Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  Coming down to the courtyard not much wiser than he had ascended, January found Cristobál in conversation with a brown and wrinkled little man who kept one of the small shops in what had once been the store-rooms of the house. The servant saw January coming and at once returned to the horses, but January held up his hand. Through the door of the little man’s shop he saw plank shelves ranged with pots of black Indian pottery, and above them, bunches of herbs hung to dry. “Apothecary?” he asked, hoping he had the correct word in Spanish. “Farmacia?”

  “Botica,” agreed Cristobál.

  The shop was gloomy, and scarcely larger than a kitchen table; its proprietor barely spoke Spanish, and Cristobál had to translate much of what January asked. Some of the medicinal plants he recognized from his sister Olympe’s stock of voodoo remedies—spikenard for chest colds and aloes for bruises, chinchona bark to induce abortions. Others—yerba mansa, matarique, escoba, and jojoba—were new to him, and he listened with interest as the panamacac explained how one used a tincture of the first to wash dirty wounds, or salves of the second for sprains.

  But when they spoke of local poisons, what January learned was not only unhelpful but puzzling. He had assumed that there was some local preparation that killed by suffocation within an hour or two of consumption, and that Werther Bremer—or someone else—had obtained it through an Indian botica like this one. But not only was there nothing that could be concealed in light China tea—“Chichinaca,” objected the shopkeeper when January held up the dark dried leaves of the manioc: bitter—but there was nothing in the shop, and nothing that the man knew of, that would kill that way at all. Tlapatl, which drove horses and cattle mad and killed men, did so through convulsions, headache, and thirst; the deadly arrow poison of the southern jungles was resinous and aromatic and completely harmless if swallowed. The only poison that came close to time and symptoms would have been the ground-up seeds of the death cama—the hog potato—and those would not only have left a noticeable residue in the glass, but would have preceded their major effects by massive salivation, which Hannibal could not have missed observing.

  There’s something here that I’m not seeing, thought January as he and Cristobál rode through the narrow streets and out into the gaudy sunlight of the Cathedral square. Something that I’m missing, or not looking at the right way.

  The answer is here somewhere.

  Only it’s disguised as something else.

  He left Cristobál beneath the trees of the great square, climbed through the brilliant pitches of the flower-sellers on the Cathedral steps, and entered the extraordinary shadowy vastness of that huge fane as the great bells in the towers were speaking noon. In one of the chapels, a dusky cavern of candles and gold, he waited with half a dozen market-women, and when his time came, confessed to killing a man in the high sun-baked pass a week ago today.

  “He was a bandit?” the priest asked, and January said, “Yes.”

  “And he would have killed you had you not killed him?”

  “I wounded him defending my life, yes, Father. He was terribly injured; he could not live. I gave him my rosary, as it is lawful for Christians to do if there is no priest near, and told him his sins were forgiven him. After he kissed the crucifix, I shot him, to put him out of his pain.” January remembered the face of the bandit, streaked with filth, and with blood coming out of his nose and mouth, tears of agony tracking through the dirt.

  There was long silence on the other side of the grille. Then the priest said, “Are you troubled about what you did, my son?” The voice of a young man, young enough to be January’s son.

  January thought about it for a moment, and said, “No. I am a surgeon. I knew that the man could not live.”

  “Nor had he lived, I think, in any real sense, for a long time before your paths crossed. Not as a man lives, in the sight of God and in his own eyes. Your act of mercy—of giving him the chance to whisper his prayer of repentance into God’s ear on the threshold of death—opened for him the door between Hell and Purgatory: these are acts that saints do, Señor. He will be in Purgatory a long time, but when he finally comes out and meets you in the streets of Heaven, I believe his first words to you will be words of thanks. Say three rosaries for his soul and light a candle to the Virgin. Your sins are forgiven you.”

  So January told the beads on his battered old rosary, and breathed the musky potpourri of incense and candle-wax and the sweaty humanity of the people around him, and watched the candle-shadows waver over the dizzying exuberance of carved shapes around the altar: saints and flowers, birds and beasts, the Tree of Life with its twining branches and a jungly undergrowth of curlicues that reminded him of the carven reliefs still visible through the dirt and roots of that dark stone room within the Pyramid of the Dead. Before the altar in a coffin of glass lay a statue of Christ dead in his tomb, gory with the blood of his martyrdom: God loved you this much.

  In a misgoverned land without hope of either law or justice, there was some comfort, he supposed, in that.

  “For all old dos Cerritos had no use for Melosia Valenzuela,” remarked Consuela later that afternoon when her stylish carriage maneuvered through the axle-to-axle jam of traffic on the Calle San Francisco toward her father’s town house, “he has been quite good about coming up with reasons for my father not to repudiate her—one has only to look at Natividad Lorcha and her mother to see why. And then again, he has done what he can to protect Valentina, and the alliances my father can make if she is his legitimate daughter.”

  “Did you know Melosia?” asked Rose as the carriage halted for the dozenth time, blocked by a dilapidated hack filled with poblana ladies and their children. Pelados crowded from the flagway, hands outstretched. Juan lashed at them with his whip. Mostly, January suspected, to keep them from holding up a quick bolt for the next break in the traffic.

  “Oh, yes.” Consuela plied her sandalwood fan—the day was a warm one and the tall, tile-fronted houses shut in the heat around them. “Father married her in ’twenty-three, just before I went to the conservatory in Milan—in fact, it was she who urged him to pay my passage. She was very young, only a year or so older than I, and utterly mortified by my father’s madness. Like my sister Isabella, she loved town life, and would not willingly forgo the opera and shopping in order to go out to Mictlán to be bored. And one can scarcely blame her.”

  The team leaped forward into a gap between a donkey-cart and a curtained carretela and Consuela cursed; Doña Gertrudis, seated beside her facing backwards, merely gritted her teeth. “In the end, when my father bore her out to Mictlán and refused to allow her to leave, Melosia simply ran away.”

  Juan blew three sharp notes on his brass horn and turned the team toward the carriageway of a four-story town house whose rich green stucco façade was laced with tilework, statues, and twisted pilasters like a cathedral’s. A manservant in Don Prospero’s purple livery opened the gates; Sancho sprang from the back as the vehicle halted, and bowed like a dancer as he put down the step.

  “You will pardon me if I put you into Grijalva’s hands here—Grijalva is the butler—and leave you.” Consuela waved to the graying and dignified little man who came out from beneath the ground-floor arcade to greet them. “I have to be at the Teatro early to dress, and I want to stop at the de Bujerio town house, where they are having a party for their daughter Pilar. . . .”

  “Pilar who’s going into the convent?” asked Rose, startled.

  “En verdad! When a girl of good family takes vows, you understand, for three days beforehand she goes from party to party, dressed all in lace and silk and wearing all the jewels she will never wear again. . . . It is only a few doors up the street. Sancho will show you when you are ready. I have sent a note to the Prussian minister inviting him to a little tertulia at my flat after the opera tonight. Tulio will be there, and nearly everyone who was there last night, so if you can manage to go on losing . . .”

  “I can manage,” sighed January, stepping down and holdi
ng out his hand to Rose.

  “I must inquire,” remarked Rose in French as the butler Grijalva led them up the marble steps, “to see if my wicked twin sister, Elena, has plans for this evening.” Her eye caught January’s, and she smiled.

  The de Castellón town house was one of the few January had seen in Mexico City that had not been broken up or rented out. Like that of Sir Henry Ward, it was exquisitely and expensively furnished in the style of the ’eighties: spare lines, pale bright brocades, china from Dresden and Limoges. Most of the furnishings were under Holland covers, and the windows shuttered and barred. The place seemed to have only two servants, Grijalva and a footman, and the plate of candies and mango that the latter brought them with coffee had, January guessed, been bought in some haste from a street vendor for the occasion.

  Grijalva showed them everything they asked to see, and, after January tipped him, even volunteered information: “Don Fernando tried to find green notebooks like that here in town, sir,” he explained of the twenty-nine identical green-bound ledgers that January discovered on the shelf in Fernando’s bedroom, dating back to 1820, when the boy had first gone to Prussia. “When I could not, he ordered them from a stationer in Berlin. They had to be the same, he insisted, green with gold stamping. He became most angry when I offered him the morocco-leather that Perez sells over on the Plaza Santo Domingo. He ordered the ink from Berlin, too, finding none to suit him here.”

  “Would you object to having the ledgers sent to Señora Montero’s for me to look over?” There’s something I’m missing. The thought glided again through January’s mind like the shadow of a shark half-seen in deep water. Something I’m not seeing . . .

  “With her permission, of course, Señor.”

  January looked around him at Fernando’s room. Like the Creole French of New Orleans, the hacendados spent on their town houses what they would not think to waste on a mere country place. Fernando’s room was plastered, wallpapered with Chinese silk, and rolls of Brussels carpets lay against the walls all around. An inlaid armoire held uniforms—the gold-braided crimson of the officers of the Tenth Berlin Guards, and the blue-and-crimson of Mexico—and a few civilian coats of finely-tailored brown velvet, of the old-fashioned cut that Germans still favored. A shelf held a few military books and Frederick the Great’s Histoire de la Guerre de Sept Ans, as well as several volumes of racing studs.

  A connecting door led to a penitential closet—Werther’s room—that contained a low bed barely larger than a pallet, a couple of rough shelves holding volumes of Schopenhauer, von Ranke, Schiller, and Grimm, and a small leather trunk. Among the white linen shirts and silk stockings therein, January found an ivory miniature, the first picture he’d seen of the deceased Fernando—startlingly like what Don Prospero must have been in his youth, with sharply-defined features, a savage beak of a nose, and chill blue eyes. With the portrait was a sheet of notepaper, folded and sealed: it contained brushings and clippings of fine light-brown hair.

  His glance went quickly to the butler.

  “Very fond of his master, Werther was,” said Grijalva expressionlessly. “None of us here understood it, for Don Fernando treated him—and indeed treated us all—worse than any dog. He beat one of the stable-boys nearly to death for stealing a few cups of oats. Werther seemed to think that as the master’s favorite, he had the right to do the same when anyone displeased him.”

  “Do you know where Werther is now?”

  “No, sir. When word reached us that Don Fernando had died, Laurent—our chef—at once sought employment elsewhere. Señors Katz and Schnitten, his two grooms, made arrangements to leave the country. . . .” A world of backstairs power-struggles, of cold glares and petty revenges, glinted briefly in the mere pronunciation of the two names. “Meaning that they stole and sold a silver tureen and a number of silver cups from the dining-room. They were gone by the time Werther returned from Mictlán, which was on the Fiesta de San Miguel, about three weeks after his master was killed. Filled with rage, he was, that the world did not rush to avenge his master’s death.”

  The butler’s voice remained low and without inflection, but something in the softening of the corners of his lips hinted at just how much satisfaction he’d taken in telling Werther Bremer that there was no more room for him in the establishment on Calle San Francisco. He closed the door behind January and Rose: “Along here is the room prepared for Don Fernando’s bride.”

  January regarded the enormous chamber with its carved American bed of black walnut, its refulgently-flowered brocades, and its bouquets of pink-dyed ostrich-plumes for a moment in bemused silence before he asked, “What was Bremer’s reaction to the news that his master was to be wed?”

  “He dropped the tray of things he was carrying—the good Limoges coffee-service and a decanter of brandy—and fled from the room, Señor. He was gone for several hours. Later that night he had a most disgraceful argument with his master, shouting and wailing that you could hear all through the house.” Grijalva’s lips pinched, reminding January of Señor dos Cerritos: if he wasn’t completely Spanish himself, the butler had been raised in the old traditions of Spanish etiquette, and the German concept of natural emotions freely expressed clearly met with no approval here.

  January raised his eyebrows, and the butler shook his head, with more than a trace of regret in his voice. “As they spoke completely in German, I could understand no words, Señor. . . .” He pocketed the silver reale that January handed him nevertheless. “But I know of no other reason that Werther would be in tears.”

  “How long was this before his master’s death?”

  “Ten days, Señor. Don Prospero arranged to have furniture delivered and the room made ready for Señorita Lorcha the following day. Only a week later Don Anastasio de Saragosse sent word of Don Prospero’s madness.”

  Hooves clattered in the courtyard—the carriage returning, empty, there being no room, presumably, in the de Bujerio courtyard for it. In the stillness of the immense house the noise echoed eerily. No thump of looms downstairs, no laughter of the vaqueros; no chatter of servants passing back and forth. January wondered if Grijalva considered the single footman—far more Indian in complexion and feature—beneath his dignity to speak to, or if the two of them had some companionable lair back in the empty kitchen quarters where they spent their evening hours. But he did not know how to ask.

  Carefully, he said, “If in his grief—perhaps in distraction of the mind—Werther Bremer sought to purchase . . . oh, perhaps something to make Señorita Lorcha ill . . .”

  But his eyes met the butler’s, and they both knew that it was not Señorita Lorcha who had died.

  “I do not see how he could, Señor,” Grijalva said in the tone of one who regrets having to do justice to the subject at hand. “He spoke no Spanish, you see. He is a very young man, Señor. He might perhaps have cut up Señorita Lorcha’s shawls, or even put salt in her coffee, but I do not think he had the knowledge of even the household substances—like turpentine or oil of vitriol—that can cause illness or death. Moreover, I think that if he did somehow purchase such a substance for such an end, Señor, he would have used it on himself.”

  But he didn’t, thought January. Or . . . “You don’t think Werther Bremer might have killed himself, do you?” he asked Rose as the carriage passed beneath the shade of the carriageway and endeavored to find a crevice in the mass of carriages, riders, beggars, and foot-traffic in the Calle San Francisco that would let it proceed the some hundred feet to the de Bujerio town house. “After accusing Hannibal and not getting any satisfaction from Ylario either?”

  “Since I’ve never to my knowledge laid eyes on the young man,” replied Rose, watching with interest the argument, on the opposite side of the street, between an old woman with a basket of poppies on her head and a priest with a little dog, “I have no way of knowing that—but I wouldn’t think it likely. Not with his vengeance unachieved. My worry is that he’s left the city and is hiding in one of the arroyos nea
r Mictlán with a rifle, waiting for a clear shot at Hannibal . . . assuming he can shoot. That is the beau idéal of the hearty young Teuton these days, isn’t it? The free-spirited Freischütz trekking through the forest green?”

  “I’m assuming he can’t shoot,” replied January grimly, “from the fact that he hasn’t done so already. What on earth is going on up there?” He rose from his seat in the carriage—which was stopped while Juan waited for two grooms to quiet a kicking horse in the harness of an elaborate old coach—and looked ahead down the street.

  In the slanted golden light of evening he could see the problem, a small marching band in green livery emerging from the carriageway of a town house whose yellow stucco front was adorned with what appeared to be statues of the entire Heavenly Host. Streamers of cut paper and standards of brilliant flowers bobbed and dipped above the heads of the crowd; clarionettes, kettledrums, flutes skirled in a lively quick-step march. As January watched, a carriage emerged behind the band, and Don Rafael de Bujerio stood up beside the driver, throwing out handfuls of coin.

  No wonder the street was impassably jammed. An army of club-bearing footmen surrounding the carriage to keep the léperos at bay didn’t help the traffic problem any, but looking over the heads of the crowd, January understood the need for the escort. Doña Imelda, sitting in the carriage, flashed with diamonds enough to cause a second French Revolution, though they were paltry compared to the jewels bedecking the white-clothed young girl at her side.

  “That can’t be Pilar!” gasped Rose, horrified. “She’s only a little girl!”

  But the very young lady in the gown of white satin, a crown of diamonds on her head, and a little ornamental shield of goldwork and enamel in her hand, could be no one else. Juan backed the horses to let the procession edge past, and January saw the girl’s face, basking in the hysterical attention with the full intentness of a fourteen-year-old’s self-perceived martyrdom, solemnly reveling in being the cynosure of every eye. Pilar de Bujerio’s lap was filled with pink roses, her smile flashing now and then with delight that held little comprehension—knowing only that for one time in her life, she was the most important person in her world.