Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint

An unpublished novel

What dream among dreams is reality? Man is the creator of those values by which he lives and perhaps dies. They are not handed down from heaven, usually.

Marguerite Young, Angel in the Forest

In the city of Guanajuato there is a museum, La Alhóndiga de Granaditas, which celebrates Mexico’s cultural and political history. Inscribed on a wall is a poem by an Indian poet whose name has long been forgotten.

Sólo venimos a dormir.

Sólo venimos a soñar.

No es verdad,

No es verdad,

Que venimos a vivir en la tierra.

poesía indígena

Part I

On the Street of Merchants and Peddlers

  On the day the President came to lunch Señora Josefina Esperon arose before dawn. She was eight-two years old. Her country was celebrating three hundred years of independence, and she was determined to make the occasion a memorable one for herself as well as the nation. Wrapped in a black kimono that smelt faintly of camphor, she sat on her balcony overlooking the Street of Merchants and Peddlers, and in the first hour of dawn she bleached her face with oyster powder. Before the air was too heavy to breathe, she rouged her cheeks and lips, drew black lines around her eyes, and while the capital city, which she hardly recognized any more, slumbered in tropical heat, she smoked one filterless cigarette.

  “Smoking aids the circulation,” she said to her servant who was making the bed. But the old servant, who was called Contenta and whose real name was long forgotten, had spent fifty-one years in that house, and she knew beyond a doubt that there was nothing wrong with her employer's circulation, it was her nerves.

  “At your age you should know better than to invite the President of the country to lunch,” Contenta said. “What were you thinking? How many times have I told you, there isn't any food in the house?”

  “All you think of is food,” Señora Esperon replied. “Food is the least of our worries, especially today.”

Allowing her thoughts to drift with the smoke that disappeared into the yellow sky, she gazed over tile rooftops to the harbor, where her parents had arrived, to the salt marsh, where oil derricks stood like prehistoric skeletons, and finally to the open sea, where red algae floated like ribbons of blood.

  “Today,” she said, “the sea is the color of wine, and the sky is hiding behind sulfur smoke. Will there be a tomorrow?”

  “There will always be a tomorrow,” Contenta answered with assurance.

  “How can you believe such a thing?” Señora Esperon replied in astonishment. On realizing what she had just said, and the various answers she was likely to receive, she quickly added, “Please don’t respond to my question. Today I do not wish to cause myself unnecessary aggravation.”

  While Contenta swept the balcony, Señora Esperon reminded her that their city, their capital, had at one time been the most beautiful city in the Americas, a city of boulevards, palm trees and gardens. A city with an opera house and a season, a national theatre, a museum, a symphony and many poets. “Oh where,” she asked, “are our beloved poets?”

  “They are dead and buried, Señora,” Contenta answered.

  “Don't remind me,” she cried. “What has happened to our city?”

  Her eyes, which were once the color of water and sky, wandered over tile rooftops, into yellow clouds and down to the red-streaked sea. This was the harbor of her birth, the capital city, her home, and she had never ventured beyond its boundaries. “I can imagine what is out there,” she had always said. “So why go?”

On the corner of Independence Avenue and the Street of Merchants and Peddlers she had lived in a house of forty-three rooms, four balconies, and two courtyards for her entire life, a life which now seemed too long and circuitous but not without a certain order. Both of her parents were buried in the larger of the two courtyards, and she would be buried there too; she had chosen her day, just as her mother had chosen hers, and she would not change her mind when the final hour arrived. She would not turn back; she promised herself this, because now, crippled with arthritis and burdened with the upkeep of such a house, there was nothing to turn back to and no one to turn back for. And so she waited in the yellow morning, and she smoked her cigarette slowly, and she thought of her mother, Eufemia Esperon y Blanco, immortalized in the minds of her countrymen. The dead poets had glimpsed the ocean in her eyes and the sun-bleached desert in her pale skin. They said that her hair was like obsidian and her cheeks and lips had been touched by the rainbow. From the day she had arrived in the capital until the day of her death, portrait painters had found their way to her door. They had gathered on the Street of Merchants and Peddlers to wait impatiently for one fleeting glimpse of the woman whose image they hoped to capture.

  Like our poets, she was a citizen of another world, her daughter thought, as she faced a morning sky and the sulfur clouds. On a narrow tapestry so long it stretched three times around the large courtyard, her mother's life and death had been recorded, and that day the woven document was being hung for the first time.

  No, she was not of this earth, Josefina Esperon thought as clouds descended over the sea, the city of her birth and her house of two courtyards. The poets were right. She was of the sky and clouds. She belonged to the wind, not the water, not the soil, not even the mountains. And her death, although it was indeed marked with sadness, had not been a sad occasion, not as sad occasions go, for she had chosen her day, had stood before her open grave without fear, wondering aloud if her life had been a dream from which she had suddenly awakened. Had it been the life of another she had lived, or had it indeed been her own; and what was to follow the grave? “It is as if I’ve been away a long time,” Eufemia had said to her daughter, who had by then, celebrated her sixteenth year. “And now I have returned to something I cannot quite remember. Where is the ship that brought us here? Where is the harbor? The crinoline wings, the halo and the star? What has happened to them? Where is my beautiful hair? My handsome doctor? My beloved saint? My Angel? Surely they are waiting for me somewhere.”

  “They are with you, Mother,” her daughter said.

  “Where is the day of my arrival?” Eufemia asked.

  “Is it not today, Mother?”

  “No. It was long ago. Why don't I know you anymore? Where have you been, and where is my Angel?”

 

  ***

  Seventeen years before her celebrated death, Eufemia and her husband, Doctor Alejandro Esperon, and arrived in the capital city. It was the beginning of a new century, and the end of a long and tumultuous voyage. A dark cloud had followed them across the Atlantic Ocean, but on the last day of their crossing they sailed under a brilliant October sky into a crescent shaped harbor of clear, green water. The port was filled with ships and music. The air was fragrant with many flowers, and the sea breeze was sweet and gentle; but the sun was too harsh on Eufemia's delicate skin so the captain of the ship presented her with a brimmed hat on which she fashioned a veil of sheer, white silk.

  “This is a country of many villages and outposts,” the captain told the couple shortly before they docked, “but there is only one city, and the people who live in it are very sly. In no time at all they will have you believing that this is the oldest port in the Americas. Oh, these braggarts, there is little they will not say or do. Are you sure this is the place for you, Doctor?”

  “This was my first choice,” Doctor Esperon said.

  “Aside from the royalists you’ll have the Indians to contend with,” the captain continued. “If a stone can think, they can hear it thinking. They’ll read your mind, Doctor. They’ll tell you who you are even before you can decide for yourself. And what’s more, they’ll predict your future, if you let them.”

  “I’ll predict my own future,” Doctor Esperon replied. “I assure you Captain, we will be very happy here.”

Relieved to be arriving, at last, Eufemia repeated her husband's words. “We will be very happy, Captain. I am sure of it. I can foresee the future as well.”

  For the doctor and his new bride, the country represented a rare opportunity, a land waiting to be rediscovered all over again. It was his ambition to open wide the door between medicine and botany and to produce his own pharmaceuticals: tinctures, tablets, and tonics that would cure the ills of the new world, the old world, or any world for that matter. He had been offered three posts, one at home in Spain, one in the north and one in the tropics. “The tropics,” he had said, “there I can grow my plants while learning about new ones.” In a small valise, he carried many packages of seeds and roots wrapped in cotton: purple foxglove, Digitalis purpurea, for disorders of the heart and vital spirits, hawthorn for angina, milk thistle for ailments of the liver, and bilberry for broken veins. He carried calendula for the skin, Lobelia inflata for asthma, mullein for infections of the ear and comfrey for diabetic ulcers, bites of spiders, and staph infections which he expected to encounter in the tropics. To fight tuberculosis, typhoid and scarlet fever, he carried rhizomes of Copis chinensiss, and for pain, sleep and sedation: the seeds of Papaver somniferum, Passiflora incarnata, Sanguinaria, and Valeriana officinalis.

  “Yes,” he said, when the boat docked, “my plants will grow very well here.”

  At first glance the capital city appeared in the image of Paradise. It was resting on a marshy, coastal plain that climbed steadily from the blue-green ocean into rolling hills and then, cloud-covered mountains of astonishing heights. The streets, which ran parallel to the coastline were bordered with flame trees, with tamarino, jacaranda and manchineel while the avenues and boulevards, all heavily planted with palms, ran from the harbor to the French Park where a band shell, designed by a Parisian architect, was surrounded by towering cypress crowned with bromeliads, orchids and nesting egrets.

  “Everything is blooming,” Doctor Esperon exclaimed. “Even in October.”

With his valise in one hand and two letters of introduction in the other, he led his wife across stately thoroughfares and down shady, cobbled streets in search of the Hotel Carmina where a suite of rooms had been reserved. “We must hurry,” he said. “We are already a day late.” His steps were quick and eager but hers were hesitant. The capital was a city of many churches, and she desired to enter each one she saw. “No,” her husband said. “There will be much time for visiting churches. Right now we must find our hotel.”

  "You go ahead of me,” she said. “I am very tired.”

  He rushed on, thinking she would follow close behind, but she did not hasten her steps, and at each corner he waited for her to catch up with him.

  “I cannot walk any faster,” she finally told him. “As you see I am carrying a load.”

  Under her long, white veil and white, flouncing skirts, she moved slowly through the tropical heat, toward her husband who was dressed in black, and whose meticulously trimmed beard was beginning to shows signs of neglect. Along the way, she clung fiercely to her load: three orange trees from Andalucia, and a pet monkey her father had brought back from Africa. The orange trees, which measured half her height, had already lost their leaves as well as the damp cloth she had wrapped around their roots. Doctor Esperon was certain that the trees would never live and the monkey, cradled in his wife's arms, would never die. The monkey's name was Angel, and he was dressed in a lace gown with a pair of crinoline wings and a skull cap on which Señora Esperon had fastened a wire halo.

  Along the way she stopped at an open air market to observe Indian women in heavily embroidered dresses. Some of the them were weaving on backstrap looms, others were selling fruits and vegetables, the likes of which Eufemia had never seen, and with names that were unknown to her: zapote, guava and papaya, nopales, atunas, chayote, epazote, mango and the most enticing of all, mamey — arranged in pyramid formation, the topmost fruit sliced in half was left to bleed like a sacrificial heart in the open air.

An Indian woman with a bunch of onions balanced on her head pushed her way through the crowd. “My husband,” Eufemia called, “here, at last, is something I recognize: onions.”

  “We have been expecting you for you a long time,” said the woman with the onions. “Why did you kept us waiting?”

  “Our crossing was very difficult,” Eufemia replied.

  From the far corner the doctor urged her to hurry along, but by then she was surrounded by many Indian women who were staring into her sea-green eyes and touching her pale skin. “You have come to represent us,” one of the women said, and Eufemia, replied: “I have come to represent God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.”

  “Your necklace,” said the woman with the onions on her head, their greens trailing like ribbons down her back. “Your necklace for my onions.”

  With Angel sitting on her shoulders, and the orange trees at her feet, Eufemia removed the crucifix from her neck and traded it for the bunch of onions, which she accepted as flowers. To her husband, who was still waiting for her on the far corner, she called out again, “These people are ready for a message, and I am ready to deliver it. I’m exactly where I need to be.”

  “And so am I,” he said, “don't make us any later than we already are.”

The Indian women hardly noticed the winged monkey clinging to Eufemia's neck. Instead, they were drawn to her pale skin, her watery eyes and warm smile all of which told them that she understood who they were and what they had endured. “You will never leave this place,” said one of the women. “You will die three times. But you will never leave us.”

  Unclear as to what her response should be, Eufemia replied: “I believe in the Communion of Saints, The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body; And the Life everlasting. Amen.”

  Taking matters into his own hands, the doctor led his wife away from the curious women who followed them to the next corner and would have followed them further had he allowed it. “Go home,” he said, waving his arms furiously. “Surely you have something better to do.” With that, the women returned to their looms and their pyramids of fruit while Doctor Esperon guided his wife down a side street which ended at the central plaza where the laurel trees had been given the shape of inverted bowls and each park bench bore the name of a poet. The tallest building on the plaza, indeed the tallest in the entire capital, was the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sea, which occupied the eastern side of the square. Constructed over the remains of an ancient pyramid, the cathedral was conceived in the Romanesque style, but two centuries after construction had begun, a baroque facade was used to complete the structure.

  “It is like the great cathedral at Santiago de Compostela,” Eufemia exclaimed.

  “Not exactly,” the doctor replied.

  “Yes,” Eufemia argued. “Exactly.”

  Across the plaza from the cathedral was the Police Headquarters, a two story building covered in decorative tiles, which was much too garish in color and far too close to Our Lady of the Sea to receive Eufemia's approval. The other two building were more to her liking. On the north side of the square, the National Palace, also adorned with a baroque facade, stared into the lace covered windows of the Hotel Carmina, which stood like a monument to simplicity in comparison to its neighbors. Eufemia approved of it without reservation.

  The Carmina was known for elegant rooms, quiet atmosphere, French cuisine and many house rules stringently enforced. The management prohibited the wearing of sleeping costumes in public areas, the excessive use of cuspidors, the preparation of food by guests, and the playing of musical instruments except in the music room and only there between the P.M. hours of four and eight. The hotel took a strong position against gambling on premises, the use of invective, the blowing of one's nose in the dining room, the growing of plants and the keeping of pets, but when Eufemia Esperon glided crossed the lobby with her winged monkey, her bouquet of onions and three orange trees, every house rule, fifty-three in all, was forgotten.

  “Here we have an exception,” the concierge announced to his assistants. He was rapidly removing a sign that prohibited the keeping of pets in the hotel, when Eufemia approached him.

  “For shame,” she said in a scolding voice. “Human beings often behave as animals, and you certainly allow them to overnight in your sanctuary, so why, then, will you not allow an animal who is in reality more human than the most human of beings?”

  Her Castilian accent and lilting voice made the concierge tremble and stumbled over his words. “Your pet is a welcomed addition to our hotel family,” he said. The words dropped falteringly from his tongue for he had already fallen under the spell of the doctor's wife.

  Relieved to hear those words spoken, Eufemia turned to her husband with assurance. “You see,” she said. “The people here are very reasonable. We have come to the right place, after all. We have arrived, at last.”