The City of Palaces (8 page)

The reason, she discovered, was simple. She wanted him to fall in love with her and that fantasy required her to conceal her face from him. It was a fantasy not merely because she could not hide her face from his gaze forever. It was also a fantasy because her life excluded the possibility of such things. Alicia had long accepted that the usual path of happiness open to women—marriage and children—was closed to her. In its place she had cultivated a different path, a life of service that repaid her in love for her modest efforts to ameliorate the sufferings of others. This was her happiness. She must accept that, embrace it, and abandon the dreams of what was not possible, for in those dreams that could not be fulfilled she would find only unhappiness and ingratitude. She sealed the jars of cream and powders, rose from her vanity, and went down to meet him with her naked face.

A
s he steered his buggy through the narrow streets of San Andrés, Sarmiento's habitually lucid mind was jumbled. All that was clear to him was that no woman had ever made as powerful an impression on him as Alicia Gavilán. What confused him was whether the impression was due to her magnetism or her tragedy, if they could even be separated. Would she have been the same woman had the misfortune of a preventable disease not ruined her appearance? Was the kindness at the core of her personality so profound it would have guided her life even if she had grown into the beautiful woman he glimpsed beneath the mask of sores, scars, and lesions? Or would she have become another unhappy rich lady pacing her mansion on the Paseo de la Reforma, waiting for a handsome doctor to relieve her boredom? And why did it matter to him? Because—the thought formed hesitantly, reluctantly—he felt for her the stirrings of personal affection. But what kind of affection, that of a friend for a friend, or of a man for a woman? In Europe, where such things were permitted in society, he had had purely platonic friendships with women, but what Alicia Gavilán provoked in him was deeper than those cordial feelings. But the other, a man's passion for a woman? With her? With her … her face as it was? He could not imagine …

A beggar boy ran in front of his buggy, forcing him to rein in his horse and allowing him for a moment to set aside his mental agitation.

A
t precisely ten o'clock, Alicia Gavilán's landau came to a halt in front of his apartment building, where he was waiting with his bag. It was a fine old coach, the black body polished to a high gloss, the family crest emblazoned on the door in red and gold. The curtains were drawn. The driver cast a wary look at him as he turned the silver handle and pulled open the door. The interior was filled with food, clothing, and children's toys; Alicia sat in a corner with a bit of embroidery in her lap. As she had when he had first seen her, she wore a silk gown of midnight blue and a lace hat decorated with feathers. A veil was fixed to the brim, but was up, revealing her face. He wedged himself in and sat beside her.

“Good morning, Doña,” he said.

“Good morning, Señor Doctor,” she replied. “Thank you for joining me today.”

“Where, precisely, are we going?”

“To visit my godchildren,” she said. She pulled a gold cord that ran above the door. A bell chimed and the carriage began to move.

H
er godchildren were scattered in the poorest neighborhoods of the city, places he knew by name but into which he had never ventured: San Sebastián, Tepito, San Lázaro. They were shanty towns that had grown up around crumbling colonial churches, which had once been the center of tiny Indian villages swallowed up by the city. Now they housed the tens of thousands of poor who had flocked to the city looking for work after Don Porfirio's land reforms had squeezed country people off their ancestral lands to create the massive ranches of his favored friends. The more fortunate lived in tiny adobe houses that faced narrow dirt roads where naked children played in the dust and packs of rabid-looking dogs scavenged piles of debris. The less fortunate lived in
vecindades
, which were tenements carved out of old colonial mansions, where a single windowless room might house a family of six or more. The least fortunate lived, as far as Sarmiento could tell, on the streets. The air reeked of raw sewage and sour pulque, the milky liquor of the agave that kept half the
pelados
in a state of pleasureless semi-inebriation. The poor had existed only on the periphery of his vision as servants, laborers, or beggars, indistinguishable one from another, with their muddy skin and inky hair, torn clothes, averted eyes, soft voices. This was the city of the dregs—the city of the
pelados
, the
léperos
—concealed within the city of the palaces, which was, he realized, the city where he lived.

Alicia Gavilán, even more than he, belonged to the wealthy city superimposed on the city of misery through which the Gavilán carriage made its way, stopping before a whitewashed adobe hut or perhaps a former monastery now carved into a warren of hovels. These were places he would have hesitated entering, but Doña Alicia crossed the thresholds cheerfully, familiarly, calling out the names of her godchildren. He followed, doubtfully, and behind him came the coachman loaded with food and clothes, candy and toys. Wherever they went, Doña Alicia was received with joy and guided to the single chair in the tiny rooms, where babies and children piled into her lap. After the gifts were distributed she would talk to the father or, more often, the mother of the family, picking up the threads of what it seemed to him were long-standing conversations. For he observed that she came not as an aristocratic benefactress distributing alms, but as a beloved friend, guide, and confidant. She was treated with respect but not servility. Her godchildren addressed her not with the formal
usted
but with the familial
tú
. They joked with her, poured out their hearts to her, complained about drunken husbands and short-changing shopkeepers, worried with her about their children, and begged her to remember them in her prayers. Meanwhile, she sat with a child in her lap, listening, encouraging, admonishing, praising. Her face was unveiled, her disfigurement freely exposed and evidently unremarkable.

But then, he thought, if there was anywhere in the city where she might have passed almost unnoticed, it would have been in the city of the poor. The filthy streets of its
colonias
teemed with men and women who, without access to the most basic medical services, labored beneath disfigurements and deformities: a man missing both legs pushing himself along with his hands on a makeshift cart, a woman with an enormous goiter on her neck, a blind child begging on a corner, men and women whose faces bloomed with violent skin diseases or bore the scars of smallpox like Doña Alicia.

When she introduced him to her godchildren, they received him courteously, more for her sake than his, he quickly surmised, and politely declined his offers of medical assistance. Even Doña Alicia's gentle cajolery could not persuade a shy mother to part with her sick child, and in the end, Sarmiento was simply an observer, greeted and then ignored.

“How is it you acquired so many godchildren?” he asked her as they bumped along a dirt road in a nameless neighborhood at the northern edge of the city.

“Most of them were foundlings at the Casa de Niños Expósitos who were in need of a godmother so they could be baptized,” she replied. “A priest at the cathedral where the orphans are taken knows he can always call on me to perform that function.”

“But some of these people we've seen are adults now,” he said. “Have you continued your bond with them all these years?”

“One is a godmother for life,” she said. “It is my responsibility to bear witness to my faith through my words and my actions as long as I live and they live.”

“You do more than that,” he pointed out. “You assist materially.”

She smiled. “A very wise priest I know, Padre Cáceres, once told me that the word of God is best heard on a full stomach.” After a moment she asked tentatively, “Do you truly have no faith?”

“I do not wish to be disrespectful of your beliefs, but in my view religion is no more than superstition, a way to explain natural phenomena for which there are now rational and scientific explanations. Those superstitions may have served their purpose once, but their time has passed. The longer they persist, the more pernicious they become.”

“What do you mean, natural phenomena?”

“Disease, for example. It is not caused by demons nor is it divine punishment. Nor was the world created in seven days and seven nights, nor man from dust or woman from his rib. The creation of the world, the emergence of humans, those were geological and biological processes that took millennia. There is no heaven in the sky, there is no hell beneath the earth's crust. I apologize if I offend you, Doña Alicia, but you asked and I should like to be direct with you in all matters.”

“I envy your education,” she said. She smiled again. “Mine ended with embroidery and piano lessons. There is so much more I would like to have studied but as my mother would say, that is not our custom. So I cannot contest your opinions of religion with equal erudition. I can only tell you there is more to my faith than superstition.”

“What is that, Doña?” he asked.

She gazed out of the carriage for a long time collecting her thoughts. “You see what my life is,” she said finally. “Bounded by custom on one hand, by my disfigurement on the other. My space is very small, Señor Doctor. Like a cell in the prison at Belem. I do not imagine that this sense of imprisonment is special to me. We are all bounded in one way or another and my cell is comfortable, unlike those unfortunates who starve in the streets. We are all birds in cages, but some of us find reason to sing. My faith is my reason to sing. I sing and my song is answered.”

“By whom?”

“By others singing from their cages and by the birds of the air, the spirits of those who have been released from their cages, and by the one who came to free us all from our cages by bursting his own, my Lord Jesus Christ.”

“You ascribe to your faith what are your own inherent virtues,” he said. “I don't know whether I think you are being foolish or humble. But it doesn't matter what I think. The world is a better place because you are in it.”

“You, too, Miguel,” she said, using his given name for the first time.

He shook his head. “All I have done today is frighten children with my stethoscope and quarrel with an old woman about herbal remedies.”

She shook her head, still gazing out the window at the streets of the poor. “There is a place for you in this world. I feel it.”

A place with you
. The thought came unbidden but once it had formed in his mind, it seemed both improbable and true.

A
h, here you are at last!” his cousin said with a mock bow. He had risen from his seat at a marble-topped table beneath the stained glass dome of maidens gathering lilies that had given the café its name, Los Lirios. The dome, like the mahogany bar that curved between Corinthian columns, had been imported from France.

Sarmiento sat down. “I'm sorry to be late. I was delayed.”

A white-jacketed waiter in a red fez approached to take their orders. When he had departed, Jorge Luis said suspiciously, “There is something different about you, Miguel.”

Sarmiento shrugged and answered, “No, I don't think so.”

“You seem unusually hale,” Jorge Luis continued. “Not the pale ghost I have become accustomed to.” He made a show of inspecting Sarmiento's face. “Your eyes are clear. Have you stopped drinking?”

“You just heard me order a whiskey,” he replied with a smile.

“By this time of the afternoon you would already have had several whiskies, but not today. There are only two causes for sobriety, Primo, God or a woman, and since you are an atheist, I must assume there is a woman.”

Jorge Luis paused to allow the waiter to set their drinks on the table. He lifted his glass of absinthe, touched it to Sarmiento's, and said, “Who is this paragon, Miguel? Presumably not the little French girl at Silvestre's place I recommended last time we met. She's lovely, but falling for a whore requires more imagination than you have ever demonstrated.”

“Do you never tire of being clever?”

“Don't change the subject,” he said, lifting the glass of green liquor to his lips. He paused, stared at Sarmiento, and blurted out, “No! It can't be. Not Alicia Gavilán!” Sarmiento felt his face flush. “It is! My God, Miguel …”

He grabbed Jorge Luis's wrist and said, in an angry whisper, “Will you keep your voice down!”

“Then rumors are true,” he marveled. “Beauty and the beast, the gossips call you, the roles inverted of course. You the beauty and—”

“Do not dare complete that sentence,” Sarmiento said, his voice tight with fury.

Jorge Luis fell back in his chair as if he had been struck. He swallowed his drink and laid the empty glass on the table. “But this is unbelievable, Miguel,” he said in a quiet, serious voice. “What does the lady say?”

Sarmiento's hand fluttered helplessly.

“You haven't shared your sentiments with her?” his cousin asked.

“How can I, when I am uncertain of their meaning or their cause?”

“Surely, their cause is the lady and as for their meaning …”

Sarmiento swallowed some whiskey. “I have seen her without her veil. I cannot feel toward her the ordinary physical attraction one feels for women and yet, Primo, when I am with her, her very presence gives me a feeling of peace and well-being as if every sordid and wasteful thing I have ever done has been forgiven. Is that love? Is it gratitude? Do I want her to be my wife or my mother? Is my feeling of being forgiven an illusion that would shatter once she knew—” He stopped and raised his glass to the waiter.

“Once she knew what, Miguel?” his cousin asked when the waiter had come and gone.