From the shaded corridor where she embroidered a tiny smock for Reina’s baby, Alicia half listened to the murmured conversation between her husband and a man with a large goiter on his neck. Reina, sitting beside her, clumsily attempted to imitate Alicia’s needlework. She pricked herself and cried out, “Fuck!” She quickly added, “Forgive me, Doña. My fingers are so clumsy, not quick like yours.”
Alicia took the cloth from the girl and examined it. “This is good work, Reina. When I first began to learn to chain stitch I stuck my fingers all the time. I can’t tell you how much cloth I ruined by bleeding on it. It’s simply a matter of practice and patience.”
She returned the cloth to the girl, who said, “Sometimes I have patience and sometimes I want to jump out of my skin.” She touched the little swell in her stomach. “Mamá says that’s the baby.”
“I’m sure your mother is right.”
“You have no children, Doña?”
“No, my dear.”
“But you are so old,” the girl said. “I thought you would have many sons and daughters.”
Alicia smiled. In the months that she had been coming to San Francisco Tlalco she had learned it was a sign of acceptance when the people of the neighborhood dispensed with extraneous gentility and spoke their minds. And to the girl, who was no more than fifteen, she realized she must seem ancient.
“I have just married,” Alicia said. “My husband and I have not yet had time to have children.”
The girl took up her sewing and said, “The doctor is much nicer now that he is married to you.”
Alicia lifted her head from her own sewing and looked down the corridor into the room Miguel used as his clinic. His patient stood motionlessly as Miguel felt his neck. Palpitation, she thought, using the term he had taught her. “Diagnosis is an art, Alicia,” he had explained, “and the doctor has four tools: inspection, palpitation, percussion, and auscultation. That is, we look, feel, thump, and listen.” He had shaken his head in disbelief when she told him that her own childhood doctor, Don Ignacio, had never laid a finger on her except to briefly take her pulse.
“Then how did he diagnose and treat you?”
“My mother told him where my pain was and he gave her medicine for me. If I was truly ill, he bled me.”
He shook his head. “That’s not medicine. It’s witchcraft.”
He was distressed to discover that the inhabitants of San Francisco Tlalco shared Don Ignacio’s ideas of professional propriety. He returned home from his first clinics with stories of the man who assaulted him when he thumped his chest to listen to his lungs, the woman who ran off at the sight of his stethoscope thinking it was made of snakes, and the little boy who clamped his teeth on the thermometer and ended up with a mouthful of mercury that nearly poisoned him. He complained that many of his patients spoke Nahuatl and that Padre Cáceres was too busy to translate for him. “Those people are impossible!” he concluded.
“Let me come with you,” she said. “I speak some Nahuatl and I know many of the people in the parish, and if you have your wife with you they may be less inclined to assault you.”
He resisted, but when he came home with a blackened eye given to him by the husband of a pregnant woman after he had touched her belly, he agreed.
“However,” he said, “I insist on teaching you some basic principles of anatomy and physiology so that you will understand what I am doing.” He smiled. “I need to knock Don Nacho out of your head.”
Her classroom was the room in their suite at the palace that he had converted into his office and laboratory, much to her mother’s horror. Miguel had reluctantly acceded to La Niña’s insistence that they live with her after their marriage. “I am an old woman,” she said. “You can’t leave me to die alone in this big house.” But after he moved his medical equipment into their apartment, she complained, “This is a family residence, not a tradesman’s place of business.” Only when he threatened to take Alicia and move did La Niña withdraw her objection.
For Alicia, however, the hours they spent in his office, where he instructed her in the body and its workings, were among the happiest of her marriage. He was a patient and kind teacher and she discovered in herself a thirst for knowledge. More than that, though, an intimacy arose between them that dispelled the awkwardness of having to play the roles of husband and wife and allowed them to resume their friendship, which had always been the strongest bond between them. Using his charts and models, he taught her the structure and parts of the body from skin to cells, explained the digestive and circulatory systems, and showed her a drop of his own blood beneath the microscope. He explained to her the causes and symptoms of various diseases and their treatments.
“Was this taught to you in the same way you teach me?” she asked.
“Ah, well, no,” he said. “I attended many hours of lectures, of course, but the deeper understanding of disease came from the clinicals where we learned to match symptoms to causes by observing sickness in our patients and then studying their bodies after they died.”
“You opened the bodies of the dead?” she asked, shocked.
He nodded. “We examined organs and tissues for disease. Only in that way could we confirm that our diagnoses were correct.” Her distress must have been evident because he added, “Alicia, this is how medicine must proceed for new knowledge to arise.”
She did not reply but thought that Miguel was virtually a different species than white-whiskered Don Ignacio.
One afternoon, as they examined a beautiful papier-mâché model of the brain, and he explained how its folds and convolutions contained the whole of human personality, she asked, “But in which part does the soul reside?”
“My dear,” he said. “You know my views on that subject. Does this study of the body in all of its gross materiality shake your faith at all?”
She shook her head. “Not at all, Miguel! The wonders of the body you have shown me only deepen my belief because who could have made these ingenious things but God?”
A little boy of four or five in a calico shirt and droopy drawers ran up to Alicia and said, “Feita, the doctor wants you.”
“Luis!” Reina scolded. “You must call her Doña Alicia.”
“It’s all right, Reina,” she said. “He only repeats in innocence what others say about me.”
“I have never called you la fea,” Reina said. “To me you are beautiful.”
Alicia smiled and patted the girl’s head as she rose to go to her husband. She knew the people in the parish called her la fea carinosa—the kind but ugly woman—just as they called Miguel el guapo doctor—the handsome doctor. But while his nickname was simply descriptive, hers, she understood, was affectionate and, softened by the diminutive feita, intended as an endearment, and she held it as such.
Miguel had carefully chosen the room he used as his clinic from all the other empty rooms that lined the garden and had been storerooms and priestly cells when the church was in its prime. This room, he explained to her, was sheltered from the wind and dust and had the largest window to let in the light. He had personally supervised its cleaning and even now the room smelled of carbolic acid, which, he had told Alicia, killed the tiny microbes that were invisible to the eye and the carriers of all disease. Try as she might, she could not help but picture these microbes as diabolitos—tiny demons—but she refrained from mentioning this to Miguel.
He was with a young girl—fifteen or sixteen, like Reina—who held in her arms a lace-wrapped bundle.
“Miguel, you wanted me?” she asked.
“The girl only speaks Nahuatl. Will you ask her about the baby?”
Alicia turned to the girl and asked, “What happened to your child, dear?” and then translated her answer. “She says her baby stopped crying two days ago. She doesn’t know what’s wrong. She begs for your help.”
“Let me see the child,” he said, and she translated his response.
She watched as the girl carefully unwrapped the lace coverings—which she realized were baptismal garments—to reveal the wizened, lifeless features of an infant. The girl fell to her knees and lifted the child above her head, presented Miguel with a tiny corpse—the skin of its fingers gray beneath delicate fingernails—and murmured, “Give my baby breath.”
Alicia caught her gasp before it could escape her lips and glanced at Miguel, whose face showed as much distress as he allowed himself with a patient.
“Please tell her to stand up,” he said.
Alicia addressed the girl gently and she rose from her knees. Miguel lowered his head and put his ear to the infant’s face and then took its pulse.
“It’s dead,” he replied. “Tell her to bury it.”
Alicia translated his response with soft words of sorrow and sympathy. Silently, the girl rewrapped the corpse in lace and slipped out of the room.
“I was harsh. I’m sorry,” he said when she had left.
“It was shocking.”
“Shock is a luxury of laymen,” he said. “Doctors are not permitted to be shocked, but it was because it was an infant and it called to mind …” He looked at her. “Well, you know what it called to my mind.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. I will go into the church and pray for her and her baby. Won’t you come and sit with me and rest?”
He shook his head. “I have to find Cáceres. There’s been an outbreak of smallpox in La Bolsa, and we are going out to try to persuade the local people to be vaccinated against the disease. It hasn’t been easy. Their witchdoctors have been telling them that I want to infect them with poison.”
She knew that what he called witchdoctors were the local curanderos who doctored with herbs and magic and who resented his presence because he charged nothing for his services.
“I could come,” she said. “I could talk to the people.”
“No, the priest and I have our little show where I inject him with saline to show that no harm will come from the vaccine. Poor Cáceres is beginning to look like a pincushion.” He added abruptly, as if startled by the thought, “You could have been vaccinated. Why weren’t you?”
“Oh, my parents would never have allowed Don Ignacio to take the liberty of injecting anything into my body,” she said. “It was not the custom.”
“Custom is the enemy of progress,” he said. “Especially in our poor benighted México. When you pray for that child, pray also for an end to the ignorance that keeps our people enslaved to custom.”
“Miguel, what was wrong with the man with the lump on his throat?”
“It’s a problem with his thyroid,” he replied. “It’s a butterfly-shaped organ at the base of your throat. It makes a secretion, a kind of fluid called a hormone that helps control the body’s metabolism, the rate that we burn the calories we extract from our food, like coal for a furnace. Sometimes the thyroid becomes diseased and makes too much of the hormone or not enough and so there is too much heat or not enough. I do not know from which this man suffers, but the goiter is interfering with his sleep and breathing and ability to swallow. I will have to cut it out.”
“Is that dangerous?”
“No, I think I can perform the surgery here. But I may need your help.”
She paled at the thought of it. She had helped him when he had had to extract a rotten tooth even though the sight of blood made her dizzy and the patient’s pain was hard to bear, but then she observed how much better the patient felt afterward. Cutting into the flesh was something different, though.
“Will there be much blood?”
He grinned at her. “Not if I do it correctly. I must go. Cáceres and I will be on foot so you take the carriage home. Leave before dusk. These streets are not safe for you after the sun sets.” He kissed her cheek. “Good-bye, my dear.”
The interior of the church of San Francisco Tlalco was suffused with the mellow glow of Argand lamps and votive candles and scented with copal, the ancient incense of the Aztecs. She never entered it without being aware, more than in any other church, that its form was that of a ship, the nave like a keel surrounded by thick walls and a vaulted roof. For here, she felt, was a refuge from the roiling waves of the city that lay just beyond the church’s heavy wooden doors. Padre Cáceres had told her the church was founded by Franciscans when the parish was still a village outside the city limits. Over the centuries, the church had ministered to the descendants of those first converts and they had cared for it lovingly. Generations of neighborhood artisans had kept fresh the floral pattern of intertwining roses and marigolds painted on the humble plaster walls—the roses for Mary and the marigolds for Tonatzin, the mother goddess of the Aztecs. When Padre Cáceres had explained this to her, she asked whether it was not heretical to permit the symbols of the pagan religion to persist in a Christian church. He replied, “Tonatzin was a gentle goddess who did not demand human sacrifice but loved the humble common people. Mary has taken many forms, daughter, and who is to say that she did not come to the Indians in the form of Tonatzin even before her son arrived on these shores?”
Above the altar was a gilded retablo with five niches that held plaster statues of the patrons of the church. In the center was Jesus, not agonized on the cross but attired in simple linen robes with his arms outstretched to embrace his people. Above him, in the niches to the right and the left were two representations of his mother: Mary as La Dolorosa, the Mother of Sorrows, and Mary as the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the two niches beneath Jesus were Saint Francis and Saint Clare.
Alicia loved that three of the five figures were female. It seemed to her that their femininity permeated the manner of worship in the church. The harsh emphasis on sinfulness that she heard elsewhere in the city’s churches was absent in Padre Cáceres’s homilies. Instead, he spoke of fallibility and forgiveness and the passionate, unchanging and ever-present love of Jesus for his people whatever they did and in whatever circumstances they found themselves. At the end of each Mass, before the final blessing, he always reminded them that while Moses had given the Hebrews ten commandments, Jesus had promulgated only two: “Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. Children, that is the whole of the Gospel.”
As she had predicted to Miguel, Alicia’s sisters were horrified that she had chosen to marry in a church in the slums of the city. Her mother, surprisingly, accepted her decision with equanimity. “San Francisco Tlalco is a venerable church,” La Niña said, overriding Nilda’s fierce protests. “Your ancestors undoubtedly contributed money toward its construction. Of course your sister should marry there if she likes.”
“Well, I for one will not risk being robbed in the streets or infested with lice in the church,” Nilda said. “I will not come.”
La Niña fixed her with a basilisk look and said coldly, “You will come. You will all come.”
On the evening of the wedding, the small church was filled with la gente de sangre, the bluebloods, who knelt in their French silks and English wools on the worn tiles that usually received the scabby knees of the poor. Outside, a line of police officers formed a cordon between the gleaming carriages of the guests and gawkers from the barrio who had never seen such a display of polished wood and beribboned horses. Inside, waiting for the ceremony to begin, Alicia agonized over her decision to wear white. Her mother had insisted, rejecting her scruples.
“Mother, how can I appear before the altar of the Lord in the white of virginity when he knows I am not a virgin?”
La Niña fanned herself with a mother-of-pearl fan she had inherited from her mother and replied, “Phew! God is a gentleman. He will keep your secret.”
“But Miguel also knows.”
“Miguel is even more of a gentleman than God. Of course you will be wed in white. We will not have a scandal.” She snapped shut the fan. “Besides, Daughter, do you really believe you are the first lady to miraculously recover her virginity on her wedding day? At least there won’t be men in the church laughing into their hands as you walk down the aisle.”
The gown she had chosen as her wedding dress was ivory silk damask with narrow sleeves and a high neck. The hem and sleeves were trimmed in lace that matched the lace jabot. She planned to wear a bustle but not a train. Her mantilla was to be fixed to her hair with a crown of white roses from the palace’s garden.
Her mother and her sisters Eulalia and Leticia went with her to her fitting. When Eulalia saw the dress, she laughed. “Alicia, dearest, are you marrying Jesus? It’s so modest. You have a lovely neck and shoulders and breasts. Why do you hide them under all this fabric?”
“They are for my husband to see, not the world.”
Leticia said, “The dress is lovely, but what jewels will you wear with it?”
“None,” Alicia replied. “It isn’t proper to make a show of wealth in that humble church.”
“Nonsense,” said La Niña. “You will wear the diamond necklace and bracelets, and must you wear a crown of flowers when we have perfectly good tiaras gathering dust in the vaults of Saturino’s bank?”
“Mother’s right,” Leticia said. “You are no ordinary woman, Alicia. Why pretend to be?”
“Because I want to be,” she said. “An ordinary woman with a husband and children.”
“Well, darling,” Eulalia said, “on the stroke of midnight after your wedding you can become La Cenicienta again, but until then you must be the princess in the glass slippers. Your wicked sisters insist.”
Alicia laughed. “Very well, wicked sisters, I give up. You may dress me as if I were a doll, but I draw the line at glass slippers.”
Eulalia’s French dressmaker replaced the long sleeves with short puffed ones, and dropped the neckline, which she bordered with white rosettes adorned with pearls. She replaced Alicia’s short lace mantilla with a floor-length one made of silk tulle. It was in this gown and veil, ablaze with diamonds and a pearl-encrusted tiara of yellow gold that had belonged to her great-grandmother, that she married Miguel. At the dinner afterward at the Casino Español, he murmured, “You look like a queen, Alicia. I feel completely unworthy of you.”
“This was my sisters’ and my mother’s doing,” she said. “At midnight I revert to La Cenicienta.”
“You have never been La Cenicienta,” he replied and kissed her.
It was at that point, she remembered, that his cousin Jorge Luis had risen drunkenly from his seat at the table, knocking over his chair, and insisted on declaiming a poem he had written for the bride and groom. She recalled it was filled with images of swans and figures from Greek mythology, rambling and pointless, and that at the end he compared himself—the poet—to Narcissus who fell in love with his own image and wasted away waiting for his love to be reciprocated. He began to sob. Miguel excused himself and led him away. When he returned, she asked, “Is your cousin going to be all right?”
“He’s drunk. I put him to sleep in the library. He’ll be fine. I apologize for this disruption. He fancies himself a poet, but, as you heard, his aspirations are perhaps greater than his ability.”
“I’m sure he meant well,” she said.
At the end of the night, they returned to the palace, to their apartment, which was now also furnished with Miguel’s few possessions. A maid undressed her and she put on the chiffon negligee that was part of her trousseau. She went into the bedroom, where the servants had lit lamps and candles and filled vases with roses. Miguel was already in the big four-poster canopy bed. He reposed on a pile of pillows. The lamp-light shone on his naked chest.
“Are you nervous?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, approaching him. “For many reasons.”
He kissed her hand. “I think I know all of them and I assure you, my dear, I will not fail to treasure you in every way. Come to bed.”
She went around the room, extinguishing lights, until the darkness was impermeable. She slipped off her gown and into bed, where the shock of his body—naked, muscled, hairy, burning—made her gasp. His hands stroked her body, and she was glad that the disease that had pitted her face had concentrated its venom there. He leaned in to kiss her breasts, touch her nipples with the tip of his tongue as his fingers delicately opened her.
“Your body is lovely,” he murmured.
Encouraged, she touched him, running her hand across the plated muscle of his chest and stomach with its ridges and contours, down through the rough hairs until she held his rod in her hand, hard and heavy and hot.
“Ah,” he said. “Ah. Yes, take it in your hand and stroke it, up and down, like this.”
He folded his big hand around hers and he moved it up and down. She felt a drop of fluid drip from the head of his rod.
“And now you,” he said. He maneuvered them so that his head was between her legs and she could feel his breath as his tongue touched the tip of her opening and then plunged inside. Her body trilled with pleasure.
“What … what is that?” she managed to murmur.
“I love this taste,” he said. “This taste of woman. Does it please you, Alicia?”
“Oh, yes, Miguel.”
After a few minutes of his tongue moving inside of her, she felt herself flooded with sensations that were like an amalgamation of every good thing she had ever touched, tasted, or smelled, but more intense because its source was not outside of her, but within. And in the midst of it, suffused with bliss, she saw Anselmo’s face above hers, his features tightened with the joy of release. But it was Miguel’s body she felt pressing against her, the hair of his chest wiry against her breasts.
He entered her where she was still damp with his saliva and her own wetness. He pushed harder until he was completely encased in her flesh and he groaned with pleasure. His mouth grazed her nipples until they were hard buds that leaked a physical delight that coursed through her body, blunting the pain she felt from his penetrations. As he began to move, the pain subsided. His strokes became deeper and faster; she felt the sweat pour from his chest, and then he reared up and with a shudder he thrust one final time, pressed his lips together, and released his seed with an explosive breath.
And then it was over. He tumbled to her side, his breath hard and rapid.
She lay on her side and he pressed against her. “Thank you,” he murmured.
Afterward, long after he was asleep, she lay awake. She could not deny her body’s responsiveness to his touch, but this was different than it had been with Anselmo. Theirs had been a playful, mutual exploration of each other’s body: sweet, funny kisses; licks and nibbles; and only then the shattering pleasure of release. By contrast, Miguel had performed upon her, as if she were a passive instrument for his need. He had not been unkind or inattentive. Indeed, he had been more attentive than she, with her scarred face, had a right to expect. But it had felt as if it were—she searched for the word—a duty, an obligation on his part. He had not once kissed her face during the act, nor even touched it. Was this, then, the only way he could bear the intimacy of the marriage bed? Tears streamed from her eyes, and she felt an old pang of self-pity for her condition that she thought she had rid herself of long ago. This once, she thought, she would let the tears flow, the sorrow well in her heart, but never again. For she was married, and to a good man, and if his revulsion was the price she must pay for her good fortune, she must humble herself and pay it.
A few nights later, she was awakened by the porter Andres tapping at the door and calling her name. She rose in the darkness, dressed in her robe, and greeted him at the door. The porter stood with a lamp in his hand and a worried expression on his face.
“Doña, the doctor’s cousin is here and he demands to see him.”
“Jorge Luis?” she said. “Where is he?”
“In the sala,” he said.
“Take me to him.”
She followed the porter into the sitting room, where she found Jorge Luis, disheveled and soaked with sweat, pacing the Persian carpet, his cigarette dropping ash and embers into it. He stopped short when he saw her, but his body trembled.
“Jorge Luis, what has happened?” she asked.
“I need to see Miguel, right away, please.”
“But—”
“Please,” he shrieked. “I need my cousin. Now.”
“Of course,” she said.
She took the lamp from the porter, dismissed him, and walked back to the bedroom, where she awakened Miguel and told him what had happened.
“I will see to him,” Miguel said, dressing. “Go back to sleep.”
She lay awake anxiously and had only just fallen asleep when she felt Miguel gently shaking her shoulder and saying her name.
“Miguel?”
“Is there money in the house?”
She sat up. “Money? Yes, of course, the household accounts. Why?”
“I need it,” he said. “And whatever other money there is. Can you gather it up for me quickly?”
“For Jorge Luis?”
“He must leave the city tonight. I will tell you everything later. But now, we have to act quickly.”
Alicia woke the majordomo and had him give her all the money in the strongbox. She brought the money to the sala, where the two men sat close together, heads bent in feverish but quiet conversation.
“This is everything,” she said.
Miguel took the heavy purse, thanked her, and told her to go back to their room. Jorge Luis did not look up at her. She stepped outside the room but lingered just beyond the doorway and listened.
“Send a telegram when you have reached Veracruz to let me know you have arrived safely,” Miguel said. “Book passage on the first ship out. Send word when you arrive at Le Havre. I will wire you funds. Don’t look so frightened, Jorge Luis. You always wanted to see Paris. Now you will.”
The younger man began to sob. “I’ve ruined my life,” he said. “Disgraced my family. If I had honor left I would shoot myself, but I am too much a coward even for that.”
“Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Go now and hurry.”
“If the police come here …”
“I will take care of that. Go.”
She hurried down the hall back into their bedroom. A few minutes later, Miguel entered the room, undressed, and got into their bed.
“If the police come tomorrow,” he said, “and ask if my cousin was here, you will tell them no. Please make sure any servant who saw him provides the police with the same answer.”
“Of course,” she said. “Can you tell me what has happened?”
He was quiet for a moment. “My dear, what Jorge Luis has done is not fit for your ears.”
“Did he kill someone?”
“No,” Miguel said. “He is not a murderer. It is something worse.”
“Worse than murder? But—”
At that moment, Miguel kissed her with a passion that shocked her out of her questions. He undressed her, and for the first time while he made love to her, he stroked and kissed her face. He locked his eyes on her eyes and with her name on his lips, he emptied himself into her. She later calculated that this was the night José had been conceived.
The police arrived the following afternoon. Not the street officers with their little capes and billy clubs who patrolled the intersections from doorways of pulquerías but two plain-clothed, hard-faced officers of la seguridad, Don Porfirio’s private police. They interrogated her and Miguel together and then dismissed her. As she had the previous night, she listened from just outside the room. Their tone, respectful while she was in the room, now became menacing.
“Do you know why we are looking for your cousin?”
“Obviously I do not,” Miguel replied.
“Your cousin is a sodomite. Did you know that?”
“That’s absurd,” Miguel said. “He is a perfectly normal man.”
“Normal? We broke up a little party last night that your cousin was attending with his friends. All men, but half of them were dressed up like women. There were things going on in the bedrooms that would make you puke.”
“I know nothing about this,” Miguel said.
“You understand, Sarmiento, that if you lie to us you become an accomplice in his infamy?” one of them said.
“An accomplice to sodomy,” the second added. “The crime against nature.”
“Gentlemen,” Miguel replied, “I know very little of that practice, but I am certain that one cannot be an accomplice without also being a participant, and I can assure you I was not.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” the first officer snapped. “This is a matter of national security. If we find out you’re protecting your cousin, no one’s going to be able to help you, not the old lady who lives here or your uncle.”
“Since when is sodomy a matter of national security?”
She heard the floor creak as they pushed back their chairs. “We’re going to continue with our investigation,” one of them said. “If it brings us back to you, our next conversation will be in Belem.”
She hid in an alcove until they were gone and then went to Miguel and again asked him what Jorge Luis had done. He said, “The less you know the better. We will not speak of this again.”
But she could not let it go. When she next saw Padre Cáceres, she asked him to confess her. After she confessed to having listened in on her husband’s private conversations, she asked, “Padre, what is sodomy?”
She could feel his shock from behind the grille of the confessional.
“Why do you ask, Doña?”
“It was the subject of the conversation between my husband and … those to whom he was speaking. They told him that someone he knows is a ‘sodomite.’ I recalled the story of Sodom in scripture and I reread it, but I do not understand the meaning of the word when applied to my husband’s … acquaintance.”
“This is not a subject fit for the ears of a Christian woman.”
“Padre, if it is in the Bible, then it is a subject for Christian women, if for no other reason than that I may take precautions to avoid whatever this terrible vice is.”
“Women are physically incapable of this vice,” he said.
“You will not tell me what it is.”
“I will not,” he said sternly. “I will, however, admonish you not to speak of this again to anyone as part of your penance for violating your husband’s privacy. Do you understand me, Daughter?”
“Yes, Padre,” she said.
Later, she again read the story of Lot and her eye fell on the phrase used by the men of Sodom who demanded that Lot bring forth the angels he was sheltering in his house “so that we may know them,” and Lot’s offer of his two virgin daughters to the crowd in response. She remembered the police officer’s description of the party—all men, but half dressed as women—and his allusion to sickening acts in the bedrooms. From these fragments, she pieced together to her satisfaction an understanding of the crime Jorge Luis had committed. In some way he had either used another man as men use women or had allowed himself to be used in that manner. Her first response was not disgust so much as curiosity. How could this be? Surreptitiously, she consulted Miguel’s anatomy texts examining the male body for some clue as to how two men might commit acts on each other that were similar to acts between a man and a woman. Eventually, however, she discovered her answer not in Miguel’s texts but in her own forgotten experience. For she remembered now that the explorations that she and Anselmo had undertaken of each other’s bodies went far beyond the bounds of propriety.
They were children, wild and curious and fearless and determined to give each other joy. She had discovered that nothing made him whimper with pleasure as much as when she took his private parts into her mouth. She remembered, too, that in his anxiety to preserve her virginity he had tried to penetrate her—and here, her face went beet-red with the memory—through her anus, but the pain was so great she had quickly demanded that he stop. Could these experimental gropings of impassioned children be the “crime against nature” that Jorge Luis had committed and for which he had had to leave México? It was too absurd and yet she could reach no other conclusion. The thought of two men engaged in these acts was repellent. Certainly God had not intended for men to abuse their bodies in that manner any more than he had intended them to become drunkards or gluttons. Nonetheless, she could not imagine any hierarchy of sin in which such acts could be deemed worse than murder. She was also surprised that her rationalist, non-believing husband would find common cause with a priest about the gravity of this indiscretion. She decided their extreme repulsion must arise from some deeper cause that was peculiarly male and, therefore, quite outside her understanding. Jorge Luis’s banishment seemed to her an injustice and she pitied him his fate and prayed for his well-being and eventual safe return. As the days passed, and her pregnancy began to show, the incident faded.
That night, after Jorge Luis had gone, and after he had made love to his wife, Sarmiento lay awake for a long time, attempting to make sense of the night’s events and worrying about their consequences. He realized that his sudden and fierce desire for Alicia had been, in part, a reaction to the repulsion he had felt at Jorge Luis’s revelations about his own sexual irregularity. The thought of Jorge Luis’s squalid practices, however, was not the cause of the anxiety that kept him awake. What kept him awake was the story his cousin had told him—that the police had raided a gathering of pedes—Sarmiento used the French word because he could think of no Spanish equivalent—at which one of the guests was Don Ignacio de la Torre, son-in-law of the president of the Republic. Jorge Luis had escaped by climbing out of a window and fleeing across the roofs of the city, but, he confessed, sobbing, he was well known in that circle and it was simply a matter of time before the police forced his name out of one of the apprehended men.
“The police will do whatever they have to do to protect Nacho de la Torre,” he told Sarmiento. “They will throw the rest of us in prison or even kill us.”
“Listen, Jorge Luis, when I was a student in Paris I was taken to pede clubs simply as an anthropological experience. Could de la Torre’s visit not be excused in the same way?”
“To see the creatures in the zoo, you mean?” Jorge Luis said bitterly. “No, Miguel. He was no tourist. Don Nacho is a habitué of our little sect. He has had many lovers among us.”
Sarmiento swallowed his distaste. “Your father is a senator. Surely that gives you some protection.”
“My father’s position is a sinecure. He has no power to interfere with police investigations and once this gets out, he will be ruined. I have to leave México, Miguel. Now. Tonight. Will you help me?”
He hesitated, but only for an instant. “Yes, of course,” he said and they had concocted a plan.
In the days that followed, Sarmiento scanned the newspapers looking for reports about the raid, but found nothing. However, two weeks after the event, it was announced that Senator Cayetano Sarmiento had decided to leave public life, resigning his position in the Senate and retiring to his estate in Cuernavaca. Sarmiento went to see his uncle, who explained blandly that he had decided to spend his remaining years in the country on the advice of his physician. He said about his eldest son only that Jorge Luis had fulfilled his lifelong desire to travel in Europe and would be gone for an indefinite period. “But you probably already know that, Miguel.”
“No, Uncle, I have had no news of Jorge Luis for some time. That is why I came to see you.”
“Ah,” the old man replied, clearly disbelieving him. “Well, now you are informed.”
After a while, the vacuum of information was as anxiety-provoking to Sarmiento as the event itself. Then, at a family dinner, his brother-in-law Damian pulled him aside and said, “I hear your cousin is on a grand tour of Europe. If I were he, I would consider remaining there.”
Sarmiento had learned that Damian’s information, although rarely given directly, was always credible. “Why do you say that?”
“I would imagine that the salons of Rome and Paris are more to his taste than the cells of San Juan de Ulloa,” he replied.
The name of the pestilential island prison chilled Sarmiento. “That is his alternative?”
Damian lit his cigar and puffed. “He might also be advised that Don Porfirio’s agents are far-flung, and if he has any secrets that might be embarrassing to our president and his family, he should continue to keep them.”
Sarmiento said, “If I hear from him, I will certainly pass along that message.”
“Be sure that you do,” Damian said grimly. “And Miguel, that advice applies to you as well.” His brother-in-law’s chilly tone was matched by the coldness in his bright blue eyes.
“There should no concern regarding my discretion,” Sarmiento replied.
“And yet there is, so take care. The officials of la seguridad have long memories and suspicious minds. It is best not to attract their further attention.”
There were no further visits from the secret police, and Sarmiento’s life returned to its normal rounds, but it was only his joy at Alicia’s pregnancy that finally allayed his residual fear. In Sarmiento’s mind, the child they had created together would at last dispel the grief that each of them carried for the child each had lost. He threw himself into Alicia’s care and into his work. Liceaga had commissioned him to write a thorough report regarding the problems of hygiene and sanitation in his district. With Cáceres’s help, he interviewed dozens of residents about their medical histories, took and analyzed samples of food and water they ate and drank, measured the spaces of their hovels, and described in minute and unsparing detail the conditions in which they lived. Amassing this information, he produced an exhaustive report in which he made specific recommendations to improve the health of the residents of his district and, thereby, the health of the city as a whole. When he presented it to Liceaga, the public health director responded with characteristic ardency.
“This is exemplary, Miguel!” he said. “I will read it with great eagerness and see that it gets into the hands of those who have the authority to put your recommendations into effect.”
“I would like to help in that effort.”
“That goes without saying,” Liceaga replied. “Indeed, Miguel, I have been thinking that your talents require greater scope than district sanitation officer.” He removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a snowy handkerchief. “How would you feel about becoming my deputy?”
“What do you mean, Director?”
“I mean, I want to make you my second-in-command. You would have an office here and oversee the work of all the district sanitation officers. You would produce a comprehensive sanitation report for the entire city, not just a single district, and take the lead in its implementation. You would join me at international public health congresses and exchange ideas with our counterparts all over the world. We could turn our miasmatic city into a model of urban health and cleanliness, and then,” he continued, warming to his subject, “we could turn our attention to the rest of México. Imagine, Miguel, we could foment a public health revolution! Do you accept?”
Caught up in Liceaga’s enthusiasm, Sarmiento replied, “I would be honored.”
On September 7, 1899, Sarmiento delivered his son, José Ramon Rodrigo Gavilán Guadalupe de Sarmiento, who would be, he hoped, the first of many sons. Later that month he was inducted into his new position, Deputy Director of the Board of Public Health for Ciudad de México. As the old century came to an end in an explosion of fireworks above the skies of the city, Sarmiento, holding his child in his arms with his wife by his side, knew what it meant to be happy.