The City of Palaces by Michael Nava

thought that her mother’s choice of “defaces” was deliberate. Her mother had not expected that Alicia would forget Anselmo, but rather that as she reached maturity, she would appreciate the absurdity of the romance between the princess and the stable boy. It would devolve from a tragedy into a farce, and passion would be replaced by embarrassment. Her mother was wrong.
    The love she had felt for Anselmo had been the portal through which Alicia had discovered her capacity for love, and love had become her vocation. The loss of her own daughter—the only child she knew she would ever bear—had made her the mother to all children she encountered. Her mother could cruelly jest that Alicia was like La Llorona—the woman of legend who had drowned her children and, after her death, was condemned for eternity to search for them along the waterways of México, weeping and shrieking—but there was perhaps a grain of truth in her words. For in each child she encountered, Alicia saw traces of her own child, and she loved them as she would have loved her own.
    Then abruptly, Alicia understood something about Miguel Sarmiento’s expression of sorrow as he had held the baby Miguel in his arms and about the tears he had wiped away so she would not see them. Doctor Sarmiento had also lost a child! And if he had lost a child and was unmarried, then there had also been a woman. He had come very close to telling her the story as they stood before the gates of the palace. Would he tell her if they met again? Plainly, whatever the details, his tale had left him with a heavy burden of guilt. Too heavy for a man whose essential goodness was clear to her. Miguel Sarmiento might not believe in God, but God—her God, the God who was love—hovered around the man waiting to be invited in but prevented by his guilt and shame. Was it vain and foolish of her to believe that she might be the instrument through which God would relieve the doctor’s burden and release him to do the good work he was undoubtedly intended for? No , she thought, not me! But a voice that was not hers whispered its reply. Yes, Daughter. You .

3
    A servant led Sarmiento through the palace of the Gaviláns in stiff-shouldered, disapproving silence. In Europe, he had met members of the nobility and they had received him at their residences, which were older and more elaborate than the colonial mansions of México, but in Europe he was a tourist collecting experiences as if they were postcards. México was home and its streets and buildings were resonant for him in a way the castles and museums of Europe had never been. The colonial palaces had awed him when he was a boy, an awe that was not lessened by his republican father’s fulminations against the aristocrats who inhabited them. They might well be “parasites,” but to a small boy they were also marvelous as they swanned about the city in their beautiful carriages and led mysterious lives behind immense carved doors.
    Now he was inside one of the great houses. In contrast to the baroque palaces of Italy and France, the interior was rather plain, a reminder that it had been intended to be as much a military fortress as a residence. The decorative work—the acanthus carvings on the archways, the delicate Ionic columns that ran the length of the second floor—was exquisite, but the true luxury was simply the space itself. Amid the bustling city, whose natives jostled in forced intimacy on the streets, sidewalks, and markets, and where most of the population lived in tenements and shanties, was this stone leviathan. The noise of the city did not penetrate its thick walls, and its inhabitants breathed not the city’s miasmatic air but the perfumed scents of its gardens. Here there was light in plentitude and a contemplative stillness in which fountains murmured and doves cooed. It was their possession of privacy that was the real wealth of the rich.
    He was