The City of Palaces by Michael Nava Page A

led into a great salon. As was the custom in Mexican houses, the furniture was pushed against the walls, leaving large, empty spaces. The accretion of three hundred years of possessions—rosewood and mahogany furnishings from the Philippines, blue-and-white Chinese porcelains, an enormous carpet woven in Persia, Spanish cabinets inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl—seemed insufficient to fill its vastness. Life-sized portraits of a ruff-collared aristocrat and his wife hung on the wall behind a long couch upholstered in pink damask.
    â€œWait here,” the servant commanded before turning on his heel and marching out.
    He prowled the room nervously. At his last meeting with Alicia Gavilán he had felt she had looked into him and seen his secret. Unable to bear the scrutiny, he had run. Later, however, recalling the kindness in her low, musical voice he had been filled with a longing to see her again and to unburden himself. Impulsively, he had sent her a note asking to meet. He had been encouraged by the invitation she had extended to him when they had stood at the doors of the palace, for it had been offered without conditions and out of her kindness. But, perhaps, he thought as he penned the note, her kind impulse would cool when confronted by his actual request. For he was as aware as she must be that unless he was offering himself as her suitor or as her physician, there was no social precedent for the private meeting of an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. Nonetheless, he was heartened by her prompt reply. Yet now, as he stood in this great room, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of her aristocratic lineage and uncertain of the propriety of their meeting, he could not help but feel out of place and intimidated. He paced the room, trying to allay his urge to flee.
    â€œSeñor Doctor.”
    He turned to greet her. She was unveiled and her face was bare of powders and cream. He was grateful for his medical training because it allowed him to suppress his shock at the extent of her scarring. Her face was a mask of lesions and pustules in which the lovely emerald eyes flickered like the eyes of one imprisoned.
    â€œI’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you when you arrived,” she said. “Shall we sit? I’ve asked for tea and coffee to be brought.”
    She arranged herself on a settee and with an elegant wave of her hand invited him to sit beside her.
    â€œThank you for receiving me,” he said. “Your residence is quite beautiful.”
    â€œAh,” she said. “It is drafty and inconvenient. My ancestors stored their clothes in chests, so there are no closets, and they feared the night air, so there are few windows. And of course the only lighting is candles and oil lamps. In my sisters’ homes, you touch a button on the wall and the entire room is brilliantly illuminated.”
    He recognized the deprecation for what it was, an aristocrat’s mild reproach for his comment about the beauty of her house. He had encountered this attitude among his noble acquaintances in Europe, where to compliment such things implied surprise that they should be other than of the highest caliber. It reminded him that, for all her kindness, she was a member of an ancient nobility, which, even if superannuated in modern México, remained fully intact within itself.
    Two servants appeared, weighted down with silver trays that held urns, cups, saucers, pitchers, and plates of pastries. They set them down on a low table before Doña Alicia. As the servants arranged the repast, Sarmiento stole a glance at his hostess. The first shock had passed and he studied her with the dispassion that was not only the fruit of his medical training but in his nature as well. The scarring had not obliterated the structure of her face and he saw that she would have been beautiful. She was like a princess in a fairy tale consumed by a dragon. Her hair, piled in braids atop her head, was heavy, dark,