Across the city, church bells clanged the hour, six o’clock in the evening the second day of Lent, at the beginning of March 1909. Sarmiento was locking up his apothecary cabinet after a long day of seeing patients at San Francisco Tlalco. As was their custom, his patients received his diagnoses with grave Indian silence, took the medicines he offered them, nodded when he prescribed a plan of treatment, and walked away on dirt-encrusted feet. He knew that most of them would sell the medicine for food or pulque and return next time with the same ailments. He had long since stopped hectoring them when they did this. He simply prescribed the medicines without comment. Since most of their diseases were variations of malnourishment, food and even alcohol were as useful to them as his drugs. He thought how Liceaga’s comment had justified his misleadingly optimistic reports about the state of public health in the city—“we must do what is necessary to do what is possible.” If sycophancy could soften the hearts of the powers-that-be toward the plight of the destitute, Sarmiento would have been licking their boots too. But Liceaga’s sanguine reports only fueled the indifference of the authorities, while the situation of the poor worsened.
The evidence was all around him. Much of the beautiful garden of the old church had been converted from flowers to food. Squash, chili, melons, and corn had replaced the ancient roses to provide for the parishioners as the cost of these staples increased and their pitiful wages fell. The church, which had not been locked in the three centuries of its existence, was now sealed tight after sunset to prevent theft. When he walked through the neighborhood, the small businesses he had observed a decade earlier were shuttered because they were unable to compete with the factories that now turned out the same goods en masse. Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city’s anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks. The eighty-year-old Díaz’s refusal to name a successor created uncertainty about the future, while a series of bloody strikes in the mines and the factories seemed, even to the dullest and most self-satisfied plutocrat, a portent of things to come. It was as if, he thought, the nation was holding its breath and it was unclear whether the exhalation would be a sigh of relief or a death rattle.
“Doctor?” The voice, male, came from behind him.
“I’m sorry,” he said without turning. “The clinic is closed but I will be back tomorrow afternoon at two.”
“I don’t need treatment, Miguel,” the man said, the voice becoming familiar.
Sarmiento turned. The stranger was of medium height and stocky, his complexion darkened by the sun, his face shadowed by a broad-brimmed felt hat such as was worn in the north. He was dressed in an old but respectable suit and a collarless shirt. He removed his hat and in his broad, handsome face Sarmiento detected vestiges of his cousin’s epicene features.
“Jorge Luis!” he cried. “Is it really you?”
“Yes, Primo, but I am only Luis now. Luis Parra.” He stepped forward tentatively. “It is so good to see you, Miguel.”
Sarmiento rushed to him and embraced him tightly. He felt the changes in his cousin’s body, the aesthetic slenderness turned to hard muscle, the once smooth face now raspy with stubble. Even his breathing was different, deeper and harder.
“My God,” he said. “You’ve become a man.”
Luis broke off their embrace and smiled at Sarmiento. “Are you surprised? Did you think I would become a woman?”
His joy at their reunion seeped away at the memory of their last meeting. “Why have you changed your name?”
“For my safety,” he replied. He reached into his pocket, removed a hand-rolled cigarette, and lit it. “And I have not really changed my name. I have simply rearranged it, taking my mother’s name as my own.”
“What are you doing in the city if it is still dangerous for you?”
“It is dangerous for Jorge Luis Sarmiento, not for Luis Parra. I have come to help organize Don Francisco Madero’s anti-reelection club in advance of his arrival in May.”
At that moment, Alicia and Padre Cáceres entered the room. For a moment, she gazed at the man beside her husband and then broke into a broad smile of recognition.
“Jorge Luis!” Alicia exclaimed, embracing him. “Thank God you are safe and well. Father,” she said to Cáceres, “this is our cousin.”
The priest extended his hand. Sarmiento observed that Luis took it with a sardonic glance in his direction, and in that glance, he saw that his cousin was less changed than he had first appeared.
“A pleasure, Padre,” he said. To Alicia, he said, “Doña Alicia, I have so often wanted to stand before you and beg your forgiveness for every cruel remark I made about you, for my drunkenness at your wedding, and for failing to appreciate your virtues and your kindness.”
She embraced him. “You owe me no apology, Cousin. I am so happy to see you healthy and sound.” She stepped back. “There is a young man in the garden. Is he your friend?”
“Yes,” Luis said. “His name is Ángel, an Indian boy from Coahuila who travels with me.”
“You must both stay and eat with us,” Cáceres said. “Our fare is simple, but we would be pleased to share it with you.”
“Yes,” Alicia said. “Please stay. We have so much to talk about.”
“On some subjects,” Luis replied quietly. “There are others that I need to discuss with my cousin alone. You understand, I hope.”
“Of course,” Alicia said. “You have been away for a long time. You and Miguel must have much to say to each other.”
Over a meal of chicken stewed in red chili sauce, squash cooked with tomato and queso fresco, beans, and tortillas, Luis told lighthearted stories of his travels in Europe and the United States, turning his hardships into amusing anecdotes. For, as he explained, after his father died, his allowance was discontinued by his stepmother and he had been forced to earn his living.
“My only skill was versifying,” he said with a laugh, “and Paris was not in need of another bad poet. When I was unable to pay my hotel bill, the management suggested that I work it off in the kitchen washing dishes in lieu of the city jail. What I observed about the sanitary conditions of the hotel kitchen made going hungry seem like a virtue rather than a grim necessity. Oh, and the characters I met there! The cooks screamed in French and Italian, the waiters in Russian, and me in Spanish. Fortunately, some physical gestures are universally understood.”
“How did you escape?” Alicia asked.
“Friends liberated me. I had been too proud to ask for their help but they helped me nonetheless. Through them, I went to England and fell in with a circle of vigorous, mutton-eating Englishmen who thought nothing of brisk walks that took them halfway across their island and back between luncheon and tea. They were very kind to me.” He paused and glanced at Sarmiento. “They turned me into a socialist.”
“Ah,” Cáceres said. “Are you then, like your cousin, a nonbeliever?”
“I believe that when God made man in his image he intended that there be no social distinctions among them. One man is as good as another, and all men are equally deserving of what Americans call life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—although, God knows, they themselves do not practice their creed. Still, it is my creed.”
“You will find no quarrel in this church with those beliefs,” Cáceres said.
“How did your association with Madero come about?” Sarmiento asked.
“I wanted to come home, but not to resume my old life, even were that possible,” Luis said. “I went first to New York with letters of introduction from my English friends to a group of American socialists. They told me about the Flores Magón brothers, who published a radical newspaper called Liberación that they smuggled into México from their exile in the American city of St. Louis. I began to write for them about the true conditions that prevail in our country beneath Don Porfirio’s gilt. I wrote about the government’s seizure of ancestral Indian lands that reduced the Indians who had farmed them for centuries into peonage. I wrote about the extermination of the Yaquis in Sonora. I wrote about the sale of our mines and railroads and ports to foreigners who are immune from our laws, the suppression of unions, and, most of all, about the concentration of greater and greater wealth into fewer and fewer hands. After a while, it was not enough for me to write about these conditions; I wished to change them.” He lit a cigarette, passed it to Ángel, and then, on the same match, lit another for himself. “I read Madero’s book. He’s no radical. His call for constitutional government, effective suffrage, and no reelection is the typical pallid fare of bourgeois liberals. Nonetheless, I sensed an underlying passion in his words that attracted me. I made my way to Coahuila and presented myself to him. I was not disappointed by the man.” He grinned at the priest. “Intending no disrespect, Padre, I must say I did not understand sanctity until I met Madero.”
The priest replied, “In what way is Señor Madero saintly?”
“In the way of complete self-sacrifice,” Luis said. “Although he is a son of one of the richest families in México, he lives wholly for the benefit of others. The workers on his estate live decent, comfortable lives, and he pays for the education of their children. He has slowly been giving away his fortune to the poor, to the horror of his family. I heard him tell one of his brothers that he would not be like the rich man in the Gospels who turned his back on Jesus when Jesus commanded him to give all he had to the poor. Madero said, ‘I shall pass through the eye of that needle, Brother, and I will bring you with me.’”
“Well,” Cáceres said, “he must be a remarkable man.”
“He is,” Luis replied passionately. “He has bravely offered himself to speak against Don Porfirio’s despotism, knowing the danger it places him in. I personally would follow him anywhere.”
Sarmiento listened to his cousin’s account of his transformation with growing amazement, for he remembered the effete young man who despised the Indians, worshipped all things French, and lived for pleasure. He glanced at the young Indian who had sat silently beside Luis while he spoke. There was more to this story, he thought, that Luis in his discretion had omitted in the presence of Alicia and the priest. He was impatient to speak to his cousin alone.
At last, the meal ended, the plates were cleared, and the priest brought out a dusty bottle of brandy.
“Gentlemen,” he said to Sarmiento and Luis. “We will leave you now. Miguel, I will see that Alicia gets home safely. Ángel, if you are tired, there is room here for both you and your master to stay the night.”
“Thank you,” Luis said. “That is very kind.” To Ángel, he said, “Go, mijo, I will come soon.”
When they were alone, Sarmiento asked, “What is that boy to you? You called him ‘son.’”
Luis poured brandy into the glasses the priest had set out for them. “He is my son and my companion and … my lover.” He pushed the glass across the table. “Your expression, Primo! You had better drink this.”
Sarmiento drank. “Thank you for not making that comment in the presence of my wife.”
“Alicia knows,” Luis said. “I could see that she had quickly surmised the nature of my friendship with Ángel. Did you tell her about me?”
“She listened to our conversation the night you left México,” he said. “When the police came the next day and accused you of being … a sodomite, she listened to that conversation as well. Some time later, she admitted to eavesdropping, and we discussed the meaning of what she had heard.”
“You spoke to her of it?” Luis asked, incredulous.
“Alicia is not like other women,” Sarmiento replied. “She is my intellectual equal and I treat her as such. In any event, she had already pieced it together.”
“What did she make of it?”
Sarmiento poured an inch of brandy into his glass. “Her sympathies are always with those whom she believes are treated unjustly, and she believes that about you.”
“Notwithstanding the nature of my … offense?”
“She thinks it is a trivial sin of the flesh, like eating or drinking too much.”
“In that case,” Luis said, “her sympathy is greater than her understanding.”
“That is equally true of me, Primo.” Sarmiento said sternly. “I think you should explain yourself.”
“Explain myself?”
“I knew you, Jorge Luis. You were a snob. I see you are transformed, but there is more to it than socialism,” he said. “Your conversion is personal, not political.”
Luis sipped his brandy. “You always were astute, Miguel. It’s true that my politics are the product of my conversion, not their cause. I suppose my conversion began the night I left here disgraced and humiliated. Those first few years of exile, I wandered around Europe trying to re-create the life I had led here, but to achieve it I had to lie about who I was and why I had left México. The lies piled up like debts, creating a constant state of anxiety that drained my life of any pleasure.” He lit another hand-rolled cigarette. “Not, in any event, that the pleasures were still so pleasurable. Another ball, another dinner party, another night at the theater. As I approached thirty, I realized that my life was without purpose and meaning, squalid and pointless. I don’t suppose you would know how that feels.”
“You would be surprised, Primo, but we are speaking of you now.”
Luis cast a curious look at his cousin before continuing. “I was in Paris and my friends took me to meet a man who called himself Sebastian Melmoth, an Englishman living in filthy rooms at the Hôtel d’Alsace. I couldn’t imagine why they had brought me to see him until he told me his real name. He was the writer Oscar Wilde, who fled to France after he was released from prison for sodomy in England. He told me he called himself Sebastian after Saint Sebastian, the martyr. There was a poisonous atmosphere in his rooms not simply of destitution but of despair and self-pity. I went back to my own shabby hotel, and I thought, if I follow this man’s example, then I must live a life of self-hatred and die in fear.”
“You mean, if you continued to practice … that vice?”
“No,” Luis said. “I mean if I continued to accept the world’s condemnation of my nature. It is my nature to love other men, Miguel. That may disgust you, but that night I decided I would no longer allow it to disgust me. It no longer does. I am at peace with myself.”
His cousin’s words were delivered so calmly and with such conviction that Sarmiento was forced to acknowledge either that they expressed a profound truth or were insane. He could not exclude the possibility of insanity, even though he saw no sign of mental illness in his cousin’s serene countenance.
“Once I made that decision,” Luis continued, “remarkable events occurred. I met a few men in Paris who felt as I did, and they introduced me to the work of the English Uranians. I began a correspondence with their leader, a man named Edward Carpenter. He turned his back on his bourgeois family to live with his lover on a farm in a small town. I went for a brief visit and stayed for a year, as his farmhand and his student. He is an honored figure among English socialists, but his socialism is motivated by love, not theory. Love, he told me, is the true leveler of distinctions. He always said you cannot love mankind and still wish to oppress men. For we homosexuals, that axiom is doubly true. You cannot love another man and still wish to oppress man.”
“What was that word you used?” Sarmiento asked, frowning. “‘Homosexual.’”
“‘Homo,’ from the Greek meaning same and ‘sexual’ … well you know what that Latinism means. The word was invented by a German writer to describe men who love other men.”
“I see,” Sarmiento replied skeptically. “Ugly word. Still, it has the virtue of clarity if not elegance.” He poured some brandy into his own glass and his cousin’s. “You really believe your behavior is normal?”
“It is for me,” he said. He smiled. “Do you think I’m mad?”
“The thought has crossed my mind.”
“I could say the same of you, Miguel.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said you knew me, but I knew you, too, better than anyone. You were an intellectual snob, an atheist, and the most melancholy of men. Yet here you are, tending to the poor, breaking bread with a priest, married to the least likely woman I would have imagined for you, and you even seem happy. Well, as happy as your nature permits. Someone less charitable than me might say you have taken leave of your senses.”
“Touché,” Sarmiento touching his glass to his cousin’s.
“To madness,” Luis replied.
José would always remember how he had watched from the railing as a boy—older, almost a grown-up—entered the courtyard, his eyes sweeping across the palace in awe, pushing a bicycle. José flew down the stairs and said breathlessly, “Is this your bicicleta? Will you teach me how to ride?”
The boy had a narrow, intelligent face and a mouth that, José soon learned, was habitually curled into a sweet half-smile. His hair was longer than the fashion, straight as an Indian’s, and parted in the middle. Beneath blunt, black eyebrows, his coffee-colored eyes were warm and friendly.
“You must be José,” the boy said. “My name is David. I am your new piano teacher.”
“I know how to play the piano,” José replied impatiently. “But not how to ride a bicycle. Please, can I touch it?”
David surrendered the bicycle to José, who tentatively pushed it across the courtyard.
“You really don’t have a bicycle?” David asked. José shook his head, and David said, with a sweeping gesture of his hand, “But you have all this. This … house.”
José did not understand. “Do you belong to a bicycle club?” he asked, returning the bicycle to the other boy, who leaned it casually against the wall. “Do you race? I saw Juan Trigueros win the Independence Day race last year. He was fast as the wind! The seat is very high. How do you get on it? I—”
David clamped his hand over José’s mouth. “Listen, peanut,” he said with a broad, white smile, “Your mamá hired me to give you piano lessons. So if you take me to your piano and let me do my job, then maybe I will show you how to ride my bicycle. Okay?”
When he removed his hand, José was also smiling. “What does that mean, ‘hokay’?”
“It’s American for de acuerdo. Now, where is the piano, peanut?”
“In the sala,” he said. Impulsively, he grabbed the older boy’s warm, soft hand. “Come on, I’ll take you.”
When they entered the great salon, David stopped, looked around the vast room, and said, “This room is bigger than my family’s apartment. Who are the people in those paintings?”
José glanced up at the twin portraits of the first Gaviláns.
“Those are my ancestors,” José replied. “Don Lorenzo and Doña Teresa.”
David ran his hand along the marble surface of the gold-and-white table at the center of the room and took in the immense Persian carpet that covered the floor in a muted explosion of reds and blues, the pink damask-covered furniture, the bronze wall scones in the form of caryatids, the Chinese vases, the vitrines displaying seventeenth-century porcelain, and a suit of armor from the time of Felipe Segundo.
“This is like the lobby of a fancy hotel,” he said. “I can’t believe anyone really lives here. Is that your piano? It’s nicer than the one I play at the conservatory. Come on, peanut, let’s start your lesson.”
They sat at the bench. David pointed to the sheet music and said, “‘The Raindrop Prelude’? Can you play that?”
“Yes,” José said, running his fingers across the keys.
“Go ahead. Play.”
José sucked in a breath and begin to play Chopin’s piece, as his mother had taught him, touching the keys with soft fingers. He struggled with the denser passages, slowing the tempo to work through them, stopping once or twice in frustration, all the while conscious of the older boy’s intent attention. He finished with a sigh of relief.
“Well, Josélito, you played all the notes, but I didn’t hear the music.”
José glanced at him and asked earnestly, “Is something wrong with your ears?”
David laughed. “Scoot over a little.”
José moved to the edge of the bench. David glanced at the music and began to play. He touched the keys with confidence, smoothly untangling the passages that had stumped José. José found himself nodding in understanding as he watched David’s hands sweep across the keys. His playing was thrillingly beautiful to José and he thought he knew what David had meant when he said José had played the notes but not the music. David could play both at the same time, the separate parts and the whole, the repeating A-flat holding the piece together like the sound of rain on a rooftop. When José wasn’t watching David’s hands, he was studying his face, where he saw—lips slightly parted, eyes tender—a look of love. It was the same look that José saw on his mother’s and his grandmother’s faces—even, sometimes, on his father’s face—but he had never imagined that one could love an activity in the same way as one loved another person. As he continued to study the older boy’s face, he felt flutters of pleasure in his belly such as no one had ever made him feel before.
“Do you understand what I mean about playing the music?” David was asking him.
“I think so,” he said. “Can you teach me to play as well as you?”
“I thought you wanted me to teach you how to ride a bicycle?” David said, grinning.
“Will you teach me both?”
David threw his arm around José and said, “I will, peanut. Do you mind that I call you ‘peanut’?”
“No,” José said, his heart warm and happy. “I like it.”
My feet cannot reach the pedals,” José complained.
David, steadying the bicycle, replied, “I don’t want you to pedal yet. I just want you to get used to the motion. Put your hand on the handlebars, not my shoulder. Come on, eyes forward.”
Holding the bicycle, David ran down the stone path into the twilit green of the Alameda, past the half-completed cenotaph to Juárez, past the iron lampposts where the electric lights had just begun to flicker on, past the mortician’s marble benches, past the bandstands and the formal gardens. José, clutching the handlebars, felt a surge of fear, then excitement, then joy.
“I want to pedal, David!” he shouted.
David slowed to a stop. “Next time. I have to bring a screwdriver to adjust the seat so your feet can reach the pedals. How did that feel?”
“I loved it!” José said.
“Okay, I need to get you home,” David said.
José climbed off the bicycle. David got on and then José hopped up on the handlebars.
“Ready?” David asked.
“Okay,” José said.
They plunged into the fashionable crowd promenading along the Paseo, eliciting shouts of “Hey, watch it!” and “Get off that thing and walk!” In response, David rode even faster and more recklessly, while José grasped the handlebars until his knuckles turned white.
The bells of the churches had been silenced for Holy Week, and the air was filled with the sound of the rattles that people carried to ward off evil spirits until the bells rang again on Easter morning. As they approached the Zócalo, David slowed down where the paving changed from macadam to cobblestone. The facade of the cathedral was draped in black. The streetcars jerked forward from the Zócalo station in a shower of electric sparks from the overhead wires. David darted among the cargadores carrying heavy trunks from the railroad station to the hotels on Calle San Francisco. He turned onto the side street that led to the palace and, too soon for José, arrived at the hulking doors, where the porter hurried out when David braked and José hopped off the handlebars.
“Won’t you come and eat supper with us?” José asked.
David shook his head. “My family is expecting me. I will see you on Monday. In the meantime, I want you to practice that piece I gave you.”
“‘Claire de Lune,’” José said. “What a funny name for a song.”
“Don’t concern yourself with the title; worry about the notes. Goodbye, peanut,” David said, and then he was off, disappearing into the Indian market in the plazuela and into the dusk.
“Come inside, Master José,” the porter was saying. “Your grandmother is waiting for you.”
Reluctantly, José went in. He found La Niña in her parlor waiting with his chocolate and plates of sweets.
“You are late, José,” she said.
“David was teaching me how to ride a bicycle in the Alameda.”
“Your piano teacher?”
“Yes,” José said.
“He is not a suitable companion for you, José,” she said. “He is only a servant, after all.”
“He is not my servant,” José said angrily. “He is my friend.”
“Drink your chocolate before it gets cold,” she said. “Next time he comes, I would like to meet this boy, your friend.”
“I will introduce you, and you will love him as much as I do,” José said.
“We shall see,” she replied.
Alicia knelt before a painting on the stone floor of the empty church of San Francisco Tlalco. She did not know how long she had been there because the bells did not toll on Good Friday. She was aware only that the light had faded and the church lay deep in the shadows of dusk. Her knees ached and pain clawed the muscles of her back and shoulders, sending shuddering spasms that brought tears to her eyes. She was not certain she could rise, even if she wanted to, but she did not yet want to. She had not intended for her devotion at the thirteenth station to become an exercise in self-mortification. However, as she gazed at the depiction of the death of Jesus that a self-taught Indian artist had painted three centuries earlier, she found herself rooted to the spot. In the background of Golgotha, the artist had painted the landscape of the Valley of México with its lakes and volcanoes and fields of blue agave. Jesus himself was no more than a half-naked Indian boy whose face was veiled with streams of blood that ran from a crown of cactus thorns. The horror and sadness of the moment of death was inscribed on his slender body, gaunt and exhausted and slack. His death cut straight to her heart, like a scythe, leveling the weeds of vanity. Her soul was naked before her God who loved her so much he had endured this death to bring her the grace of eternal life.
Miguel had once asked her what she thought about when she prayed. “Nothing,” she told him. “But you spend so many hours at it, you must be thinking of something.” “No,” she insisted quietly. “I think of nothing.” He had looked at her with the same frowning expression with which he regarded obstinate patients.
But she had spoken the truth. When she prayed, as she had for the past few hours, her prayer eventually shed the stifling cloak of language and became, instead, a pulse of yearning, grief, wonder, and gratitude. It felt, physically, as if her entire body and all its complex systems had become concentrated in her heartbeat. Mentally, where thought would have been, there was, instead, an enveloping sensation of light. Rarely was it as powerful as the light of sun. Rather, it was like the flickering of the flame of a votive candle, which, for as long as it lasted, suffused her with feelings of peace and well-being unrelated to any person or object in the world. She did not leave her body, as she had read that the saints did when they prayed. To the contrary, it seemed to her that she more deeply entered her body, until she touched the center of all existence, including her own, sometimes for no more than a moment, sometimes for a little longer. It was a place as still and quiet as the whisper that Elijah had heard on the mountain of Horeb, after the storm and the earthquake and the fire, which he recognized as the voice of God. She wondered what Miguel would have made of it had she answered his question about what went through her mind as she prayed by saying, “I listen for the whisper of God.”
A groan involuntarily escaped her lips and she knew it was time to rise. She stood, crossed herself, and rested for a moment against a column before setting out for home. As part of her Lenten practices, she gave up her carriage and walked wherever she needed to go, overruling Miguel’s concerns for her safety. Behind her, near the altar, she heard the frantic shuffle of footsteps and glimpsed Ramoncito, Padre Cáceres’s mute Yaqui servant, running from the sanctuary. A moment later, she saw him and Padre Cáceres enter hurriedly.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Cáceres questioned frantically.
Ramoncito made a noise of affirmation.
“Take me to him.”
They disappeared through the door behind the sanctuary that led to the room where the priest and his acolytes prepared for Mass. Alicia, stirred by concern, unthinkingly followed them, but the room was empty. It appeared that they had gone through another door, left open, through which she saw descending steps. She stood at the top of the steps, looked into darkness, and breathed the musty air of a crypt. She saw the flicker of a candle and heard Cáceres’s voice again: “We can’t leave him here. Let’s take him to my room.”
She stepped back, into shadows. A few minutes later the priest and his servant emerged through the door, carrying the body of a man.
“Padre,” she said, stepping forward. “What is this?”
“Doña Alicia, what are you doing here!” he exclaimed.
“I was in the church and I heard you talking to Ramoncito,”
“Come,” he commanded her. “I will explain everything.”
She followed the men into the priest’s cell, where they laid the corpse on his narrow bed. Cáceres lit the lamp and she saw the body was that of an emaciated young man, scarcely more than a boy. The priest knelt, laid his hands on the boy, and began to administer the sacrament of extreme unction. Alicia and Ramoncito knelt behind him. Silent tears ran down the Yaqui’s face. When the sacrament was completed and the priest had covered the boy’s face with a linen cloth, she asked him, “Who is he? What happened to him?”
The priest sighed, rose to his feet, and invited her to sit.
“His name was Diego. He was a tribesman of Ramoncito, another Yaqui, who had escaped from a henequen plantation in the Yucatán, where he had been enslaved. He got as far as here, but the privations he endured in slavery were too much for him.”
“Why here?” she asked.
He paused, gave her a piercing look, and said, “What I am about to tell you must not leave this room.”
“Whatever you say I will keep in the strictest confidence,” she replied.
“In the days before the Americans fought their civil war, there was a system of sanctuaries that helped the black slaves escape from the southern part of the United States to Canada, where they were free. It was called the underground railroad. The sanctuaries were established by good Christians who knew that human slavery was abhorrent to the Lord.”
She nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“For twenty years, Yaqui men have been deported from their homeland in Sonora and sold as slaves to the henequen haciendas, where they are worked to death. Over time, we have created our own sanctuaries to help those who escape reach the American border. Our own underground railroad. This church is a station on that railroad. We shelter the men in the crypt until they are well enough to travel, and then we provide them with the means to reach the next station, in Guanajuato. Ultimately, they cross the border in the American territory of Arizona, where the Yaquis have set up their communities in exile.”
She nodded. “This is commendable work, Father.”
He shook his head. “Not in the eyes of the law, Doña Alicia. Legally, men like Diego are the property of the plantation owners. By helping them escape, we are committing theft. The penalties are very harsh. If we were discovered, I would be prosecuted and thrown into jail and the church itself shut down.”
“Surely the archbishop would intervene on your behalf.”
“The archbishop knows nothing of these activities,” Cáceres said curtly. “If he did, he would personally surrender me to the civil authorities for prosecution.”
“You mean … ,” she began slowly, as the implications of his words sank in.
“Doña, power protects power. The church is no different. You see, we are quite alone in this work.”
“Then you must allow me to assist you.”
The priest shook his head. “No. You are generous and kind to offer, but the risks are too great.”
“They are far less for me than for you, Father. I belong to an old family. My husband is an official in the government. My brother-inlaw Damian is a confidant of Don Porfirio himself, and I am a friend of the first lady. I am above suspicion.”
Ramoncito, who had remained in the room, made a rough noise. She turned to look at him. He pointed to her, tapped his heart, and nodded.
“Thank you,” she told him and then addressed the priest. “If Ramoncito trusts my discretion, you should too, Father. Let me help you.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly. “Perhaps it was providential that you overheard me and discovered us. Now, our immediate concern is to give the boy a Christian burial.”
“Padre,” she said. “Do you shelter only Yaqui men? What of their women and children?”
His face turned to stone. “The children are taken from their families and placed in orphanages or given to Mexican families to adopt. The women are killed, so that they will not bear other children. It is the policy of our government to wipe these people off the face of the earth,” he said. “God help us, but they are succeeding.”
“But why?” she cried. “What is their offense?”
“Their offense?” he repeated angrily. “Their offense is that they refuse to surrender their ancient homeland to be partitioned among our president’s cronies. Their offense is that they exist at all.”
“God forgive México for this crime,” she said.