not the air itself, however much it stinks, that makes people sick. The miasmatic theory is simply a species of spontaneous generation, which,” he said, indicating the framed page of Pasteur’s speech, “that document incontrovertibly discredited.”
Liceaga’s smile erased all traces of severity and he beamed benignly at Sarmiento. “Exactly so, Doctor! And yet you would be surprised at how members of our profession here in the city cling to the belief that illness is caused by vapors in the air. Vapors! Or who still believe that health is a matter of keeping in balance the four humors. Some of the old physicians still bleed their patients! As if medical science had stopped with Galen.”
“Rest assured, Doctor, I do not subscribe to the view that the basic constituents of the human body are black and yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.”
“Excellent,” he said. “I am sorry to have misjudged you, Doctor.” He dropped his voice. “We try to do our work here unfettered by the demands of politics. That is not always possible.”
“I have no interest in politics,” Sarmiento said.
“I am glad to hear it. Let me tell you about our work.” He gestured toward the window with its serene view of the volcanoes. “We live, sir, in one of the loveliest cities on the planet and one of the unhealthiest. One could not have designed a worse location for a metropolis than the Anáhuac Valley,” he continued, almost gleefully. “Why, we are not even a true valley but a closed basin walled off by mountains and volcanoes. The city is a sinkhole at the lowest point of the basin surrounded by lakes and constructed on swampy landfill. Water, my boy! There is our curse. There is both too much and too little of it.”
Sarmiento found himself smiling, both amused and engrossed by what was clearly a lecture-hall performance for Liceaga’s medical students.
“The city sits on the corpse of the lake on which the aborigines built their capital. When the rains come the old lake churns beneath us like distended guts while our three nearest lakes—Texcoco, Chalco, and Xochimilco—pour their poisonous overflow into the canals and flood the city. Meanwhile, our ancient and inadequate sewage system backs up and contaminates our drinking water. The result is disease and death.”
“Surely the new drainage system will alleviate some of these problems,” Sarmiento offered.
“Yes, but without a modern network of sewers to flush wastes into that system the city will continue to stew in its own filth,” Liceaga replied. “Part of my commission is to persuade the government to undertake that project. And of course, there is the human element.”
“What is the human element, Doctor?”
“In the last thirty years, the city’s population has increased by more than a third, largely through the arrival of country folk looking for work. Unfortunately, most of these immigrants belong to the ignorant, benighted, and stubborn race of Indians. They cling to their filthy habits and customs, living like animals in tenements that have never seen the disinfectant of sunlight or soap. They empty their bowels and bladders in the streets, fill rain gutters with their wastes, and anoint their sick children with holy oil instead of bathing them occasionally. They are the human equivalent of our sewers, and like our sewers, they must be flushed out and cleaned.”
“The Indians cannot be rebuilt like the sewer system,” Sarmiento ventured.
“No, unfortunately that is not an option.” He opened a silver case on his desk and removed a cigarette, fixed it in an ivory holder, and lit it. “I and other public health advocates have long urged the government to encourage European immigration, like the North Americans and the Argentines. But we are not a port city like New York or Buenos Aires and so remain inaccessible to that better class of immigrant. Our immigration is entirely internal and from the dregs of our population. Cigarette?”
“No thank you,” he said.
“We cannot rebuild our Indians,” Liceaga said, “but we can try to transform them.”
“How will you do that?”
Liceaga sprang from his desk and went to the map of the city on the wall. “As you can see from this map, the Board of Public Health has divided the city into eight sectors. In each sector there will be a head sanitation inspector, answerable to me alone. His job will be to investigate the sources and causes of diseases and to develop a plan to eradicate them. I have the government’s full backing to use whatever means are necessary to put those plans into effect, including the judicious use of force.”
“How can people be forced to be healthy?” Sarmiento wondered.
“They cannot, of course, but they can be quarantined and vaccinated if necessary to prevent the spread of contagious disease. Their houses can be fumigated and their diseased possessions destroyed. Of course, we would not resort to force without first attempting to educate them.”
“I am glad to hear that,” Sarmiento said.
Liceaga pursed his lips. “I realize some of these measures may sound extreme, Doctor, but we are in a war against disease and in that war, every weapon must be deployed.”
“Of course.”
“If you will join us in this battle, Doctor, I would like to appoint you to be the sanitation inspector for the second district. Here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the map.
Sarmiento went to the wall and examined the map. The second sector was comprised of neighborhoods that stretched from the edge of the Zócalo south and east to the fetid shores of Lake Texcoco. “I am not familiar with these neighborhoods,” he said.
“They are some of the city’s worst because they border Texcoco,” Liceaga explained. “They are subject to frequent epidemics of typhus, to flooding, and they have the highest rate of infant mortality in the entire valley. It will not be an easy commission, Doctor. But you seem young and vigorous and idealistic. The perfect candidate. Will you accept the post?”
Sarmiento did not hesitate. “I would be honored.”
The March sun cast its placid warmth in the garden of the Gaviláns, where the air smelled of rose geraniums. Beyond the walls came the muffled cries of street vendors singing out their wares: “Mantequilla! Mantequilla! ” “Carbón, señores, carbón! ” “Gorditas de horna caliente! ” “Caramelos de esperma! Bocadillos de coco!” The vendors shrilled their wares as if the lard, coal, tortillas, or candies they were selling were the last of their kind. Their cries, as they blended together, were like bird calls, as if the city were a gigantic aviary. In the garden, actual birds sang from the fruit trees and hopped along the ground looking for grubs. Alicia and Sarmiento sat in the mirador transfixed by the warmth of the sun, the cascade of human and bird song, the geraniums’ mingled fragrance of cinnamon and attar of rose.
“I am very glad you accepted the director’s commission,” Alicia said. “I know the parish of San Francisco Tlaloc in your district. The pastor—Padre Cáceres—is a kind man and devoted to his people.”
“I do not think I will have reason to acquaint myself with the local clergy,” he said. “Nor do I imagine they would welcome a man of science.”
“Why do you say that, Miguel?”
“The church has been the enemy of science since the Vatican persecuted Galileo for pointing out the earth orbits the sun and not the other way around.”
“There is more to the church than the Vatican,” she replied. “There are the parish priests, like Padre Cáceres, who try, simply, to apply Christ’s message of love in their everyday work. They would welcome your willingness to alleviate the suffering of the poor by whatever methods.”
“If all Catholics were like you, my dear, the church would have a better reputation among the educated than it does.”
“Oh, Miguel, life is too short, and there is too much to do, for me to concern myself with the church’s reputation. I do what I can to be faithful to Christ’s admonition to love God and to love my neighbor. Nothing else matters.”
“To love God,” he repeated. “How you can love a phantom?”
“Because he is not a phantom to me. I perceive him in the scent of the flowers and the sun’s warmth on my face. Do you truly not feel at this moment a benign and loving presence?”
“Only yours,” he said. “Alicia, I have something to ask you.”
She drew a quick breath. “Miguel …”
He had gone to his knees and he clasped her hands in his. “Please, Alicia, would you do me the great honor of becoming my wife?”
“Before I can answer your proposal, there is something I must tell you about myself.” She caressed his face. “Please, sit. Your knees will wear out before I finish.”
He got up and sat beside her. “There is nothing you can say that will dissuade me.”
She gave a brief, low laugh. “I hope not! But, that is for you to decide after you hear me.” She sighed and began. “Many years ago, in this garden …”
When she finished telling him about Anselmo, the loss of her virginity, and her child, Sarmiento sat quietly breathing in and out, staring ahead, and she thought, with a pang of grief, that he could be dissuaded after all.
“Your lost child, my lost child,” he murmured, as if to himself. “Do you see the symmetry in our stories, Alicia? Each is half of the other’s. We need each other to complete them. To give each other a different and a happier ending. Will you marry me?”
He fell again to his knees, but this time he buried his head in her lap. He wept. She stroked his sun-warmed, thick hair and wondered, for whom did he weep? For his sin in taking the lives of the girl, Paquita, and their child? Or for the possibility of redemption? Yes, that was it, Alicia thought. He would marry her as an act of restitution. Not out of love. He had told her he admired her, respected her, felt humbled in her presence, but he had never said he loved her. Did she love him? Her hand hesitated and she threaded her fingers though his hair. Not as she had loved Anselmo, in whose body she had wished to be merged, one heart beating, forever and forever. No, what she felt toward Miguel was compassion and the desire to relieve his pain, as one would soothe a child who awakens in the night afraid of the dark.
He raised his head to her, his face streaked with tears. “Please, marry me.”
She nodded. “Yes, Miguel,” she said. “Gladly. I accept your proposal. I will be your wife.”