Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  As he tied the body in place, he saw where Don Prospero’s bullet, entering just above Anastasio’s left eye, had torn away a huge chunk of the back of his skull; it must have passed within inches of Rose’s cheek.

  Let me know what I owe You for this, he whispered in his heart, his hand groping for the rosary in his pocket. Anything You ask. Anything You want.

  “No, Don Anastasio was right,” he said. “He had to have Prospero locked up, preferably in France or Spain, where any communication or instruction would have to come through him. It was the only way he could buy himself time to readjust the situation. And the only way he could get Don Prospero confined was to present Santa Anna with evidence of insanity so gross that it could not be ignored: viz., being found in a pagan temple with a sacrificial victim’s torn-out heart in his hand.”

  “Giving a new meaning,” mused Rose as she swung onto her horse in front of Hannibal, “to Othello’s threat to ‘cut out his heart in a church.’ ”

  And Hannibal, looking like a corpse himself now in the moonlight as exhaustion and shock began to settle in on him, gave a single whispered chuckle.

  January looked up at him for a moment, then, though his legs ached at the thought of yet one more climb, turned and set off up the pyramid again. His approach sent half a dozen coyotes streaming out of the black sanctuary cave; he averted his eyes, in the swaying lantern-light, from the corpses of José and Lobo.

  As he picked up Don Anastasio’s short velvet coat, he turned one last time to the offrenda: flowers and tea-cup, gloves and sword, candy and tobacco and bones. Blood spattered them and the vermin had already disarranged Don Anastasio’s careful ordering of the fake shrine, but still they had an eerie beauty, an eerie power. His sister Olympe, he thought, could have warned Don Anastasio not to make an altar to the young man he’d murdered, no matter whom he wanted to convince of Prospero’s madness. Or at least—if she’d been feeling charitable—she’d have warned him to keep away from it on the night of All Souls.

  It was agreed that Rose and Hannibal should start at once for Mexico City while January rode with the dazed and sleepy Don Prospero to within sight of the hacienda walls. As Hannibal had said, even on the night of the Feast of All Souls, the compound at Mictlán was somber and quiet save for the lights in the servants’ quarters, and one light burning in the chapel.

  During the ride from the pyramids, Don Prospero had seemed half-waking and half in dream. But beyond repeating, in answer to January’s question, that Fernando had told him that Anastasio had been responsible for Fernando’s death—and that Fernando had said that it had something to do with peanuts—the old man was silent. Whether he recognized January, or remembered his murdered chef and the bloodied shirt and bag of money in January’s luggage, January did not know. When they came within a hundred feet of the casco gates, January helped him down and sat him on a deadfall tree, tied up the horse that bore Anastasio’s body, then fired his pistol twice to bring the vaqueros, and rode away as fast as he could.

  January had frequently had cause to comment on how simple life was for the heroes of the romances to which his sister Dominique was so addicted. They could gallop all night on horses that never grew tired, without the nuisance of changing saddles to a spare cow-pony who kicked—by the light of a convenient moon that never set, apparently—in order to show up “at daybreak” upon the doorstep of helpful friends, Renaissance Italian cities evidently not having customs barriers. After an hour of vainly trying to figure out a way through the marshes on the northwest side of Mexico City, he gave up. He joined the enormous queue of charcoal-merchants, wood-sellers, farmers with loads of vegetables and enormous herds of cattle, sheep, swine, and geese bound for the city’s markets, finding—several hundred feet closer to the front of the line—Rose and a nearly-unconscious Hannibal still waiting also.

  The gates were open by then but the line was slow, owing to the number of merchants cutting ahead of those who couldn’t afford to bribe the customs inspectors. January pulled his hat over his eyes, wondering if he was going to be arrested for Guillenormand’s murder—or for being El Moro—and watching the Indians glide by on the canals of the marshes, heading for the markets with canoe-loads of fruits and flowers.

  It was the third of November. The Dead had returned to their homes in Heaven—or presumably in Hell—for another year.

  At the Calle Jaral, Consuela was having breakfast with Don Rafael de Bujerio, both of them in dressing-gowns. “Hannibal is a dear man and I love him with all the passion that inflamed the heart of Dido for Aeneas,” she assured January as she hurried with him and Rose down to the courtyard, where Hannibal slumped at one of Señora Garcia’s tables, being served cocoa heavily laced with laudanum by that obliging lady. “But after all, Dido was Queen of Carthage and did not need to be provident about her grocery-bills. Don Rafael’s heart is broken. . . .”

  Or anyway his pride seriously miffed, thought January, but didn’t say so. Perhaps the jilted hacendado was merely being provident as well: Don Prospero had given ample evidence that one daughter of doubtful provenance was to him pretty much like another.

  “Bonifacio wrote to me Sunday that you had come to Mictlán,” Consuela added, leading January and Rose—with Hannibal supported between them—into the old house’s inner courtyard. The Garcias and several other families occupied what had been kitchen and laundry quarters around it, but a back stair led up to one of the smaller rooms of her own apartment, which Hannibal had occupied prior to his appropriation by Don Prospero two months before. It was a small, sunny, whitewashed room, and very quiet: books stacked in a couple of upended crates, sheaves of music, pots of ink. Consuela had already started storing extra trunks of dresses there. “Then last night Rafael arrived with the news that you had murdered my father’s cook, for no good reason that I could understand. . . .”

  “It isn’t true.” January laid Hannibal—half unconscious—on the bed and took the razor Consuela fetched from the wash-stand to cut away the makeshift bandages and the trouser-leg. The whole leg was swollen from hip to ankle and Hannibal’s right side was a mass of bruises; the tibia seemed to be cracked rather than broken through. January was astonished that the damage hadn’t been worse.

  “So Sancho assures me,” said Consuela. “He arrived yesterday also, along with Cristobál, having talked to all the servants at Mictlán. Lupe and Yannamaria both saw Guillenormand alive through the kitchen window long after the pair of you had retired together for the night. Guillenormand was talking with Don Anastasio, and so Sancho is prepared to tell that blockhead Ylario.”

  “Anastasio will have gone straight to the kitchen,” January told Rose after Consuela had left to tactfully hustle her new lover on his way. “Did Don Prospero say anything to you while I was up in the pyramid, before he fell asleep?”

  Rose shook her head. “And he may not recall that it was he who killed Anastasio. Unlike Hannibal, Don Prospero isn’t sufficiently accustomed to opium to sort out dreams from memories.”

  “Do not speak slightingly of the God of Poppies,” whispered Hannibal, opening his eyes. “Don Prospero has no need of Smyrna cocktails to hold conversations with invisible Jaguar-Gods. So no one would ask—or try to tell one act of madness from another.”

  Rose poured a little more laudanum into a glass and held it to Hannibal’s lips. The ride—and the straightening and re-splinting of his leg—seemed to have taken the last of his strength; he appeared to January almost like a spot of sunlight on the worn linen of the bed, that would fade with the first cloud across the light.

  “I have to admit Anastasio made his plans very cleverly.” January pushed the fear in his heart aside and kept his voice brisk and matter-of-fact. “He laid a subtle groundwork by hinting to me—and almost certainly to others as well—that he’d found evidence of sacrifices among the temples. Killing that poor rabbit was an act of genius. After that I don’t think a single one of us would have doubted that Prospero would later have killed a man.”
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br />   “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,” whispered Hannibal, “thou shalt not escape calumny. At least not if you’re a lunatic, a catamite, or a votary of the God of Poppies. Did you ever believe I’d actually done it, amicus meus?”

  January said, “No. I didn’t know how you could have not done it, but I never thought you did.”

  The fiddler’s mouth pulled sidelong in the ghost of a smile. “Towering heaven in bronze and terror fall / and bury me and all the folk of earth / upon that day when I forsake my friend. . . .” His eyelids slipped closed and the long fingers slid limp.

  Breakfast with Don Rafael notwithstanding, Consuela ordered her traveling-carriage prepared and departed for Mictlán shortly before noon, to fetch Hannibal’s violin and books. Sancho was dispatched to make the journey to Vera Cruz with money to pay passage on the first steam packet to New Orleans available, it being too late in the year to count on a sailing vessel. Doña Gertrudis was still at Saragosse with Isabella: “A fortunate circumstance,” remarked Rose as she packed up their trunks preparatory to the swiftest possible departure that could be arranged. “Whatever Cristobál and the other servants tell Ylario about who was where when M’sieu Guillenormand was killed, I feel that the fewer people who know of our presence here, the better.”

  January looked into Hannibal’s room several times during the morning, always to find him sleeping, but when he and Rose entered after siesta, the fiddler was propped up in bed with a closed atlas by his side—standing duty as a desk—laboriously working on what appeared to be a letter.

  “Consuela should be back sometime tomorrow,” Rose told him, going to the cupboard to fetch a second book to provide stability under the ink-well. Sheets of paper and spare quills were scattered everywhere on the counterpane. “I think Cristobál and I will visit Ylario first thing in the morning to find out if it’s safe for Ben to be seen on the streets. I understand—from Cristobál—that young Werther has been released from La Accordada, and is staying with Ylario, so I think that a hasty retreat is more than ever in order. The main question now is, how much do we tell of what happened last night? We don’t even have to have been there, you know.”

  “Some of us earnestly wish we had not,” agreed Hannibal. He was sweating with the effort of writing, and his hand shook so that he had to stop constantly to wipe his palm on the ruffles of his too-large nightshirt, but his lovely Italianate handwriting remained perfectly steady.

  The air had changed with the ending of siesta; from the courtyard below the voices of children drifted, shrieking with joy in some kind of game, just as if the world they would grow up in promised them something other than poverty, drunkenness, and ignorance throughout their lives. Señora Garcia called them to order with a loving laugh; the cobbler tapped with his little hammers and last, and one of his daughters sang as she gathered in the laundry.

  Over the city, all the bells of the churches chimed the hour, distantly answered by bugles from the Bosque de Chapultepec.

  “By all appearances,” Rose went on, “Don Anastasio and Don Prospero went to the Pyramid of the Dead together. They were attacked by bandits there, who killed Anastasio. It might even be a little difficult to explain our presence on the scene, though not nearly so difficult as an explanation of how Anastasio murdered Fernando.”

  “Of which we have neither jot nor tittle of proof, by the way,” said January. “Only a staggering order of probability.”

  “But would it serve anyone, now, to have Don Prospero locked up?” queried Rose. She took the pen-knife and quill from Hannibal’s trembling fingers and mended the point as she spoke. “Josefa would simply go into a convent—dragging her poor daughter with her almost certainly—and leave Casimiro to be raised by Isabella and whoever Isabella next marries. I grant you, Mictlán is no place I’d want to see a child raised, but . . .”

  “I suspect,” said Hannibal, “that things would be better all around if you did admit to being there, and did admit to seeing Don Prospero kill Don Anastasio in a fit of madness. It will complicate things, of course, and perhaps delay our departure, but . . . Thank you.”

  He fell back against the pillows, the pen sliding from his fingers. “Did you happen to see anything of what was in the well with me, amicus meus? In that little hollow under the ledge, where all things roll that fall there? The lantern fell on its side and the things never give much light in the best of circumstances, but . . .”

  January shook his head. “Only shadow and darkness.”

  “Just as well.” Hannibal brushed the letter with the feather end of the quill. “When you see Ylario tomorrow, Athene, take him this. Tell him if he doesn’t believe it, to go down the cenote with a lantern himself. He’ll find the remains of at least four women—I made it four, anyway, counting skulls and corset-bones. One of them was wearing a sapphire necklace.”

  In the end, of course—as January suspected would be the case—nothing much was done. Ylario investigated the well within the Pyramid of the Dead, but there was nothing to prove that Melosia Valenzuela and the other three women found there had been killed by Don Prospero. Santa Anna could not be reached, and the entire Avila clan united behind Doña Isabella in vociferously denying that a noble criollo gentleman would ever do such a thing.

  No one, as far as January ever heard—through subsequent letters from Consuela, Sir Henry, and the Graf von Winterfeldt—was ever prosecuted for the murder of Sacripant Guillenormand.

  On the seventh of November, Consuela Montero left Mexico City for Vera Cruz. She was accompanied in the carriage by her dear friend Rose and another dear friend, Doña Viola d’Illyria, in deep mourning for her husband and obliged to walk with a cane and a crutch as the result of a severe fall. Doña Gertrudis remained at the Avila de Saragosse town house with her widowed sister-in-law Isabella, and if some of the members of the military bodyguard provided by Capitán Ylario thought that Doña Viola was Doña Gertrudis, January did not enlighten them.

  Riding beside the traveling-coach up the dry, rutted slopes of the Sierra Madre Orientale, January was rather curious as to what Hannibal and Consuela would have to say to each other on the six-day journey to the coast, but Hannibal appeared to accept Consuela’s dismissal of him philosophically. Love was all very well, but there were always grocery-bills.

  “And so long as Santa Anna remains in power, I doubt anything much will be done about my father—maybe not even after he falls. As he will fall if he takes on the Americans. And those who replace him . . .” Consuela shook her head. “My father is quite good at befriending those in power.”

  She stirred at the chocolate the innkeeper had brought them—rather rancid and made with goat’s milk—and gazed into the embers of the fireplace in the corner of the big, chilly, dirt-floored common-room of the travelers’ inn at Perote. The diligencia from Vera Cruz was in, and around the other plank table were grouped its passengers: ship-captains, a French merchant, an indignant-looking official in a black coat, and the man’s wife and daughter, all smoking cigarettes that filled the room with blue fumes. The Yankee coachman sat by the door, contentedly spitting tobacco on the floor. January remembered staying in this same inn three weeks previously.

  It seemed like another lifetime.

  “It is as you said, Rose, concerning the families of those who are insane,” Consuela went on. “How the madness of one affects them all. Sometimes I think it is the same in my whole country. That until its leaders cease fighting among themselves, and decide that just because they are of pure Spanish blood—or mostly pure Spanish blood—they do not have the right to ignore those of us who are not, there is not much that can be done for anyone here. And that, I fear, will take some time.”

  The Captain of the steam packet La Sirène, a Caribbean Frenchman, greeted with a shrug the information that Doña Viola was actually a man: the Captain had been around the Gulf for a long time. In a great reek of coal-smoke and shuddering convulsions in every beam and timber, the ship parted from the wharf, Consuela’s sma
ll black form growing smaller across the stretch of green water, Cristobál and Sancho and Zama waving on either side. January watched the low flat shore of sand-dunes and blackened buildings recede in the lurid glare of the tropical morning, conscious of a sense of deep sadness.

  He had not, he told himself, gone to Mexico expecting to find it a land of freedom just because it had abolished the slavery of men. But he had expected to find something other than he had. Perhaps, like Capitán Ylario, he had read too many philosophers, and had believed too much in what he read. Perhaps, like Werther Bremer, he had not been prepared for a world shaped by the kinds of slavery that one could not point to, or fight.

  Every indio was still every white man’s slave. Men still died like animals over pennies, as the bandit had died in the pass. Or died for nothing, like the pelados in the streets.

  And blacks were treated exactly the way blacks seemed to be treated everywhere in the New World, as creatures without rights or name.

  At least he hadn’t been murdered, he reflected. And that was something. Rose was still alive, still with him. . . . And he’d had a few weeks when he didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped and sold to the Territories.

  That evening, after supper in the cramped and smelly passengers’ cabin, he carried Hannibal up to the fore-deck and outlined to him—for the first time, given the near-ubiquitous presence of servants, escort, and assorted other supernumeraries on the journey—his theory of how Don Anastasio had known that the de Borregos family was prone to morbid sensitivities and particularly to that of arachis hypogaea, and had turned that knowledge to personal effect. Hannibal listened with interest, but said, “I can only be grateful that things transpired as they did, because God knows how you’d have proved that, even in an impartial court of law with a stiff wind behind you. Not that I appreciated at the time being pitched over the edge of that well, but I would much rather have a broken leg than hang—which is what I’d have done if you’d gone before a judge with a tale like that.”