Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  January nodded. He had already observed something of the kind in Vera Cruz, and had slipped the customs officials at the barrier an enormous bribe not to search his baggage last, which he guessed they ordinarily would have done. It could, he supposed, be called an investment. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Moreover,” the priest added, “it is several streets to the Plaza Mayor—the Cathedral square—and the Calle Jaral lies beyond it. The léperos are everywhere, and will be upon you like flies on meat if you are afoot.”

  “Léperos . . . lepers?” He used the French word, lepreux, and the padre shook his head.

  “Not actual lepers, no. But this is what the beggars of the capital are called, léperos—pelados—as filthy as lepers, and more dangerous.” Padre Cesario sighed, genuinely distressed. The priest was a man of fair complexion and European features, almost certainly full-blooded criollo—Creole Spanish. He had a small parish church in the city, he had said on their journey; he looked far too well fed and well clothed to be living off that income alone.

  “These are men driven from the villages by poverty and starvation, and by fear of being drafted into the Army, where conditions are truly terrible, Señor. Day laborers when they can get work, who starve when they cannot. With the fighting that has raged over my country all these long years, they have flocked to the capital by the thousands, so that there is neither work nor food for them, and most spend their days pursuing oblivion in the pulquerias. No one in Mexico City ever walks if he can pay to ride.”

  January looked around him. Lines of mules passed by, guided by muleteers—arrieros—in striped serapes and wide-brimmed hats of glazed black leather; water-sellers with huge pots slung before them and behind on head-straps, and soldiers in red and blue. But no gentlemen on foot, he saw, and no women save the Indian women, or the countrywomen—poblanas—in their short bright two-colored petticoats and satin vests, jingling with silver ornaments. Even these were importuned by beggars at every other step. In every doorway, in every alley, he glimpsed still more wretched human bundles of dirty rags, waiting.

  “Thank you, Padre,” he said, and signed for a cab.

  “Lastly,” said the priest, “if I may be so bold as to advise you, Señor, hire servants as quickly as you can. Wherever you go, have them follow you. And that, my friend, will do more than anything can to make people . . . if not forget your race, at least not turn up their noses at you as being of no worth. Ah!” His face radiated into smiles as a high and spindly carriage known as a volante appeared around the corner and drew up before the diligencia offices. “One of my—er—parishioners, come to welcome me. Señor—Señora . . .” He shook hands with January, bent to kiss Rose’s glove. Then he sprang to the open carriage, in which waited an extremely fashionable-looking lady who greeted him with a most unparishioner-like kiss on the lips.

  As January helped Rose into the cab—and looked down his nose as haughtily as he could manage to while he tipped an Indian porter to load up their baggage on it—he wondered if Consuela Montero was still in Mexico City at all, and even if she was, whether the opera singer would be concerned with Hannibal’s fate. She was, if he recalled Hannibal’s letters correctly, the illegitimate daughter of the wealthy hacendado Don Prospero de Castellón, and therefore the half-sister of the murdered man.

  Yet she was the only one he knew who might know exactly how matters stood.

  In his letters, Hannibal had described the house on the Calle Jaral as “once the palace of a local marquis of impeccable heritage, now let—to the family’s enduring chagrin—to a silk-merchant and a coffee-seller on the ground floor, and to my most scandalous and beautiful Concha upstairs.” In addition to the aforementioned establishments, there was a shoemaker operating in what had been the coal room, a manufacturer of cigars operating out of—and apparently raising his family in—what had been the wood room, while the coffee-seller’s wife ran what appeared to be a public cook-shop in the palace’s old kitchen, with benches set up in the front courtyard for her customers.

  This lady was the only one still in evidence when the hack pulled in under the broad arch of the gate, just clearing up after the comida, the leisurely early-afternoon dinner that preceded the daily siesta. The afternoon sun poured hot rays down into the courtyard so that the very air felt smothered. “Do you think anyone will be awake to let us in?” asked Rose, looking around her at the crude chairs and tables that occupied the space where the family carriages had been stored in palmier days, and at the laundry hung from the balcony arcades.

  “I suppose we can nap in the courtyard until Prince Charming comes along and wakes Sleeping Beauty with a kiss.” January paid off the driver, who had set the baggage down near the broad stone stair that led to the upper arcade. No one appeared from any of the many doors visible on that level, so January picked up the trunk, and Rose the hat-box and carpetbags.

  “The Day of the Dead is the Feast of All Saints at home, isn’t it?” asked Rose as they climbed the stairs. “I remember Mother taking me to her mother’s tomb to clean and whitewash it—she’d have her cook make up a picnic lunch like everyone else who came to the cemetery that day, but I don’t recall anything about expecting Grandma to come out of the grave and share it with us.”

  She set the bags down at the top of the steps, put back the veils of her hat, and looked doubtfully at the shut doors and shuttered windows. In the United States it would have been illegal for her to wear a hat at all—women of color being required to wear the tignon, or headscarf, of servitude—and January delighted in the close-fitting bonnet, the neat, soft swags of her curls.

  “Mother would take me to the white section of the cemetery, too, to hang a wreath on her father’s tomb and pay our respects to the family. They always pretended to the children that she was a ‘former servant,’ but of course they all knew. The Americans in New Orleans don’t do any of that, do they?”

  “That’s because Americans breed behind fences like cats and don’t have families, according to my mother,” remarked January, picking out from the several doors the one with a large bronze knocker. “Not that, as a former slave herself, my mother has a single ancestor in any graveyard in town—that she knew about, at any rate. That never stopped her from having the cook make up a basket lunch and going down to St. Louis Cemetery to spend the day visiting with her friends.”

  He was raising his hand to the knocker when the door flew open. A voice inside cried, “Señor Enero! Madre de Dios, come in! My house is yours, and everything in it—thank God you have come!” And a small crimson whirlwind bustled forth to catch him in a tight embrace.

  “And Señorita Rose!” Consuela Montero turned, her plump hands and ample décolletage still flashing with garnets though she’d loosened her raven curls in preparation for siesta. “The lady who made the fireworks for the opera!”

  Rose laughed as they were drawn into the sala—the formal and rather bare room common to the inns they had stayed at in Vera Cruz and on the road. Like those at the inns, it contained only a long table running down the middle, and ten heavily carved chairs ranged around the walls. A painting of the Virgin adorned one wall, above a blue-and-white Chinese vase of roses. Elsewhere, rather surprisingly, hung a small Turner in a gold frame.

  “Señorita Rose no longer,” said January gravely. “Madame . . . Señora Enero, my wife.”

  “En verdad? Felicitación, Rosita . . . may I call you Rose?” Consuela tiptoed to kiss Rose’s dusty cheek. “Señor, Señora . . . this is my companion Doña Gertrudis de Avila de Caldofranco. . . .” She gestured to the black-clothed woman who had stood beside the door through all of this, a look of impassive disapproval on her high-born Spanish countenance. “Though why it is considered correct to keep a chaperone here when all the town knows one is living in sin with a violin-player—that’s enough, Trudis, now go fetch us wine and cakes, and have Lita make up the spare bedroom for my guests—you will, of course, remain as my guests? Hannibal will be overjoyed. . . . You got my letter?”<
br />
  “We got a letter from Hannibal.”

  “He wrote one, then? I did also, once it became clear that that imbecile Ward, the minister of the British, was going to do nothing.” Consuela led the way through a door into her own bedroom, which like many in both Mexico and France—and indeed in the older houses of New Orleans as well—was set up as an informal parlor. There were comfortable chairs, a pianoforte—January couldn’t help touching a key and found it was in tune—and another small modern painting, an English cathedral beneath an astonishing sky. “That adoquín Ylario—the junior intendant of police in this city—has been out to the hacienda three times in the past two weeks, watching the place from the arroyos beside the road, waiting for my father to ride out so that he may go in and arrest Hannibal while most of the vaqueros are gone. He has a judge here in town. . . .”

  “How much danger is Hannibal in?”

  “A great deal, once Ylario should get him into town.” Consuela nodded thanks to the manservant who brought in a tray of light wine, coffee, and cakes: pandolce sparkling with crystals of brown sugar, camote, hulled peanuts, and flowers wrought of marzipan. “Ordinarily, of course, a man might remain weeks—months—in La Accordada prison before an alcalde even sees him, and he might never be seen if Santa Anna sends his Army recruiters through to draft the prisoners. But there are judges who, like this Capitán Ylario, are sick of Santa Anna’s favorites, and since they cannot hang my father—who paid Santa Anna’s debts for him many times when Santa Anna was still a loyal officer of the King—they will be more than glad to sentence poor Hannibal to death the moment Ylario brings him before them. By the time my father could locate Santa Anna to rescind the order—for El Presidente has a habit of running off to his hacienda in Vera Cruz and pretending to be a philosopher for months at a time—Hannibal would be dead at the end of a rope.”

  “What kind of evidence do they have against him?” asked Rose, and Consuela blinked at her in surprise.

  “The evidence against him is that he did it, Señora. My brother deserved to be poisoned, and I don’t think there was a tear shed for him by anyone in the house except that mariposa valet of his who found the body, but . . .”

  “What happened?”

  The singer shrugged impatiently, and picked apart the hull of a peanut with small, deft fingers, as if the matter of Hannibal’s guilt or innocence were secondary to the importance of his escape. “We had all just sat through the most dreadful dinner to celebrate my brother Fernando’s wedding on the following day. At the end of it Fernando went into my father’s study and locked the door. Everyone still at the dinner-table saw Hannibal take brandy and glasses from the sideboard and go outside—the study has three doors, one from the sala, one from the corredor outside, and one from my father’s room, which was padlocked because my father had gone mad just then and was locked up in his room. But from the window of his room my father saw Hannibal take a bottle from his pocket and pour something into one of the glasses of brandy, just before he went into the study.”

  Rose said, “I can see how there would be a misunderstanding.”

  Consuela shook her head. “There can be no misunderstanding about it, Señora Rose. I came out into the corredor only moments later, with my half-sister Valentina and my father’s mistress Natividad, who was going to marry Fernando, and with Natividad’s mother and Doña Gertrudis, of course. . . . A woman in this country does not neglect her duenna’s company any more than she neglects to cast a shadow upon the wall. So we were all there when Hannibal came out of the study, without the brandy or the glasses. The rest of the men all stayed in the sala drinking while Hannibal played the violin for us in the corredor; then when the men came out the servants were in the sala, clearing away the dinner and setting up tables for cards. So you can see there was no way in which anyone else could have entered the study. My father is quite mad, you understand, but when he sees actual things—not talking skulls or feathered snakes floating in the air or the Jaguar-God materializing in his bedroom—he is most observant. He didn’t like my brother. . . .”

  “I don’t imagine he did,” murmured January, “if Fernando had pilfered his mistress.”

  “Dios, no! That had nothing to do with the matter. It was my father’s idea that Franz marry Natividad. . . .”

  “Franz?”

  “Fernando. My brother. From the age of ten he had lived in Prussia, where he went to military school—he was twenty-five when he died. He was a major in the Tenth Berlin Guards, and loved the army of the Prussians. It was clean, he always said, as if less exalted beings lived in filth and fed upon garbage. He did not want to come back to Mexico. He only did so this year, after the deaths of our older brother Don Damiano and Damiano’s son Luis from the vomito negro.”

  “So up until this year,” said Rose, “this Don Damiano was your father’s heir?”

  “Just so,” agreed Consuela, dusting dark crystals of sugar from her fingers. “My father was married three times, you understand—in many ways that is the reason for his command that Fernando marry Natividad, which Fernando did not want to do at all. Father’s first wife was Doña Marcellina de Medellín, by whom he had Damiano and our eldest sister Josefa, who is now a widow with two children. After Doña Marcellina’s death my father married Doña Maria-Exaltación de Borregos, a Spanish girl sent here to a convent during all the fighting in Spain, and she bore him Isabella and Fernando. Later still he wed Melosia Valenzuela, who became the mother of Valentina, and who ran off one night when Valla was a little girl with only the clothes on her back, not that I blame the wretched woman in the slightest for doing so.

  “My mother,” added Consuela, her voice thinning to a wry edge, “he also attempted to imprison as he imprisoned poor Hannibal—she was a mantua-maker—and she struck him over the head with a tortilla-press and made her escape with the connivance of some muleteers. I don’t think he ever tried that sort of thing again with a woman. But you see, because Melosia ran away, Natividad’s mother did not see any reason why Father could not marry Natividad, and so of course to silence her Father arranged for it that Natividad marry Franz.”

  While Consuela was speaking, January was marginally conscious of a steady parade of servants past the open bedroom door. They bore the luggage, bedding, ewers of water, and wood for a bedroom fire along the corredor. Consuela seemed to employ nearly a dozen servants, far more than even the most lavishly-kept woman would have in France, let alone in the United States. Having seen the sheer numbers of poor in the streets, January guessed there were men and women who would happily scrub chamber pots for food and a place to sleep in an attic.

  No wonder anything in this country, from murder to imported point-lace, could be bought with a bribe.

  With raised eyebrows, Rose asked, “And your brother agreed to this—er—arrangement?”

  “He had to.” Consuela poured herself another cup of coffee, and dropped a chunk of pale-brown sugar into its inky depths. “He was a colonel in Santa Anna’s army, and without my father’s money he could not buy uniforms or guns for his men when they march north to Texas to deal with the Norteamericano rebels, for of course the Army has no money to pay for such things. Franz does not like women, you understand, let alone that Natividad is a cusca and stupid as a wooden peg.”

  “So Hannibal is still at the hacienda?” asked Rose. One would never guess to look at her that twenty-four hours ago she’d been loading rifles in an overturned stagecoach with blood all over her dress. She had a long oval face and, despite a treacherous dusting of freckles, a naturally serious expression: in her pale-blue traveling-dress, simple hat, and spectacles, she looked like she’d never done anything in her life but teach geography to schoolgirls.

  “Oh, yes. You understand, my father had been holding Hannibal prisoner for six days already before the murder. Myself, I was ready to strangle the old lunatic, for I was singing La Sonnambula in three days at the Teatro Principal and had to rehearse, and an excellent performance it would have been had th
e conductor been sober. I cannot think why it was not my father who was poisoned, instead of Franz.”

  “Holding him prisoner?” asked January, startled. “What had he done?”

  The diva shrugged. “Played the violin.”

  “It must have been quite a tune,” Rose remarked.

  The smile that tugged Consuela’s full lips was both reminiscent and wry. “You know how Hannibal plays,” she replied. “As the angels of God would play, did God permit His angels to suffer passion and grief. He also plays picquet—Hannibal, I mean—an old-fashioned game much out of favor these days, but my father dotes upon it. And he can talk to Father of Petronius and Suetonius and listen when Father goes on for hours and hours about the statues of the old gods that he digs up from the ruins of the Indian cities, or buys from every peddler who comes through the village. So when it came time for Hannibal and myself to return from our visit at the end of August, Father said it would suit him better that Hannibal remain as his guest, and play the fiddle for him every night, as the singer Farinelli once did for the King of Spain, and play picquet with him, since the rest of the family were all bores and monstrosities.”

  January said, “Hmmn.”