Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  “If he could have been induced to remain a general instead of indulging in the illusion that he knows the first thing about politics, this whole country would have been better off,” murmured Don Anastasio, who guided his leggy black thoroughbred mare up beside the carriage to pay his respects. “He’s an excellent general, and like your President Jackson, he knows the value of a hard strike in making sure that a second strike is not needed. If he knew the meaning of the word ‘loyalty,’ he would be a true hero.”

  Rose raised her eyebrows. “If George Washington had known the meaning of the word ‘loyalty,’ there would not be any United States for Mr. Jackson to be president of.”

  She spoke playfully, but though Don Anastasio returned a rueful acknowledgment of the truth of her irony, his smile swiftly faded. The infantry was passing before them now, thousands of feet beating dull time on the hard-packed earth. Uniformed ranks, some of them; others in the white billowing clothing of farmers, or the embroidered shirts of the Mayas from the Yucatán who spoke no Spanish. Marching in sandals and crude rawhide zapotes because they did not have boots, carrying pikes and spears because they did not have guns, or carrying guns that even January could see were ancient, broad-muzzled smoothbores from another era, many of them virulent with rust.

  “Santa Anna’s decision to embrace the cause of liberty was what brought about Iturbide’s victory, and our freedom from Spain,” said Don Anastasio softly. “And it was his defection that left Iturbide defenseless to his foes, and opened the floodgates to all the madness that came after: this strongman and that seizing my poor country by the throat. And all because Santa Anna took offense when he was told he could not sit in the Emperor’s presence.” He shook his head. “For him that was typical—that all things are personal, having nothing to do with the good of the country. And such an outlook can lead only to disaster.”

  They are marching to their deaths, January realized, watching the grim brown faces of the marching men, the heads held defiantly high. They had the stoic courage of men who work patiently to wring a living from unpromising land, but all of Friday night and Saturday night, while listening for word of Werther Bremer at Consuela’s, January had heard the brags of the men who’d sold powder and balls to the Army and made a fortune doing it, adulterating the powder with coal dust, and buying up the balls in job-lots wherever they could without the slightest effort to check that they would even fit down the muzzles of the guns.

  Courage would do those men little good if they had weapons that wouldn’t fire, or if they were trying to march the eight hundred miles to Texas—in the dead of winter—on rations of cornmeal that were three parts sawdust.

  “They deserve better,” he said.

  “Better?” Don Anastasio’s laugh was a puff of bitterness. “They deserve something instead of the nothing they’re getting. Look at them! Not those poor Yucatecs from the jungles, who haven’t even seen snow in their lives—not that Santa Anna has given a thought as to what the Sonoran Desert is going to be like in February. Look at the others among them. Santa Anna’s recruiters have emptied the jails: pimps, pickpockets, beggars, and thieves—at least those thieves who haven’t the family or influence to buy themselves out of the Army.”

  Genuine distress twisted Anastasio’s face. Following the direction of his gaze, January saw the slouching forms and wary eyes that watched, not the officers, but the other men, calculating their chance to make a break for it and take with them whatever they could in the way of other men’s pay, and whatever weapons could be sold for the price of a few glasses of pulque.

  “In a way I suppose it’s efficient,” sighed Anastasio. “If men must die, it’s far better that they be scum like that—thieves and idlers and drunkards who are of no use to the state or to themselves—than men with families, men who can raise healthy children or healthy crops. But to give comrades like that to true soldiers is as criminal as giving them defective guns.”

  At his own carriage his wife was gesturing him back. He shook his head and bent down again over Rose’s hand. “One day maybe both of our countries will come to their senses.” He rode away through the crowd, his mare picking her way with the delicacy of a lady crossing muddy ground in satin slippers. January saw him bend from the saddle to kiss Doña Isabella’s hand, and those of Doña Gertrudis and Consuela, who sat in the carriage beside her. Turning his gaze, January scanned the other carriages for some sight of Natividad or her mother but could see no glimpse of either. Anastasio would certainly know where he could write to Señora Lorcha to arrange a meeting, he supposed, but to do so would be almost an announcement of intentions, always supposing the lady would deign to write back to—or receive—a visitor of color.

  Much better to encounter her by chance at a place such as this.

  “Good Lord,” said Rose, shocked. “Is that their artillery?”

  January turned. “Are those pieces you’d show off if you had others available?”

  Rose made a face. “I can almost find it in my heart to be sorry for Santa Anna.”

  “Save your pity for his men,” January said. “And for the Texians should Santa Anna defeat them—or should any fall alive into his hands. He has a reputation for massacre, and he doesn’t particularly care how many of his own men perish in achieving his victories.” He sprang down from the carriage, and as the last dust settled behind the few cannon and limbers, followed them to the park beyond the trees, where they were being drawn up.

  No one stopped him. A few guards loitered in the trees, mostly occupied with smoking cigarettos and flirting with the poblana girls. Gentlemen of Don Rafael’s type strolled among the guns with lady-friends, but January’s eye was drawn to a solitary figure in gray corduroy, half-hidden in the shadows of the cypresses.

  January dropped back into the trees himself, and circled so as to come behind the man, who was in any case so deeply involved in making notes in a pocket memorandum-book that he didn’t turn until January was nearly in touching-distance. Then he spun, his hand going to the pistol he wore at his waist. . . .

  “January,” said John Dillard, and relaxed. “Come to see the parade?”

  “Such as it is,” said January. “I’ve seen better artillery turn-outs at Fourth of July militia parades down Canal Street.”

  Dillard pocketed book and pencil and held out his hand to shake. “They’re bringing in cannon from Vera Cruz next week, I hear.”

  “I hear that, too,” agreed January, clasping the American’s hand in his own and wondering how he could unobtrusively bring up the subject of fugitive German valets and Anthony Butler’s slaves. “Those’ll be the cannon they took from the Spanish fifteen years ago: they haven’t been fired or cleaned since then.”

  The Tennessean’s blue eyes narrowed sharply. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “At the opera,” said January. “Playing cards at the back of one of the boxes with about half the Mexican officer corps.” Dillard had looked as nonplussed as if January had said he’d been slipped battle-plans at a church-service. “Those cannon are so fouled with rust, I’d be surprised if you can stuff a ball down them, even if the men who’re selling powder to the Army weren’t adulterating it with coal dust and sand.”

  “Bastards.” Dillard spat, indignant in spite of himself. By the amount of tobacco-juice in the grass, he’d been standing by the artillery park, making notes, for some time.

  “You’re still outnumbered, though,” said January quietly. “Badly.”

  “We’ll manage.”

  “I pray you do. You remember what happened six months ago, when the state of Zacatecas tried to rebel against Santa Anna in favor of the old Constitution of 1824, as Texas is doing now. Not only were all the militia slaughtered, but Santa Anna turned his troops loose on the civilians as well.”

  “I guess Mr. Houston’ll just have to keep that from happening,” said Dillard, and spat again. “I appreciate you telling me about the cannon and the powder and all,” he added. “I’ll pass that word along to Mr.
Butler. They said when I came here it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t speak the language, but Lord—” He broke off, eyes going past January, and he let out a low, bemused whistle. “Well, now, will you look at that?”

  January followed his glance to the extremely stylish barouche drawn by four matched cream-colored horses to a shady spot on the fringes of the reviewing-ground. In it, Natividad Lorcha fanned herself with spangled yellow silk and followed Santa Anna’s wide-shouldered scarlet form with parted lips and admiring gaze. When the Generalissimo turned her way, she lifted her hand in greeting. Santa Anna made his horse caracole for her, and swept off his plumed chapeau bras.

  January was about to pass along Rose’s remark about a black mourning corset when realization dropped into place; he asked Dillard, “You know the young lady?” and was astonished at how off-hand his voice sounded to his own ears.

  Dillard chuckled. “Well, we were never introduced. But I do know the last time I seen her, she was walkin’ out with one of Santa Anna’s best friends.”

  January nodded wisely, with as much a man-of-the-world grin as he guessed a white man would tolerate about a woman who, if not precisely white, wasn’t black either. “A pretty good friend, I’d say.” Both men laughed.

  But Rose, when he recounted the conversation to her minutes later, said, “Dillard is Valentina’s lover at the garden wall?”

  “He has to be,” said January. “Where else would he have seen Natividad and Don Prospero together?”

  “Then Butler’s slaves—or freedmen, as the case may be . . .”

  “. . . suddenly have a connection with Werther Bremer after all,” finished January softly. “Though why Butler would have sent slaves or former slaves after Werther when he had Dillard and his other secretaries for the job still escapes me.”

  “Possibly it wasn’t Butler who sent them, but Dillard himself.”

  “Possibly. Either Dillard saw something or learned something—God knows what—on the night of the murder, or more likely Valentina enclosed a note of some kind with the parcel she passed over the wall. Hannibal isn’t the only man in the Valley of Mexico capable of translating Spanish to English, though there doesn’t seem to be anyone on Butler’s staff endowed with that particular talent. . . .”

  “That’s very harsh of you, Benjamin,” reproved Rose, angling her head to peer over her spectacles. “You can’t expect Mr. Dillard to entrust his love-letters to the pig-headed rhinoceros. In a way I’m relieved that it isn’t Ylario taking the law into his own hands. . . .”

  “And he may still be.”

  “True. But it does leave us with the problem of how we’re going to get around Butler. . . .” She switched effortlessly to Latin as Consuela and Doña Gertrudis, trailed by the faithful Sancho, appeared beside the carriage and climbed in. “How we shall deal with the butler if we cannot find the valet.”

  By the time January reached the cypress grove near the artillery, Natividad’s carriage was empty. One of the soldiers guarding it—there were six of them, more than were in charge of keeping Texians with memorandum-books from counting the field-pieces in the artillery park—informed him for the sum of a reale that La Señorita had indeed gone to take her comida with the Generalissimo and his officers. With as much of an appearance of leisure as he could muster, January strolled among the picnickers who had now spread themselves out among the cypress-trees around the fringes of the parade-ground, scanning the crowd for sight of Natividad’s mother. He saw no sign of the squat, black-clad figure, though he did see a number of cock-fights, a dog-fight, dozens of assignations, and Don Tulio de Avila y Merced running a faro-bank for an enormous crowd of young officers and gentlemen, with every sign of carrying on into the evening.

  As January, Rose, Consuela, and Doña Gertrudis returned across the marsh to the town, the smell of smoke and cooking from the Army camp and the drifting music of a dozen bands followed them for miles.

  Before departing for the review that morning, January had sent a note to Dr. Hernan Pichon at the Hospital of San Hipólito, and Rose had dispatched another to Consuela’s aunt in the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of Mary. Upon their return, they found replies to both these missives, Dr. Pichon bidding them to visit on the following day—Tuesday—and Sor Maria-Perdita arranging for Rose to call on Friday afternoon.

  In France it was still considered an amusing way to pass an afternoon, in some circles, to visit mad-wards and watch the antics of the lunatics, though this was no longer as fashionable as it had once been. Some of January’s friends in Paris—writers and artists of the Gothic genre, mostly—claimed they did so out of a desire to “more deeply understand the human emotions through the dreams of madmen,” though January suspected this argument as less than honest. As a medical student, he had visited the wards of Charenton and the Salpêtrière, and had found nothing either enlightening or amusing in the stink of excrement smeared on walls or voided into clothing, in the droning chatter of those chained figures in the shadowy cells, in the howls that echoed from the wards where the maniacs were confined.

  Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Macbeth had asked, and two hundred and thirty-five years later, it seemed, no one was any closer to an answer.

  The hospital administrator, a gravely elegant man who looked like a French marquis, greeted them in the entry-hall of what had formerly been the monastery of San Hipólito, and led them across the wide central garden. Men lay stretched on the grass beneath the pepper-trees, or walked about under their lacy shade. At one side of the cloister a man stood with his face to a pillar, his arms wrapped about it as high as he could reach. Another was spreading out children’s clothes over the rim of the fountain, talking rapidly to himself, and stopping every few seconds to bend and drink deeply from the water. There were two other well-dressed couples in the garden who January guessed—by the European dresses of the women and the way they put their heads together, talking and pointing—were simply curious visitors, perhaps in quest of deeper understanding of human emotions.

  “These in the garden are the privileged ones, you understand, the quiet ones,” explained the administrator. “The furious are kept in the monks’ old cells. . . .”

  “BASTARDS!” a man’s voice screamed. “Bastards, robbers, murderers . . . !” A man burst from the big door at the far side of the court, stark naked and swinging a three-legged stool like a weapon. He dashed straight for the outer gate, January and Rose springing to one side out of his path and the administrator to the other. “You can’t make me! You can’t make me . . . !”

  Dr. Pichon and a burly attendant who reminded January strongly of Werther Bremer’s bull pounded after the escapee, running him to earth near the man at the pillar, who buried his face against the stone and clung to it as if it were his sole hope of life.

  “Hold him!” yelled Pichon as the attendant wrestled the naked patient on the ground—the patient struck at his attacker with the stool, shouting words seemingly at random: January caught “principles” and “justice, yes, we need—we can’t make a world—yes, darkness—we can’t—yes. . . .”

  January caught the stool and wrenched it away—the man’s strength was terrifying. The administrator seized the patient’s thrashing legs and sat on them, and one of the visiting gentlemen ran up also to assist, while the two ladies clung to the remaining tourist and shrieked. Around the garden the other “quiet” patients began to mill and shuffle, crowding away or running to look or simply dashing excitedly back and forth in the arcade.

  “Get them out of here!” yelled Pichon as he dipped a bucket of water from the fountain, leaped up on the stool, and dumped the water over the heaving patient’s chest and face. Water splashed everywhere. The gentleman visitor sprang back with a cry, and the leg he’d been holding down flew up and smacked January—now holding an arm—across the temple. “Another,” Pichon gasped, thrusting the bucket at Rose, who obediently dipped it full from the fountain again. An attendant raced up with a second bucket, and for some minutes
the mad-doctor stood on the stool, dumping bucket after bucket of water over his patient, while January, the administrator, and the first attendant all got as soaked as if they’d stood in a shower-bath.

  “The rats,” screamed the madman desperately, “the cats and the rats—rats chase the cats . . . !” Water poured into his mouth and January wondered that he didn’t drown. He was probably halfway to it when the attendants dragged him, gasping, to his feet and into the nearest open cell. During the whole of the chase and the water-treatment the men confined around the cloister had howled, pounding on the doors of their cells. “Get the others inside,” commanded the administrator to the dripping attendant at his side. “Señor, if you will excuse us . . . there is no danger, none whatsoever, but it is better if these quiet ones are taken away until the shouting is over.”

  “Of course.” January was mentally charting the fastest route to the gate that led from the cloister back to the vestibule, or, at a pinch, looking for which open cell was the closest, into which he and Rose could dive in case of real trouble. The two visiting couples clung together in a corner of the garden, the women still shrieking, the young men gawking as if at a stage-fight in a melodrama. The man who’d been laying out the children’s clothes had sunk down beside the fountain, weeping, and wept still more when the attendant wouldn’t let him gather up all the little garments again and take them with him; he clutched what he could to his chest as he was herded toward the door of what had been the monastery refectory. The man at the pillar stubbornly refused to release his grip on it.

  “I am trying to do my job and you all refuse to let me! Let me alone, let me do what I need to do. . . .”