The Mexicans killed my mother.” Plink, plink, plink. “I wanted to avenge her.” Plink. Tomasa lifted her fingers from the piano keys and glanced at Alicia. “I know now that not all Mexicans are bad. Maybe they sent all the bad ones to Sonora to make war on my people.” Plink. “That is why I left my brother in Arizona and followed the warriors home, so I could fight with them.”
“You followed the warriors into the desert? Why didn’t you go with them?” Alicia asked. She was teaching Tomasa to play by ear the Chopin prelude that had attracted the girl. She made it clear she did not wish to learn anything other than that piece and she refused to learn to read music. Alicia would play a few notes while Tomasa studied the placement of her fingers and then she would imitate her. The girl had intense concentration and fierce persistence, and she was well on her way to mastering the piece. As they worked together, she had begun to speak about herself in short bursts. She told Alicia her father was a warrior killed in battle against the Mexican army and that she had a younger half-brother. Her mother was hanged in a roundup of the Yaquis. She and her brother escaped with a band of refugees to an American border town in Arizona. Today, for the first time, she spoke of how she had come to the orphanage.
“The men would not take me,” she said. “They said I was a child and a girl besides, but I am the daughter of a warrior.” She pressed a half-dozen keys as if for emphasis. “They left at night. I waited and then tracked them. I planned to come into their camp the next day when we had gone too far for them to take me back.”
“Weren’t you afraid of becoming lost?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “I followed the road of the ancestors,” she said. “Their souls burned in the night sky and lit the path to the homeland.”
“The stars,” Alicia said, grasping her meaning. “You were guided by the stars.”
She nodded. “The men moved faster than I could follow and I lost them,” she said. “After three nights I reached the homeland. I had brought no food or water, only the clothes on my back. When the Mexican soldiers found me, I was too weak to fight.”
Alicia glanced at the girl. There was nothing special to distinguish her from all the other Indian girls Alicia encountered in the course of a day in the city, drawing water from communal fountains, selling lottery tickets, minding fruit and vegetable stalls in the markets, carrying tiny black-eyed babies in slings across their backs. But this girl had walked across the desert without food or water to become a soldier. She began to understand why, after thirty years of warfare, the Mexican army had been unable to defeat the Yaquis.
“The soldiers took me in chains to their fort at Potam. I was happy to breathe the air of the homeland again, even with an iron collar around my neck, but then they tried to …” She slammed her hand on the keyboard. “I fought them off but there were too many. Six of them held me while another put his thing in my mouth. I bit down so hard I could taste his blood. They beat me and threw me into a room with other Yaquis. They chained us together and marched us to a freight car and nailed it shut. We waited there for two nights before it began to move.”
“Without food or water?” Alicia asked.
Tomasa nodded. “We drank our piss until we were dry. We licked our skin for the flavor of salt. We began to die.” She added fiercely, “But we died like Yaquis, in silence or cursing the Mexicans.” She played the first notes of the prelude before continuing. “After seven nights, we came here, to this town. They opened the doors of the car and the ones who were alive were put in a corral, like animals. Our feet were still chained together, but my legs are thin and I slipped out of the shackles. I escaped! But this town …” She shook her head. “There are so many people, more people than I have ever seen in one place. I did not know where I was or where to go. I stole some food from a market and wandered for a day until I saw a church that was like the churches of our villages, small and white and plain. I sought refuge there.”
Alicia imagined the confusion and terror of the child as she wandered the streets of the city, hungry, thirsty, and alone.
“Inside there was an altar for San Miguel, the warrior. I prayed to him for help. The monks found me—the brothers of San Francisco. They fed me and let me bathe. I would not answer their questions because I was afraid they would return me to the soldiers. They brought me here.” She gently pressed a key. “Now my mother comes to me in my dreams. She is very angry that I left my brother alone. She tells me I must return home to him. This is what I must do. As soon as I can, I will escape.”
She spoke with certainty and Alicia did not doubt she would escape the orphanage on her own if she could find no other way to return home.
“I can help you, Daughter,” Alicia said. “If you will let me.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Your brother needs you. Your people need you.”
“I will leave soon,” she replied, “for I have learned what I wished for you to teach me.”
Then she played the prelude faultlessly.
Sarmiento reread the telegram. “Package safe in El Paso. When will you come to claim it?” It was signed by “LP.” He smiled at his cousin’s attempt at discretion. There was no need. All of México knew that Madero, released on bail, had crossed the border into the American state of Texas and issued a call to rebellion. Thus far, the call had not been heeded. Two months after the Centenario celebrations Don Porfirio seemed as entrenched as ever. There were reports of fighting in Morelos between the government and a ragtag Indian army that called itself the Ejército Libertador del Sur, the Liberation Army of the South, led by a self-appointed general named Zapata. The official press, however, assured its readers that General Huerta, called the “Indian butcher” for his ruthless suppression of the Mayas, had been dispatched to Morelos and would soon extinguish the revolt. Beyond that, the Pax Porfiriana kept the country in its iron thrall. The apparent hopelessness of Madero’s cause should have made his cousin’s invitation to join the rebellion—“When will you come to claim it?”—seem, at best, quixotic if not deluded. Much had changed for Sarmiento in the eighteen months since he had sat in the strange, squalid pulquería with Luis—it was called, he remembered, the Valley of Paradise. Even then, he had understood Díaz’s government to be autocratic and corrupt, but he had held out hope that some incremental and positive change was possible, if only as a matter of the regime’s self-interest. Don Porfirio’s cynical motto—Pan o palo, bread or the stick—had once at least acknowledged some payment was due to the people in exchange for their freedoms. This was no longer true. Somewhere along the line the old man, hearing the cries of his people for bread, had muttered, like another autocrat, let them eat cake. Now there was only the stick, the billy club, the shackles. Díaz was a cancer on México and, if the patient was to survive, he must be carved out of its body. As a physician, Sarmiento saw his duty clearly. Now he must explain to his wife why it was necessary for him to leave her and their child, perhaps never to return alive.
José was mesmerized by the sight of himself in the long, gilded mirror. He loved his new evening clothes—black tailcoat with silk facings, black trousers with a satin stripe, glossy black pumps, white waistcoat, stiff shirt and wing collar, and a white silk bowtie. His suit had been made for him to accompany his grandmother to his first opera by Señor Vargas, the ancient tailor who had cut his grandfather’s clothes. In his dusty shop, Vargas curtly instructed José to remove his cadet’s uniform and to stand perfectly still while the old man took close measurements of every part of José’s body, withered fingers brushing José’s flesh, while mumbling to himself, “Qué buena forma.” The tailor’s touch was discreet but approbative, as if José were a rare and particularly fine bolt of cloth, one with which he could make something extraordinary. The tailor’s appreciative attentiveness to his body made José flush with pleasure. José did not understand his reaction, any more than he understood why he disliked it when his grandmother’s confessor, Padre Juan Pablo, cupped José’s face between his liver-spotted hands and lifted it as though he were about to kiss him with his fishy mouth. Yet both men, when they laid their hands on José’s body, touched in him the same chord, one producing pride and the other repulsion.
Reluctantly, José tore himself away from the mirror to present himself to his grandmother. La Niña was dressed in her habitual black but not the rusty widow weeds she ordinarily affected. Rather, she wore a resplendent ball gown of jet, painstakingly sequined and beaded so that when she moved, it shimmered like starlight on black water. Her seamed cheeks were powdered smooth and rouged with a subtle tint of rose. Her mouth was painted in the same shade. She exuded lavender and jasmine. In place of her mantilla, her heavy white hair was piled on her head and adorned with a tiara. Around her neck hung a latticed necklace ablaze with diamonds, and diamond earrings dripped from her ears. José was amazed at her transformation from crone to queen, like a character in a fairy tale. She crooked a bejeweled finger at him and beckoned him forward.
“Old Vargas knows his business,” she said approvingly. “You are as handsome as a prince. Come, let us go.”
While they inched toward the entrance of the brilliantly lit theater, behind a long line of carriages and automobiles, La Niña provided detailed instructions on how he was to comport himself, but José’s attention was captured by the sight of the beautifully dressed men and women alighting from their vehicles at the door of the great theater. When at last they reached the entrance, a uniformed usher rushed to open the carriage door, but La Niña waved him away in favor of her own footman. They descended the carriage to a red carpet. José offered his arm to his grandmother and led her beneath the great stone arch carved with the masks of comedy and tragedy into the foyer. The floor, white marble veined with gold, reflected the opalescent light of the dozen enormous lanterns and the massive chandelier. It was as if they had stepped into a pearl. The air was heavy with the scents of perfumes and colognes—in the garden of fragrances he detected rose, gardenia, clove, lime, and bay rum—and filled with the rumble of conversation. From fragments of conversation—“that beautiful boy? Her grandson,” “one of the last grand ladies,” “looking every minute of her age”—he realized that some of the talk was about his grandmother and him. A few women half-curtseyed as they passed, eliciting from his grandmother a curt nod of acknowledgement, but as he had been instructed, he looked straight ahead. He escorted her up the wide stairway to their box. A footman bowed at the sight of them, pulled back the heavy red drapes, and stepped aside to allow them to enter. Two gilt chairs had been set in the center of box, close to the railing. José stood behind his grandmother’s chair, pulling it back slightly, and waited until she was seated before he took his own seat beside her. The vast theater was beginning to fill and José was again aware of the attention he and his grandmother attracted from the crowd, but he was too dazzled by all that lay before him to do more than dimly notice the fingers pointed at their box and the half-heard remarks.
Beneath a circular ceiling painted with plump putti, the Teatro de México was a rococo pile of white marble, pink damask, and gold. The facades of the tiered boxes were plastered with gold-leafed allegorical figures. Above the proscenium arch were two other massive arches thickly decorated with gods and angels. The proscenium itself was plastered with gilded fleur-de-lis. Enormous mirrors set along the sides of the house redoubled and echoed the decorative frenzy, and the soft light lilting down from the dazzling crystal chandelier added depth and dimension. The stage was hidden behind heavy gold curtains, the apron ablaze with footlights. As the musicians filed into the orchestra pit and began to tune their instruments, José’s heart raced with anticipation. A few minutes later, the lights dimmed. The conductor emerged to a torrent of applause. His grandmother, who had been sitting beside him with regal indifference, now touched his hand. The moan of a single violin began the overture. Within moments, currents of music swelled through the still, scented, hothouse air. As the golden curtains slowly parted, José thought his heart would explode with excitement.
And then, he frowned. The stage was bare but for a row of battered papier-mâché palm trees against an immense painting of a dark stone wall and a pair of seated hawk-headed Egyptian gods. Two fat men stood near the center of the stage. One wore a long, white tunic, his arms covered with snake-shaped bracelets. The other was clad like a soldier in a leather skirt and breastplate, but his face was pink and jowly. José thought he looked more like a butcher than a general. The two men declaimed to the music in Italian, facing the audience rather than one another. The fat soldier burst into a song and when he finished, the audience applauded. He bowed and waved his hand. A stout woman emerged from the wings in a gold gown and a long headdress surmounted by a crown. She and the soldier sang for a moment and then another woman appeared, this one so fat that her chins bobbled like a windup toy. She wore a black wig that came down in a curtain of hair on either side of her face and a midnight-blue gown. The audience roared and there were cries of “Tetrazzini!” She and the two men sang for a moment and then a procession of singing soldiers filled the stage, followed by a man wearing the headdress of a pharaoh. The music grew loud and martial. José understood from the repetition of the word “guerra” that the soldiers were going to war. When the song ended, everyone departed the stage but the woman called Tetrazzini.
José knew that the opera was make-believe, but the make-believe seemed to him, who dwelled so deeply in his own detailed fantasies, shopworn and perfunctory. He could not bring himself to imagine that this porcine woman who looked like a cook was the beautiful Princess Aida. He slumped back in disappointment and began to fidget with the creases in his trousers. The opening notes of a lovely song drew his attention to the stage. Tetrazzini lifted her heavy arms, tilted her head, and, alone in the footlights, began to sing. The house was hushed as she cast her song into the silence. It was not the purity of her voice as much as her certitude that pierced his heart. With every cell in her body she communicated her conviction that she was Aida. He leaned forward, captivated, and he believed her. Her singing spun a web of enchantment that transformed the painted backdrop; the leaves of papier-mâché palm trees rustled with a desert breeze and the painted walls acquired the heft of stone. In the mesmerizing pool of her voice, everything had changed, not only on the stage, but in himself. He was still aware he was watching an illusion—paper trees, fat woman—but simultaneously he was transported to Egypt, where a beautiful young girl sang of love. He experienced something similar when he reread his favorite novel, imagining himself in a ship scouring the bottom of the ocean with Captain Nemo, but all that took place in the solitude of his mind. Here, his imagination was stimulated and intensified by the woman on the stage. When she reached out her hand as she ended her song, she seemed to be reaching for him, beckoning him to enter this marvelous fantasy. He reached back, his hand floating in the air, and in his mind their fingers touched.
“José, what are you doing?” his grandmother asked, breaking the spell.
“Applauding, Abuelita,” he replied, raising his other hand and joining the deafening cheers and applause.
He had never felt such grief as he did when the opera drew to a close, Aida and Radames buried alive in the crypt, Princess Amneris prostrate above them. When the princess intoned her final “pace” to the imprisoned lovers, he could not see the stage for his tears. His head was filled not only with thoughts of the dying lovers but of David. He felt his grandmother’s hand in his and glanced at her. She, too, was weeping. And then the music stopped, the curtain swung shut ending the tale, and the house exploded. The audience cheered, applauded, stamped its feet, and wailed the name “Tetrazzini!” He jumped to his feet and joined the cries, his grief transformed into wild joy. The curtains opened and Tetrazzini appeared on the stage, where she was soon ankle deep in roses flung from the crowd. He wished he had brought some gift to thank her for the journey she had led him on, but he could only beam love and gratitude toward her. He wept and applauded with the rest of the audience, demanding curtain call after curtain call. Tetrazzini burst into joyous laughter, her head bobbing with delight and cried out, “Viva México!” which incited the crowd to even higher peaks of delirium. “Viva Tetrazzini!” it roared back, in a single mighty voice that rattled the crystals of the chandelier. “Viva! Viva! Viva!”
His heart did not return to its normal beat until he was in his bed, hours after his last glance at the empty, flower-strewn stage. As he looked around his moonlit room in the deepening silence, he felt as if his feet had at last touched ground after descending the steps of a great height. Almost instantly, he was asleep.
Sarmiento lay on the sofa in the bedroom he had shared with his wife for over a decade, smoking. He pretended to read a medical journal while he watched her out of the corner of his eyes as she loosened her hair, shook it out, and reached for a silver-handled brush. She was the least vain woman he had ever met, but he assumed the pleasure she took in this nightly ritual derived in part from the matchless beauty of her long, black, glossy hair. The pinkish light of the paired Argand lamps that illuminated the mirror softened her facial scars. She wore a white nightgown, her shoulders covered with a beige cashmere shawl. Around her neck was the crucifix she never removed and on her fingers two rings, her wedding band and a gold ring set with a pearl. She brushed her hair with long, slow strokes. This is her place, he thought. She belonged here in this absurd but charming palace where the roof leaked, the servants stole, and La Niña refused to install electricity because she was convinced it would seep from the outlets and poison the household. This was her place in the world, but not his.
“Miguel, may I disturb your reading?” she asked tentatively.
“I am only pretending to read while I watch you,” he said.
“Your journal must be very dull,” she replied, smiling.
“What would you like to talk about?”
“There is a girl at the orphanage. Tomasa. She is a Yaqui who was captured by soldiers in Sonora and arrived here after terrible hardships. Her parents are dead. Killed by our soldiers, but she has a younger brother in Arizona for whom she is responsible. I promised her I would help her reunite with him.” She paused in her brushing. “I told the director of the orphanage if he released her to my custody she could enter service here. He agreed. But I must still find a way to get her to the border.”
He sat up. “How old is she?”
“Thirteen, perhaps. Not old enough to travel alone for such a distance, particularly without proper documents. Padre Cáceres said he would try to find a couple to adopt her and escort her, but his parishioners are …”
“Incapable of such an undertaking,” Sarmiento said. “They are good people, but poor. Not the kind of people who travel for leisure. They could attract the attention of the authorities and be intimidated by them into confessing their true purpose.”
“Yes,” she said. “If Tomasa were an infant or even a small child, they could claim her as their child and who would question them? But a girl on the verge of womanhood is a different matter, and, well, she is rather fierce, Miguel. I’m afraid if she were questioned, she would run away.”
He stood and walked behind her. “I will take her myself, Alicia.”
With a puzzled expression, she said, “You?”
He placed his hands gently on her shoulders and said, “I will take her to the United States. Once I reunite her with her brother, I will continue on and join Madero, who has escaped to Texas, where he plans a revolution against Díaz.”
She had been expecting this, or something like it since he had resigned his position at the Superior Sanitation Council. His restlessness and unhappiness had decreased, and he had begun to seem his old self again. Until this moment, she had not understood that this was because he had been coming to a decision and now he had made it. She knew she had the power to prevent him from leaving, although she doubted that even she would be able to restrain him for long. Once he was in thrall to an idea, he would suffer under its compulsion until he carried it out. This was their most basic difference. For her, ideas were phantoms that had only such power as one gave them, while humans were real with actual needs. Ideas were men’s Moloch, the false gods they fabricated, clothed in purple, crowned, and to whom they then sacrificed themselves. Themselves and others, spilling real blood for an illusion. So she thought as he spoke of democracy and freedom and liberation.
“Miguel,” she said, cutting him off. “Are you prepared to kill?”
Startled, he said, “I don’t understand.”
“Don Francisco wants to lead a revolution,” she said. “Revolution is war. War, Miguel. Will you fight? Will you kill?”
She saw from his frown that this was not a question he had asked himself. He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. After a moment, he said, “No, I will not kill.”
“How can you be sure?” she pressed.
“I have already killed once,” he said softly, and she knew he was speaking of the servant girl who had died at his hand when he tried to abort their child. “That was enough for this lifetime. Besides, I am a doctor. I am sworn to preserve life, not to take it.” With a resolute expression, he continued, “Yes, there will be war and death, but no man will die at my hands and I will save those who I can save.” He reached for her hand, smiled sadly, and said, “Why couldn’t you be like other women and throw yourself at my knees, weeping and begging me not to go? Instead, you ask me the one question that makes me doubt myself.”
“I am like other women,” she said unhappily. “I do not want you to go. I do not want you to be injured or killed, and if this revolution fails, I fear I will never see you again.”
“If the revolution fails,” he said, “I will seek refuge in the United States and you and José will come to me and we will begin a new life there.”
“Oh, Miguel,” she cried. “To give up everything for these ideas?”
“The suffering all around us is not an idea, Alicia, it is reality. Like the suffering of the girl, Tomasa. Don’t you want to help more than one child at a time?”
She threaded her fingers through his and came to a decision of her own. “If you must go, I will go with you.”
“War is no place for a woman,” he said firmly.
“I don’t mean that I will join your revolution,” she replied. “But you will be less conspicuous if we travel as a family. We can go together as far as the border. I will take Tomasa to her brother and you will go to Don Francisco. And then I will return here to our home and wait for you.”
“It’s not necessary,” he said quietly.
“It is,” she told him. “I am like other women, Miguel. I know I cannot prevent you from going, but I am not ready yet to let you go.”
He nodded, took her hands in his, and kissed them.
José felt a hand stroke his cheek and then gently shake his shoulder. He opened his eyes to the sight of his father sitting at the edge of his bed. A single lamp lit the room. His father was fully dressed in his habitual black suit. His face was grave but his eyes were filled with a tenderness José rarely saw in them.
“Papá, is something wrong?” José asked, sitting up in bed.
“No, mijo, just get dressed,” he said quietly. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
His father left the room. José yawned and glanced at the window. He could see from the ashy pallor of the sky that it was near dawn. He drew the blankets around him to ward off the chill and considered the situation. He might have worried that he had angered his father except for the gentleness in his eyes and voice. Could his father be planning a surprise for him? This seemed unlikely because his birthday had passed and the Nativity was still two months away. Sleepily he tossed aside his blankets—waking El Morito, who hissed a complaint—and dressed quickly in his cadet’s uniform, fastening its many buttons with icy fingers.
His father was waiting in his buggy at the doors of the palace. José climbed in beside him, wishing that his father had chosen to take his grandmother’s carriage, which was large and warm and comfortable.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see, José.”
“Is Mamá coming?”
“No, what I have to show you is for your eyes alone.”
José shivered, his mind filled with questions, but just then Chepa came running out of the palace with chocolate and pan dulce, a horsehair blanket draped over her shoulder. She chided his father for taking José out into the morning vapors without sufficient covering as she laid the blanket across José’s lap and gave him his breakfast.
She concluded her scolding by saying, “And where are you taking him? Decent people do not go abroad at this hour. Only thieves and, well, worse, Doctor, and I’m sure you know what I mean.”
Sarmiento smiled. “I will avoid the riffraff, Chepa. As a matter of fact, we are going to church.”
She scowled. “Now you’re mocking me!”
“No, I am sincere,” he said. “I am taking my son to the cathedral.”
She glared at him, decided he was being truthful, and said to José, “Remember to say your prayers for your family, Josélito. God loves the prayers of children above all others. And you,” she said to his father, “I don’t know what you’re up to, but you might try a prayer or two yourself, if the words don’t scorch your unbelieving mouth!”
His father laughed, shook the reins, and they trotted toward the Zócalo.
José sipped his chocolate and nibbled his gingerbread as his father drove them through the quiet streets, steering by the rows of red police lanterns in the middle of the roadway. The flicker of gas lights gave way to electric street lamps as they approached the great plaza. His father halted the buggy in front of the cathedral across from the streetcar kiosk where the big green and yellow cars were lined up in a double row readying for the day’s runs. José looked at them longingly. He had never been on a streetcar, but he loved to watch them race along their tracks, sparking the electric lines overhead, the windows filled with the faces of their passengers. David had promised to take him on a streetcar to San Ángel, but then David had left.
His father, getting out of the buggy, said, “Here we are.”
“Are we really going into the cathedral, Papá?” José asked.
He hadn’t thought his father was serious when he told Chepa they were coming here because, as was well known, his father did not believe in the existence of God. José himself was quite satisfied that God existed, although his picture of God owed a great deal to the glowering portrait of his grandfather—long dead before he was born—that hung in the grand sala. That God was perpetually enraged but also quite remote, and José knew he was too unimportant to engage the deity’s interest. He believed he was watched over by gentler spirits: by Jesus, whom Chepa called “diosito lindo” as if he were another of her grandchildren; by Jesus’s mother, Mary, who had the same calm and loving eyes of his own mother; and by his guardian angel, whom he was always trying to catch in the corner of his field of vision, where Chepa told him he could be seen.
His father lifted him out of the buggy, as if he were a baby and not a ten-year-old boy. His protest died on his lips because the power of his father’s body as he lifted and held him made him feel warm and protected.
“Not inside the cathedral,” his father said. He crooked a finger upward. “To the top.”
He followed the direction of his father’s finger. Outlined against the sky’s faded brocade was the west bell tower, where Santo Ángel de la Guarda lived. He was the little brother of Santa María de Guadalupe, who lived in the east tower. She was so immense that, when she was rung on a clear day, she could be heard all the way to heaven.
His father reached into the buggy for a lantern and handed José the blanket. “You may need this when we reach the top,” he said. He stopped a passing Indian and gave him a peso to watch the horse and buggy.
He followed his father through the small, wooden door that led into the bell tower. His father lit the lantern and began to ascend the narrow stone risers. José tried to keep pace but the stairs were steep and the walls sweated a piercingly cold chill that made his teeth rattle. Cold and tired, he stopped. In a moment, he had lost sight of the lantern and stood in utter darkness.
“Papá!” he called, frightened. “Papá!”
His father came back down the stairs to where José was leaning, breathless, against the damp wall. “Do you remember when you were very little and rode on my back?” He stooped down. “Come on, mijo. Climb up and I will carry you the rest of the way.”
He clambered onto his father’s back, tucked his legs beneath his father’s arms, and clasped his father’s chest. He could feel the heat of exertion rising from his father’s body, deepening the familiar scents of tobacco and bay rum. He leaned his cheek against his father’s neck and closed his eyes, and he was a toddler again being swept off his unsteady feet by his enormous father, who slathered him with kisses and called him “mi hombrecito”—my little man.
José did not doubt that his father loved him, but it was the bodies of the women of his family from which he ordinarily received the animal intimacy that created love’s profoundest bond. The smooth, soft, and yielding bodies of his mother, grandmother, and aunts swaddled him in flesh. His father’s embrace was very different. His body was hard and his skin covered with bristly hairs. In his barbed embrace, José did not lose himself, as he did in his mother’s arms, but remained a distinct entity. His mother’s body sheltered him; his father’s body challenged him. His mother’s touch was imbued with the nostalgia of the womb, calling him back to a place of unquestioned safety. His father’s strong hands had delivered him from that womb and continued to push him forward into the world.
They reached the cavernous room where a dozen lesser bells were hung and ascended a final flight of stairs to the top of the tower, where they stood on a platform beneath the three tons of Santo Ángel. José eased off his father’s back. His father draped the blanket around José’s shoulders, took his hand, led him to the east side of the tower, and said, “Mira,” as the eyes of morning began to open above the snow-shrouded peaks of the volcanos, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl.
He watched the light break across the valley, revealing the green and brown of farmland. The occasional flash of colored tiles marked the dome of a church of one of the outlying villages. He could see the silvery sheen of the five small lakes that, in ancient times, had filled most of the valley. His eyes traced La Viga, the last surviving canal from the time of the Aztecs, as it flowed toward the city from Lake Xochimilco. As it had in Moctezuma’s time, it connected the countryside to the city, and its surface was clotted with barges and canoes laden with food and flowers for the markets. His father led him around the platform, and he saw the Paseo de la Reforma, almost deserted at this hour, cutting west toward the mossy forest and castle-covered hill of Chapultepec. He could see the domes and towers of the colonial city amid the marble structures of the Centenario, seventeenth-century tenements, and the new suburbs of the rich. Electric streetcars and horse-drawn carriages shared the same venerable cobblestone streets. Far off, a train crossed an iron trestle and plunged into a remnant of primordial forest. He saw everything all at once as the sun rose higher in the sky, and he could only murmur, “Oh, Papá, it is so beautiful. I never knew it was so beautiful.”
“It is,” his father said. “This is our patrimony, José. Do you know what that means?”
José, still astonished by the landscape unfolding beneath him, could only shake his head.
“This is México, Josélito. This is what our fathers have given us to love and protect and, if need be, to lay down our lives to preserve it for our sons. This is our world, José.”
José’s heart beat with pride for his country and love for his father, and he could not tell where one ended and the other began.
“Yes, Papá,” he said, slipping his hand into his father’s. “This is our world.”