Free The City of Palaces by Michael Nava

of the city.
    â€œMost 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.”
    â€œBut some of these people we’ve seen are adults now,” he said. “Have you continued your bond with them all these years?”
    â€œOne 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.”
    â€œYou 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?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, natural phenomena?”
    â€œDisease, 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.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhat 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.”
    â€œBy whom?”
    â€œBy 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.”
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œYou, 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