Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  And as Consuela had predicted, they talked.

  They talked of parties they had been to, and horse-racing, cock-fighting, dogs—none of those brilliantly-uniformed officers ever seemed to have actually drilled troops in his life. Young Major Cuchero, one of Santa Anna’s aides who’d been at Mictlán three days before, got a big laugh by describing how he’d gotten his prize fighting-cock drunk before a match so it would be cut to pieces by one of Santa Anna’s, thus endearing the Major to the President’s heart and getting him a promotion to console him. Another officer named Lajazar mentioned seeing the President with a new little game-pullet. . . .

  “You mean poor Fernando’s bride?”

  “She’s had a narrow escape. You remember the time he bought an evening with La Perfecta, and then beat her so she couldn’t work for weeks?”

  “Sounds like Fernando,” remarked January, lighting a cigar that would have gotten him jailed in New Orleans. “I knew him in Berlin—or met him, anyway, I’m sure he wouldn’t remember the likes of me. Was he going to be married, then? That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “If you knew anything much about him,” laughed Cuchero good-naturedly, “you’d know how much that doesn’t sound like him.”

  “Personally,” said Lajazar’s mistress, a flashily-dressed girl with a jeweled comb a foot tall in her Indian-black hair, “it’s not Fernando I’d have worried about if I were Natividad, but Werther.” She drew a long breath of smoke, holding her cigarette with a tiny gold clip to avoid staining her fingers with the nicotine. “I wouldn’t have put it past him to put Spanish fly in her rouge.”

  “What became of Werther, anyway?” asked January. “Does anyone know?”

  “Walking the streets, I should imagine,” said a portly man who’d recently bought the right to tax every pulqueria in the city. “There’s the woman who’d know . . .” And he nodded at Consuela, who had been playing ombre with Don Rafael and, January noticed, had quietly made enough to run her household on for several months.

  Consuela shrugged. “My brother paid him, and his chef, and his grooms out of his own money, not Don Prospero’s,” she said, something January had already ascertained from Don Fernando’s ledger. “He did not like the servants of this country any more than he liked the food, he said.”

  “My uncle Don Salvatore hired the chef,” provided Don Rafael with a worried glance at the house-lights, to make sure he got back to his mother’s box before she started looking for him. The de Bujerios were seated nearly opposite Consuela, but down a tier on the more fashionable level. Since his arrival at the party, Don Rafael had been assiduous about keeping in the shadows of Consuela’s box.

  “Werther came to me asking for work,” said Major Cuchero, shrugging so that the gold braid that plastered the collar and breast of his crimson uniform glittered in the candle-light. “But aside from all else, the man spoke only German, which is a language for horses, not men. Of what use is such a valet?”

  “You tell us, eh, Cuchero?” taunted Lajazar, whose mistress Cuchero had been eyeing across the drifting blue smoke that filled the little chamber. Cuchero leaped at him with a roar of rage, so that January and the pulque-merchant had to separate them amid a great deal of shouting and demands that the remark be taken back, so loud that even those playing cards and gossiping in the boxes to either side called out to them to hush. The entire subject of Werther Bremer was swallowed up in challenges to a duel and the quest for seconds, and then a long argument about whether the half-dealt hand that had been interrupted should be continued or scrapped, and in that case who had the deal . . . ?

  January had witnessed similar scenes at every ball and party where he’d ever practiced his profession as a musician; it didn’t seem to make any difference whether he was in Paris or New Orleans, or whether he played for Americans, French, or free colored—or, evidently, Mexicans. Someone would make a stupid jest in his cups, someone would take offense, and if they were Spanish or French or the Creoles of those races, challenges would be issued and seconds sought. The Americans were just as likely to go after one another on the spot with bowie-knives, boot-heels, and pistols.

  He’d played enough entertainments among the free colored to know that the sole reason there weren’t formal challenges to duels on those occasions was that duels were forbidden to men of African blood. There were certainly swollen eyes and bloody noses from back-lot encounters, and if there weren’t quite as many fights as the white men had, it was because the free women of color had fewer polite scruples than the white ladies of good society, and were likelier to tell their menfolks not to act like fools.

  Throughout the whole, Doña Gertrudis sat with her veils pulled down over her face at the front of the box, watching the opera in stiff-backed silence. January envied her.

  Before the hectic splendor of the concluding chorus died away, the whole scene in Consuela’s box packed itself up and moved back to her flat, expanding there to include several more card-tables and many additional gallons of brandy. January—and Rose, who compared notes with him the following morning over coffee—picked up a good deal of miscellaneous information about Fernando de Castellón, but little that they had not known before. The picture of the cold, finicking, stingy, and brutal martinet emerged like a white marble statue from among a garden of persiflage concerning the provisioning of the Army, the number of Texians each officer proposed to personally kill, the number of rifles sold by this or that middleman and at what enormous profit—though no one seemed to have tested these guns to see if they would actually shoot—the size of each officer’s tent and entourage, and the merits of his blood-horses, to the disparagement of every other beast in the officers’ corps. Bets were laid on the bull-fights to be held in the President’s honor on Sunday afternoon: “Truly you must come, Señor Enero,” urged a half-dozen of January’s new acquaintances, mellow with the money they’d won from him and with copious amounts of Consuela’s brandy. “How could it not be a glorious spectacle, with de Bujerio bulls in the running . . . ?”

  And Don Rafael bowed stiffly to them and smiled happily, in the midst of explaining something about the cut of his coat-back to an apparently enthralled Consuela. As far as January could tell, Don Rafael completely failed to recognize Rose’s evil twin sister, Elena—who, with her quadroon complexion, French-accented Spanish, and narrow, delicate features, though she certainly would never have been taken for a white woman, might have been from anywhere along the Caribbean shores.

  But then, he doubted Don Rafael’s ability to recognize anyone not in his immediate family or connected with his own immediate interests.

  There was another fight—over a Colonel calling the pulque-seller “Señor Escalada” rather than “Don Julio,” as the merchant considered his right—with a great deal of shouting and the screaming of the women everyone had brought with them, broken glasses, and accusations of boot-licking, profiteering, and stealing sheep and selling them back to their owners. After the last guests departed close to dawn, and Sancho and Sebastian were cleaning up spilled brandy, peanut-hulls, mashed pandolce, shattered glassware, and the stubs of innumerable cigarettos and cigars, January heard, as he walked along the gallery to his room, the soft notes of a pianoforte being played very quietly: the duet from the second act of the opera they’d seen that evening, “O namenlos Freude.”

  He stopped beside the half-open doorway and saw in the single candle’s light the still, calm face of Doña Gertrudis de Caldofranco as she sat at a small six-octave square instrument of the kind that had been built in Germany forty years earlier.

  “You play very beautifully.”

  Her hands paused on the keys. Consuela passed in the gallery: “I’ve nothing further for you this evening, Aunt Trudis. There’s rehearsal again tomorrow morning, so be ready after breakfast.”

  “Yes, Señora.”

  Consuela’s heels clicked away down the tiled corredor. January heard her call out for Pepita.

  In a cool, small voice, Doña Gertrudis s
aid, “In my day it was considered an accomplishment for a woman of family to play—in the bosom of her family, which was where she remained.”

  Her hair, dark streaked with silver, shimmered in the dim light under the shabby black point-lace of her mantilla, and she turned to regard January against the blackness of the silent courtyard beyond him. “In my day we were taught to be what our families needed of us; my brother to manage the estates; myself to raise children of decency and responsibility, to work with the Church in caring for orphans and the poor. For the honor of my city and my country, I wish that you could have seen New Spain as it was then. Now my husband and children are all dead, and my brother is a penniless bankrupt; our lands are gone because we had not enough men to work the mines, and the rebels burned out the villages on our estates. There was a time when I thought I would have the courage to die before I would see myself the servant of an opera-singer who is the daughter of a mestizo whore.”

  In her voice January heard the echo of Francisco Ylario’s, when the Capitán spoke of the Principles of Universal Law to men who casually bought and casually sold justice at their whim because they liked the way a man played cards or the violin. When he spoke of the Emperor, who had, for a few brief years, seemed to be about to establish in Mexico a nation of wealth and honor.

  “I have cut sugar-cane in the fields,” January told Doña Gertrudis, “beside men who were the sons of Kings. Men do what they must to live, Doña. And women also.”

  “All we have is what we remember,” said the woman. “Of our families, and of how we once lived, and what we once were. And even that, if we wish to spare ourselves pain, it is better that we forget. Good night.”

  As January turned away, he closed the door. The soft voice of the pianoforte followed him into the night.

  TWELVE

  The following morning January made enquiries for Señor Benedicte dos Cerritos among the letter-writers who set up their portable desks, their ink-wells and their sheets of pink and blue paper among the candy-stalls and vendors of mangos and oranges in the dense shade of the arcade along the western side of the Plaza Santo Domingo. He was directed to a house a short distance up a narrow street, like Consuela’s, formerly a noble town house, now let out to a variety of tenants whose barefoot brown children darted in and out of the old carriageway into a laundry-hung courtyard. Señor dos Cerritos himself—like the original owner of the house in which Consuela lived—retained a few rooms in the rear, above the kitchen court. The servant woman who answered January’s knock looked him up and down warily, as if holding his black skin and African features up next to his subdued European dress and spotless linen.

  She took his letter of introduction and went in, leaving him in the harsh spatchcocked light of the bare arcade. A moment later she returned with the grudging information: “Señor dos Cerritos will see you.”

  January tipped her and went in, to find a fragile, elderly gentleman who rose politely from his chair in the bare and tiny sala and offered him a seat on the other side of the clean-swept hearth.

  “Thirty years ago, of course, there would have been no need to even ask about inheritance,” he replied to January’s question. “Don Prospero de Castellón was the Comte de Mictlán before Mexico became independent of Spain, and all his lands were entailed to his eldest male heir: his son Damiano and then to Damiano’s son, Luis. Both of them died about this time last year while traveling to Vera Cruz—a most insalubrious city.” He sounded as if he thought the city fathers of that malarial coastal town had simply been too lazy to do anything about the heat and the damp swamp miasmas that bred disease.

  “While I am of course unable to discuss the specifics of Don Prospero’s provisions, I feel able to assure you that the principle of primogeniture has always been a guiding beacon to the Comte—to Don Prospero.”

  January remembered the opinions expressed concerning such ladies as Coatlique and Helen of Troy. Not a man to trust money or property to a woman, however many women he might marry or take under his wing. “So it would be likely that his grandson, Casimiro Fuentes, will inherit at least the real estate?”

  Dos Cerritos gazed stolidly past January’s shoulder. “You may draw such inferences from my words as you please, Señor.” Would the old man have been more forthcoming to a man of his own race? January was inclined to think he would not. Dos Cerritos was a lawyer to his fingers’ ends. Questions, from white men or black, Spaniards or indios or mestizos, had only one answer: I am of course unable to discuss the specifics. . . .

  “Does Don Prospero have a will?”

  Señor dos Cerritos’s mouth pinched; the delicate nostrils flared. “I’m sure I could not say, Señor.”

  Either he doesn’t, thought January, or it’s the sort of thing you’d expect from Don Prospero: absurd enough to infuriate everyone but not quite insane enough to throw out. Given the upheaval and corruption in the legal system, he wondered what absurdity it would take to get the will of so influential a man set aside.

  “Would you be able to tell me something of the status of Señorita Valentina? Correspondence of hers was involved in her brother’s death, so when the matter comes to court, I’m sure there will be questions about her position in the household, in the light of her mother’s desertion.”

  “Ah.” The old man’s lips pursed tighter, as if even his breath were money that must not be allowed to leak out. “I warned Don Prospero. . . .” He shook his head. “It is fashionable nowadays to speak of the equality of all men, Señor, but when it comes to it, blood will always tell. Doña Marcellina Alba de Medellín—the mother of Damiano and Doña Josefa—though she was born in this country was of perfectly pure Spanish blood; Doña Maria-Exaltación de Borregos was, of course, of an old Spanish family. Melosia Valenzuela . . .” He helped himself to snuff from a golden box on whose lid the miniature of a girl was painted in ivory. The old man’s clothing would not have been out of place in a portrait fifty years old, a full-skirted black coat and knee-smalls, with ruffles of very fine linen, worn nearly to cobwebs, at his scraggy throat and blue-veined wrists. He wore a wig, too—January could glimpse an old-fashioned wig chest through the doorway of the bedroom, which was crammed with law-books, dishes, all the salvage of what had once been contained in many rooms.

  “I understand that efforts have been made to convince Don Prospero to repudiate Doña Melosia so that he may marry again. Does anyone know where she now lives?”

  “No, Señor. That she left with a lover is certain. She took nothing but the clothing she wore, and the sapphire necklace that disappeared with her has never turned up for sale in this country. Don Prospero has never been fortunate with women.”

  January thought about Consuela’s mother and the tortilla-press. “Don Prospero spoke of some scandal concerning his second wife, Doña Maria-Exaltación. . . .”

  “That was merely a tale put about by the servants.” Some flicker of youthful annoyance snapped in Señor dos Cerritos’s pale eyes. “Old Yannamaria, I daresay, if the Devil hasn’t carried that old witch off by this time. Doña Maria-Exaltación was never in good health, always throwing out a rash or down with the vapors. Her death in 1817 was no more than her sickliness catching up with her. Had the cook not been handsome, and had she been taken sick in the middle of the night instead of just after luncheon, there would have been no peasant jabber of poisoning or illicit affairs. At the time, even Don Prospero did not believe it, although she—”

  He checked himself, coughed unconvincingly, and settled back into his chair. More mildly, he continued. “Don Prospero did not even fire the cook.”

  January strongly suspected that Don Prospero wouldn’t have fired a good French cook whom he did suspect of poisoning his wife, but he only asked, “Was this M’sieu Guillenormand?”

  “No, the man before him, a Monsieur Pourpoint. A young man, as I have said, and I suppose one that women would call handsome.” He took another pinch of snuff and dusted away the residue with a lawn handkerchief as worn and mended a
s his cuffs. “He left Don Prospero’s employment shortly after Doña Maria-Exaltación’s death as soon as it was deemed safe to travel by sea, and returned to France.”

  “Do you know of any reason why Señora Lorcha would call M’sieu Guillenormand a poisoner?”

  Dos Cerritos’s thin lips curled. “Because she grew up eating tortillas and beans and thinks anything else is foreign and suspicious, like many today in higher stations than she.” Such a flash of animation suffused his narrow face that January wondered whether Natividad’s mother had ever come up here in the hopes of influencing this dry and precise old man. When, in a rush of anger, the old lawyer went on, January was sure of it.

  “She thought she had that—that disgraceful daughter of hers settled for life, if not with the buck, then with the kid, and well-served she is for her folly. Sacripant Guillenormand is a most conscientious man for a Revolutionist heretic, and dedicated to his art, as indeed was M’sieu Pourpoint—and, as far as I can tell, the same could be said for the Frenchman Giles Laurent, whom Don Fernando brought with him from Prussia. Doña Maria-Exaltación was always sick with one thing or another, as is her daughter, Doña Isabella. Poor Don Anastasio has become quite a crank about her health, the way he’s becoming a crank about Don Prospero’s madness, something he took in stride before Fernando and his doctors got to him. He’s convinced now that Don Prospero is growing madder by the day, when all of us who know him know that he has been holding conversations with the Jaguar-God since he was quite a young man.”