Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  When the men rose to join the women, Don Prospero caught January’s arm. “You are but lately come to Mexico, Enero? I could not but note your admiration for my splendid Coatlique.”

  January had in fact not given the hideous image more than a glance. The breeze through the open door of the sala made the candle-flame waver over the image’s surface, giving the impression of uneasy movement to the snakes that made up her skirt.

  “I dug her up among the pyramids that lie behind this house,” the old hacendado continued, his eyes, with their queer intensity, locked upon January’s face. “They’re a study of mine, you know. You must ride out with me tomorrow to look at the pyramids—they were infinitely wise, those ancients, and infinitely powerful. The priests used to wear masks made of the detached facial bones of former victims, exquisitely set with crystal and turquoise. Quite remarkable.”

  “I should very much like to see them,” said January, and the old man smiled, a baring of teeth, like an animal about to bite.

  “Ignorant folk seem to think the priests cut through the victim’s breastbone vertically to tear out the heart,” Don Prospero said. “But in fact they slit the thorax in a horizontal curve just beneath the curve of the rib cage and reached up under the sternum, something that can be accomplished in a few seconds.”

  Past the Don’s shoulder, January saw Don Anastasio, on his way out the door, pause and look back. Concern and something like fear flickered in his dark eyes.

  Out in the corredor, January had to smile at the way the women had divided themselves up, like liquids in one of Rose’s chemical experiments stratifying immediately and automatically, literally unable to combine. Rose sat beside Consuela, talking of stage machinery and how to make fire effects without burning the theater down. Natividad, January guessed, would probably have joined them had her mother permitted her to even acknowledge the presence of a woman of color in the long, furnished arcade, much less exchange words with her: not that Señora Lorcha was much less than three-quarters Indian herself, and her daughter close to that. But as Señora Lorcha snubbed Rose, Doña Imelda snubbed her, forming the nucleus of the criollo Spanish group of Josefa, Valentina, and Valla’s duenna. All puffed on their cigarettos with little golden clips and ignored the existence of the other women as they would have ignored flies upon the wall.

  At the sight of Santa Anna’s aides—handsome young men in uniforms as gorgeous as their chief’s—Valentina rose, smiling. Doña Imelda was immediately at her side. “See, Vallacita, here is Rafael, your novia,” she said in a voice that carried a command to Rafael in no uncertain terms. Torn from his approach to Natividad, Don Rafael came over obediently to join his mother and Valentina on the leather-covered bench and launched into an informative account of the re-upholstering of his carriage. Valentina turned her face coldly away.

  Down in the darkness of the courtyard, one of the vaqueros around their fire played a sharp quickstep baille. Hannibal’s violin caught the melody and turned it, weaving the air into a lilting barcarole and tossing it back into the shadows. The guitar replied, quicker now and challenging; the violin answered lightly, quadrupling each note into cascades of riffles. January heard the vaqueros around the fire laugh at the guitarist’s expression, and as the two instruments merged into a lively duet, he realized General Santa Anna had quietly joined him.

  “So Sir Henry Ward gave you a mandate to look into your friend’s little problem, eh?” The General’s teeth gleamed as he took the cigar from his mouth. “That was gracious of him.”

  January met his eyes. Santa Anna was a man of average height for the United States, though he was accounted tall in Mexico—he carried himself like a king. Had he looked this gracious and noble six months ago, January wondered, when he’d turned his troops loose on the women and non-combatants of the captured rebel city of Zacatecas, after slaughtering the prisoners taken in arms?

  “Whether Señora Montero spoke in truth or in anticipation—or merely out of a desire to annoy Capitán Ylario—I will endeavor to see Sir Henry Ward at the earliest opportunity, Your Excellency.”

  Santa Anna chuckled. “It is true that Capitán Ylario is officious. The pettifogging of bureaucrats did not end when the Spaniards were ejected from my country, and Ylario is the worst of that breed, narrow-minded, unimaginative, and in love with rules . . . bah! You really think your friend is innocent?”

  “I do, Excellency, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he is my friend,” replied January. “Because a man remains loyal to his friends.”

  The dictator raised his brows, then glanced across at Don Prospero, who was listening to the music with the first expression of repose January had seen on his face.

  “Perhaps because I have heard only a part of the evidence against him, and I have not had time to look around and draw my own conclusions,” January continued. “If you were hunting in the mountains, Excellency, wouldn’t you rather see the quarry’s tracks yourself than depend on the word of a guide? Particularly a guide you do not know?”

  The President’s smile widened. He had put away an enormous quantity of wine and brandy at supper but seemed little the worse for it. The dark-green uniform jacket he’d changed into for dinner, so covered with bullion that it flashed in the smoky flare-light, was unbuttoned at the throat to show spotless French linen and the red slash of a cravat, like a flow of blood. “You’re a wise man, Enero,” he remarked. “What do those stupid Nortes think of to make men wise like you to be slaves?”

  “It is something that happens to wise men now and then,” said January. “Aesop was a slave. So was Plato at one point in his life. All a wise man can do is seek the truth.”

  “And the truth is that every one of us at table that night ate the same food, and drank the same wine and brandy out of the same bottles as Fernando de Castellón,” said Santa Anna. “And Fernando believed that your friend murdered him.”

  “Fernando was dead for hours before his valet found the body,” January pointed out. “I’m a surgeon, sir. I think at least I’ll be able to prove that if given a chance.”

  Santa Anna raised his eyebrows, but made a gesture like a fencer conceding a hit.

  January asked, “Do you happen to know why young de Castellón threatened Hannibal’s life earlier that day?”

  The President shrugged, then grinned maliciously. “Perhaps because your friend was making love to la bella Valentina.” He glanced along the corredor to the fair-haired, black-clothed girl who sat with her face turned away from her relentlessly informative fiancé, gazing restlessly into the dark. “A pile of his love-letters to her was on the desk.”

  FIVE

  There wasn’t much point in opening that subject with Hannibal—not with the damsel in question, her fiancé, and her prospective mother-in-law all within twenty feet, not to mention Consuela, whom January had once suspected of attempting to murder a rival over an opera impresario’s affections. Moments later Hinojo appeared in the doorway with the announcement that card-tables had been set up, and everyone settled down to gamble, the invariable pastime of nearly the entire upper class. Don Prospero summarily broke into Don Anastasio’s scholarly discussion of agriculture with Rose to demand that his friend partner him at whist. Santa Anna, rather to January’s surprise, asked him to make up the fourth at the table, infuriating Señora Lorcha, who thought that her daughter should have had the position. “A most lovely young lady,” whispered the dictator to January as they took their seats, “but can’t tell a spade from a club.” Natividad settled for sitting on Santa Anna’s knee and asking questions about his hand (“What will you ever do with all those hearts?”) until he sent her over to help his host instead. January heard about nothing but cock-fighting and the revolution in Texas for the remainder of the evening.

  January rose early the following morning. The room he and Rose had been given lay on the eastern side of the court, next to Hannibal’s and almost directly opposite the main gate. It was massively thick-walled and
would have been considered bare by American standards, at least to Americans who hadn’t spent their first seven years sleeping on a pile of corn-shucks in a slave-cabin. He knelt in the last hard chill of the lingering night to pray before the cross in the wall-niche, then washed in the dark, moving carefully so as not to trip over something and wake Rose. The water in the can beside the door was warm, and he made a mental note to thank Cristobál. Outside in the court he could hear the muffled clop of hooves, the voices of vaqueros as they received their orders from the hacienda’s mayor, and the soft chatter of the indio women as they took up their carding-combs and spindles. Light trickled through the cracks in the heavy wooden shutters. From the little chapel on the other side of the court, a small bell spoke its musical note.

  When January emerged from his room, it was to see Doña Josefa as she came out of the chapel door, a thin, sinister figure in her black gown and veils, trailed by a smaller, slighter figure who had to be her daughter, Paloma. They crossed the court and vanished beneath the gallery, through the smaller archway that led into the realm of the women. The girl, January noted, looked around her with interest at the horses, the vaqueros, the villagers bringing in firewood through the gates, and the men of Santa Anna’s bodyguard, and now and then nodded to this person or that, though she dared not stop to speak. Doña Josefa walked with head down, hands still clasped in prayer.

  The chapel door closed behind them. They were the only worshippers.

  Hands in the pockets of his short brown corduroy jacket, January walked the whole of the corredor around the three sides of the court, counting doors and, where possible, glancing into such rooms as were open at this hour, familiarizing himself with the lay of the land. The rooms on the south side of the quadrangle contained only the rolled-up straw mats and heaped woolen blankets of the acomodados, the footmen, maids, kitchen-boys who lived in the main house rent-free in exchange for their services. Other than the usual massacred Christ on the wall, there was nothing else in that long dormitory.

  Another dormitory contained the beds of the married servants, separated by muslin curtains. The vaqueros, regarded as a lesser breed, slept downstairs in the store-rooms along the lower arcade, or sometimes in the sheds or on the ground among the maze of corrals that stretched behind the kitchen.

  The rooms on the east side doubled as store-rooms when there were no guests to occupy them while those along the north side—facing the warm winter sun—seemed to be more or less permanent bedchambers on either side of the sala, the small butler’s pantry, and Don Prospero’s study. The large bedroom at the northeast corner was clearly the best guest room, with one of Santa Anna’s soldiers standing guard outside it; alone of all the rooms in the casco, it had a lock on its door. It, and every other room along that side, had bars on the windows: ornamental bars of turned wood, to be sure, but quite stout enough to prevent passage. Every other chamber could, once the shutters were open, be entered as casually as through the door. No window in the place was glazed.

  Screw-holes marked Don Prospero’s door where a bolt had recently been affixed and recently removed. Standing beside the barred and shuttered window, January guessed that it would be possible for someone inside to see a man at the study door. As Hannibal had pointed out, there was an iron cresset on the pillar just opposite. The fire that the servants would have just finished kindling after dinner would have clearly illuminated Hannibal’s face. January moved on to the sala.

  There, a Friday-faced, drooping beanpole in livery was laying out napkins on the sideboard. January nodded a greeting to the man and crossed to the closed door that communicated between sala and study. Its jamb was still marked with yesterday’s bullet gouges, pale in the soot-stained wood. There were others, he saw, older and repaired with plugs whittled of wood.

  The door was not latched. The room beyond was still shuttered, shadowy in the morning cool. Its plastered walls were painted bright yellow and decorated with gay painted borders. Plank shelves covered every wall, overflowing with a higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of books, newspapers, pamphlets, idols, vases, skulls—human and animal—and what appeared to be chunks of rock taken from the fields. Idols stared from every shelf: gold, silver, stone, and terracotta; feathered headdresses, crystal eyes that gleamed creepily in the gloom.

  Candle-wax dribbled on everything, and walls, ceiling, idols, and books were splattered with huge gouts of faded black where ink-pots had apparently been thrown. The desk—rough local work, like nearly all the rest of the furniture in the casco—was a drifted chaos of letters, documents, and newspaper-clippings that someone had apparently intended to organize into a commonplace-book and then abandoned. A couple of wrought-iron candlesticks reared like cacti among the mess, ringed in blobs of dribbled tallow. Whatever had been done with Fernando’s patent Argand lamps, they had not been welcome once his father resumed control of this room.

  In addition to the door that led into the study from the sala, the room had two others: one going out onto the corredor, the other leading into Don Prospero’s bedchamber. Both were closed with iron bolts.

  “Best you do not go in there, Señor.”

  January turned and saw the tall footman behind him. Bonifacio, he recalled Consuela had addressed him last night.

  “The Don sometimes becomes very angry if things are disturbed.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.” January stepped back from the doorway immediately: he knew how the wrath of a “very angry” master would inevitably fall on the servants, not the offending guests. “I only wanted to see the room where poor young Don Fernando was found.”

  The footman nodded understandingly. He looked to be mestizo, with a good deal of Spanish blood. Though his crimson livery was cut in the fashion of the previous century, he did not wear a wig, and like most of the hacienda servants, he wore crude, moccasin-like zapatos rather than shoes. His Spanish was good. “I heard them say that you were Don Hannibal’s friend. That the English government sent you to help him.”

  “Indeed they did,” said January, casually fishing a silver reale from his pocket, which Bonifacio accepted without hesitation or embarrassment. News traveled as fast, January reflected, through the servants’ dormitories here as it did among the slaves back in New Orleans, and for the same reasons. When your life and your livelihood depend on the folks in the Big House—on their whims and preferences—gossip takes on a completely different dimension than mere pastime. You cannot say of a man “His anger is his problem, I don’t have to truckle to his crochets” if he has the power to sell your children, or to keep you safe from the recruiters of a voracious Army, or to throw your family off the land that is the only thing between you and the hopeless life of a pelado on the streets of the capital.

  And every silver reale is one more bright little weapon with which to battle hopelessness and fear.

  “Did you see his body?”

  “Oh, yes, Señor. I was one of those who helped carry it down to be cleaned by the women.”

  “Would it be permitted that I speak with some of these women?”

  “Of course, Señor. I will take you to them myself.”

  Bonifacio straightened the last of the napkins and tableware on the sideboard as he passed, and led the way out into the corredor.

  “On the night of Don Fernando’s death, do you think someone could have come into the study through Don Prospero’s room?”

  “I don’t think so, Señor.” The footman nodded a greeting as they passed other servants on the stair, carrying up cans of hot water for guests. “The door from the Padrón’s room into the corredor was locked with a padlock, and the one that connects it with the chamber beyond—the chamber that used to be the dressing-room between Don Prospero’s chamber and that of his wife—was also bolted. I don’t think Señorita Natividad would have opened it for any reason.”

  January glanced back over his shoulder as they descended the tiled stair, mentally raising his eyebrows at the idea of the master of the house giving his son’s fiancé
e—former mistress or not—a bedchamber adjoining his own. “And who has that room now?”

  “Señorita Natividad,” replied Bonifacio without change of expression. “It is where she always stays.”

  “I see,” said January, wondering—as Consuela had wondered—why it was Fernando who had been murdered and not his father. “And who had the corner room, then?”

  “That was Don Fernando’s room, Señor,” answered the footman. “He stayed there whenever he was at Mictlán, and locked it up and kept the key with him when he was away in town. It was his mother’s room, you understand—Doña Maria-Exaltación de Borregos—and after her, that of Doña Melosia, Valentina’s mother. It was Doña Melosia who had the lock put on, though she seldom stayed here on the hacienda. Doña Melosia was a woman of great sensibility,” the servant added tactfully. “A woman of the city, unused to the countryside and its ways. She stayed mostly at the town house as Don Prospero came here more and more. When her husband entertained the gods inside his head”—he tapped his temple significantly—“you can see how troubling it would be for her.”

  January nodded, remembering those glittering blue eyes and the feral smile. He wondered if Fernando had smiled that way.

  The kitchen court lay east of the main quadrangle, through an archway like the gate of a young city. The kitchen building was little more than a shed, open at one side and flanked by a thatched shelter for the firewood and, on the other side, by four outdoor ovens like whitewashed beehives. There were three open brick firepits whose gridirons sent up waves of heat, a line of rickety store-sheds, and another thatched shelter where half a dozen women ground corn in stone metates, chattering among themselves. “Yannamaria,” Bonifacio introduced, “this is Señor Enero, Don Hannibal’s friend. Señor Enero seeks to know about Don Fernando’s death. Lupe, Tepinita,” he introduced others, “Xoco, Cihu.”

  It was not lost on January that Bonifacio introduced him as Señor Enero—Mr. January—but referred to Hannibal as Don, a distinction accorded the penniless violinist for his white skin. At least he wasn’t simply called Enero, as Santa Anna had done, the lack of any honorific at all comprising a category occupied by children, Indians, léperos, and—in the United States—slaves.