The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire
Page 27
Alas, it was Doña Juliana who in her carriage took Alicia to see, or rather, intrigue with General Bazaine. But from the moment Pepa heard about that (from Frau von Kuhacsevich, who got it straight from Maximilian’s coachman, the horse’s mouth, as it were), she concluded that Doña Juliana, caught off guard by the little American’s hysterics, must have merely thought to go first to her one relative with an “in”—that most unlikely Madame Bazaine, her niece Pepita. They called it a December-May relationship, but it was more December-January—the groom robbed the cradle!
Well, why, in Heaven’s name, did Alicia not first contact her own sister-in-law? That was an “in” if you wanted one! Why did Alicia not think of that?
It was the grossest humiliation to have been subjected to Their Majesties’ consternated questions. Over the past months it has become increasingly clear to Pepa the injury, possibly irreparable, that the scandal made to her reputation at court. But should she have been surprised? From the very first, she did not approve of Alicia. Miss Green was “green” indeed. A Washington belle with a head full of air could hardly be expected to adapt to Mexico, and she was too young for Angelo—half his age! Angelo must have been bewitched. Pepa told their mamá (and she half-believed it herself) that the cook at Rosedale, Aunt Sally, a Negress the size of a house, must have slipped an aphrodisiac in his chowder. True, in the past two years, one’s estimation of Alicia had improved, marginally, but as her recent irresponsible behavior has abundantly revealed, first impressions were not mistaken. Princess Iturbide is only sorry that Doña Juliana has been embarrassed. To this sweet, gentle, devout old family friend, Princess Iturbide has no intention of mentioning the episode, any more than she would if, say, someone passed gas. A highness’s mere presence at Doña Juliana’s visiting day will convey that her hostess is restored to favor. Yes, in paying this first visit, she descends from her proper level. But information is currency; a peso of it might be exchanged for larger coin from Madame Almonte, Frau von Kuhacsevich, Count del Valle, Tüdos, who knows?
Chole, with labored breathing, leads her up the stairs. The stairwell stinks of burnt molasses. The stone steps are worn and chipped. Princess Iturbide grips the railing, favoring her left hip. She turns her good ear to the tinkly buzz of the harpsichord. The parlor stinks of not only burnt molasses but, as ever, mildew and rotting leather, never mind that the window has been left wide open. Beneath the portrait of Don Manuel, there on a dusty scrap of velvet sprawls a sorry-looking crèche, all ajumble, the roof of the straw manger listing, and some of the angels missing wings, or arms. Over the sofa the same worm-eaten painting that must have been hanging there since the last century: Our Lady of Guadalupe, and, kneeling before her, church officials in lace and scarlet robes, the viceroy in a blue coat—a long-faded blue that quite clashes with the upholstery.
Doña Juliana, touching the diamond brooch at her throat, rises from her bench.
She comes around and embraces Pepa. She pats Pepa’s cheek, just as she did when Pepa was a little girl.
“So good to see you, my dear, wherever have you been? I thought—”
“And you.” Princess Iturbide breaks away, irritated at her hostess’s ignorance of protocol. Wasn’t it all over Mexico how foolish Madame Almonte had made herself in receiving Carlota at Veracruz with an abrazo?
“Ah!” Doña Juliana says sadly as her hand disappears into the folds of her shawl. “You have not brought Agustinito?”
Pepa does not answer as she arranges herself on the wing chair, which protests her bulk with a dangerous-sounding creak. Doña Juliana has the eerie sense that she is treating with an apparition. After the fiasco with Alicia, Doña Juliana assumed she had been cut. Pepa seems to have changed. Is it her bearing? She has put on weight. She’s had to move her black pearl ring to her pinky. And what an exotic crust brown loaf of a hat. Chapeaux, the French call them. Doña Juliana herself would sooner go out of her house with a cookpot on her head!
To Princess Iturbide, her hostess seems of a piece with the ancient furnishings, awaiting, with passive and pious stolidity, the indignity of further deterioration. Dust clings to absolutely everything.
Doña Juliana repeats: “You have not brought Agustinito?”
“Pardon?” Pepa says, turning her good ear.
“Agustinito. How is he?”
“In the park.”
Doña Juliana claps her hands. “A splendid day to be in the park! Though a bit chilly for my old bones. And tell me—” she leans closer to Pepa’s good ear—“how is the little darling?”
“Plump. Rosier than ever.”
Pepa seems unusually distracted. Doña Juliana is uncertain what more she might ask about the little one whom she has missed as if he were her own grandchild. Oh, with such heartache. Every morning, she used to lean over his pram to tickle his chin, or squeeze a chubby leg. Who is this pollito? Is he Agustín chiquitín?
The Gómez Pedrazas have always been close to the Iturbides. Her husband’s friendship with the Liberator and in recent years her friendship with his children had been a wellspring of pride. She had been devastated when Angel and Alicia left—and hurt, though not surprised, when, once she joined the court back in September, Pepa sent no invitations and stopped coming to her at-home days. Princess? Your Highness? What should Doña Juliana call her? “Pepita” is what she once called her, the same as her niece. Oh, but that was fifty years ago.
As far as the baby is concerned, as Don Manuel used to say, Don’t be a dog between two tacos. In other words, if you don’t want to end up hungry, choose. Don Manuel chose Iturbide—and, though that almost cost him his life, he had made a sacred oath to his emperor. But there was something else Don Manuel used to say, and in this peculiar circumstance, it seems to Doña Juliana the wiser: if you can do nothing, say nothing. Though her heart belongs to Alicia, who had been so frantic with grief—a mother’s grief, and what would Pepa, a spinster, know of that?
This is what happened on that horrid, rain-soaked middle of the night back in September: Doña Juliana heard such a violent clanging it took her a moment to recognize her own doorbell. Who would jerk its rope like that? Chole ran down to see through the judas eye: a woman in a hooded cloak, dripping wet—Alicia! Looking wild, her hair disarranged, her face stained with tears. Chole brought her a cup of té de tila, linden flower tea, to calm her. Alicia spilled it down the front of her dress. Where was her husband, and her brothers-in-law? Waiting near the city of Puebla. It made no sense, and then all at once it made perfect sense.
“If I cannot see my child—” Alicia let out a sound that could have come from a wild animal.
Doña Juliana took her into her arms. “I know, I know.” And she did know: Doña Juliana had lost her only child in a miscarriage. “You are not alone,” she said, smoothing Alicia’s damp hair. “And remember, Our Mother Mary also lost her son, Jesus.”
Doña Juliana did not question what she was to do: help in any way. Alicia spent the rest of that night pacing. Doña Juliana could hear the floorboards creaking, and her muffled weeping. After breakfast, which Alicia did not touch, at once Doña Juliana took her to her niece, Madame Bazaine. From General Bazaine it would be a straight shot to Maximilian’s ear—no need to go through twenty-seven layers of flunkies. As the widow of a man who had been a cabinet minister and briefly president, Doña Juliana was no stranger to these backdoor strategies. And, having chaperoned her niece during the recent courtship, Doña Juliana had, despite her prejudices (above all, that he was too old and also French), grown to esteem General Bazaine as a man of honor, with both good sense and a good heart.
Pepita’s reaction to Alicia’s story was to cover her mouth. With a gravity far beyond her seventeen years, she grasped Alicia’s hands and said, “My dear friend, I will do all in my power to help you.”
Without delay, Alicia was ushered into the general’s office. Doña Juliana and her niece waited in the anteroom on two of the several straight-backed chairs lined up against a wall decorated wit
h a bristling array of sabers and muskets and pikes. It was stale-smelling with ashtrays and a spittoon; Doña Juliana got up and, with some trouble, forced open the window. She had just sat down again when his aide-de-camp, Captain Blanchot, came out of the general’s office and, uncertainly, pulled the door closed behind him. “Bonjour,” said the two señoras. But Captain Blanchot—whom they had seen at innumerable dinners and balls and, recently, at his own wedding to one of the Miss Yorkes—did not recognize them. He brushed his fingers at the back of his collar and then, as if he’d decided something, slapped his thigh, and stalked off into the garden.
Doña Juliana said in a low voice, “The general is only trying to protect him.”
Pepita whispered, “How I hate Maximilian.”
Doña Juliana patted her niece’s hand. “The less said, the sooner mended. Remember who you are, dear. Your husband has been put in a delicate position.”
Doña Juliana then brought out her rosary beads and worried them for twenty minutes that felt to her like twenty hours.
Afterward, Alicia told her that as soon as he had sent his aide out of the office, the general informed her he had just received a message from the palace—that Maximilian was aware she was in Mexico City and that, as she had of her own free will signed a binding contract, Bazaine should take no notice of her suit. She had dissolved into tears. The general, very much the gentleman, invited her to be seated, and with his own hands, he poured and brought her a glass of water. Her story spilled out of her, and tears, and she didn’t really remember it all, but when she had finished, she found him looking at her from across his desk with an expression of deep sadness. She gave him the letter she had written Maximilian. He put on his spectacles to read it. Then he lay the letter flat on his desk and put both of his bear-like hands on top of it. His Spanish, though oddly accented, was impeccable.
“¿Y qué, su señoria, desearía que yo hiciése? And what, Madam, would you have me do?”
“Send my letter to Maximilian.”
“Consider it done.”
Over the next two days, the tenderest hopes were nurtured . . . above all, in fervent prayer to Our Lady, to Jesus, and San Judas Tadeo, or Saint Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of desperate cases. Day and night Doña Juliana kept the wax tapers burning before the altar in her drawing room. Then, on the second morning, a Palatine Guard appeared at her door. He said that Their Majesties wished to confer with Doña Alicia about her son’s future. The officer was one of those Austrians, crisply polite, but there was a dead-ness in his blue eyes; Doña Juliana felt very uneasy. The coach he had come in, parked directly in front, blocked her door. It was the size of a wine merchant’s van, and its curtains drawn. On its gleaming black side, stenciled in gold, was the spider-like monogram MIM, for the Latin, Maximiliano Imperator de Mexico.
“Please,” the officer said, and with a gesture, made Alicia understand that she was to climb in.
“No, no,” Doña Juliana said, “Let me lend you my carriage.” As a signal, she squeezed Alicia’s elbow. Later, looking back on it, Doña Juliana realized she could not have prevented Alicia’s arrest. Maximilian must already have given the order. It could not have mattered which coach Alicia climbed into. But at the time, Doña Juliana did not know this. She waited all morning for Alicia to return, and then she waited all through the afternoon.
That evening Father Fischer came to the house. By this time, Doña Juliana was so sick with worry she could scarcely breathe. Father Fischer explained that yes, Princess Doña Alicia had been detained but no, nothing untoward had happened, she had not been thrown in a dungeon (he laughed gently) nor anything of the kind. What on earth did Doña Juliana take Maximilian for? Alicia would be reunited with her husband and brothers-in-law in the city of Puebla, they would continue on to Veracruz, board the first steamer out, and reside in Paris, generously provided for—
“Oh! But the heartbroken little mother!” Doña Juliana sniffled into her handkerchief.
Well, Father Fischer countered, it was surely very painful, but there were matters of a higher interest for the nation. This was a time when many people were making many sacrifices, and as Doña Juliana knew, Their Highnesses Don Angel and Don Agustín Gerónimo and Don Agustín Cosme, and Doña Pepa and, indeed, Doña Alicia herself, had signed a very (he swung his head), very solemn contract.
When Doña Juliana could not stop shaking, Father Fischer sat with her and together they recited the Lord’s Prayer. His soutane smelled of cabbage, and his breath of beer, but his voice, so smooth, soothed her. Then, with three graceful flicks of his hand, her confessor blessed her. Doña Juliana should not trouble her mind, he said. This was what God wanted.
On this Doña Juliana and Pepa agree heartily: it will be a gala day when Father Fischer returns from Rome. He shall reconcile His Holiness with Maximilian, neither has the least doubt, for Father Fischer is a man of the firmest integrity, the utmost perception, and a charm that could make the Devil give up his horns. Doña Juliana has written to Father Fischer, though she has not yet received an answer. “And you?”
Pepa cups a hand to her ear. “Pardon?”
“Have you had any mail from Father Fischer?”
“Ah, mail. Have you heard—I’m sure there’s been no report in the newspapers, but last week, renegades captured the mail coach twice.”
It seems that Pepa misheard her question, but Doña Juliana follows this new tack. “Twice, you say?”
“My sources are in the Palace Guard. The mail bags were slashed open and their contents dumped over a hillside—within sight of the fort at Río Frío.”
“Brazen they are!”
“Quite.” Pepa takes a large forkful of cake.
“You’ve no news of Father Fischer then?”
“Who?”
“Father Fischer.
“Not yet.”
“God willing, soon.”
Pepa closes her eyes. “God willing.” She accepts a freshened cup of café de olla.“Madame Bazaine, is she well?”
“Very.” But Doña Juliana is in no mood to offer up tidbits about her niece. Whatever she says about Madame Bazaine will be repeated as on a bullhorn. “I have terrible news. My neighbor, Count Villavaso, across the street, may have been murdered.”
Princess Iturbide gasps. “Murdered, you say?”
Doña Juliana explains: Chole got it from the count’s cook that in the night a thief had broken into his kitchen. “Apparently, the count heard the noise, grabbed his musket and, as he ran down the stairs, slipped and cracked open his skull. Either that or someone hit him with a brick bat.”
“A what?”
“Brick bat.”
“What?”
“Brick bat. Someone hit him with a brick bat.”
“Ah.”
“The cook found him in a heap at the bottom.”
“God save his soul!”
“All that went missing was a bag of cornmeal.”
“That is the price of a man’s life these days.”
It seems to Doña Juliana that her visitor is giving her crèche a ferocious stare. “What is the matter?”
“His son will agree to sell it?”
Doña Juliana blinks. “Whose son?”
“Count Villavaso’s. It is my object to buy that house.”
“My dear, you cannot live where something so evil has happened!”
“Where else am I to go? Unless I am to live in what has been turned into an officers’ barracks, or wait an eternity for repairs to be made. Other than Count Villavaso’s, there is not a suitable house to be had between here and Timbuktu.”
“My dear.” Doña Juliana leans forward to pat Pepa’s hand. “You would give me the happiness of my life if you would take the upper floor of my house.”
“If that were possible . . .” The Heir Presumptive in rented rooms? Une idée affreuse. But Pepa is a disciple of discretion when it comes to other people’s feelings. “I’ve a nest egg to invest. Property, that’s the thing.”
“I couldn’t.”
Doña Juliana raises the coffeepot. “More—?” The clock on the mantel interrupts her with ten tings. Or rather, as its ancient mechanism has begun to fail, ting, bong, b-B-b-bong, brrrr-ong, bing, ting.
Pepa brings herself up, using the arms of the wing chair to brace herself. “Prince Agustín will have returned from the park.” She makes no move but allows herself to be embraced.
“Bring Agustinito with you next time?” But Doña Juliana’s voice so quavers that Pepa does not hear her.
On her way out, passing the last little table, Princess Iturbide happens upon the the carte de visite of her godson. She picks up the silver frame and gazes upon his small person as if for the first time, her eyes softening the way a mother’s would. Prince Agustín stands with one pudgy hand on the cane seat of a chair. He wears those shoes the Master of Ceremonies had so strenuously objected to, and a lace-trimmed frock. That helmet-like hat he refused to put on is on the chair. His lips slightly parted, his expression is at once innocent and frank. Princess Iturbide has given out some two dozen of these cartes de visite—she wonders, who passed theirs on to Doña Juliana, or did she purchase it, and in which shop?
Doña Juliana says, coming up behind, her lorgnette to her eye, “The intelligence, it shines right through.”
“Oh, he is in charge,” Princess Iturbide agrees.
“He reminds me so much of his—” Doña Juliana was about to say “mother,” but she catches herself and says, instead, “grandfather.”
“Indeed.” Princess Iturbide sets the picture back on the table, upon the moth-eaten altar cloth with the other little portraits, dusty photographs of Doña Juliana’s nieces and nephews, General and Madame Bazaine’s wedding portrait, dusty miniature oils of long-dead sisters, Don Manuel . . . And, amongst a collection of dusty snuffertrays, that atrocious ivory of a Madonna. Its eyes, Pepa judges, are squeezed-looking and the fingers those of a monkey. Pepa’s mamá had inherited a collection of ivories, including an exquisite Virgin of Loreto, a Santa Rosalía, and a Saint Francis of Assisi with an open-winged sparrow—an Oriental marvel—attached to the hand. In Mexico, Mamá had kept them in her boudoir, and been heartbroken to have had to abandon them. Compared to those ivories, this is pitiful. If she were Doña Juliana’s daughter, Princess Iturbide thinks, she would advise her to put it away. Or at least clean the thing! A handy recipe is to dissolve rock alum in soft water, then boil the ivory for a minimum of a quarter-hour. One can take a hogs-bristle toothbrush to it. When clean, it must be wrapped in a damp cloth, to keep it from fissuring. But, as Mamá used to say: El consejo no es bien recibido donde no es pedido—Advice is not well received where it has not been invited. One must have patience with the elderly, Pepa reminds herself. There, but for the Grace of God, go I, and shall I go. A dim golden glimmer of what she imagines to be her future: herself in a sumptuous salon, receiving her godson, a beautifully educated young man soon to be, if not already, emperor of Mexico: Agustín III, a man with a vision for his people and the fear of God.