by C. M. Mayo
In between Carlota’s bergère and a gilt mirror a slim door leads to another bedroom, this one no bigger than a closet, where her wardrobe maid, Mathilde Doblinger, raises herself on an elbow to see, beneath that door, the wand of grayish yellow light.
Ja, the empress must still be awake . . . Don’t poor Charlotte’s eyes ever tire of all that reading? A person could go blind. Mathilde sinks down again into her pillow. This day was too strange for her German blood. It is like the trick of a magic lantern to have those Iturbides here, under the roof of a Habsburg and a Saxe-Coburg! About that tin-horn “Emperor” Iturbide, she’s heard all about that affair, so uncannily similar to the story of Murat, that upstart son of an innkeeper that Bonaparte made the king of Naples. Like Murat, Iturbide was an incompetent scoundrel and his subjects threw him out. Like Murat, Iturbide was too ambitious to stomach his exile; like Murat, Iturbide was fool enough to return, and he had hardly stepped off the boat when he got himself hauled in front of a firing squad. And after that, the Mexicans, those apes, they dug up the cadaver to steal the boots off its feet! And the son of Iturbide, for a pension, sells his child like a box of spécaloos, the mother must be mad as the moon. The baby’s aunt, that witch, anyone can see it, she’s gobbled him up, delicious little lozenge. A nice arrangement for a no-account spinster to live here, and as an Imperial Highness! That costume she wore for the audience, Mathilde saw it afterward hanging in the wardrobe—a rag! Cheap moiré, the color of three-day-old fish scales.
Mathilde tugs her nightcap over her ears. How will poor Charlotte cope with this perversion of nature? A duckling put into a peacock’s nest!
By now Charlotte, a vigorous twenty-five years old, in the perfection of health, after eight years of marriage, might have had five, six children of her own. Why, her cousin, Queen Victoria of England, she pops them out, buns from the oven. But Maximilian does not visit his wife. In Miramar Castle, Maximilian spent his nights in a cramped mop-closet of a room directly off the main entrance hall. Mathilde would not have believed it had she not overheard Charlotte tell a visitor that the little bedroom was a copy of Maximilian’s quarters on his yacht! As was the study next to it, which was why the ceiling fell so low.
It is true: Mathilde hates Maximilian a little, though she would never, on her mortal soul, let slip from her lips one word of disapproval. Serving Charlotte is Mathilde’s life. What will happen, or should happen, or should not have happened, is not for a wardrobe maid to know or question. Whatever comes to pass is God’s will. All Mathilde allows herself is to pray, with her fingers laced tightly together, her knuckles pressing into her forehead, Santa María, ora pro nobis . . .
The words float out into the chilly night.
The air dead-still, sky solid black, it is about to rain. From Chapultepec Castle, an immense stretch of mud-dark fields bring the road into the edge of the city at Buenavista, a gem of a baroque palace. In this “city of palaces,” Buenavista is one of the most dignified, but peculiar, for it is not made of the customary reddish tezontle but of gray stone, and its chief feature is an enormous elliptical central courtyard. Its curving rooms open onto this courtyard, and on the one side onto the street, and in the back, onto gardens. It is a palace, its occupant often grouses, with a few too many windows.
The scrape of boots: a sentry on the roof. They cannot be seen from the back balcony, but in the garden, there are two more: one stationed beyond the line of apple trees, another at the gate.
This, for now, is the residence of General François-Achille Bazaine, supreme commander of the French Imperial Forces. In his robe and babouches, General Bazaine has gone out onto this balcony to smoke the last of a superb cigar. He considers the lights in the distance: the scattering of pin-stabs that is Mexico City, and yonder to the west, lit up in midair like a house afire, Chapultepec Castle. He pushes his cigar to his lips.
So—Bazaine begins to puff—yesterday, the anniversary of Mexico’s Independence, Maximilian makes a fiesta for Iturbide, the martyred hero, a way of throwing some flowers at the mochas and the priests—and kicking dirt in the faces of the French! Disdaining the services rendered to him, Maximilian had not consulted Bazaine, nor the French ambassador. General Almonte must have put him up to it or, God knows.
And to make the little Iturbide his heir presumptive, and fork over to that family such pensions, such a pile of lucre—when the Mexican treasury cannot even equip or properly feed that piss-ant excuse for a Mexican Imperial Army!
And to ship the child’s parents off to Paris with this so-called Status of the Murat Princes? It about made Bazaine fall off his horse!
As his aide-de-camp pointed out, such an arrangement prompted serious concern. Was it even within the Mexican constitution for Maximilian to name his heir? His aide-de-camp had studied the Treaty of Miramar, but it was mute on the matter.
The guerrillas are putting up hot resistance in the north, kidnappings are rife, along with regular attacks on the stagecoach highways . . . No, this throne is not yet firmly rooted. Should the experiment fail, well then, France cannot be expected to defend a dynasty it has had no say in shaping!
As his aide-de-camp, red in the face, sputtered, “The high-handed ingratitude of this Austrian is chilling.”
Bazaine, however, had merely raised his eyebrows and rubbed his mouth.
Bazaine is a soldier, which means he follows orders, and his orders until further notice are to support Maximilian. Moreover, Bazaine does not easily anger. He has gotten as far as he has because, when everyone else goes off on their high horse, he maintains a low center of gravity.
Coolly, he draws on his cigar, and Bazaine turns over in his mind what might be Maximilian’s motivations . . .
So. The Iturbide question, if there was one, has been stomped.
Hsss, Bazaine exhales.
Perhaps yes, Maximilian was concerned that conservative society (which is becoming disenchanted with him) could rally around a member of the Liberator’s family. Why, at dinner the other day, once again, the archbishop had compared Iturbide to Our Lord Himself. The archbishop, having impaled a spear of asparagus, fixed Bazaine with such a vicious expression it might have unnerved anyone else. But Bazaine, with the sangfroid of a stone, noticed that the prelate’s hand was trembling. A droplet of butter sauce landed on the lace tablecloth. The archbishop’s voice came out thin and nasal, “Our Liberator was betrayed by Freemasons, as the Hebrews betrayed Our Lord.” Bazaine had gone on slicing his veal. This took some doing. The cutlet was cooked tough as mule hide.
“That, sir, was the beginning of the disgrace of this country.”
Bazaine, one elbow on the table, put a piece of meat in his mouth.
This was the same pig-headed ultramontane who, before Maximilian set his pretty foot on Mexican soil, had threatened to excommunicate anyone Bazaine appointed to office. That cork was an easy one to pop—just took positioning a few artillery pieces in front of the cathedral’s doors.
De toute façon . . . Iturbide, Freemasons, that could—Bazaine now muses, puffing his cigar—have been true. N’importe. It was before his time.
Et bien, what’s to be done when what the empress has got is a chinless candy-ass? Chases butterflies, looks for every chance to show his mercy, to the guerrillas his—Bazaine’s—men have died like dogs trying to capture. Last week, the guerrillas got three of his officers, castrated them, strung them from a tree by their ankles, and left them like that to die, covered with blood and flies, of thirst. There is much worse. Oui. When he is out with his men in the campo, riding over the burned fields, past ruined huts and rubble-strewn courtyards, the starving dogs, gangs of begging children, Achille Bazaine knows it in his bones: this is a godless country. And he and his men have been sent to plough the sea. Until they are recalled to France—or shipped back to Sidi-bel-Abbès, or, Devil knows, Cochin China.
Bazaine raises his fist to his mouth and belches. Too much roast. That gravy had onions. He tosses his cigar butt over the side, and with a small
yawn, then a lusty, lips-peeled-back yawn, he turns to go in.
The French general is quick-witted as a fox, and durable as a camel, in both body and character. His father, an engineer, abandoned the family in Versailles. François-Achille was sent to a good school, but not good enough; he failed the entrance examination to the Ecole Polytechnique. What did that matter? From the time he was a bantam-sized boy, François-Achille had known what he wanted: action. Was not his middle name that of the invincible warrior? In the French Foreign Legion, Bazaine fought in the mountains of Spain, the sands of Algeria, the Crimea, Solferino—countless times he has had bullets sing by his ears. Men all around him have been shot, bayonetted, hacked, pummeled, trampled, decapitated. He has had seven horses shot out from under him, been knocked flat by three explosions, and several times had mortars land right where he’d just been standing. His stars, he knows, have been lucky ones, too lucky not to displease the jealous gods. Bazaine was one of the senior officers on the troopship to Mexico, when out in the middle of the ocean, he first sensed a change, something he did not quite have the words for, something gritty and bitter in the back of his throat. He is beginning to understand that this is dread.
Bazaine’s years chasing after Abd-el-Kader and his ruthless horsemen— laying siege to oasis towns, and then, bayonet fixed, entering their stinking labyrinths—have impressed upon him a deep-seated suspicion of anything that appears too easy to walk up to, and yet, he has preserved an almost child-like openness, the flexibility to bend toward the ripe, fragrant fig of opportunity.
Mexico: pourquoi pas? Its latest “president,” some little Indian lawyer named Benito Juárez, attacked the church and refused to honor Mexico’s debts with France. The United States invaded Mexico back in 1847, but as the Union and the Confederacy became embroiled in their civil war, France had no obstacle to pressing its claims, and in the process, bringing to these unfortunate people law, order—in short, civilization. Bazaine was not the only officer who had bragged that what they were about to gear up for was a mere victory parade. They could expect to suffer casualties in the port city of Veracruz, mainly from typhoid and yellow fever, but to drums and fifes, chanting songs while lovely señoritas tossed them flowers (and bien súr, other favors, if you liked your women as you did your coffee), the main body of the French Imperial Army would march over the hot lands, and the sierras, easily liberating Orizaba, Puebla, and finally—touché—Mexico City. They had not yet left the docks in France when General Lorencez had gone around saying, “We are so superior in organization, discipline, and morality, we are already the masters of Mexico!”
The Arabs have a saying: he who despises the little lamb will weep for the herd. Vanity dulls the senses, and for battle they need be razor-sharp. Lesson one, basic training. And you must think like the enemy, anticipate his every step.
Oof, what happened? On the fifth of May, 1862, the French Imperial Army slammed into the city of Puebla and broke like a goddamned pencil. In that one day, they pissed away half their ammunition, shells lobbed onto dirt, 462 men slaughtered by Mexican artillery and Mexican calvary . . . Like whipped dogs, the French Imperial Army had to retreat to Orizaba and wait for reinforcements. Before French prestige could be avenged, it took twenty thousand more men, Lorencez’s replacement with General Forey, another year, and a ferocious siege of Puebla that stretched for sixty-two days and ended with street-by-street, house-by-house fighting. After the triumphant entrance into that shell of a city, and then into Mexico City, Forey was promoted and called home, and François-Achille Bazaine was made supreme commander in Mexico—a promotion he had dreamed of, schemed after, grasped at. And strangely, now he had it, it left him cold.
At first, he would regard himself in the mirror and tell himself: I am the Master of Mexico. Then he would see a sprinkle of dandruff on his collar. In the year before Maximilian arrived, Bazaine sometimes thought of himself as one of those dogs that chases after carriages. Now that he’d got the carriage, and a bloody whopping big one, a goddamn municipal garbage wagon, what the hell did he want with it? Sleeping on a featherbed, nothing to do but sit half the day on his derrière in thumb-twiddling meetings with pinheaded bureaucrats, opportunists, schemers, sticky-palmed contractors, journalists, and greedy-minded little clerics (with those ones, it was Father, Son, and Holy Peso). Then, after Maximilian arrived, more lunches, dinners, teas, balls with groaning buffets and pink champagne; of course, Bazaine has been packing it on. He feels it in his ankles and his knees when he jumps from his horse. He’s had new uniforms made, and still his trousers are tight and his jacket cuts around the arms. Life has so much deliciousness to offer, not only those beef tamales bienpicantitos and refried beans: in the last days of spring he married a pretty mexicana, Pepita de la Peña, who is young enough to be his grandchild—and pourquoipas? He himself is young, at least at heart!
“Mi corazón . . . my heart,” his Pepita calls him.
Pepita de la Peña, Madame Bazaine, has the grace, the sparkle, and the fierce sweetness of an angel.
Doña Juliana de Gómez Pedraza, her elderly aunt said, smiling at him from behind her lorgnette, “Dare I say, General, you are a lucky man.”
His Pepita lives for him, he now lives for her, and the children they will have—for he has longed to have children. Until now he had been sad to think that he would march into the sunset of his life without them. He’d had a wife, Marie, whom he’d had to leave behind in Paris. He and his brother officers had thought they could call for their wives, or be recalled to France, within a matter of months. But things dragged on too long. After the fall of Puebla, soon after he sent for Marie, the news came that . . .
But he has promised himself not to dwell on Marie.
After Mexico, in the end, which will come quickly, la belle France, his white-gloved honor, his chestful of ribbons and medals won for the glory of Louis Napoleon’s empire: they will matter to François-Achille Bazaine’s true heart no more than that cigar butt he just tossed over the balcony.
It lies on the paving stones below, abandoned, still glowing.
Meanwhile, in their apartment on the Calle Coliseo Principal, Angelo and Alicia throw things into trunks! Boxes! Baskets! An old iron parrot cage! They are rushed, they’ve been ordered to quit Mexico, not at their leisure but before dawn. In less than one hour, palace guards will escort them to the Hotel Iturbide where, just before the cock’s crow, they are to board the stagecoach to Veracruz. From there, they are to take the next steamer to New York, and from there, without delay, to Paris. The Iturbides shall be received in the court of Louis Napoléon as Highnesses of the Mexican Empire. It is to be a life gilded with glamor and ease, and they should be grateful. Any other ideas they might entertain would be, as the Palatine Guard intimated, “not the best for your health.”
Alicia races down the stairs with an armload of petticoats. Angelo scoots up to his desk and begins frantically sorting through his papers. In the next room his elder brother, Agustín Gerónimo, propped on a rolled blanket, is getting quietly squiffed on the last of the cognac. Agustín Cosme—where is he? And in the midst of this madness, the child’s dismissed nanny, Lupe, a wizened little woman with a frightened and despairing expression, steals into the dining room. She looks right, looks left, then grabs a silver candelabra and wraps it into her shawl.
“Lupe!”
Lupe’s heart skips a beat—but it is only Doña Alicia calling for her from the top of the stairs.
Lupe comes out into the hallway to answer, “Sí, niña.”
“Lupe, bring me the market basket, I’m wanting it for the shoes. ¡Apúrate! Hurry!”
But Lupe does not go into the kitchen to fetch the basket. In the dining room, she waits until she hears Doña Alicia’s footsteps disappear into the bedroom; then Lupe picks out a silver teaspoon from the drawer and drops it in the little purse she wears under her blouse. She buttons the purse tight.
“Lupe! Do hurry!”
“Sí, niña.” But what Lupe does is, s
he removes her huaraches so as to come silently down the stairs.
In the kitchen she stuffs a bag with tortillas, cheese, and several handfuls of raisins. Then she puts her huaraches back on and, leaving the back door open, slips into the alley, into the night.
Upstairs, Alicia dumps her apronful of shoes on the mattress. She huffs. Oh, that lazybones Lupita, she’s got tzictli on the bottoms of her huaraches! As she comes to the landing, Alicia catches sight of her reflection in the barred window. But she won’t worry about how she looks (her pale hair sweat-soaked and wild), she won’t stop, she won’t think about Lupe and the other servants and the thousand things, she must run, run past her baby’s shut bedroom door, down the stairs for the basket for the shoes. There is a dam of numbness inside of her, and it is holding back a Niagara.
September 18, 1865
PAST MIDNIGHT
Past midnight, as the sky tears itself open, pouring needles of silver over Mexico City and the whole vast Valley of Anahuac, uncounted thousands of souls lie awake for the noise and their worries of flooding, ruined roads, drowned crops and animals. General Bazaine, in his bed with a bear-like arm over his wife’s waist, thinks guiltily of his men in their field tents. But the French are not the only soldiers suffering tonight. At the gates to Chapultepec Castle, an Austrian volunteer shivers in his slicker. His rifle is so cold, his fingers have gone numb. To keep from drifting off, he sing-hums through chattering teeth a beer-hall song, Ein, zwei, drei und der Hündschen . . . his words are soused in rain; twelve paces away, the other sentry cannot hear them. On the topmost floor of the castle, where the flat-roof thrums and, just outside the window, the drain spouts dribble and splash, the empress’s wardrobe maid, Mathilde Doblinger, having prayed, and having then recited the rosary one hundred times, stitches lists in her mind, counting on her fingers the tasks for next morning, dress-hems washed of mud and mended, slipper soles scrubbed, a silk rosette stitched back onto a bodice . . .
