Sarmiento plunged into the crowded streets behind the National Palace. When he and Alicia had discussed the possible consequences of his speech, they had agreed the likeliest outcome was his arrest and confinement in Lecumberri. She would seek him at the prison when he did not return home. Should he return home? He thought not, at least not until he had time to work out another plan. But where could he go? He glanced down the street and saw a pair of priests, deep in conversation, walking toward him. Cáceres, he thought. Cáceres would take him in. He moved swiftly and purposefully south, toward San Francisco Tlalco.
The priest was in the garden tending his remaining rose bushes. Sarmiento paused at the gate and watched him. The first time he had entered the garden it had seemed to him an unlikely slice of paradise in a blighted neighborhood. Cáceres had shown him, however, that San Francisco Tlalco was not a human refuse pile but a community. Its inhabitants were the vestigial descendants of the ancient race of the Aztecs, and the parish garden was a lingering breath of the garden city of Tenochtitlán. When he had first come into its streets in his white uniform and his citation book, Sarmiento had seen only the degradation of the Indians. Cáceres had taught him to see the triumph of their survival after centuries of violence, disease, and destitution. Sarmiento did not pretend to understand everything that the survival of the Indians meant for México, but he knew México would never achieve wholeness until it embraced the heritage they represented. It was, he thought, as the American president Lincoln had said in the passage of a speech Madero liked to quote: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Until México accepted the past that its Indians represented, it would have no peace, and without peace the future of México, like Ciudad de México itself, would be constructed on a swamp.
“Pedro,” Sarmiento called, entering the garden.
Cáceres looked up, saw him, and grinned. “Miguel, have you come to help me? If so, you are overdressed.”
“I have come to ask your help,” Sarmiento said.
The priest put down his shovel and gazed at him with concern. “You are distressed, Miguel. What has happened?”
“Can we talk in private?”
The priest wiped his hands on his trousers and approached him. “Yes, of course. Come.”
In her anxiety, Alicia went to the one place in the palace where she had always been happiest—the kitchen. Chepa, seeing her shuffle slowly into the big, warm, fragrant room, clucked, “Mija, you should be in bed! How thin you have become! What can I feed you? Graciela, bring the lady some of that fresh bread you have just taken out of the oven. Juana! Butter and honey. Quickly.”
Alicia eased herself onto the bench at the long table where the women of the kitchen plucked and chopped, ground and skinned, mixed and kneaded. Sunlight glinted off the copper pans hanging from racks near the big, tiled stove. She drew her rebozo over her thin shoulders and relaxed to the smells and noises of the kitchen. She smiled at the little altar to San Pascualito, the aproned kitchen saint, who held a wooden spoon in one hand and a bowl in the other. Instead of flowers, the altar was decorated with garlic, onions, beans, flour, and peppers. As she defeathered a chicken, one of the girls sang a song Alicia had sung as a child, “Tengo una muñequita vestida de azul, zapatitos blancos, camisón de tul …” Chepa brought Alicia thick slices of warm bread spread with butter and dripping honey, and a cup of sweet, milky coffee.
“You must eat!” she said fretfully.
Alicia knew the cook was thinking of the many meals she had sent up to Alicia’s room during her convalescence, only to have them returned almost untouched. To appease her, Alicia picked up a slab of bread, its warmth tingling her fingers, and took a bite. It was delicious! Surely, she imagined, when Jesus broke the bread he passed to his followers at his last supper, it had tasted like this bread—dense and substantial—not like the flat, tasteless hosts the priests handed out at the Eucharist. She licked honey and butter from her fingertips to Chepa’s evident delight.
“Another bite, mija,” the cook said. “You must regain your strength.”
She sipped her coffee, nibbled at the bread, and said, “My dear, if ever I had to leave this place, I believe I would miss you the most.”
“Leave this place?” Chepa snorted. “Why would you leave this place? What troubles you, Daughter?”
She smiled, kissed the older woman’s fingertips. “Nothing. At this moment, I am very happy.”
Quarreling male voices followed by banging on the door to the palace startled the women into silence. Alicia rose from the table and went out into the courtyard, followed by the cook. The front door flew open. The porter Andres stumbled backward and fell to the ground. A group of men brandishing rifles and pistols poured into the courtyard. Although they were dressed in ordinary clothes and were neither police nor soldiers, they appeared organized and purposeful. Ladrones, was Alicia’s first thought, but what kinds of thieves would dare such a brazen daylight assault on the palace?
“Who are you?” she demanded, swiftly barring their way forward. “What do you want?”
She was addressing an older man—the others seemed like boys, barely out their teens—who wore a black suit, sombrero, and collarless white shirt.
“Sarmiento,” he growled. “Where is he?”
“If you are referring to my husband, he is not here. Leave now, or I will call the police.”
“Move!” he said, and pushed her aside so roughly she stumbled and fell into Chepa’s arms.
“Stop, you devils!” Chepa shouted. “Do you not know you are in the palace of the Marquesa de Guadalupe Gavilán?”
The leader ignored her and called out, “We want Sarmiento.”
He and the other men moved toward the second gate, into the family’s courtyard. Alicia, recovering her balance, rushed ahead of them and threw herself before the gate.
“Unless you are the police, I will not allow you to enter.”
The leader drew his pistol and pointed it at her. “Lady, if you do not move, I will shoot you.”
Chepa screamed. Startled, he spun toward her, and shouted, “Shut her up!”
One of the other men struck the cook with the butt of his rifle, knocking her to the ground.
Alicia, shocked by this violence, pressed herself more tightly against the gate. “Leave, I tell you!” she commanded. “Leave my house!’
She heard footsteps running across the courtyard behind her. She glanced back to see Santos, the majordomo, running toward her with a pistol in his hand. The leader of the invaders raised his own pistol and aimed it at the servant.
“Santos, no!” she screamed and threw her body between him and the shooter. There was an explosion and she felt molten heat sear her insides. Her hand went to her belly and blood gushed between her fingers. She fell. Screams and shouting filled the courtyard. She saw the boots of her attackers as they fled the courtyard. Then she saw nothing.
Cáceres should have returned by now, Sarmiento thought anxiously, though in the dim recesses of the church crypt he had no real sense of how much time had passed since the priest had left for the palace. He sat on a cot at one end of the long, musty room. Illuminated by torches were rows of tombs. Along the walls were shelves lined with skulls and bones that reached from the stone floor to the vaulted ceiling. The tombs held the remains of three centuries of parish priests. The bones along the walls were the Indians who had been buried in the church cemetery, long since dug up as the neighborhood—once its own small village—was engulfed by the city. Ordinarily, human remains inspired neither fear nor reverence in Sarmiento, for whom death was simply a cessation of biological functions and not the portal to an afterlife. At the moment, however, with his own mortality seemingly hanging in the balance, the staring sockets of the dead, the smell of bone crumbling into dust, and the skittering of rats made him shiver from more than the damp and cold. He pulled an itchy blanket around his shoulders and resigned himself to waiting for the priest.
He had fallen asleep. His eyes fluttered open and a cobweb of images from a dream clung to his consciousness—Paquita, the girl he had killed; Alicia’s face; a bloody hand, perhaps his own. Some of the torches had gone out and darkness encroached upon him like a rising tide. The priest, he thought, where was the priest! Had he been caught and detained? Was Sarmiento’s hiding place being tortured out of him? Had he seen Alicia? He could wait no longer, he decided, but would go home, whatever the risk. At that moment, the door to the crypt was thrown open. A square of light appeared at the top of the stairs followed by a rush of footsteps that belonged to more than one man. He sprang up and looked for something, anything, with which to defend himself. He grabbed an iron candelabrum and prepared to swing it at the intruders, when he saw Cáceres and Damian. His brother-in-law was, as always, impeccably groomed and dressed, but he was red-faced from exertion.
“What is this?” Sarmiento demanded of the priest. “Why have you brought my brother-in-law?”
“Doña Alicia has been shot,” Cáceres gasped.
Sarmiento dropped the candlestick. “No,” he moaned. “No.”
Damian stepped forward. “Huerta’s thugs invaded the palace. She tried to prevent them from shooting a servant.” He laid his hand on Sarmiento’s shoulder. “She’s not dead, Miguel, but she is badly wounded. You must come.”
He shook off Damian’s hand. “Why are you here? You told me if I challenged Huerta you would abandon me.” He looked at Cáceres. “Is this a trap? Did he force you to bring him? Are there soldiers waiting for me upstairs?”
“No, Miguel,” Cáceres said. “I swear on my vocation. Your wife lies gravely wounded. She begged me to bring you to her and Don Damian heard. He insisted on accompanying me, to help if we were stopped.”
“Look, Miguel,” Damian said. “I know what I told you, and had it been you they had shot …” He faltered and when he spoke again his voice shook with feeling. “But it was Alicia. Please, this is no trick.”
Confused and horrified, he hesitated. Was he still dreaming?
“If you fear Huerta’s men will return to the palace, don’t,” Damian said. “The whole city knows what happened today. The palace is surrounded by a mob of Indians who revere your wife. They will not permit entry by anyone who would harm her. Come, there is no time to argue further.” He grabbed Sarmiento’s shoulders and begged, “You must trust me, Miguel.”
He shook himself into alertness. “Take me to her.”
Outside the palace, as Damian had said, an immense crowd thronged the gates. He recognized people from the neighborhood and from San Francisco Tlalco, but others he had never seen before. They let him pass, accompanied by Damian and Cáceres, in mournful silence. A group of nuns in white habits knelt in the first courtyard, praying the rosary. In the second courtyard, society women mingled with street vendors and maids, and richly robed cathedral priests stood with Franciscan monks in brown habits and sandals. Their murmurs of consolation followed him as he passed among them and climbed the stairs to his family’s apartment. In the parlor, his sister-in-law Nilda was deep in conversation with a surgeon named Terraza. Sarmiento knew him. He was a butcher. Nilda looked at him and hissed, “You! This is all your fault.”
“Quiet, woman,” Damian said curtly.
Terraza approached, hand outstretched. The man’s shirt cuffs were soaked in blood. Her blood.
“Miguel,” Terraza said, grasping his hand. “Such a tragedy.”
He jerked his hand out of the surgeon’s. “How is she?”
“A bullet to the abdomen,” he said. “It perforated the bowel. There was a great loss of blood. I removed the bullet and sutured. But as you know, in these cases the real threat is sepsis.”
Sarmiento stared at the bloody cuffs. “She is already weak, recovering from a serious illness. Even a minor infection will kill her.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I did all I could. I did my best.”
Sarmiento nodded. “Thank you.”
He turned his back to the others and wept.
The numbness in her fingertips was slowly spreading through her fingers and soon she would be deprived of the sense of touch. The other senses would follow—taste, smell, hearing, sight—and she would leave the world blind, deaf, and insensate. Her anxiety was mitigated by her subtle awareness of doors opening—the same doors through which she had tumbled in her vision of unity. They opened now more slowly, deliberately, inviting her to step across their thresholds. She hesitated, knowing that once those thresholds were crossed, there would be no turning back. So this was dying—the pause between two realms of existence that allowed the soul a moment to compose itself before death, like gravity, tugged the leaf from the branch.
A fleshy blur above her resolved itself into the features of Pedro Cáceres. The priest’s careworn face and white hair were luminous. He squeezed a bit of sensation into her failing hand.
“Daughter,” he murmured. “My dearest daughter.”
She heard herself croak, “Where is Miguel?”
“Safe at the church. I will go and bring him here.”
“First, confess me,” she whispered.
“Of course.”
“Father, forgive me for I have sinned,” she said, but she abandoned the familiar formula and cried, “Pedro, I am afraid of dying!”
“That’s no sin, Alicia. Even Christ in the garden was afraid of dying. I assure you, mija, you should have no more fear of damnation than he did.”
“I am not afraid of hell,” she whispered. “I am afraid of heaven.”
She saw his confusion and wished she had the strength to explain that the source of her anxiety was the annihilating purification that awaited her.
“The body,” she said laboriously. “Everything it loved, gone. What will be left of me?”
He smiled lovingly. “The cup that holds the water and the lantern that shelters the flame are only vessels, Alicia. Discard them and water is water, fire remains fire. The part of you that loves has never been your body. It is your soul and that will not be extinguished.”
She nodded. “Yes, yes. Of course.”
“I will bring Miguel. Will you wait for him?”
“Yes,” she said. “But bring him quickly.”
The familiar scent of lavender and roses and the rustle of silks stirred her into consciousness, and she opened her eyes. Her mother sat beside her. Her face, unlike the priest’s, was not illuminated but desolate and withered. It was the face of an ancient animal trapped, uncomprehendingly, in old age and infirmity. She knew, looking into the other woman’s bleary eyes, that death was already sinking its tendrils into her mother’s flesh and would not be kept waiting for long. Her heart surged with compassion.
“Mother,” she said, lifting her hand to La Niña’s face.
“You fool,” La Niña said bitterly. “Did you think Santos has more value to me than you? Servants can be replaced. Not my child.” Tears streamed from her eyes. “You had no right to martyr yourself. You should have stood aside.”
“Forgive me,” she said, taking her mother’s hand. “I could not.”
“Do not die and there will be nothing to forgive.”
“If God wills it …”
“If you had listened less to God and more to me,” her mother said with some asperity, “you would not be lying here. One does not make old bones by being virtuous. Could you not have spared a thought for your own well-being, Daughter? Did you have to open your purse to every beggar who stretched out his hand to you?” Grief crumpled her face. “What did you achieve?”
“I have been happy,” Alicia replied.
La Niña sighed. “Happy? Does that matter so much?”
“It is everything, Mother.”
Alicia? Can you hear me?”
His voice was warm and soft, like a drizzle of honey.
“Miguel!” She opened her eyes. His face was furrowed with worry. He stroked her face tenderly, biting back tears. “Thank God, you are safe.”
“I came as soon as I could.” He stood and pulled back the covers. “Let me look at the wound.”
She heard him gasp when he undid the bandages and saw where the bullet had entered her. She could smell her putrefying flesh. He had explained septicemia to her—an uncontrollable bacterial infection that often followed traumatic wounds. She had already guessed from her failing body that something like this was happening to her, but his shock confirmed it. He carefully rebandaged her.
“How much time is left to me?” she asked him.
“Don’t talk like that,” he said, avoiding her eyes.
“We have always been honest with each other, Miguel.”
“Not long,” he said reluctantly. “A day or two. How do you feel? Are you in pain? I could give you morphine.”
She shook her head. “Morphine dulls the senses. I would rather bear the pain.”
“Oh God, Alicia, this is my fault,” he said, breaking down. “I brought this upon us.” He sobbed. “I am so sorry.”
She stroked his hair, now threaded with gray, coarser than it was the first time she had touched it so many years earlier. The beloved body, she thought, once so hard and strong. Time’s depredations had begun to soften it, loosening the skin on his neck, rounding his shoulders, raising the veins in his hands. The realization that she would not grow old with him stabbed at her heart.
“We agreed,” she said softly. “You did the right thing.”
“Then I should bear the consequences,” he said, lifting his head. “Not you.” He was like a little boy, entreating his mother.
“You will have your own cross to bear, Miguel,” she told him.
He nodded. “This was not what I expected.”
“God does not care about our expectations,” she said. “He sends us the suffering we need, not the suffering we are prepared to endure.”
“How can you speak of God when he is going to take you away from me?” he said bitterly.
She kissed his fingers. “After Anselmo, after my disfigurement, I did not think another man would ever love me or that I would bear another child. What a miracle you have been for me, Miguel! Still, even in our happiness, we were fated to part. Only the moment of parting was unknown. Now that it is here, I prefer to be grateful for the miracle rather than angry it is over. It makes our separation more bearable.” She stirred; the pain was great. “You must take José and leave México. You aren’t safe here.”
“Without you, there would be no reason to remain, in any event.”
“You must marry again,” she said quietly.
“Never!” he cried.
“My dear,” she said. “You need a woman to soften your solitude. You must also think of José. He is a sensitive and gentle child. He needs a mother.”
She saw from his face that only now was he thinking about the effect her death would have on their son. It was a look of terror.
“He will look to you when I am gone,” she said. “Be brave for him.”
He pressed his face into her breast like a child seeking comfort and wept fresh tears. She kissed the top of his head. Her words had failed to assuage his grief, but they had quelled her own lingering fears because their truth had resonated in the depths of her heart. Parting had always been inevitable and now that the moment had arrived, there was nothing to be done about it except to be grateful for what had been and for what was to be. Jesus on the cross must have felt such release, she thought, turning his eyes at the end from the suffering of the world at his feet to the limitless serenity of the sky where his father awaited him like the father in the parable of the prodigal son: “For this son of mine was dead, and now he is alive again!” She heard a voice in her head, slow and sweet as honey on the tongue: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives, give I to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” As he sobbed, tears sprang to her eyes too, quick and hot, but while his were tears of sorrow, hers were tears of joy.
José Ramon!”
Frère Martin’s sharp tone woke José from his daydream and brought him back into his geometry class, to the itchy wool of his uniform against the skin of his thighs, to Fatty Marquez’s smirking assumption that José was in trouble again for his inattention. José readied himself for the teacher’s reproach, but instead, in a softer voice, Frère Martin continued, “Come, José. The rest of you, keep working.”
José followed his teacher into the courtyard, where Tío Damian was waiting for him.
“José,” he said, in a strained voice, quite unlike his usual amused tones, “I have come to take you home.”
José’s confusion was increased when Frère Martin crouched down so that they were eye to eye. He took José’s shoulders in his hands and said gravely, “God bless you, child.”
“Come, José,” Damian said, extending his hand.
“What’s wrong?” José blurted out.
“We will speak in the car,” Damian replied.
But as Damian’s driver negotiated the dozen blocks between José’s school and the palace, his uncle remained silent until the Rolls-Royce had stopped at the palace gate. A crowd was gathered in front of it. Damian turned to José and said, “Your mother was injured this morning when some men invaded your home looking for your father.”
Nothing in that sentence made sense to José, who, only a few hours earlier, had left the palace with his mother’s kiss lingering on his lips and his father’s admonition to concentrate on his studies echoing in his ears. As he passed through the crowd to enter the palace, José heard sympathetic murmurs of “Pobrecito.” In the first courtyard, one of the housemaids was on her knees scrubbing dark stains from the cobblestone. She glanced up at him, her face streaked with tears. Chepa came running from out of the kitchen. Her head was bandaged. She squeezed him in a tight embrace. She, too, was weeping. Damian separated him from the cook. By now, José was terrified.
“Where’s my mother!” he demanded.
Chepa drew a shaky breath. “The doctor just finished. She is in her room.”
“What doctor? Where’s my father?”
“Come along, José,” Damian said. To Chepa, he said, “Bring two brandies, would you?”
They stepped past the maid on her knees—José glanced into the pail beside her, its water red—into the second courtyard and sat on a bench facing the fountain. The warm sun, the familiar fragrance of roses, the trickle of water from the stone tiers of the cantera fountain into the pond calmed him a little. He waited for his uncle to speak.
“Your father went into the Senate this morning and made a very dangerous speech,” Damian said. Chepa came with the brandy; he took one and gave one to José. “Take a sip, boy.”
He made a face at the liquid’s sour taste. “What did my papá say?”
“He called the president of the Republic a murderer,” Damian replied. “It is nothing less than the truth, of course, but you don’t walk into the lion’s cage to taunt the lion and expect to walk out uninjured.” He gulped his brandy. “Your father knew he was risking his life by speaking out—”
“Then why did he?” José cried.
Damian gazed at him appraisingly. “You are nothing like him, are you?”
José looked down and prodded the moss that grew between the cobblestones with the tip of his shoe. “I disappoint him.”
“You must continue to do so,” his uncle replied. “It may save your life one day.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” Damian said. “After he made the speech, he disappeared. Huerta sent men here to find him. They came into the house and were going to shoot one of the servants when your mother tried to stop them. She was shot instead. She was not killed, José, but she was seriously injured. The doctor removed the bullet, and she is resting now. I will take you to see her, but you must be brave.” He tugged at the collar of José’s cadet’s uniform. “Can you be brave, little soldier? For your mamá?”
José, biting back tears, nodded. “Where is my abuelita?”
“I think we will find her and your aunts with your mother. Come on, then.”
His mother was lying in bed, encircled by his aunts and his grandmother. When he entered the room, they lifted their heads and looked at him, their faces raw with grief. His grandmother held him in her thin arms, and he was aware of her fragility. His aunts moved away slightly from the bed to make room for him. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his mother’s sleeping face. He touched the faded scars she had once told him were God’s gift to cure her of vanity, stroked her thick, soft hair, and listened to her ragged breathing. She seemed small and spent, like an exhausted child.
She is dying.
The words formed in his mind with a certainty that left no room for fear. Instead, he was enshrouded by a strange calm, not the calm of acceptance, but the bleaker calm of fate. When she had been ill before, and he had thought she might die, he had been wild with fear and grief because her death would have ruptured his reality—the reality of a cosseted child, a little prince living in a palace whose greatest challenge was the boredom of surfeit. Since then, however, his city had disintegrated around him, shattered buildings and the glassy-eyed dead transforming familiar landscapes into a circle of hell. He had felt the fear of the adults whom he had once believed were impervious to fear and invincible in their certainties. The world had taught him there are no certainties and ultimately no safety. Terrible things happened without warning or explanation. His mother could die.
He blinked back his tears. He was not yet a man, at least not like his father or Tió Damian, but he could no longer be a child. As he watched his dying mother, he felt the world’s enmity and he responded not with a child’s grief but a man’s defiance, as if his blood were being infiltrated with threads of iron.
He sat there for a long time until she opened her eyes, which were clouded with pain, and whispered, “Mijo.”
He clasped her hand and smiled. “Mamá.”
Dinner was morose, the servant girls unable to hide their tears as they served the courses and cleared the dishes. Exasperated, Gonzalo muttered, “How can I enjoy my food with all this sobbing?” and was met by a cold stare from his sister-in-law Nilda and an admonitory one from his wife, Leticia. The ordinarily gay Eulalia quietly rearranged the food on her plate without eating. Damian simply drank through the meal, waving away the platters of food offered to him. At the head of the table, the wizened marquesa sat sphinx-like, casting unfriendly glances at her family as if they were uncouth strangers whose company had been inflicted upon her. Sarmiento observed the table silently, lifting forkfuls of food into his mouth but tasting nothing.
“This is all your fault,” Nilda said to him, not raising her eyes from her plate. “You killed our sister.”
“Alicia’s not dead!” Leticia cried.
Now Nilda looked up, not at him but at her sister. “She will die and he is to blame.”
No one spoke in his defense and the truth struck like a slap. He had no friends at this table. His connection to the family had been entirely through Alicia, and once she was gone, the connection would be severed. Without excusing himself, he rose from the table.
“Stay,” La Niña commanded.
“I am not welcome here,” he said stiffly. “I will go to my wife.”
“The rest of you, go,” she said. “You sit, Doctor. There are matters we must discuss.”
In a clatter of silverware and heavy chairs skidding resentfully across tile, the room cleared and he was left alone with his mother-in-law. She indicated her wineglass and he filled it and then sat beside her.
“Nilda is a fool,” she said. “Alicia has achieved what she has always wanted.”
“What is that, Señora?”
She sipped her wine, grimaced, and spat out, “Martyrdom,” as if it were a curse.
His remonstration died on his lips—her anger was her way of grief. Instead he said quietly, “Her actions were consistent with her character.”
“As were yours!” La Niña barked. “The two of you, peas in a pod, she looking to heaven in the sky and you to heaven on earth. Striving after things that do not exist and never will. Had either of your feet touched the ground instead of walking on clouds, we would not be sitting here. Why could this life not be enough for you?”
“We dreamed of a better world,” he said.
“A better world? For whom? Not for me,” she said. “This world is quite sufficient to my needs. I do not wish for it to change.” In a softer voice, she said, “You think I am a selfish old woman, but the truth, Doctor, is that I have seen the disasters dreamers like you inflict upon the rest of us. Do not forget, I lived through the civil wars that followed independence, the French invasion, the coups, and the countercoups after Juárez died. Bloodshed and misery, and all of it in the cause of someone’s idea of a better world. Díaz was a peasant with an appalling accent, but he was a realist who understood México. He imposed peace and order. You and your friend Madero have only succeeded in bringing down the roof.”
“It was not Madero,” he mumbled, “but the forces of reaction. He never had a chance.”
She shrugged. “I have said my piece. Now we must be practical. You must leave soon, to protect yourself and this house.”
“Yes, I know. I will.” He paused, expecting an argument, then added, “José must come with me.”
She nodded slowly. “You are his father.” With a bleak smile, she asked, “Did you think I would demand that he remain?”
“I know how much you love him.”
“It is because I love him that I would send him away,” she replied. “If he remained here, he would become the family’s poor relation after I die. He would only end up in some miserable marriage arranged by one of his uncles to bring money into the family. Take him to Europe or the United States, where he will be free to become himself, whatever that may be.” She creaked out of her chair. “I only regret I will not live long enough to see him become a man.”
“Whether you live to see it or not, he will do you credit,” Sarmiento replied.
She paused at the threshold and looked back at him. “I wish I could be as certain as you, but I cannot foresee what will become of him. His gifts are useless in the world I have known.” She sighed. “But my world is passing away and perhaps in the world to come, there will be a place for him.”
Day gave way to night. The moon filled the window above José’s mother’s bed and then passed on. The electric lamps cast orbs of light too frail to penetrate the shadowy recesses of the big room. Chepa had come and lit candles, tall and thick and yellow. Father Pedro had arrived and administered last rites as the family gathered at the foot of the bed, their faces as still as the ancestor portraits that lined the walls of the palace. One by one they departed, even his father, but José remained at his mother’s side, refusing food or sleep. For once, his wishes were respected, and he was allowed to remain.
His mother had not opened her eyes for a long time now. Sometimes her arms jerked into the air and then just as abruptly fell back upon the bed. Her raspy breath filled the room, subsided into a nearly imperceptible stream of air, then began again loud and labored. José had imagined death was like sleep—you closed your eyes and it was over—but dying, it appeared, was hard work. He wept silently at times, but for the most part he experienced not grief but an immeasurable compassion for his mother.
This was a new emotion for him, deeper than the quotidian love of mother and child. That love was personal and possessive, a web spun from the filaments of their moment-to-moment intimacies that went all the way back to his first heartbeat in her womb. The love that swelled and broke his heart as he sat beside her was forged in suffering—her suffering as she lay dying, his as he maintained a helpless vigil—but it transcended the particular event and seemed, to José, to comprehend every moment of loss that had ever been suffered by anyone. It was as if he were standing at the summit of the volcano Popocatépetl and he could see, in every direction, the vast terrain of human loss. But beyond that landscape, at the far rim of his vision, there was a blur of light where, without knowing why, he knew that all suffering and all loss came to an end. Then came the startled realization: this was God. The deep sense of peace that held back his torrent of grief was the presence of God in the room.
His mother was looking at him with tired but serene eyes.
“Josélito, bring me the silver box on my dresser and the little pair of scissors,” she said in the calm, loving voice he had always known, as if today were like any other day, and her request like any other request.
“Yes, Mamá,” he said and went to retrieve the items.
She had managed, with great effort, to prop herself up on her pillows and placed the box in her lap. She took the scissors from his hand and clipped a lock of her hair. Then she cut a bit of the satin ribbon from her nightgown. Slowly, with clumsy fingers, she tied the lock of hair in the ribbon. Then she opened the box and removed a ring set with a large, yellowed pearl and a necklace formed of wooden beads and a rough cross.
“Give me your hands, mijo,” she said.
He put out his hands.
“This is your inheritance from me.” She strung the necklace—which he now saw was a rosary—between his fingers. “This was given to me by a man whose people have been hunted down but who still survive because they believe God has not abandoned them. It represents faith.” She placed the lock of her hair in his palm. “This is my promise to you that you and I will be reunited through the grace of our Lord, Jesus. It represents hope.” Lastly, she gave him the ring. “This pearl was given to me by my first love, a boy named Anselmo. I looked into his eyes and saw God there, because God is love, and love is God, José. All love, mijo. Whoever you love, love fearlessly, no matter who he may be. Do you understand?”
“No, Mamá,” he said haplessly. “I am sorry to be so stupid.”
“You are not stupid, my dear. You will one day remember my words and understand them. Faith, hope, and love,” she whispered. “These three things remain. But the greatest of these is love.”
“Yes, Mamá.”
“Put these in their place,” she said, indicating the silver box and scissors.
He took them from her lap and carried them to the dresser. When he returned to her bedside, she was gone.
He stood beside her bed, wracked by heavy involuntary sighs, as if his soul were trying to catch its breath. When he regained his composure, he slipped the rosary over his neck, the ring on his finger, and the lock of her hair into his pocket. Then he went to find his father.