The City of Palaces by Michael Nava Read Free Book Online Page B

by a friend of the governor. He was vague on details, saying only, “The sheriff came with some papers. My papá said we had to leave.” She related her own uneventful history—she had lived her entire life within the walls of the palace, except for the hours she was at school or at church. He had four brothers and three sisters and they lived with his parents in two rooms in the colonia of La Merced, but he lived in the stables, visiting home only on Sunday. She told him about her three sisters, all much older than she, the two eldest married, the third engaged. He told her he missed his family, and his descriptions of his loneliness gave her a name for her own feelings of solitude.
    He could not read or write. One night she brought pencil and paper. Guiding his hand, she showed him how to write his name and then he insisted that she teach him how to write hers as well. After that, he practiced by writing their names with his fingertips on her flesh. She loved his touch. His tongue rasped her small nipples and he told her she tasted like apple. The skin of his scrotum was as plush as velvet in her hands and the two stones it sheathed were fascinating to her, hard yet spongy; more than once he yelped when she pressed too firmly. Each time he penetrated her, her first feeling was of separation—his body clearly divisible from hers—but then as he continued his thrusts were like pebbles tossed into a pond. The ripples spread and deepened across and inside her body, and as they both sank into the same swamp of sensation, she could no longer tell her flesh from his. He was the first to say, “ te amo ,” but said it only sparingly after that, as if the phrase were a jewel, the only one he would ever be able to give her. She was freer with “I love you” because it resounded in her mind all day, and to prevent herself from saying it aloud when he was not present, she had to give it voice when he was. They undressed and dressed by moonlight. “Our moon,” he told her. One night he brought her a pearl, a single pearl that he said he had bought at the Monte de Piedad, the city’s pawnshop. It was yellowing with age, like the autumn moon.
    Alicia was neither as alone nor as insignificant in her family as she imagined. La Niña noticed the change—the combination of swooping and inexplicable happiness alternating with expressions of gnawing melancholy as she mumbled to herself. She instructed her personal maid to spy on her daughter. Manuelita followed her into the garden and watched, from a distance, as the two children made love. They were beautiful together and Manuelita pitied them for what was to come. She reported to her mistress. Anselmo was gone by nightfall. Within a month, Alicia began to show signs of pregnancy. Her mother immured her within her rooms and, borrowing from her favorite novel, La dame aux camélias , let word go out that Alicia suffered from consumption. When she was about to deliver, Alicia was secretly transported to the foundling home, where she gave birth to a daughter in the Departamento de Partos Ocultos—the Department of Hidden Births. It was there, as she was recovering, that she was infected with the smallpox virus, as was the child she was nursing. Her daughter died.
    F ifteen years had passed but the garden was much the same as it had been the last night she and Anselmo had parted. She dried her tears. She remembered that during the confrontation with her mother she had cried out, “But Mamá we are no different than Romeo y Julieta !” Her mother, narrowing her eyes, had replied, “Romeo was a nobleman, not an Indian from the slums, and at any rate, that was a fairy tale.” “But I love him, Mamá.” “I assure you, you will forget,” her mother said. “As Julieta would have forgotten Romeo, had she lived. Time defaces every memory. You will see.”
    Now, reflecting upon that encounter, she