Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  “It drains the excess liquids from the nervous system, reducing the excitation of the fibers,” explained the doctor. “Is that all right, Doña Francisca?” He patted her shoulder. She continued to weep without a sound. The attendant laid one huge hand on her strait-jacketed wrist, and murmured encouragement to her in a voice too low for others to hear.

  “Did Don Damiano ever speak to you about his father when he was alive?”

  “Once,” LaVeuve answered. “Just after I opened my sanatorium here. That was back in ’twenty-five, when things looked—well, different than they do now, politically. Nothing ever came of it, though. Don Damiano was too cowed by his father and too habituated to the situation at the hacienda to pursue the matter seriously. He traveled a great deal, Don Damiano, and spent much of his time at Don Prospero’s other haciendas, in Jalapa and the low country near Vera Cruz, and in Catorce, where Don Prospero has mines. Of course Don Prospero demanded that the boy Luis be left at Mictlán. It was only chance that Luis was with his father in Vera Cruz the summer before last when yellow fever broke out in the town.”

  The doctor shrugged, and walked with them to the workroom door, which opened onto what had been the main courtyard. An elderly man sat there reading in the shade of a cypress-tree beside the small stone fountain; another was planting seedlings in one of the several big terracotta jars of earth along the sunny southern arcade.

  “It was Don Anastasio de Saragosse who brought Don Damiano here, as a matter of fact,” Laveuve said. “But in those days he was mostly concerned about how to deal with his friend rather than whether or not he should be restrained. There was no talk whatsoever of restraint. And though Don Anastasio tells me now that Don Prospero has become worse in recent years—and indeed in recent months—personally, I can’t say that I see much of a difference.

  “Of course,” he added, “by the time it was apparent that there was a problem with Don Prospero, Santa Anna had come to power and would not hear of his being restrained as a lunatic. Possibly he suspected that Don Fernando would not be as forthcoming as his father in the matter of gambling-debts and loans. And the vaqueros, of course, find his behavior not in the least discomposing. Don Prospero pays them well—and keeps the Army recruiters away.”

  Glancing through the doors that led into what had been store-rooms, a wood room, and a room for making chocolate, January saw that they were furnished with cribs, coffin-like slatted boxes on legs. Again, he supposed, more humane than chains, but the thought of having a lid down that close over his face made his flesh creep.

  “Is there any possibility,” he asked bluntly, “that Don Prospero might have gotten free of his room before his son’s death? Dr. Pichon said that the vaqueros let him out. . . .”

  Laveuve sighed and shook his head wearily as he removed his monocle to polish on a handkerchief. “God knows. Myself, I don’t think he could have restrained himself from showing off his escape if Vasco had let him out beforehand. But I do not, as the lawyers say, know of my own knowledge that Vasco—or that dreadful Lorcha woman, with her marriage contracts and her drunken priest—didn’t somehow obtain a key and unlock one of the doors in the hour or so after supper. I know only that after Don Fernando’s death, and after Don Prospero was out, Vasco took the keys from poor Pichon at pistol-point; and I observed when I was there the other day that the bolts had been removed from the doors.”

  “What will happen,” asked Rose, “should Don Prospero have another fit of madness?”

  The mad-doctor shrugged, and bowed a little to her as the attendant on duty opened the courtyard’s outer gate. “Nothing, I should imagine. If by some chance he should behave so outrageously as to force the issue, I believe that the old man’s only surviving grandson, Casimiro Fuentes, would have legal conservatorship under the guardianship of his mother. But personally,” he sighed as Consuela’s carriage pulled forward from where it had been causing a traffic impedance for the past half-hour in the Paseo de Bucareli, “I cannot imagine what it would take to overcome the President’s fondness for a man who finds mistresses for him and obliges with money on demand.”

  That afternoon, when siesta was done, Consuela outfitted January in the largest obtainable footman’s livery—in which he could barely move—a powdered white wig, and spectacles. “Now, whatever you do, don’t get down from the box,” she instructed. No worry there, January reflected, his breeches would no doubt come apart at the seams if he tried to so much as bend forward. “The seat is high, so that Señora Lorcha will see only that there is a black footman, and not that you are tall, which I think is what most people see of you even if they do not look at your face. Juan,” she added to the little coachman, “when the carriage stops, you give the reins to Señor Enero and help the Señora in or out.”

  The coachman looked deeply offended but made no argument, and in any case there was no call for such a diminution of his status that day. The low-slung red-lacquered barouche, drawn by its peacocky chestnuts, promenaded along the Paseo de Bucareli until lamplight softened the gathering cobalt gloom of the evening, jostling for wheel-space with what appeared to be every other volante and carretela in Mexico, without obtaining sight of either Señora Lorcha or her daughter. January felt close to despair. It was already Wednesday evening: Santa Anna was due to depart for his hacienda in Vera Cruz on Saturday, after Sir Henry Ward’s reception Friday night, and there was still no word from Cristobál about Werther Bremer. January’s only scrap of comfort lay in the fact that Rose, on her promenade of the Alameda the day before, had encountered Lady Ward, the only other woman there on foot.

  The two women had immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits—sharing views concerning the education of women—and as a result, Rose and January had been invited to Friday’s reception.

  “So we’ll have a chance to speak to Natividad then, if nothing else,” said Rose once the carriage had returned to the Calle Jaral and January was gingerly dismounting the box. “And possibly to suborn one of Anthony Butler’s slaves for information, if he should happen to bring one along. I asked Lady Ward and she says there are three of them, the tall footman we saw, Butler’s valet, and a female cook, she thinks. She spoke of them as slaves but doesn’t actually know what their legal status would be back in South Carolina.”

  “I wonder if my time wouldn’t be better spent trying to speak to the cook while everyone in Butler’s household is at the reception,” said January, easing himself out of the too-tight crimson coat. “If Cristobál hasn’t located Werther by that time I may have to. But how I’ll get into a walled town house after dark . . .”

  “. . . is something to be thought of Friday, not today,” said Rose. “As Don Quixote said: Patience, and shuffle the cards.”

  The following morning—Thursday—they searched—without success—through the enormous dim-lit chambers of the Monte de Piedad—the government pawnshop across the plaza from the Cathedral—for Fernando de Castellón’s green-and-white Meissen tea-set, and in the late afternoon set out on a promenade again. This time they rode along the Paseo de la Viga, which stretched for miles south of the city, through the marshy verges of what had been the southern end of Lake Texcoco. A tree-lined canal connected the city’s markets with the freshwater lakes of Xochimilco and Chalco beyond, and the road that ran along it to the little towns of Iztapalapa and Coyoacan was nearly as crowded as the Alameda or the Paseo de Bucareli.

  And it was there that they saw, sipping pulque and nibbling peanuts at one of the makeshift tables set up along the canal’s verge, the squat, black-clad figure of Señora Lorcha.

  “Girls have no gratitude anymore,” sighed Señora Lorcha as Juan—with a perfectly stony expression—helped her into the barouche. “After all I did for my Natividad, all my efforts . . . Since our return to town a week ago I have seen nothing of her, nothing! Not a word, not a note . . .”

  Not a medio, added January silently, perched on the box beside Juan in his ill-fitting crimson uniform. He was certain that Rose was c
hoking not to say the same words.

  “I have walked here along the Paseo, her favorite place in all the world, in the hope of catching a glimpse of her! Of my own daughter! And I so depend upon my child . . . !”

  Her voice cracked with grief. On the canal, flower-boats were returning from the city markets, the long, low canoes brilliant with leftover marigolds, poppies, blue and purple irises, and lilies of every color from blood to snow. Families of Indians poled them, men playing the guitar and singing; along the grassy verges, other canoes had tied up, and impromptu dances begun. Farther out on the lake, birds flew among the chinampas, the long islets of withes piled with dredged mud from the lake-bottom and planted with vegetable gardens, so that the open water was a sort of Venice of vegetation and canals.

  “Isn’t that just like men,” exclaimed Rose, “to take a daughter from her mother and then to treat them both as if they were of no account!”

  Had she wound up Señora Lorcha with a key, she could have received no better recital of that lady’s grievances, anger, and version of the events of the eighth of September, interspersed with liberal personalities about Don Prospero, his son, his daughters, and his cook: “Nasty, finicking fregón, always fussing about his kitchen—as if a real man would know anything about cooking! And guarding every scrap of food after a meal as if it were the Sacred Host! And what Prospero pays him—fifteen hundred pesos a year, when he cannot spare a few coppers to keep his own son’s novia from starving in a garret. . . .”

  “Fifteen hundred ?” repeated Rose, considerably startled. As well she should be shocked, thought January—provincial governors didn’t make much more.

  “Fifteen hundred,” affirmed Señora Lorcha with bitter relish. “And whatever else he skimmed out of the bills he’d submit, for cheese imported from France and white flour, and imported French mierda belike to spread on his imported French raspberry bushes! If you ask me”—petticoats rustled and corsets creaked mightily as the Señora leaned closer to Rose—“if you ask me, that drunken fiddler wasn’t the one who poisoned Fernando at all. It was that cook. He knew Fernando wouldn’t pay him anything like that much once old Prospero was clapped up.”

  “Really?” Rose was laying it on with a trowel—she sounded enthralled. “But . . . but how could that be? Didn’t everyone at dinner eat of the same food?”

  Spite and satisfaction dripped from Señora Lorcha’s voice—and delight, apparently, at Rose’s expression of round-eyed awe. “Faugh! As if the cook of a house wouldn’t know exactly which dishes each person favored, and which Valentina would turn up her pretty nose at, or Natividad, who’s so dainty in her ways that she wouldn’t eat more than a kitten. . . .”

  An untruth—January had watched Natividad at dinner and she’d run a close second behind her mother in the shark-like heartiness of her feeding.

  “There were thirty dishes on that table, and some took from one and some from another! Fernando was finicky as a lapdog, always complaining about this dish or that. After eight months, of course, the cook would know what he’d eat and what others wouldn’t! But that imbecile Ylario wouldn’t figure out that Cain killed Abel when they were the only two men in the entire world! Policemen!”

  “I’ve often thought,” said Rose in a conspiratorial voice, “that it would have served the lot of those puffed-up ampulosos right if you had brought about the marriage of Don Prospero and Natividad—which goodness knows both of you had every right to expect. . . .”

  “Expect? The dirty old goat promised marriage—and not with that son of his, either, who had as much use for a woman as an ape for a top-hat! And I would have brought it about, key or no key, doctors or no doctors who thought themselves so smart! I would have had the bolt off the wood of the door! But no, that ungrateful girl had to get cold feet, and sigh, and weep, and say she was afraid . . . afraid! Like she was afraid of Fernando as well, when I told her, ‘What’s a few licks?’ I said. ‘Every woman gets them from every man!’

  “But that spying sneak of a valet caught me at it—listening at doors, he was!—and Fernando put me from the room . . . put me from the room as if I were a child! And had me watched. I told him, I’m not one of your soldiers, I said, and he only laughed at me: You may thank God that you’re not, he said. For you’d soon see what befalls those who disobey the master of this house.”

  Her voice thickened with anger and self-pity. “Called himself the master of the house, he did, as if his father were dead. Whoever poisoned him like the dog he was did no more than justice, and good riddance from the world.”

  Hacienda Mictlán

  Wednesday, 27 October 1835

  (Written in German—not read by Benjamin January until midnight Friday)

  Amicus Meus,

  For God’s sake, get me out of this place before Friday evening. I’m sending this missive via Don Prospero’s footman Bonifacio, enclosed in a love-letter to Consuela, and praying that Bonifacio will be sufficiently wing-footed as to deliver it before Sir Henry Ward’s reception commences.

  Valentina-like, I’m making preparations to escape on Friday, but the only way I can do so unnoticed is on foot, and I cannot get far without your help.

  Don Prospero informs me that he’s leaving Mictlán to attend the reception on that night. I very much fear that the moment our friend Capitán Ylario realizes Don P. is out of the way he’ll hot-foot it out here to show Santa Anna that no Dictator can bite his thumb at the Principles of Universal Law while Francisco Ylario is around to defend them, so there. And it will horrify you to hear—it certainly horrifies me—that this is not the paramount reason behind my decision to fly.

  Some very odd things are happening here.

  Even odder than my host conversing with Quetzalcoatl in the sala and drawing up a menu with the chef as to what Fernando would like when his spirit comes calling next Monday night, and rather more disquieting.

  As Cleopatra says to Anthony, all strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise—but one can have too much of that sort of thing.

  Owing to a miscalculation of the kind one usually makes with one’s finances—a too-greedy consumption of pages 143 through 304 of Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Monday night—like the foolish virgin burning her lamp-oil I arrived at the accounts of Valmont’s death, the Marquise de Merteuil’s come-uppance, and the remaining two hours of my usual wakefulness at roughly two o’clock this morning. (I should know better than to commence reading with less than half an inch of pages in my right hand. Ah, mad love! Da me basia mille, deinde centum. . . .)

  It was in any case pitch-dark and deathly silent when I stepped out into the corredor—the moon was down and even Don Prospero’s jolly henchmen had sought their honest couches—and I crept along to the study, where I knew there to be a copy of Procopius’s Secret History, always a reliable source of late-night entertainment. I admit that I crept, being in mortal terror of waking Don P. and becoming entangled in yet another orgy of speculation concerning Helen of Troy. (We had engaged in this activity for some hours earlier in the evening. It had, I admit, enabled me to well and truly fleece my host at picquet while his mind dwelt with indignation on the marital relations of the King and Queen of Sparta, but while I yield to none in my belief that one-third of all human wisdom can be found in Homer, still there are limits to what flesh and blood will bear.)

  Upon reaching the study, I found to my surprise that the door stood open, though I could perceive no light within. Stepping inside, I immediately smelled both candle-wax and hot metal, as if someone had only that moment extinguished—or covered and concealed—a lantern. Like a simpleton, I did not immediately return to my chamber, but instead reached in my pocket for a lucifer-match, at the same time calling out, “Who’s there?”

  The result of this—as you will have foreseen—was that before I could get the match to strike, I was assaulted from the side by someone who smote me over the head with the 1672 London edition of L’École des Filles, seized me by the throat, knocked me into
the wall with considerable violence, and then—I assume, I was too stunned to follow the exact sequence of events—absquatulated, as the Americans would say. I don’t think I was actually unconscious, but the next moment there were candles, torches, servants, Don Prospero, and Valentina of all people—fully dressed including her corsets—crowding into the study and helping me to my feet.

  It was quite plain that the place had been ransacked. There were spaces on the shelves where books had been pulled off and stacked on the floor, and you could see bare wood on the desk where papers had been likewise treated. Don Prospero took from behind the desk one of the bull’s-eye lanterns from the stables, still lit but with its slide closed. I told my story, and in spite of the fact that I can come up with no reason why I would have hurled myself against the wall and smashed myself over the head with the 1672 London edition of L’École des Filles, I could see that he didn’t believe me.

  He hadn’t spoken to me one way or the other about my remaining here during his absence, but since last night he has conferred with Vasco and I don’t like the way Vasco has been looking at me. I wouldn’t put it past the two of them to lock me up, which will certainly make it easier for Ylario to find me when he arrives, as he inevitably will.

  I really think it is time for me to depart. There is a ruined curing-house some little distance from the village of Saragosse, Don Anastasio’s hacienda, which lies some miles to the west of Mictlán: a remnant of agricultural experiments gone awry. I will leave Mictlán as soon as Don Prospero departs, and make for that curing-house on foot—there is, at least, water at the stream near-by, and shelter. I beg of you, meet me there with horses on Friday night. Whatever is going on here, I suspect that Don Prospero’s departure will render the situation worse.

  Mictlán is empty and hollow these days, and indescribably sinister. Playing picquet in the sala with no one present but Don Prospero and, to judge by his occasional remarks, Tezcatlipoca, is an eerily unpleasant experience, notwithstanding the money I took off them both. Eerier still is retiring to bed, with all rooms empty and silent now save for little Casimiro down at the other end of the corredor and, presumably, Fernando’s ghost.