Chapter 17

Slivers of silvery light illuminated the tangle of trees. The branches were leafless and twisted. They ended in nubs like the amputated limbs José had seen in one of his father’s medical books. His heart pounded in his chest, and a spasm of nausea constricted his throat. His feet sank into soft, squishy ground. Each step released another jet of the stench of rotting meat that filled his nostrils and clung to his clothes. As he edged his way among the trees there suddenly appeared in his path a man-sized, winged creature covered in fecal-colored feathers. Its face, framed by a mane of greasy hair, was half-human, half-avian. It turned black, irisless eyes on José and croaked menacingly. José staggered back away from the creature, and, as he did, tore through the gnarled branch of a tree. From a dozen broken twigs, voices shrieked, “Why do you hurt us, boy!”

José screamed. El Morito’s startled green eyes glared at him for a second and then the cat jumped off the bed. His breath was hard and shallow and his heart pounded in his chest. His bedclothes were damp with sweat. He reached to the bed table and turned on the lamp. The light flickered on, dispelling the shadows in which he half-feared the bird creatures were lurking.

His door creaked opened and his mother entered the room in her nightgown and robe. Her long, thick hair, falling loosely around her shoulders, reminded him of the birds, and he shuddered as she approached him.

“José,” she said gently. “I heard you shout. Did you have another nightmare?”

“Yes,” he said in a quavering voice. “I dreamed of the Wood of the Suicides.”

She sat at the edge of his bed and sighed. “I wish you had obeyed me and stayed away from the Palantino.”

“I’m sorry, Mamá,” he said sobbing, as he threw himself into the cradle of her arms. “I shall never disobey you again. I will never go back there.”

For weeks after he had gone to the coffin maker’s theater, the flickering shadows on the muslin had replayed themselves obsessively in his mind. He had repeatedly asked his mother if they could return, but her only interest in the Teatro Palantino had been to learn about his father. When he asked to go alone, she told him El Carmen was not a safe neighborhood for an unaccompanied child.

“José, that is enough,” she said in a tone that brooked no further argument. “I forbid it.”

His grandmother, noticing his moping, asked him the cause. He tried to explain to her what he had seen and why it was so urgent that he return. “The pictures moved like a dream, Abuelita, and I want to see them again, but my mother says no.”

“If it is that important, I will send Santos with you,” she said, “but you are not to tell your mother.”

One afternoon, while his mother was away, he slipped out of the palace with Santos, his grandmother’s majordomo. Santos hailed a cab and they wandered the streets of El Carmen until they found the mortuorio just as José had remembered it. José trotted down the coffin-stacked aisles to the table where the man sold tickets, Santos at his heels. Santos bought tickets and they went into the close, dark room that smelled, Santos complained, like the privy in a cantina. José chose a bench closest to the screen, near where the fat woman pounded away at her out-of-tune piano. As before, they waited until the room was filled and then, like the purest and most intense moonbeam, the white ray of light materialized above their heads and filled the muslin sheet.

A black box was projected upon the screen and words appeared in white lettering—La voyage dans la lune—and beneath those words, “Geo. Méliès, Star Films, Paris.” José had no idea what the latter words meant, but the first phrase filled him with excitement because it conjured up the title of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. He hoped that the similarity between the titles was not a coincidence. His hope was rewarded when the title faded. A long-haired, snowy bearded man, clad like a medieval alchemist in robes bespangled with stars and planets, appeared before a gathering of similarly dressed men. Illustrating his scheme on a blackboard, he proposed a journey to the moon. José clapped his hands, earning the suspicious stares of the sodden crowd that surrounded him.

With increasing wonder, José saw that the story unfolding on the screen was just as Verne had told it: the forging of a bullet-shaped chamber, which was loaded into an enormous cannon and fired into the night sky to carry six of the men—astronomers—to the moon. In images that words could never have captured, the moon grew larger and larger until its cratered surface filled the screen. It revealed the craggy face of the man in the moon, just as José had always imagined he would look. His astonishment turned to laughter when the projectile pierced the moon’s eye. He gasped in amazement at the lunar terrain the astronomers encountered when they emerged from their vessel, arabesques of pale stone spiraling against the moonless sky. As the exhausted astronomers slept, seven stars rose in the sky above them, each with the face of a woman. The stars faded and the moon goddess appeared swinging on a crescent, while Saturn, like the Ancient of Days, looked down at the astronomers from among his rings.

In his conscious mind, José knew, as he had known at the opera, that he was looking at painted backdrops, not stars and planets, and human beings, not celestial creatures. But the flicker of shadow and light where image tumbled upon image, magically fading in and out, enchanted him. It was as if he had been carried to the screen and deposited there, unseen but present as the astronomers, fleeing a sudden snow, escaped into a tunnel that led to a subterranean landscape filled with enormous mushrooms. He shared their terror when they encountered the Selenites, insectoid moon people, moving like contortionists across the frightening topography. When the astronomers ran from the hostile Selenites to their vessel, José’s heart raced as if he were running with them. When they reached their capsule, he lurched forward, silently urging them into the chamber. The capsule was poised at the edge of the cliff. One of the astronomers threw a rope over the cliff, climbed down, and loosened the vessel so that it fell from the moon and dropped like a stone through the sky. He watched it plunge into the ocean, scraping the bed of the sea. Only when the capsule floated to the surface where it was towed by a steamer to port did José expel his pent-up breath. On the screen the word “Fin” released him from the film’s spell. Dazed, he found himself back in the loud, squalid room beside Santos, who was doubled over, eyes shut, muttering prayers.

Later, his grandmother summoned him to her bedroom and said, “Santos told me that you took him to a haunted mortuary filled with ghosts and devils! He was so frightened I asked your father to give him something to calm his nerves.”

“They were not ghosts, Abuelita, they were moving photographs that told the story of a journey to the moon.”

She looked at him with complete incomprehension. “Whatever it was, he refuses to go back. I am sorry, José, but perhaps your mother was correct to forbid you from this … activity.”

José did not protest. He knew now how to find the theater and he had every intention of returning.

José,” his mother said, stroking his hair, “what you saw were only images, photographs. They are no more real than the book that first described them.”

He lifted his head from her breast. “But they were real. The people on the screen were real.”

He wanted to believe her, but he could not shake the residual images of the tormented souls in hell that filled his head when he shut his eyes.

Several weeks passed before he was able to return to the Palantino. He had set out from the palace under sunny skies, but the capricious summer weather turned stormy as he retraced his path to El Carmen. He was caught in a downpour of warm, oily rain. He sheltered in a dark, dusty shop called La Huesana. Its walls were lined with shelves that held the store’s small stock of candles, religious statues, milagros, and jars and jars of dried herbs. He shook off the rain and read the labels on the jars. Some he recognized—rosemary, basil, spearmint, epazote, rue, sage. Others were strange in name and appearance—withered flowers, scaly bark, and dried twisted roots in jars labeled wolf bane, angel’s trumpet, and devil’s claw. Copal burned at an altar in a dim corner of the room where seven candles, each a different color, flickered before a robed and hooded statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As he approached the altar, he was conscious of the shuffle of his footsteps on the dusty floor and the pounding rain on the roof. The objects laid out on the table among the colored candles—glasses of water, vials of oily substances, hand-scrawled notes, a bottle labeled Agua de Florida—mystified him. The statue was clad in a rainbow-hued robe the same seven colors as the candles—gold, silver, copper, blue, purple, red, and green. He looked up at the hooded face, expecting the stern but loving visage of Guadalupe, and gasped when he saw, instead, a skull. Only then did he realize that the figure held a scythe in one hand and a globe in the other.

“La Santisima Muerte,” an old voice rasped, making his heart jump. “Our lady Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Dead.”

José looked at the person who had spoken, a woman dressed in the garb of the poor of the city—full calico skirt, dusty at the hem, a stained embroidered blouse, a black, frayed rebozo draped across her shoulders. She seemed ancient, older even than his grandmother, who was the oldest person he knew. Her white hair was piled into a bun and her face was creased, careworn, and dotted with moles, warts, and age spots. She studied him with rheumy eyes, glistening and damp.

“She is the most powerful of the gods,” she continued, in the same rasp that he imagined was what his cat would sound like if it could speak. “Everyone must come to her. The world is her field, the cutter is her harvesting tool.” She reached out a withered hand and touched his face appraisingly. Her fingers were as brittle as the leaves of an old book. “You are a pretty boy,” she said. “A two spirit. What is your name, child?”

“The Lady called you,” she said, gesturing toward the skeleton she had called Saint Death. “Some peril must await you, but she will protect you if you give her reverence.”

He wanted to run from the incense-scented shop, but he felt rooted to the floor.

José dug into his pocket and pressed a silver coin into her hand, thinking he would buy his way out. She took it and commanded, in a tone he dared not disobey, “Wait here.”

She disappeared behind a beaded curtain he had not noticed before. He heard the beating of wings, a soft cooing, and then she shuffled into the room holding a pigeon in her hands. She lifted its head to him for him to touch. Mesmerized, he stroked the tiny, feathered head. The pigeon turned its head toward him, eyes black and hard, like the beads of his grandmother’s rosary.

“What is a two spirit, Señora?” José asked as he continued to nervously stroke the pigeon’s head.

“The two spirit combines the male and the female in a single body and is desired by all. Men and women both will burn for your touch. To incite such desire is a dangerous thing. I will implore the Lady’s protection for you, but the cost of her protection is life. Not yours, child, but someone near you.”

He wanted to leave but could not make his legs move. Horrified, he watched her take the pigeon and with a swift twist break its neck. At the altar of Santisima Muerte, she plunged a little knife into the pigeon’s breast and caught its blood in a shallow dish. She began an incantation. José ran out of the shop into the rain and did not stop until he came to the theater.

He sat on the bench in the front of the room, staring at the muslin sheet, still shaking from his encounter with the old woman. He realized she was a bruja, a witch. Chepa had told him about such people, men and women who could cast spells and speak to the dead. He had always thrilled to the cook’s stories but now he remembered anxiously that she warned him never to give a bruja his true name or any item he had touched, and he had done both. Would the bruja find him and cast a spell on him? He waited for the film to start and to distract him with its magic from his fears.

The moonbeam shot across the room above him, the sheet filled with light, a black box materialized, and then the words:

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

From the straight road and woke to find myself

In a dark wood. How shall I say

What wood it was! I never saw so drear

So rank, so arduous a wilderness!

Its very memory gives a shape to fear!

The film was Italian, and as José quickly gathered, depicted the journey of the poet Dante into hell guided by the spirit of another poet named Virgil. The opening scenes were dark and ominous, but thrilling in the way that José had come to expect from films. The play of shadow and light drew him into the story so thoroughly it seemed he had left his body and was following the two poets. Every emotion and sensation they experienced ran through him as well. So completely had he surrendered to the film that when he followed the poets into the circle of gluttons, a spasm of shock passed through him.

Naked men writhed and twisted on the stony ground beneath torrents of rain and clouds of mist. José had never seen a naked man before, but as he watched, he felt that some corner of his mind had longed for these images. He did not understand why the sight of their muscled chests and thighs, lean buttocks, and the mysterious triangles of hair that cloaked their genitals both mesmerized and mortified him. All he knew was that his skin prickled with excitement and shame.

The poets descended further. The images of hell became darker and more frightening. He felt himself sinking into their horror as if water were closing over his head. The two men entered the Wood of the Suicides. The bare trees and the filthy bird creatures hopping along the blasted ground rose up in his imagination like vomit he could not expel. Having surrendered to the power of the film, he could not stop it as he could close a book that frightened him, nor could he control the images that flooded the screen as he could control his own imagination. He was as beguiled, as hypnotized by the flickering images of hell as he had been by Tetrazzini’s voice when she sang Aida. Some part of him knew this hell was as illusory as Aida’s Egypt, but the illusion was like a threshold that, once crossed, drew him into a reality so saturated with emotion it consumed him.

So, unwillingly but unblinkingly, he followed the poets into the trenches of hell, to the flaming tombs in which the heretics burned for eternity and to where the blasphemers lay beneath a rain of fire. The poets crossed a narrow bridge across a gorge where, in the river of filth below, the dissolute tried in vain to wash away their sins. José watched the poets approach the slow procession of hypocrites weighed down by robes of lead, past Caiaphas, Jesus’s condemner, now himself crucified on the floor of hell. The lake of ice was like a vast chessboard where the treasonous were frozen to their necks. It was here that José, surfeited by the images of horror, was aghast at the sight of one man feasting on the brains of another and at last had to turn his head aside. When he could finally bring himself to look at the screen again, it was filled with the three-headed image of Satan, himself frozen in the lake. In one of his mouths was the wriggling body of Judas. José watched the enormous jaws bite down on the struggling legs and torso. Satan’s eyes, beneath eyebrows as thick as malevolent caterpillars, looked surprised at Judas’s resistance to being eaten. His clawlike fingers tore at Judas’s parts, like a man dismembering a roasted chicken. The poets climbed his hairy hide to the surface of the earth, where, their backs turned to the mouth of hell, they beheld the stars. The film ended.

It was dusk when José left the theater, the sky above El Carmen shading into the darker blue of evening. He stumbled home, frightened by the shadows deepening in the doorways, by the gaunt faces of the beggars who approached him with outstretched hands crying, “por Dios, por Dios,” by the skeletal burros shaking beneath their heavy burdens, and by the painted faces of the women who accosted him from the alleys with lewd hisses. By the time he arrived home, his heart was like a bird beating its wings against its cage. He ran to his mother and confessed that he had disobeyed her, willing to risk punishment in exchange for consolation. That night the nightmares began.

His mother kissed his forehead and again reminded him, “What you saw was not real, José.”

He wanted to believe her, and yet he wondered how could hell have been imagined in such detail if someone—Dante or the man who made the film—had not been there? “But there is a hell, isn’t there, where bad people go? I don’t want to go there. Please don’t let me go there.”

He sniffled. “No,” he said, but the image of the naked men passed through his head with the shameful memory of his excitement. “I’m not a bad boy, am I?”

“No, mijo, you are a good and gentle child. You do not have to worry about hell. Now, say your prayers and ask God to help you cast these images out of your head. Think, instead, of the sweetness of his heaven.”

The renovated Senate chamber was one of Don Porfirio’s more ironic public works because in his time the Senate was a collection of elderly sycophants so responsive to his whims he called it his caballada, his stable. In the dowdy old chamber, furnished with spittoons, moth-eaten drapes, and frayed carpets, ancient ex-comrades-in-arms of the president enjoyed a peaceful retirement rubber-stamping his decrees between naps. The potted palms, it was said, were livelier than the solons, and when one senator quietly died at his desk, it was several hours before anyone noticed. With the approach of the Centenario, it was decided to renovate the chamber in anticipation of the foreigners who might wish to observe Mexican democracy in action.

The spittoons were gone, the drapes and carpets replaced. The marble dais from which the president of the Senate presided over his colleagues was cleaned and polished. The old battered desks were replaced with new ones complete with sterling silver ink sets—these quickly disappeared—and red, white, and green bunting was hung along the edges of the ceiling.

When Sarmiento entered the Senate, it was no longer a place of repose but one of buzzing, even violent, activity aimed primarily against Madero’s government. Opposition senators heaped scorn and calumny on Madero in vicious speeches that were faithfully reprinted in antigovernment newspapers and accompanied by scabrous cartoons. Madero’s Senate enemies, partisans of the old regime, were emboldened as Madero’s inability to satisfy the competing demands of his partisans destroyed his popular support. The opposition senators were determined to depose Madero and reinstate, if not old Don Porfirio, another strong man who could govern México with the iron hand they believed it required. Some opposition senators favored General Huerta, recently returned in triumph from Chihuahua, where he had put down Pascual Orozco’s rebellion. The old Indian killer, however, continued to profess his allegiance to Madero. Others had encouraged General Bernardo Reyes, Díaz’s minister of war. He had launched a rebellion that was quickly quashed, and Reyes now awaited trial for treason in a military prison in the capital. What had drawn the Senate into special session was yet another rebellion.

Sarmiento slipped into the chamber just as the president of the Senate had begun to speak. “We are informed by the government that Señor Félix Díaz, nephew of the former dictator, has landed at the port of Veracruz at the head of a rebel army and declares himself the provisional president of the Republic.”

Cheers from the opposition were immediately drowned out by cries of “Treason!” from Madero’s partisans. On the dais the president slammed his gavel ineffectively as the clamor grew, accusations and counteraccusations filling the air. A hand clasped Sarmiento’s shoulder. He spun around and faced his cousin.

He followed his cousin out of the chamber and through the labyrinthine corridor of the National Palace to the president’s offices. Luis walked briskly and said nothing. His hair, Sarmiento observed, was threaded with gray and his suit draped a thinner body. He had left the Ministry of Government and been assigned to the Ministry of War, where he operated what was called the counterrebellion division. It kept him busier than ever, snuffing out rebellions large and small against the first democratically elected president of México in almost fifty years. As for Sarmiento, he had hoped to enter the Senate inconspicuously, serve Madero quietly until his term expired in 1914, and return to private life. His suspicious election, however, had immediately made him a target of Madero’s Senate enemies and the opposition press. Moreover, as Madero’s fair-weather supporters abandoned him, he clung all the more closely to those, including Sarmiento, who had been with him in the desert. Inevitably, Sarmiento had been tugged into Madero’s inner circle.

He followed Luis into the yellow room where Madero, his brother Gustavo, a few other civilians, and a battery of uniformed army officers stood around the conference table covered with maps. Sarmiento recognized the minister of war and the leader of Madero’s faction in the Chamber of Deputies, but of the generals, he knew only Huerta, who glared at him briefly from behind his blue-tinted glasses. He felt out of place among the soldiers whom he instinctively distrusted, even as Madero’s government was increasingly reliant on the military for its survival. The maps, he observed, showed the topography of the city of Veracruz and its environs.

One of the generals, pointing to a spot above the city, said, “We could move our artillery here, fire on the barracks, and then send in a force.”

“And turn the streets of Veracruz into a battlefield,” Gustavo Madero said sharply. “Political suicide.”

“Don Félix commands the coastal defenses,” the minister of war said. “We couldn’t get close enough to land without exposing ourselves to his guns.”

“Then we have no choice but to surround the city and lay siege,” Gustavo Madero said. “How long can they last?”

The minister of war replied, “They have enough food for weeks, but if we cut the water supply, days.”

Sarmiento said, “If you cut the water supply, you will be inviting a cholera epidemic.”

All eyes were upon him. Gustavo Madero said, “We can’t take the city without some casualties. Microbes are cleaner than bullets.”

Huerta cleared his voice and growled, “A government incapable of taking one of its own cities except by siege looks weak.”

No one spoke until the president said, “I would rather look weak than soak the streets of Veracruz in the blood of its residents, General.”

The generals exchanged hooded looks before returning their attention to the maps.

“A siege by land, then,” the president said, “and a blockade of the port. Don’t cut the water except on my instructions.”

“And Félix Díaz?” Huerta asked. “When he surrenders, do we shoot him on the spot?”

His minister of war said, “Don Francisco, I urge you to reconsider. We don’t need a trial to establish that Félix Díaz is a traitor who should be stood against a wall and shot. You bring him here and he will become a magnet for other would-be rebels.”

Gustavo Madero chimed in, “Like Bernardo Reyes. Reyes sits in his very comfortable prison cell writing long letters to his partisans justifying his treason. You can read them in the opposition papers. You should have executed him, Francisco. Shoot Díaz and show the world you have some balls!”

Even the generals seemed startled by Gustavo’s audacity in expressing what they were surely thinking themselves, but Gustavo was the president’s brother. Unlike them, he could speak his mind without fearing the loss of his command or a transfer to a backwater post in the jungles of the Yucatán.

Madero looked at this brother and said, “An eye for an eye ends in blindness. I will not countenance extrajudicial murder. Reyes and Díaz will be tried, convicted, and punished according to the laws I have sworn to protect and preserve. That’s all, gentlemen.”

Two weeks later, Félix Díaz surrendered and was brought to the capital, where he was comfortably lodged in the new penitentiary to await trial for treason.

José’s school had been founded as a military academy three hundred years earlier by Spanish Jesuits who in the tradition of their founder, San Ignacio de Loyola, conceived of themselves as God’s infantry. Now it was operated by French Jesuits more interested in civilizing their charges than in preparing them for holy warfare. All that remained of the school’s martial traditions were the cadet’s uniforms its students wore and twenty minutes of drilling each morning in the courtyard. Shouldering wooden rifles, the boys marched to the beat of a drum and fife under the gentle gaze of Frère Reynaud.

On the morning of February 2, 1913, José was treading the ancient cobblestones of the courtyard with his classmates in a disheveled formation not remotely military. The boys laughed and chattered, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders, wooden rifles dragging on the ground behind them. Fatty Marquez thought it was funny to use his rifle to poke José in the butt. José turned, glared at him, and hissed, “Stop it, Fatty!”

“Would you rather I poke you with my pinga, Josélito,” the older boy chortled.

José made a vulgar gesture and heard Frère Reynaud’s high, soft voice admonish him, “José Ramon, would you want your mother to see you do that?”

A sharp whistling noise shrieked in the air above them, and a tall stone urn, overflowing with red and white geraniums, exploded, spraying the boys with dirt, rocks, and petals. The boys ran screaming to the classrooms just as another shell gouged a crater in the center of the courtyard. José took refuge in the classroom where Frère Martin taught geography with beautiful colored maps that fueled José’s daydreams when he should have been learning about the chief exports of Bolivia and French Indochina. Frère Martin ordered the boys to duck beneath desks and tables. Another shell struck the courtyard, blowing the door off the classroom. Fatty Marquez, crouching beside José, whimpered and a puddle of urine spread beneath him. José felt his heart pounding in his throat. The sound of gunfire and screaming penetrated the room from the streets just beyond the walls of the school. After what seemed to José to be an eternity, the violent noises stopped. Frère Georges, the white-haired principal of the school, entered the room. He spoke to Frère Martin in rapid French and then told the boys to stand. They got out of their hiding places, some of them wiping away tears.

Frère Georges said, “Boys, circumstances beyond my control compel me to close the school until further notice. Your families have been notified of this fact, and when they come for you, you will be allowed to leave. Until then, you must remain as you are.”

“The situation is unclear,” the principal replied. “The rebels have retreated from the Zócalo to the Ciudadela, where they remain at this moment. No more questions. I leave you to Frère Martin.”

When he had left, Frère Martin said, “It is wrong to cheer a revolt against President Madero. He is a true Christian. One who has regard for the poor. Now, let us pray for him and for the safety of all. Come on boys, ‘Our Father …’”

José tried to say the familiar words but kept losing his place in his anxiety for Don Panchito and for his father, who had gone to the National Palace that morning for a meeting of the Senate. The hours passed slowly. One by one, the boys were released into the custody of their families. José was among the last left and fear gnawed at his belly. Had something happened to his father? But then his father arrived, looking old and tired.

“Papá!” José exclaimed, running to him. He threw himself into his father’s arms and only then saw that his coat was damp with blood. José recoiled. “You’re bleeding! Are you hurt?”

“No, José, it’s not my blood. There were wounded in the Zócalo; I stopped to help those whom I could. That’s why I’m so late. Are you all right?”

“There were explosions. Juanito Marquez wet his pants. Papá,” he said, grabbing his father’s arm urgently. “Is Don Panchito dead?”

“No, mijo, he’s fine. Come, let’s go home. Your mother and your grandmother must be sick with worry.”

They drove to the palace in his father’s buggy through deserted streets, skirting the edge of the Zócalo, where José saw people stretched out beneath the trees as if sleeping on the cobblestone. The National Palace was surrounded by soldiers. They were not the ceremonial soldiers who usually guarded the doors in the splendid dress uniforms that José loved for their gold buttons and spiked helmets. These soldiers were armed and in battle dress. He watched a line of artillery guns being wheeled by horse cart down the Avenida de Cinco de Mayo, just as they had during the Centenario parade. But this time there were no cheering crowds. In the resounding silence, he could hear the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves and the scraping of the wheels on the pavement. He looked again at the prone bodies scattered around the plaza.

“Yes, José,” his father replied, taking his hand. “They were killed in the fighting this morning.”

His father sighed. “Don Pancho is the first freely elected president in almost fifty years. Before him, presidents have more often been installed by violence or by fraud. I thought, I hoped, that we had outgrown that history, but …” His voice trailed off. “Everything depends on the loyalty of the army,” he said, more to himself than José.

His father, lost in his own thoughts, did not immediately reply but then, as if remembering José was present, said unconvincingly, “Don’t worry, mijo. Everything is fine.”

At the palace, he was greeted with kisses from his grandmother and his mother, but as soon as they had assured themselves of his well-being, they sent him to the kitchen so they could talk to his father. Chepa gave him a cup of chocolate and a concha, his favorite pan dulce, but it tasted like dust. The porter Andres opened the gates, and he heard his cousin Luis in the courtyard, asking for his father. The porter told Luis that the doctor was in the library. While Chepa was distracted, José stole away from her worried care. The library door was half-open. José stood outside, straining to hear. He knew it was wrong to listen uninvited to the conversation of the adults, but his fear overcame his scruples. He felt the urgent need to understand what had happened that morning, and he wanted the hard words the grown-ups spoke to each other, not the gentle evasions they addressed to him.

“It was Díaz and Reyes,” Luis was saying. “They conspired in their prison cells with some old Díaz generals, who sprang them from jail and provided the troops. Reyes was shot when he tried to charge the palace. Díaz has retreated to the Ciudadela.”

“I was leaving the Senate chamber when I heard the shooting,” his father said. “We lacked a quorum because almost none of the opposition senators showed up. I suppose they had been warned. Don Francisco had not yet arrived at his office.”

“He rode down the Reforma from Chapultepec on a white horse,” Luis said. “The poor grabbed at him, wailing and praying, as if he were the second coming of Jesus. When he reached Avenida Juárez, there was gunfire and a policeman standing next to him was hit in the head. Madero’s guards hustled him off into a shop until the shooting stopped. That’s where they told him Bernardo Reyes had been killed. He actually wept. Fool. He should have killed the son of a bitch when he had the chance.”

“That leaves Félix Díaz,” Sarmiento said. “Not a military man. Why would the army follow him?”

José peered into the room just as his father took the brandy bottle and filled his cousin’s empty glass. Luis looked like a man who had seen his own grave.

“The generals know Díaz is a fool, but his uncle’s name is a rallying point, for now. General Villar was seriously wounded repulsing the attack on the palace.”

“I know. As soon as the casualties started to arrive, I went to see how I could help. He had a head wound. Very bad.” Sarmiento sighed. “It was like Ciudad Juárez all over again.”

“It gets worse,” Luis said. “You know who Madero appointed to replace Villar as the new military commander of the city? Your old friend, Huerta.”

“Yes, the butcher,” Luis replied, draining his second glass. He reached for the bottle and poured another. “Huerta spread his arms and embraced the little man and told him he would give his life for the president of the Republic. That made Madero weep again.”

“I know, I know. Army men are behind the coup and now that Reyes is dead, they’ll need a new leader. Díaz is a figurehead, useful for the time being, but ultimately the army will want one of its own. Someone like Huerta.”

Luis said, “Madero smiled and told me I was too mistrustful. He seemed, I don’t know, resigned. Almost peaceful.”

Sarmiento, remembering Krishna’s words to Arjuna on the eve of battle that Madero had quoted to him, said, “Don Pancho believes we have our destinies and they cannot be altered. What’s the situation now?”

“Díaz and his rebels have dug in at the Ciudadela and the surrounding streets,” he said. “There are about fifteen hundred of them. They are well equipped with artillery and guns and the Ciudadela has enough ammunition to keep them in business for weeks. Huerta is moving troops into the Zócalo. Madero has slipped away to Cuernavaca to gather reinforcements. The city is about to become a battleground. You might want to consider removing your wife and child.”

“Stay. I have a feeling that doctors will be in short supply.” After a moment, he said, “What do you think will happen, Luis?”

His cousin shrugged. “Díaz’s force is small. A sustained attack on the Ciudadela would drive them out into the open, where they would be annihilated. But this is not a military situation, Miguel, it’s a political one. Madero’s support has been falling for months. His enemies have grown bolder. If they suborn Huerta and he goes over to their side, our little president is finished. As are we all.” He stood up. “I have work to do. I will see you again.” The two men embraced.

José hurried out of their path, back to his room. He lay on his bed and thought about what he had heard. The rebels had captured the Ciudadela. The ancient armory lay a mile and a half south of the Zócalo. José knew it well from weekend excursions with his classmates. The long, low building lay behind thick walls with entrances at the four cardinal points. Outside its walls was a park that had some of the best skating paths in the city. Among the park’s fountains and flowers was a monument to José Morelos, one of the fathers of Mexican independence. Morelos had been imprisoned in the Ciudadela by the Spanish and executed against its walls, the bullet holes still visible a century later. Don Porfirio had turned the building into a military museum, where José and his friends had examined the massive cannons that had been used against the Spanish in the War of Independence.

José could not imagine that the quiet, musty corridors of the Ciudadela housed real soldiers or that its ancient guns could be fired. But Primo Luis had spoken of ammunition and artillery. It occurred to José that his Ciudadela, a playground where he raced his classmates on skates and ate ice cream while a military band played in an ivy-covered gazebo, was not the real Ciudadela. His thoughts wandered back to the dead bodies in the Zócalo, which was another of his playgrounds. The city itself had always been for him benign and familiar. Was it all an illusion? What was happening? And abruptly the images of the inferno rose in his mind, and he ran from his room in a panic to seek comfort in his mother’s arms.

In the evening, his aunts arrived at the palace to plead with La Niña to leave the city and retire to the family’s house in Coyoacán. José sat beside the old woman, who listened impatiently to her daughters.

“And you?” she asked, when they had finished. “Are all of you leaving the city?”

“Yes, of course,” Tía Nilda replied. “There are soldiers in the streets! There are dead bodies in the plaza. You cannot remain here. It is too dangerous.”

“Don’t speak to me of danger,” La Niña replied. “I have lived through worse. The French army bombarding its way into the city, the rabble that invaded my home after the French left and seized your father. I pled for his life at the point of their bayonets. You think I am afraid of a little fireworks? How ridiculous! This is my home and I intend to remain in it.”

His mother had slipped into the room during La Niña’s little speech. Now Nilda addressed her. “What about you, Alicia? Surely you will not remain here with your child?”

“I will not leave without Miguel, and Miguel does not intend to leave. In any event, someone must remain with Mother.” She looked at José. “But perhaps it is best if you go with your aunts, José.”

“No!” he cried without thinking. “I want to stay with you and my abuelita.”

Tía Leticia said, “Come now, José, don’t you love your aunties? We will take good care of you until it’s safe to return to the city.”

He was afraid to say what he feared—that if he left, something might happen to his parents or La Niña because saying it aloud might make it come true—so he shook his head and said, “No, I want to stay.” He looked at his mother. “Please let me stay with you, Mamá. Don’t make me go.”

“He proves his courage with his desire to remain here,” La Niña said. “Let the boy stay.”

His mother looked at her sisters and said, “My family will remain here. God protect us and you.”

At ten o’clock the following morning, Huerta began a bombardment of the Ciudadela. The rebels responded in kind, and for the next ten hours an artillery duel shook the city to its bones. Inside the palace, the family, including Sarmiento, sheltered in La Niña’s apartments and pantomimed normality. She read a yellow-bound French novel, while José and his mother sat at the piano and practiced the “Moonlight Sonata.”

Another shell struck nearby and José’s fingers faltered for a moment. Sarmiento looked up from the German medical journal he was pretending to read and watched his wife and child. He could scarcely begin to assess his emotional state, a confusing brew of fear, anger, and disbelief overlaid by simple shock. He had been in battle before, but he had never thought the battle would follow him into his very home. This invasion of his family’s private world by the machinery of warfare felt like a nightmare from which he struggled to awaken. But it was no dream. He and his family had been reduced in an instant from autonomous human beings with free will and personal histories to ciphers on the battlefield. They were of no greater significance to the generals lobbing bombs above the city than stray dogs. His fury was equaled only by his despair. Let it end soon, he thought, not caring on what terms or for which side. Let it end.

The battle continued for a third day. The servants, like cats, disappeared into the crevices of the palace, ignoring La Niña’s summonses. She stalked them until she found each one of them, cursed them for their laziness, and threatened to turn them out into the inferno if they did not return to their duties. Late in the morning, the pastor of San Andrés church pounded at the doors of the palace seeking refuge. One of the rebels’ explosive shells had struck the bell tower and leveled it. The debris had collapsed the roof of the rectory, leaving him without a home. He was admitted and later, with trembling hands, said Mass in the family chapel for the entire household. Even Sarmiento attended.

As the day wore on, the rattle of machine gun fire joined the explosions of shells. Soldiers’ voices could be heard shouting above the din, loudly and then trailing off as they ran through the streets. The old families who had lived in the neighborhood for generations and over whom the Gaviláns had once exercised suzerainty now also appeared at the gates. La Niña instructed the porter to let them in. Soon the elegant courtyards were filled with men, women, children, and infants surrounded by the piles and bundles of their possessions. There were wounds to tend to and hands to hold, keeping Sarmiento and Alicia busy. La Niña and Chepa inspected the larder and discussed how to stretch the food to feed the masses in the courtyards. José leaned on the walkway of the second floor and looked down at the silent Indians crowding the courtyards. Their appearance in the palace was more frightening to him than the explosions and the machine guns outside the walls. After a few minutes, he went into his room. Almost mechanically, he began to collect his dozens of tin soldiers. He dropped them into his toy box and shut the lid.

Alicia rose early the next morning. After dressing in old clothes, she went into the kitchen to help prepare food for the families crammed into the courtyards and the lower rooms of the palace. Chepa smiled when she saw Alicia. At the far end of the room, where the entire wall was taken up with adobe stoves, ovens, and fireplaces, scullions stirred pots and turned tortillas. The cooking fires illuminated walls hung with braids of garlic and chilies and the high ceiling, a rich, greasy brown from the smoke of generations of meals.

Chepa replied tartly, “What shall we feed them? José’s little cat? There’s not enough food.”

“Remember what Jesus did with five loaves and two fishes,” Alicia replied mildly. “Everyone will eat, if only a bowl of beans and tortillas. Give me an apron and put me to work. What do you need done?”

Chepa said reluctantly, “Well, the molendera ran away during the night, but grinding corn for tortillas is no work for a lady.”

“Show me her place,” Alicia replied, reaching for an apron hanging on a peg on the wall.

When Sarmiento came into the kitchen looking for her, she was soaking the ground corn in lime water. He took her aside and said, “I’m going to go out while the guns have stopped.”

He lifted his hand, showing her his black bag. “I’ll take this,” he said. “A doctor will be safer on the streets than a senator.”

“To scrounge whatever medical supplies I can and go to the National Palace,” he said. “To see if Madero is still president.” He kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back soon.”

The damage from the previous day’s bombardment was apparent as soon as Sarmiento stepped outside the palace. There was a crater in the plazuela where the bandstand had been. Flower urns had been overturned and shattered on the cobblestone, spilling black soil and red geraniums. The body of a soldier lay in a pile of debris in a corner. Sarmiento approached. The soldier had been shot through the head, and his shoes and rifle had been taken. He closed the boy’s eyes and began walking toward the Zócalo down narrow streets that seemed suddenly foreign and treacherous. The devastation was worse as he approached the great plaza. The sides of buildings looked as if giant bites had been taken out of them. Walls were collapsed and roofs had fallen in. Lampposts were bent down and ruptured telegraph and telephone wires festooned the deserted roadways. The Zócalo was strewn with rubble and bodies. A half-dozen green streetcars had been blasted into burned-out shells. Trees still smoldered from the shells that had hit them. In front of the National Palace, soldiers lay on their stomachs guarding the entrances, and there was a row of artillery guns in front of the cathedral. He willed himself to be calm as he walked through the wreckage toward the entrance of the National Palace. At the door, a captain stopped him and said, “Quién vive?”

“Doctor Miguel Sarmiento,” he said. “I am the president’s personal physician and a senator of his party. So he still governs México.”

The captain sighed. “Who governs México is anyone’s guess, but the president is still in the palace. You may enter.”

Once inside he was confronted by other soldiers who detained him for nearly an hour until, to his surprise, Gustavo Madero himself appeared.

The president’s brother wore a wrinkled suit and a collarless shirt. He was unshaven and his hair uncombed. His glass eye was bright and round as a marble but his natural eye was bloodshot and fatigued.

“Sarmiento,” he said wearily, “perhaps you have not been told, but the Senate is not in session today. You should get back to your family. Díaz may attack again at any moment.”

Gustavo hesitated, but then said, “All right. Come. He is fond of you. Perhaps seeing you will raise his spirits.”

He followed Gustavo through the labyrinth of the palace to the presidential suite. In Madero’s private office, cots had been set up and the room smelled of food, sweat, and fatigue. The president, as formally attired as his brother was casually dressed, sat in an armchair by a window reading. When he saw Sarmiento, he rose, set the book down on his desk, and went to embrace him.

“Miguel,” he said. “Thank God you are all right! And your family? Josélito? How are they?”

“The rebels shelled my house, but fortunately it was not occupied,” he said. “My wife is at Chapultepec and they will not attack there.” He smiled. “This will soon be over.”

“Reinforcements are on their way. Once they arrive, the rebels will be vastly outnumbered and General Huerta can begin his attack …”

Madero threw him an exasperated look. “I have complete confidence in General Huerta.”

Sarmiento could tell this was an ongoing debate. He sided with Gustavo. “But surely the army outnumbers the rebels at this moment.”

Madero said, as if quoting, “The Ciudadela is a venerable fortress, Miguel. Overwhelming force will be required to take it.” He smiled his gentle, beneficent smile. “You must not worry about the situation too much. When I rode to the palace from Chapultepec, the people came out and threw flowers in my path. The people are still with us, Miguel, and as long as they are with us, all will be well. Your cousin is here. He has been doing good work for us.”

“Hasta luego, mi presidente,” Sarmiento said. From the corner of his eye, his glance fell on the book Madero had been reading. The Bhagavad Gita.

A young secretary escorted him down the hall, past soldiers and scurrying clerks, to Luis’s office. Luis came out from behind his desk, held Sarmiento in a long, tight embrace, and, after inquiring about his family, asked, “What is it like on the streets?”

His cousin nodded. “This morning the rebels blew a hole through the wall at Belem prison, freeing all the scum of the city. Their thugs set fire to the offices of newspapers friendly to the government. Our thugs set fire to theirs.”

He shrugged. “Don’t look so surprised. Don Francisco doesn’t know about them or pretends not to know, but without them we would be defenseless.”

Luis looked disgusted. “So Huerta tells him, but then he disappears to his favorite bar, and our soldiers sit in the streets being picked off by the rebels. If Huerta fails to attack tomorrow, perhaps even Madero will come to the end of his patience. Until he opens his eyes to the actual situation, there is nothing anyone can do.”

“Huerta is a traitor. I believe that he is exchanging secret messages with Díaz through the American ambassador but I cannot yet prove it. Gustavo has men watching Huerta and in the embassy.”

“Why would the Americans help the rebels bring down a democratically elected government?” Sarmiento asked incredulously.

“Dictators are better for American business,” he said. “While Don Porfirio was in power he made enormous concessions to the American mining and railroad companies without consulting anyone. Madero has been looking at those deals and making noises about revising their terms so that México gets more than a few pennies on the dollar. Wilson, the American ambassador, is determined to prevent Madero from interfering with American profits. He has been attacking Madero privately for months, and now he sees his chance to get rid of him. We have intercepted his cables to Washington telling his government that Madero is finished and urging them to recognize Don Félix. So far, their fat President Taft has been cautious, but Wilson is pushing for intervention.”

“All it would take is a misplaced shell or the accidental killing of one of their citizens and they would have their pretext to invade in support of the rebels.”

Luis sighed. “México’s history is a series of coups and rebellions, Miguel. I know we hoped it would be different, but evidently political violence is in our blood.” He forced a smile. “Well, one way or the other it will all be settled soon. Perhaps in a day or two we will meet for a drink at the Café Colón.”

Sarmiento could not respond with equal gaiety. Instead he embraced his cousin, kissed him, and murmured, “Take care of yourself, Primito.”

The shops were closed, but Sarmiento found a looted pharmacy. He entered and took whatever had been left of value he could use to doctor. As he emerged from the wrecked building, a long car slid imperiously through the bloody streets on its way to the National Palace. American flags fluttered from its corners and he saw in the back seat the profile of the American ambassador.

For the next three days detonating shells and bombs echoed through every quarter of the city. To José, the silence in the lulls between the bombing was even more frightening than the bombings themselves. The ordinary noisiness of the city to which he was accustomed was human noise, from the songs and cries of the street peddlers to the pleading whispers of the beggars. Those voices were utterly still, as if the city were empty. He sat at his piano, playing every piece he knew, trying to fill the silence with something other than his terror.

The courtyards of the palace continued to fill with refugees from the neighborhood, many sick or wounded. Miguel saw to their injuries and Alicia nursed them afterward. During pauses in the fighting, she went out with Chepa to forage for food and medicine. The sights of destruction and death were searing. Bodies had been piled into mounds, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. The corpses twitched as they burned, and the smell of roasting human flesh made her dizzy with nausea, but she dare not stop. In the rubble of a collapsed building, she heard a child whimpering. She dug through the brick until she found it, an infant clinging to her mother’s corpse. She carried the baby to the palace, but Miguel was unable to save the child, and they buried her in the garden. In stolen moments, she went into the chapel and prayed, with more passion that she had ever prayed for anything, saying again and again, “Dear God, let it be over soon.”

At dawn on the sixth day of the battle, soldiers marched through the streets proclaiming a twenty-four-hour truce. Sarmiento wandered through once familiar streets that had been pummeled beyond recognition. Thousands of residents piled their possessions into carts or on their backs and began walking out of the city. Red Cross vans went around the Zócalo picking up bodies. These were taken to the plains of Balbuena and incinerated. A few stores reopened and were immediately mobbed by crowds looking for food and drink. Barricades of broken furniture and overturned carts were put in place to seal off the streets to the Zócalo. Artillery guns were wheeled into place. The rebels remained ensconced in the Ciudadela and the government clung to possession of the National Palace. In the late afternoon, a delegation of opposition senators was admitted to the Ciudadela ostensibly to negotiate with Félix Díaz. When they emerged, they announced that Don Félix had demanded Madero’s resignation as the price of peace. This news was conveyed to the National Palace. Madero refused. At five in the afternoon, the bombing resumed.