The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

by C. M. Mayo

  But Carlota, though her bedside lamp glows, sleeps; down the hall, Maximilian sleeps; around the corner, Pepa, serene princess, sleeps; and, most sweetly of all, an angel on pillows of gossamer, the tiny Agustín sleeps with his thumb in his mouth, never dreaming that his home is being abandoned, his father’s and mother’s clothes, shoes, knickknacks, jewelry, books, and papers packed up. By three in the morning, all the beds and his crib have been stripped and the bedclothes wadded into a trunk. The bookcases, the piano, and the inlaid mahogany wardrobes will be picked up by an agent for auction (the proceeds to be forwarded to an account in Paris). His father’s library, a last crate of Madeira wine, and the portrait of his grandfather, the one of Don Agustín in his uniform as Imperial Military Commander that had hung over the piano, have been entrusted to Doña Juliana de Gómez Pedraza for safekeeping. And if the draperies have been left hanging on their rods, a China coffeepot forgotten in a debris-strewn corner of the dining room, and a silver candelabra and several teaspoons gone missing, along with the nanny, Lupe, no matter: under the watch of two Palatine Guards, Alicia, Angelo, and his brothers, Agustín Gerónimo and Agustín Cosme, and every last rain-spattered basket, box, and hand valise—and that iron parrot cage crammed with shoes—are loaded onto the stagecoach to Veracruz.

  Angelo is the last passenger to climb aboard, and he has not yet sat down on the bench when the door slams shut. The guards, a pair of Hungarians, ride alongside the stagecoach, as they will, Angelo guesses, until it leaves the city. They are aristocrats of some minor sort, but they had stood watching as the coach was loaded with the grim, stupid expressions of workers in an abattoir.

  In utter gloom Angelo rakes his hands back over his hair. Then he presses his fist to his mouth. He had suspected Maximilian would stoop to this. Yes, he had: the hammer of that thought pounds in his head louder than the rain. It makes his throat tight to think: they have been made to travel in the rainy season! When the yellow fever is at its peak. Agustín Gerónimo took it the way he takes everything—with another drink. The other brother also: Agustín Cosme reeks of cognac and he’s snoring already, his chin lolling on his chest. Beside Angelo, Alicia is wedged in next to a colossal Belgian grocer, with a hatbox crowding her lap. There are eleven passengers, packed tighter than ja-lapeños in a jar. Before reaching the coast, how long will they be trapped in this wretched contraption, two weeks? Five? The roads, if they can be called that, are troughs of mud. Last week La Sociedad reported that, past Orizaba, an entire team, eighteen mules, had fallen into the muck and suffocated. The ravines will be flooded; at any point along the way, the wait to cross, in some roadside inn acrawl with vermin, could last for days. In the high sierra, nearing the pine forests around Río Frío, they could be attacked by bandits. Then, down in the hot lands, typhoid, cholera, malaria, yellow fever . . . Veracruz this time of year is a deathtrap. Angelo is livid: with Maximilian, yet more so with himself. Ah! the elegant lunch in Chapultepec Castle, the shiny medals of the Orders of San Carlos for Alicia and Pepa, and of Guadalupe for himself and his brother . . . So goes the fuchsia flip of the matador’s cape!

  Never would Angelo have signed such an agreement of his own volition. He would have withstood the pressure from Pepa alone, but they all, including Alicia, were rock sure that this would be the best for the family, the best for the baby, the best for Mexico. Alicia argued, “Our son is heir apparent to the throne, this only makes the fact official, and promises for him—”

  “You are out of your mind.” Angelo had cut her off and for days refused to listen to one word about it. But if his wife was nearly twenty years younger than himself, a belle who liked nothing better than to chatter about dress trimmings and flubdubs (how it charmed him when she would toss her head, darling, for my chapeau, which do you think the more recherché, the jonquils or the ostrich feather?), she was as strong-minded as a man. She kept at him, a pestle to a mortar. She pointed out, “You were the one who wanted to name him after your father. You were the one who insisted, it is his rightful heritage.”

  Yes, Angelo had insisted they name their son Agustín, but only after his elder brother had suggested it. Agustín Gerónimo: he was the one whose son should have carried on the name. But of course there was no such person, and with his health in ruins, there never would be.

  “Eh, it’s yours.” Agustín Gerónimo had turned fifty-six that year, but with the web of veins reddening his nose and bags under his eyes, he could have passed for seventy. A decade earlier, he had announced he would never marry. Women, he said, they expected castles in the air, or else, as far as he could pull a bead on it, their manner of thinking was Chinese. Angelo guessed that Agustín Gerónimo’s bluster was a cover for wounded pride.

  Alicia’s mother, Mrs. Green, wrote that she voted (as if this were a democracy!) for the name Uriah, after her father, General Uriah Forrest, who had served with General Washington and lost a leg in the Battle of Brandywine. “Uriah?” Pepa said, as if she smelled turpentine. Agustín Gerónimo’s response was to slap his knee and guffaw.

  So, their son’s name was Agustín de Iturbide. “¿Y qué?” Angelo had said to his wife, meaning, he wanted nothing to do with Maximilian’s scheme.

  Alicia gasped. “How can you not care about his education? We cannot dream to give him the education Maximilian can!”

  “But—” Angelo began.

  Pepa cut him off. “A Habsburg—”

  Alicia leapt in, “Think of it, knowing Europe, Paris, London, Vienna, all of Italy—and having chances to travel to Brazil, Egypt, and he will know Maximilian’s nephews, and—”

  Pepa cut in, “The princes of France, of Prussia—”

  “And Russia,” said Alicia.

  “And England! He can be sent to the best school—”

  “In London or Yorkshire and then Oxford—”

  “Heidelberg,” Pepa said.

  Alicia reached over the arm of her chair to touch Pepa’s arm. “San Michel in Brussels is first rate.”

  “Saint Cyr—”

  “The Sorbonne!”

  Turning from Pepa, Alicia now fixed Angelo with her most business-like look. “You yourself have had an education that would have been impossible in this country. It hardly seems fair to deny such an opportunity to your own son.”

  Angelo, aghast, turned to his older brother.

  Agustín Gerónimo had been stroking his chin. He made a steeple with his fingers. He raised his eyes to the wall above the piano. There, in a gilt frame, hung the portrait of their father. The Liberator, with his glorious sweep of reddish hair, looked younger than all of them, except Alicia.

  Agustín Gerónimo hiccupped. “Important, education.” He hiccupped again. “A man needs. Exactly.”

  Pepa, she was the one who first wormed the idea into Alicia’s head. Months ago, she’d said, “What Maximilian is offering us is our sacred duty to accept. Brother—” she gripped Angelo’s arm. “Can you not see?” Her eyes were shining. “It is for the Holy Church. Our father and mamá, you know they would have wanted this.”

  “No,” Angelo said, and he brushed off his sister’s hand. He’d been up to the neck with these women.

  But Angelo had no lack of respect for his father. To the contrary; Angelo may have kept a poker face with his wife and siblings, but a secret chamber in his heart had thrilled to think that after their desert of exile, and the thousand and ten insults to their name, their father was once again being shown respect and gratitude.

  “Don Agustín de Iturbide was our envoy of Providence!” It was last Easter Sunday that the archbishop spoke those words before the assembled multitude. For Angelo, to hear the reverence and unassailable authority in that voice, he felt at once joy, and the knifepoint of fear. Did the archbishop want to provoke Maximilian? Earlier this year, when Maximilian would not reinstate the church properties that had been confiscated by the republic under Juárez, the papal emissary left for Rome in a white-hot fury. The archbishop had been chafing under the French. It was no secr
et that he detested General Bazaine, and lately, it was rumored that privately he had been calling Maximilian “ese alemán, that German.”

  To every one of the Iturbides it was an article of faith that their father had been both a genius and Mexico’s greatest patriot, and if his rivals called him ambitious, this was only because they had jealous designs. Mamá always said, as his intimates knew and as his every action revealed, Don Agustín de Iturbide harbored no ambition but the pure and blameless desire to serve his country—which was Spain, until in its own upheavals, it abandoned its children in the Americas. In 1821, out of the ashes of two roiling decades of civil war, insurrections, and anarchy, the Liberator proclaimed the Plan of Iguala, thus erecting this nation—he decided to call it Mexico—as a constitutional monarchy under three guarantees: independence; the union of Mexicans and Spaniards (as all men were held to be equal); and the Catholic religion as its one True Faith. The Liberator then offered the crown of Mexico to Fernando VII of Spain, and his brothers, and they refused it. Undaunted, the Liberator sent a delegation to Vienna for an Austrian archduke—but that court offered nothing but scorn. Mexico was an orphan and, without a king, slipping back into the morass of chaos. France had suffered its Reign of Terror; how long until Mexico would be soaked in that same blood? Every city from Acapulco to Zacatecas had ready thieves, pillagers, Jacobins, the Mexican people began to clamor for their Liberator, their generalíssimo, to be their king. As a Christian and as a patriot, what choice did he have? As he told the family, he was morally obligated to accept “these golden chains.” The empress, the princes, the princesses, they all had to accept them. If they were made prisoners, and it already felt that way to Angel, surrounded every moment of his days and nights by bodyguards, the Iturbides had been—as his older sister Pepa, who was eight, explained it to him—chosen by God.

  They could no longer call their father Papá. He had become “Your Majesty.” He looked very beautiful with his rings. Whenever he entered a room, everyone stood up. Always, there were many people around him. Always, outside his office, there was a crowd waiting to see him. Before, as was the custom, children kissed their parents’ hands, but now they were to kiss His Majesty’s ring. His Majesty was like a Roman Caesar, so broad-shouldered and with his reddish hair. Priests, officers, all sorts of important men, so many people, even Indians in their colorful dress and bare feet, would come to kneel before him on one knee and kiss his ring. Angel believed that the throne, its limbs carved to resemble sheaves of wheat, was of solid gold, even after Pepa told him, “Don’t tell, it’s just painted.”

  Big brother Agustín Gerónimo was the Prince Imperial, gangly, big-footed, his face pocked with acne. He was annoyed to outrage by the little ones who wanted to put grubby fingers on his sword and pistols. For Angel, a bewildered six-year-old, it was all over almost as soon as it began. In their palace, glass shattered over the carpets, they could hear shouting down in the Calle de San Francisco, “Death to Iturbide!” Outside the city, the family had to sleep in their carriage and in the fields. The priest who came with them went into the farmhouses to beg for food. At the coast, they found the sea raging like something alive. They could all drown, their father said, but Mamá answered, with a hard edge in her voice, that it were better they all die than endure one moment more among people so ungrateful. At sea, in the rolling, pitching nights, Angel was tumbled out of his bunk. At meals, soup splashed, dishes slid and crashed. Soon everyone was plagued by head lice, and maggots infested the salt pork and hardtack. Someone tried to poison their father and Angel, and the captain refused to stop, he had strict orders to continue no matter what, he said, though for the retching (his father had given Angel an emetic), Angel nearly died. The ship was a pesthouse, but when they docked at Leghorn, they were made to stay onboard, under quarantine, for another thirty gruesome days. The Iturbides were not wanted in Italy, nor in Paris. They had no place, it seemed, anywhere. In London their father learned of a Spanish plot to invade Mexico. Out of patriotism, he was inspired to return to Mexico to deliver the news and offer his help.

  For the little ones left behind in school in England, that summer dragged by, each day slower and soggier than the last. The games the English boys played were dull beyond words—marbles, jacks, and they would trot along guiding a hoop with a stick, like girls. In Mexico Angel had flicked knives at dogs. His bodyguards had taken him to bullfights. In England, his elbows on a ledge, Angelo—this was his name now—stared through a lead-glass window at cows chewing their cuds in the rain. One gray morning, he was brought into the rector’s library. It had mildewy-smelling books from the carpet to the curlicued ceiling, and behind a desk, a leather globe on a stand. He spun the globe with his finger and it squealed. A priest appeared; Angelo saw his dark expression and he expected he would be struck, but instead, the father, who spoke Spanish, told him that his papá was con Dios, with God. God is here on earth, one of the teachers had said, so Angelo wanted to know, when is my papá coming back to get us?

  For many years afterward, Angelo had the feeling that time had stopped, at that moment he touched his finger to the leather globe, evil magic. They were sent to the United States where they joined their mamá and the new baby, Agustín Cosme, in New Orleans. Then they went to Washington, to live on Georgetown’s Holy Hill near the Jesuit College. They lived on there, but outside of time; in an English-speaking dream, if Mexico were real or, remembering this sueño, this dream sweetly dappled with harp music, if that is what their country was.

  Angelo is forty-eight years old. Educated by the Sulpician Brothers in Baltimore, and later by the Jesuits at Georgetown, he is, if by nature a stylish man, meticulous and guarded. He was glad to serve his country as a diplomat in Washington, but he has never sought to be a public man. Many are dazzled by the glamor of it. But he has always known, public life is riddled with indignity. You lose your humanity and become a thing, a puppet to be loved, or bashed, slandered, decapitated. Your fate depends upon your fellow citizens who can be noble friends or, when you least expect it, murderous ingrates. Whether emperor or president, you and your family are the property of the nation, and the nation is a Janus-faced beast.

  He had thought he had escaped the fate of a public man.

  He has heard of ships plowing into icebergs in the dark. Having to leave Mexico again was like that: sudden, implacable. Horrific.

  Of exile Mamá used to say, es nuestra jaula, it is our cage. In her blacker moods, when she did not know how she would scrape together the money to pay the rent, she would rage, her fists at her forehead, “Válgame Dios! This is being buried alive!” She had lost everything. She hated Washington—“ese fangal, this swamp,” she called it, and she found living in Philadelphia unbearably cold. Madame de Iturbide, as she insisted she be addressed by all but her children, spent her days gossiping about Mexicans she had not seen in years and, in the convent, intriguing with the sisters over bureaucratic trivialities. With the exception of Pepa, for daughters, there was the convent. For her sons, her object was that they marry into the best families, that is, those whom she knew and who had both titles and land enough to provide substantial incomes—which was tantamount to expecting them to find a phoenix in a henhouse. In Washington, what Mexicans? Mamá had a low opinion of Chileans, Peruvians, “all those from down there.” Spaniards were another matter, but in the United States, Spaniards of consequence could be counted on one hand, nay, two fingers, and certainly, they had superior alternatives for their daughters. It did not help that Agustín Gerónimo was notorious all over Georgetown for once waving around his pistol at a brandy-soaked tea party.

  Angelo was nearing forty when, like a spring breeze, Miss Alice Green, she of the golden hair and laughing eyes, whose dainty, silk-slippered feet seemed to float over ballroom floors, alighted in his life. Nothing mattered but Miss Green. His every thought, every breath, every action was for Miss Green. He brought her flowers, he made her a valentine, and on her birthday, he brought her a corsage of orchids. In summ
er, they went to concerts on the White House lawn; in the autumn, the opera and to National Theater to see a play. In winter, after ice-skating, did she fancy roasted chestnuts? He bought her a newspaper cone of the hottest ones, fresh off the fire. He was not Miss Green’s only suitor, and her mother, Mrs. Green, merely and barely tolerated him. Time was of the essence, for, to advance in his diplomatic career, he would need to return to Mexico City, which he could do now that so many of his father’s enemies were dead and Santa Anna in exile. He proposed to Miss Green and, to his joy, was accepted. He had thought her mother would object, but to his surprise, she quickly, though without enthusiasm, gave her consent.

  It was Mamá’s reaction that stunned him. From Philadelphia, she wrote that she had taken to her bed, prostrate with grief. Angelo replied in a respectful and soothing manner, reminding her of what he had already told her, that, naturally, Miss Green was a Roman Catholic; surely she remembered Mrs. Green, a convert, from Holy Trinity. (Mrs. Green, he carefully added, was the lady who would sometimes sit next to Mrs. Decatur, widow of the commodore.) The Greens were a respected family in Washington society; Miss Green was the great-granddaughter of Maryland’s Governor Plater, and of General Uriah Forrest, who had served with General Washington and lost a leg in the Battle of Brandywine. Angelo furthermore explained, underlining this twice, that he fully intended to take his bride to Mexico, to which she had agreed. I am certain, dearest Mamá, that you will understand me, and you will find for your devoted sons beloved an honored place in your heart. He enclosed with the letter a train ticket, that she and Pepa might come down from Philadelphia to attend the wedding. But he received no answer until the morning of his wedding day.