Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  January saw Doña Imelda’s face, too, filled with the same purring satisfaction he’d heard in her voice at Mictlán: Now, Josefa, envy is only to be expected. Saw the bitterness in Josefa’s eyes as she looked at her father from the opposite end of the dining-table, anger that smoldered with the slow patience of the robbed.

  Gems winked on the little crown in the evening sunlight as the carriage proceeded slowly up the street, to the next party, the next celebration, music and brightness and flowers following in its wake. Like the musicians that had followed the woman January had seen the previous morning, who bore in her arms the corpse of her child.

  “Ai, what a bore! And what a crowd!” Consuela scrambled up into the carriage and settled herself beside Rose with a flounce. Sancho, who had both pushed the crowd aside for her and defended her passage, swung nimbly up behind. “And if I had to endure one more second of Isabella going on about how her daughters would have gone into the Incarnation, if either of them had lived, and what a martyr she is that they did not—as if Anastasio would have permitted any daughter of his to become a nun!—and all her sorrows about losing her sons and her grief at her brother’s death . . . and coming to the party in full mourning, though she never so much as bothered to visit Fernando in the whole eight months he was here in Mexico . . . I have had enough of respectable people for one day, and enough of family for a lifetime! Let us go to the opera, where people at least are greedy and reasonable!”

  THIRTEEN

  Well aware that no matter how much money he’d lost to them the previous night—and no matter how shady their own antecedents—none of Consuela’s raffish hangers-on would even consider visiting a black man’s opera box, much less appreciate a black man visiting theirs, January settled down in peace and quiet and enjoyed L’Italiana in Algeri as much as it was possible for him to do so.

  But his racing mind could not let go of the butler Grijalva’s voice saying “. . . He would have used it on himself.” Of Ylario: “The jealous lover would have poisoned the girl.” Of the sight of a torn-out heart, swimming in a vessel of blood.

  Beside those thoughts, Rossini’s frippery version of life in a North African harem paled to absurdity, and January remembered only how the dark eyes of his first wife, Ayasha, had snapped with exasperation as she’d compared the absurdities of the tale with her own upbringing in her father’s small harîm. Remembered her extravagant gestures in the café afterwards at the Palais Royale, and the scents of rain and coffee.

  Ayasha was dead, too, he thought, and his mind tangled once more in uncertainty and fear.

  Someone had bought poison (From whom? What kind?), and had introduced it into something Fernando ate or drank after dinner (before or after Hannibal spoke to him?). And Hannibal, who had never hurt a soul in his life, would hang for the crime.

  If he lived through the Days of the Dead.

  Rose, though she usually derived more enjoyment from the stage machinery than from the music in any opera, kept up a wry commentary on the logical failings of the plot (“Has that man ever actually read anything about how the sultans treat their women?”), though now and then he caught the worry in her sidelong glance. During the entr’acte she and January played their usual game of inventing tales about the spectators in the other boxes, a pastime enhanced rather than diminished by the fact that they knew virtually no one. They provided them with names—The Purple Prince, Madame Guêpe, Captain Falstaff, Abbé Frollo—and life histories, and speculated as to why gentleman A bowed so deeply to gentleman B, and why mothers and duennas smiled so sweetly upon gentleman C while subtly elbowing young Major D almost over the railing and into the pit.

  January spied Don Anastasio in attendance upon a fragile-looking, fair-haired woman in mourning black—presumably his wife, Fernando’s full-blood sister Doña Isabella—in the box with Doña Imelda and an excited and radiant Pilar. In another box, close by the stage in the most fashionable tier of the theater, Natividad Lorcha chatted with a revolving battalion of uniformed officers: “I see she’s out of mourning already.” “Nonsense, Benjamin, you wrong the poor girl! I’m sure that under all that pink silk she’s wearing a black corset.” January laughed, but the distraction was momentary: The answer has to be here somewhere.

  What am I not seeing?

  At Consuela’s afterwards—amid the same talk, the same drinking, the same rounds of vingt-et-un and ombre in the overheated candle-lit sala—January was approached by his hostess with a tall, florid-faced dandy in tow, a fair-haired gentleman in lavender kid gloves and a buttonhole the size of a cabbage. “Benjamin Janvier, of New Orleans,” introduced Consuela in her lilting French, “His Excellency Egon Rupert von Wolfbüttel, Graf von Winterfeldt and minister to the King of Prussia.”

  “I am deeply honored.” January rose from the gaming-table and bowed profoundly, thanking the Fates that New Orleans had a large enough population of Germans to have given him a command of the language.

  “My dear sir, a pleasure, a pleasure.” The minister replied in French, which most of the old German aristocracy preferred to the tongue their peasants and soldiers spoke. “You’re not here in connection with the Texian question, are you? I didn’t think so—dreadful men, and they never cease spitting.” He held up his gold-rimmed quizzing-glass to study January more closely. “I felt sure a man who would wear a waistcoat like yours could not be associated with them. Surely that waistcoat is Parisian? From Monsieur Joliffe’s in the Avenue de la Pepinière, if I’m not mistaken . . .”

  “You have a wonderful eye, sir.” Warned by Consuela that the minister was something of a dandy, January had been careful to wear his best pale-green silk vest, which was indeed from Joliffe’s. “I lived in Paris for many years before returning to New Orleans. And I suspect the Texians would have little use for a man of my hue, except possibly to pick their cotton.”

  “Well, the more fools they. Although it goes without saying that anyone who’d believe any promises of peaceful retreat given them by any relation of the President . . . Well, enough of that.” He waved an airy hand and let the glass fall to the end of its violet ribbon. “They’ll see their mistake when Santa Anna’s Army of Operations marches into view. And how may I serve you, sir, since Henry seems to have given you carte blanche in that letter of introduction dear Consuela told me about? She always has that determined glitter in her eye when she wants me to do her a favor.”

  January laughed. “It’s only a simple enquiry, your Excellency. I’m searching for a man named Werther Bremer, a servant. He was valet to—”

  “Dear heavens, yes, Werther.” The minister nodded. “Fernando de Castellón’s valet. Terrible about Fernando.” He sighed. “A good soldier. Santa Anna will miss his talents, particularly now that he’s trying to whip those poor savages into an army capable of taking on the Texians.”

  “Do you think he’ll succeed?” asked January, thinking of their Tennessean fellow-passenger John Dillard.

  Von Winterfeldt raised his pale brows. Despite his paunchiness—carefully concealed with good tailoring and a merciless corset—he had an air of physical strength: a fencer, guessed January, or a devotee of singlestick. Not a man to cross, and be damned to your lavender gloves.

  “Santa Anna cannot afford to fail. It isn’t so much that he wants Texas—the land’s good for very little except the running of cattle, you know. But if the Texians declare themselves to be an independent republic, and are simply let to go, the Americans will almost certainly move on to colonize Santa Fe and the fur-trapping lands to the north, and declare them to be independent republics also. California on the Pacific, too, for all I know. It has decent ports, I understand.

  “Santa Anna’s already put down one rebellion in Zacatecas, and not in a fashion likely to win him much loyalty from other states. The Yucatán and Oaxaca have barely anything in common with Mexico City already. I don’t completely agree with the centralistas, but once a Federal union starts to divide along sectional lines, there’s no stopping it—it’s
astonishing that Jackson was able to keep South Carolina from seceding from the United States over that tariff business a few years back. And once that starts happening, it’s only a matter of time before the individual states start being used as bases for European powers.”

  “I understand the Army here leaves a great deal to be desired.”

  “It leaves everything to be desired, my dear sir. Including funding, by the way. They say the bull-fight tomorrow afternoon is in honor of the President, but it’s really to raise money to buy the poor wretches boots and guns. Not that they’ll get a thing worth wearing. I know the man Santa Anna gave the contract to, an absolute bandit! Have you been to a bull-fight in this country, Sir Henry?” He turned to address the English minister, who had appeared at his side, shepherded by the indefatigable Consuela.

  “Barbarity,” snapped Sir Henry, shaking his head.

  “Now, Henry, any Spaniard will tell you it is the observation of bull-fights that makes Spaniards manly. I understand they’ll be fighting bulls of the de Bujerio line, and the Potosí—quite fierce animals, and of impeccable bloodlines. Certainly they could trace their lineage back a number of generations further than most members of the government these days. If you’re looking for Werther Bremer,” von Winterfeldt added, raising his quizzing-glass again to regard January, “that might be a good place to find him. I offered to pay the poor lad’s fare back to Lübeck, the most I could do, although since he’s a Holsteiner I have no actual responsibility for him. But the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein has no minister in Mexico. I felt sorry for him, poor boy. But he refused, saying he must remain and avenge his friend. I understand he was seeking employment at the bullring when he could find nothing among de Castellón’s fellow officers.” He shook his pomaded head again and peered at the nearest knot of plumed and beribboned colonels and aides. “Fools. I understood from Fernando that Werther was a most excellent servant. And why would one wish to address a servant anyway?”

  On his way to Mass the following morning—with the sky still opal-gray above streets deep in strange blue shadow—January saw posters for the fights: six bulls from the ranches of de Bujerio, Potosí, and El Grande Zacatecas, to be killed in the bullring of San Pablo, in order to raise money for the Grand Army’s debts. No mention of the men who would fight them, though the names of this torero or that had laced the talk at the card-tables the previous night. Even over the cards, the talk had been more about the bloodlines and ferocity of the bulls. The Graf von Winterfeldt had given him the use of his box for the fight, sparing him the expense of paying treble price for tickets that brokers had fought for in the mobs at the ticket office earlier in the week.

  In the quiet of the Chapel of the Angels, January knelt among the market-women and the servants—the only other people who attended Mass this early—and sponged his mind of worry and thought, opening his heart to the words of the ritual and his soul to the silence of God. A week ago he had killed a man—maybe more than one—in the dusty pass on the road down from Perote. A week ago they had buried the white-haired Swiss valet Da Ponte in the churchyard at Chalco, torches burning golden in the gathering dark of evening.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. . . . Pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death.

  For the bandit in the pass. For the old Da Ponte in his lonely grave in foreign soil.

  For his dear young friend Artois St. Chinian, who had died in last summer’s agonizing heat in New Orleans and who would have been in Paris by this time, ecstatic with delight at the education his white uncle would have paid to provide him, away from the city and the land where men would look at him and think: nigger.

  For Ayasha, always in the darkness in the center of his heart, like a flower perfuming an empty room at night.

  Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

  Pray for us. . . .

  For Hannibal, facing death at the gallows. I’m sorry now that I ever wrote to you . . . stand not upon the order of your going. . . .

  It might be best to get Hannibal out of here. . . .

  The smell of blood in the darkness.

  Guide me to Werther Bremer, Mother of God—and put the right words in my mouth when I meet him.

  Hannibal charmed every woman he met, thought January. With any luck the Mother of God would look kindly upon him, too.

  When first he had gone to France in 1817, the baiting of bulls with dogs was still common. January had always hated those inn-yard spectacles, the tethered animals bellowing in terror and rage, uncomprehending of why they were being set upon in circumstances that they could not escape; dying in a welter of blood and agony so that men could bet on how long it would take them to do so, and how many of their tormentors they could take with them into the darkness.

  Perhaps, he thought, it was because he himself had once been a slave.

  The corrida was different from these gory outrages: ritualistic, a passion-play in which the tragic hero was the bull, the man cast as implacable Death, with always the titillation of the unpredictable, the possibility of the roles reversed. And of course—it went without saying—the brutal fascination of pain.

  Nobody apparently gave a thought to the horses disemboweled and dying in agony—they were a sideline, a footnote to point up the peril the man was in, like the nameless Greek infantrymen Hector slaughtered on the way to his duel with Achilles. Rose said, after the first matador rammed home his sword between the disabled and exhausted bull’s shoulder-blades, “I’m sure if the point of the exercise is beef, there are easier ways to obtain it,” and left, accompanied by the disappointed Zama, to eat ices and read Jane Austen in the carriage.

  January remained through two more corridas, watching the faces of the people around him in the shaded boxes, and out beyond on the benches in the westering sunlight. Listening to the sound of the crowd.

  He found himself remembering the wake for his young friend Artois St. Chinian only a few months before. The boy’s wealthy white uncle had come to the gathering, which had been held in the house of January’s sister Dominique. In the stuffy heat of the bullring box, with the sun glaring across the red-splotched sand—with the gaudy colors of the crowd, with the harsh blue stink of cigarettos and the gold scents of ginger-beer and candy in his nostrils—January recalled the look of shock and bafflement in that old white man’s face. It had been a typical wake of the free-colored community, men and women who knew the dead boy only slightly howling in grief in the bedroom, then passing into the parlor to get roaring drunk while they laughed and chatted with friends and listened to January play the piano.

  All was done in love, in understanding that the dead Artois would want his friends to laugh as well as weep. The tunes January had played had been the boy’s favorites, lively and quick-stepping. People had smiled as they sang.

  The old man had not understood.

  And January was aware, looking at the faces of the men and women on the plank seats in the sun below the boxes—listening to the cries of respect, of approval, of awe that swept like wind across the packed crowd—that he did not understand what was going on here. He saw there was skill and artistry involved, as well as brute courage. One of the matadors had it, though another was so nervous, he made all kinds of mistakes, jeered and laughed at by the aficionados, until he finally had his thigh ripped open from groin to knee. Even the clowns, who leaped and capered about the ring, or ate mock banquets before the charging bull only to spring aside at the last second in showers of breaking plates, had a panache and timing that some of the graver toreros lacked.

  And he saw how it was a spectacle of bravery, even though the bull was carefully and systematically disabled by having its blood let and its heavy neck muscles—the muscles that controlled its ability to gore—sliced with lances and jabbed with darts, while it was confused, panicked, maddened by the firecrackers attached to the banderillas and bursting all around it.

  Yet seeing all that, the cruelty of it revolted him. The cruelty, and the ass
umption that because men were men, they had the right to torment and kill; the right to encourage the spectacle of death, for their own amusement or for what they perceived as their own spiritual fulfillment.

  He left the box and descended the rickety wooden steps in semi-darkness, for evening was coming on. Once outside, he sought for a way around the rough-plastered adobe wall of the ring to the back, where he knew the corrals must be. This was not easy, for the San Pablo bullring stood in the tangle of small streets between the city’s heart and the grubby barrios that fringed the lake on the east, and there were houses of adobe, and other, more ramshackle buildings of mud and thatch built up against its wall. By keeping the bullring wall in view on his right, January threaded his way through the narrow alleys till he found one wide and thick with trampled mud and cow-dung, and this he followed to the square beside the Church of San Pablo, where the makeshift corrals and chutes had all been set up to separate out the bulls from the small herd of steers with which they’d traveled from the ranges where they’d run wild for years.

  He’d watched the men working the ring, the assistants running up and down the narrow shadowy slot between the barreras and the first row of seats, carrying jugs of water for the toreros, or spare swords or extra capes. Had observed the carpenters who swiftly repaired the barriers when one of the bulls rammed into it; the physician who waited for the gored matador to be carried out. With the exception of the physician, most of these workers had looked to be either indio or mestizo, and January assumed that a Prussian valet could not, in the weeks since his master’s death, have acquired enough of the torero’s obvious skills to have sought that kind of employment.