by C. M. Mayo
At news that Puebla had finally fallen, the Mexican Republic’s president, Benito Juárez, and his cabinet ministers, packed up and fled north. The ragamuffin Republican Army marched out with them. It would not be long, Angelo supposed, until that army melted away, and Juárez himself would seek asylum, probably, in New Orleans. In the past several days, while waiting for the French troops to arrive, order in Mexico City, or rather, a semblance of it, had been kept by citizen volunteers and guardsmen lent by the foreign legations, including that of the United States.
The U.S. minister, Mr. Thomas Corwin, however, was disdainful of what he called “Louis Napoleon’s Mexican adventure.” Mr. Corwin was popular in Mexico with both Republicans and conservatives, for it was well-known that back in 1847, when he was the senator from Ohio, he had loudly and steadfastly opposed the U.S. invasion of Mexico, calling it “unjust and dishonorable.” The land grabs, of California, Texas, and more, Mr. Corwin had called “hypocritical avarice.” Now, arms crossed over his broad chest, Mr. Corwin, whose visage might have been carved in stone, gazed down upon the spectacle of the French Army with undisguised contempt.
Lined up along the ledge of the flat-roof, his fifty-odd guests were mostly men, Yankee traders, mining engineers, railroad people, and a Dane with a sunburnt nose. Mr. Wells, a journalist for Harper’s and The Overland Monthly, wore an ill-fitting hounds-tooth suit and a derby. Leaning out over his elbows, he said, out of the corner of his mouth, which held a fuming cigar, “A fine candle to our Army of the Potomac.”
Across the street, from a balcony, a woman upturned a basket of roses; from another balcony, a pink dot of a nosegay made an arc before disappearing beneath the river of men. Angelo and the Dane were discussing how the police had driven around the city this morning, delivering sacks of flowers. The baby began to mewl and turn his head toward his mother.
“He’s hungry,” Mr. Wells observed.
With the clamor from the parade, they could barely hear one another; Alicia could pretend she’d not heard that impertinence.
“Why’s his head shaved?” Mr. Wells edged closer. “Got lice or somethin’?”
Alicia turned away. Shifting the baby from the crook of her elbow to her shoulder, she now rubbed his little back. Yes, she stayed right where she was, for she was enchanted by those uniforms: gold braid on the shakos, now kepis with sun-curtains, now a fluttering battle flag of yet a different regiment. Tirailleurs algériens in their white turbans. Cavalry. Artillery: siege, mountain, field . . . each a special world . . . The sun was precisely overhead, so that the walls of the buildings on the both sides were luminous. Everything shimmered and flashed. And the officers! So smart, their glittering chests, gold braid shining all up their arms, saluting with white gloves.
“Viva Forey! Viva Bazaine!” Someone was calling down the names of the generals.
More roses, confetti, and a lusty “Long live the Holy Church!”
Angelo wore an inscrutable expression. He pulled his cigar from his mouth. “What do you reckon, Mr. Corwin, fifteen thousand men?”
“No, sir. Substantially higher.”
All the while, Alicia could not help but keep glancing down at the babe in her arms, into his sea blue eyes closing, then opening to search her face, or scowl at the sun. O, how his lips made an “O,” how he curled and uncurled his tiny, perfect fingers. And what was wonderful to her was that his own grandfather, too, had come into Mexico City at the head of an army. Don Agustín de Iturbide, the Liberator, had received these same cheers from his grateful countrymen, and a rain of roses—Pepa, then a young girl, had heard the bouquets thudding onto the roof of the family’s carriage. The Liberator had united Mexico under a tricolor of green for independence, red for the memory of Spain, and white, medallioned with the Aztec symbol of an eagle perched on a cactus and devouring a snake, for the purity of the True Faith. Alicia looked into her baby’s eyes and in silent words from her heart told him this story, which ended this way: And you are not only the Liberators grandson; you are his tocayo, the one, the very special one, who has the same name.
“Tocayito,” she whispered, kissing the top of his shiny head. And then (as Pepa and Doña Juliana were always urging her to do), she pulled the blanket over him.
Speaking now to Mr. Corwin, Mr. Wells said, “I wager the French’ll bleed this country, then—” he made a slicing gesture across his throat. “Skedaddle.”
Mr. Corwin squinted but offered no reply. The latest news to reach Mexico City was that a month ago, at Chancellorsville, General Robert E. Lee had routed Union forces twice the size of his own. All told, over thirty thousand men had perished. But for the Confederacy, Chancellorsville was an astounding triumph. It was the North that would oppose an empire in Mexico, and very possibly the North was whipped. As for what Washington wanted or did not want, that was moot. No one, it seemed, could stop the juggernaut of Louis Napoleon’s Army. There, below in the Calle de San Francisco, was the proof for their eyes: artillery caissons, wagons, mules, more men, and then—when Alicia felt her arms becoming weak with fatigue from holding the baby—bringing up the rear, the ambulances. There were so many ambulances she gave up and went inside for limeade and pie. It was strawberry pie: her favorite.
Angelo and his brothers were not cheering the French Occupation, but neither were they so incautious as to oppose openly what could well be the permanent new order. Juárez had attacked the church. His government, crippled by bankruptcy, was incapable of maintaining order, and so perhaps General Almonte had reason to say, “Better this Devil than the other one.”
After many years abroad, in Washington, London, and the Continent, General Almonte had returned to Mexico City, where, with French cannon behind him, he had assumed the office of Lieutenant General of the Realm, President of the Council of Regents. His was a breathtaking pole vault into power. Even his detractors had to shake their heads at the audacity of it. But unlike his onetime mentor, Santa Anna, General Almonte was not a flamboyant personality. He could throw out his chest and flash his medals, and he was jealous of the perks of his position, as all men of power wisely are, but he was, at bottom, a suzerain of simple tastes. Although he had dined at the tables of royalty, he was most at home with his mug of pulque, his plate of beans, and his wife’s own tamales de tinga. He was, moreover, a very Scotsman of fiscal prudence, a tireless, shoulder-to-the-shovel worker, who worked most effectively behind the scenes.
Now, to be General and Madame Almonte’s friend could be most convenient. To be their enemies, in a word, unhealthy.
The Iturbides were neither. In the weeks that followed the occupation of Mexico City, as the French Imperial Army now thrust tentacles into the countryside, taking over cities, highways, mines, and ports, for news the Iturbides had to content themselves with reading the heavily censored newspapers and third-hand drawing-room gossip, like other mere spectators. As was abundantly obvious to Alicia now, the Almontes were of a provenance distant from the exalted one of Mexico’s distinguished creole families. In Washington, Alicia knew almost nothing about General Almonte. She had supposed the ambassador was a typical specimen of Mexican gentleman. Once in Mexico, however, from Doña Juliana and others, she heard earfuls about that pata rajada (barefoot Indian). What, did she not know?! General Almonte was the bastard of Father Morelos! Yes, Father José María Morelos, so-called Slave of the Nation, hero of the early wars for Mexican Independence? Oh, no, no, no, nothing—absolutely—to do with Don Agustín de Iturbide. Why, Iturbide, a colonel then, had fought against Morelos. Morelos was a mule-driver-turned-parish-priest who led armies of campesinos in bloody insurrections, until he was captured and, as God wanted, convicted by the Inquisition. Not until five years after his execution did Spain itself descend into liberalism; only then did good men, decent men such as Agustín de Iturbide, take up the cause of independence.
There were a multitude of stories about how Morelos’s bastard received the name Almonte. The one toward which Doña Juliana inclined was that the pea
sant mother, when presenting Father Morelos with the baby, was told to “take it al monte, to the mountain.”
As for Madame Almonte, nobody who was anybody knew anything about her family. She had directed some sort of technical school in Mexico City and, at her instigation, her husband had put his name as author onto the Guía de forasteros, an overpriced guidebook that featured her amateurish drawings of Mexico City’s principal buildings. A decade out of date, the Guía de forasteros was, nonetheless and all of a sudden, prominently displayed in all the bookshop windows.
Ostensibly, General Almonte was working with the French to install a Catholic monarchy. The idea, as formulated by a select group of Mexican exiles in Europe, was that this form of government, this time with the unassailable prestige of a European prince, would provide Mexico with the stability finally to realize its potential, with the unquestioned reign of the True Faith and with protection, desperately needed, against an encroaching neighbor to the north. Of course, said monarch would ally himself with the interests of France. A Mexican imperial government would grant France generous trade concessions and make payments on debts—above all, it would satisfy, as the republic had not, the holders of the so-called Jecker Bonds. The expectation was that, with the gold and silver from Mexico’s until now chronically under-exploited mines, and the soon-to-be-abundant tax receipts on revived trade, the expedition would, voilà! pay for itself.
But not just any European prince would do. He had to be of impeccable royal blood. He had to be Catholic. Not too young, not too old. Ambitious but malleable. The candidate Louis Napoleon had drawn a bead on was the Archduke of Austria Maximilian von Habsburg, for he was all of these things, and (delectable icing on the cake) also a direct descendant of Carlos V, Holy Roman Emperor and (as Carlos I) king of Spain at the time of the conquest of Mexico.
Should the Archduke Maximilian refuse the crown, well, there General Almonte would be: difficult to dislodge. Perhaps, Agustin Gerónimo wondered, Santa Anna, from his Caribbean exile on the island of Saint Thomas, might have had something to do with this scheme, after all.
“Perhaps,” Angelo said.
“Perhaps,” Agustín Cosme echoed faintly.
Pepa de Iturbide, for her part, welcomed the French. She had no pity for Republicans. In confiscating church property, Juárez and his ilk had stolen the patrimony of the poor and they deserved to burn in Hell until they were chicharrón, that is, fried pork rinds. Alicia did not worry her pretty head with politics or religion (topics her nicely bred family rarely discussed at the dinner table anyway). However, she wholeheartedly agreed with her sister-in-law that the arrival of the French was an excellent thing, for the streets were now cleaner, the beggars more orderly, the officers so gallant and dashing. Best of all, there was a raft of new shops—one opened its door every day, it seemed.
For the past year, the Compagnie Transatlantique had been plying its steamships between Saint Nazaire and Veracruz; now, with the stagecoach highway opened from Veracruz to Mexico City, one could find imported corsets with genuine whalebone, Parisian silk stockings, quality trimmings and laces for bonnets. The newspapers were soon advertising shipments of pianos, umbrellas, sewing machines, champagne and cognac, billiard tables, gas lamps that were ever so much more efficient and smoke-free. Mexico City now had a proper patisserie; bookshops carried the most recent issues of Revue des Deux Mondes, Le Moniteur, Victor Hugo novels, and what-have-you. There were French language schools, French music schools; and a French tailor, Monsieur Bouffartigues, right there on the Calle de Refugio No. 19; not to mention the touring French theater troupes, French opera, and the Chirini Circus, direct from Paris with, as the newspaper announced, “trapeze artists and a battle of Moors and Christians on horseback.” Alicia and Pepa were among the few Mexico City señoras who spoke French—or even were in-the-know that “ch” was pronounced “sh” and not to pronounce the “z” at the end of words such as “chez.” As had been très chic in English-speaking Washington, they now sprinkled their Spanish conversations with bons mots— so much so that when (at Angelo’s insistence), Alicia went to call upon Madame Almonte, this lady, in the crush, mistook her for a Frenchwoman!
“Ma cher Madame . . .” When Alicia answered her in English, “How do you do?” Madame Almonte blinked. She stared hard, pinching her brows together, and then let out a tiny scream of pleasure. She gripped Alicia by both shoulders, pulled her close, giving her the heartiest Mexican abrazo, finished with a clap on the back and a smooch on the cheek. Madame Almonte did say, “Remember me to Don Angel,” but she neglected to ask anything about Alicia, her family, her new baby. Nothing. Madame Almonte just went on, retailing some story about her and her husband’s tour to some dowdy mining town, to her rapt audience of the obscure. Some of these women were smoking! Fanning herself, Alicia nearly had a congestion, and not because of the smoke. The sofa was understuffed and the cake tasted dry. “You leave already?” Madame Almonte said in her awkward English. “Please to come again.”
“O Moses,” Alicia later told Pepa, “why bother?”
Meanwhile, baby Agustín was growing plumper by the day. He was a stubborn little fellow and a champion chewer. At four months, he had the habit of chewing on his toes; at six months, he gnawed off the corner of his mother’s Harper’s Monthly. One morning, Alicia found him teething on a button. “Lupe,” she scolded the Mexican nanny in her now flawless Spanish, “you must watch what he puts in his mouth.”
“Sí, niía.”
Alicia herself spoilt the baby with spoons of nieve de limón (lime sorbet) off her plate. When he was especially squirmy, she set him on the floor and let him crawl. At mealtimes she pretended not to notice when he went exploring under the table, where he would go tugging at shoes and trousers and skirt hems. The one who enjoyed this most was Salvador, the baby’s thirteen-year-old cousin. An orphan, Salvador was the only child of Angelo’s younger brother, also named Salvador, who had died in Mexico just two days before Angelo’s wedding—though the news of that fierce blow had not come to them until many weeks later. A shy, thin, but big-shouldered boy, Salvador was living with an uncle in Toluca; now and again he came to Mexico City to visit. With an embarrassed smile, Salvador would lift the tablecloth and then dip his head under the table. “Ay, who’s pulling at my shoe?”
Alicia, coquettishly, would say, “Father? Might we have a little mouse nibbling under there?”
Pepa would press her lips in consternation. This was not her idea of any way to raise a child.
Letters, very slowly, made their way between Mexico City and Washington. News might be three weeks or three months old when it was read; its reply would then be read another month or more after that. Some letters were lost. The War Between the States went on, and it was vicious. The baby was already taking his first unsteady steps when, one spring day of 1864, his grandmother Green, outside for the first time without her paisley shawl, held his photograph in her hand for the first time. Her heart leapt for joy—and stung with longing for this grandchild, for her dear, darling Alice was so far away. She had not seen Alice in seven years.
It seemed the photograph was taken when he was first able to sit up on his own. Posed upon an ornately carved chair, he was looking off at something or someone (Alice?) to the side. His frock was so large it covered his shoes and spilled over the sides of the chair. In the letter, Alice explained that Pepa and Doña Juliana, their landlady, had recommended shaving his head—a harmless concession to Mexican custom, it seemed to Alice, and what if there were something to it? After all, Alice’s father’s hairline had begun to recede when he was still in the navy.
The baby’s face appeared blurred, but his expression, it seemed to Mrs. Green, was remarkably frank. He had intelligence. He had the same ears as his great-grandfather, her father, General Uriah Forrest. She wiped a tear from her eye.
Pride goeth before destruction, but Lord forgive her, she was proud of her Alice, her youngest, who had been the one Mrs. Green most feared for. It seeme
d like only yesterday that Alice, elbows on the carpet, her little chin in her hands, was poring over that old atlas. She had been such a headstrong child, prone to daydreaming, and as a belle so frivolous. Mrs. Green had tried to convince her, marrying a Mexican would be a trial beyond the strength of a mere Job. But now, Mrs. Green recognized, Alice had shown herself to be both brave and steadfast. No meteor that would streak to earth, her Alice was a true star.
Mrs. Green left the porch to go into the house for her spectacles. When she came out again, drums were on the wind; the soldiers were drilling at Fort Reno. Three years into the war, Mrs. Green had not yet become accustomed to the sound; it set her nerves on edge. She sat down on her rocking chair and put on her spectacles. In the photograph, the baby’s face was still blurred.
Alice’s letter began thus: The baby is the greatest thing that could have happened for this family—a pefect Godsend.
There was no one to see her; Mrs. Green burst into tears.
THE ARCHDUKE MAXIMILIAN VON HABSBURG, OR A E I O U
Our story turns now to an ivory castle, perched by an uneasy sea within sight of the city of Trieste. In the northeastern corner of Italy, then part of the Austrian Empire, Il Castello di Miramare, or Miramar, was the residence of the archduke who was second in line to the throne. Whereas Vienna’s ancient gray Hofburg Palace huddled around shadowy courtyards, Miramar stood new, crisp, unafraid of the Italian sun. Even today, in the early morning, just before the sun rises from behind the hills, and all the birds are singing, its tower seems to glow from within. Yes, sometimes a story’s beginning fools the eye, the way a fata morgana projects a landscape that may in fact lie hundreds of miles beyond the horizon. But sometimes, too, persons who do not appear to share even a footprint’s worth of common ground turn out to have destinies bound together in painful knots.
