by C. M. Mayo
From the veranda, the crowd disperses: the empress to her boudoir, the princess to hers, the ladies-in-waiting arm-in-arm out into the gardens; Frau von Kuhacsevich, with a voluptuous sigh, to inspect last-minute matters in the kitchen; and Tere and Weissbrunn—well . . . let us draw the veil over that pair . . .
“Grab hold!” Maximilian says to Agustín. “No, not my neck!” They fly over the greenest part of the lawn, Maximilian zigzagging around the croquet hoops, then past the orchestra, the butterfly nets fluttering behind Professor Bilimek, white and pillowy. A flock of swallows bursts overhead; a crow caws from the top of the jacaranda; and over the dappled lawn beneath the ficus tree, just as the last of this little parade, José Luis, clears the final cornetist, a one-legged hussar in a sun-faded captain’s jacket, Sawerthal’s baton swings the orchestra into “Wiener Kinder.”
Maximilian feels a special affinity for children. It is not so much that he wants one of his own, but that he identifies with their unblemished beauty, their innocence, and above all that natural ability to lose themselves in the joy of a moment. Or is it really a natural ability? He wonders. In an adult, certainly, it can be a talent cultivated as artists do, yes, as must any of those who, by profession or inclination, call upon the Muses.
When he was a twelve-year-old boy, there was a distinct moment one gray winter’s day in the Hofburg when he looked up from his schoolwork, the endless hieroglyphics of trigonometry, and caught sight of his reflection in the window. Four o’clock and it was nearly dark outside. He had been horrified: how old he looked. The life drained out of him! In a whisper that neither his older brother, Franz Joseph, nor Charlie, could hear, he solemnly swore: I shall not forget who I truly am.
Adults, it seemed to Max, were as butterflies in reverse: they, too, had been beautiful and free, but they had folded in their wings, spun themselves into a cocoon, and let their appendages dissolve until what they became was hard, ridgid, little worms. One’s tutor, for example, reminded one of a nematode.
Twiddling concern with numbers, “practicality” in all its Philistine guises, makes Maximilian stupendously bored. He needs vistas of sky, mountains, swift-running and sun-sparkled water; he needs—as a normal man must eat—to explore this world, to see, to touch its sibylline treasures: hummingbirds; the red-as-blood breast of a macaw; the furred and light-as-a-feather legs of a tarantula. God in all His guises: mushrooms, lichens, all creatures. As a boy Max had delighted in his menagerie: a marmoset, a toucan, a lemur. The lemur escaped and, outside overnight, died of cold. A footman opened the door in the morning, and there the thing was, dusted with snow and stiff as cardboard.
“I detest winter,” Max declared. Franz Joseph, Charlie, and the little brothers, bundled in woollens and furs, they could go ice-skating or building fortresses for snowball fights. Max preferred to stay inside with his pets, his books, and the stoves roaring. The one thing he relished about winter, for it was a most elegant way of thumbing his nose at it, was to go into the Bergl Zimmer and shut the door behind him. Its walls and its doors were painted with murals, trompes l’oeil of the most luxuriant flora and fauna: watermelons, papayas, cockatoos, coconut trees, hibiscus. Where was this, Ceylon? Java? Yucatan? Sleet could be falling on the other side of the Hofburg’s windows, but this treasure of the Bergl Zimmer, painted in the year 1760 for his great-great-grandmother the Empress Maria Theresa, never failed to transport one into an ecstasy of enchantment.
His mother had counseled her sons, many times: “Make up your mind to be happy. Then you will be.”
Here, this moment in Cuernavaca, one is happy: perfumes in the air, colors from the palette of Heaven, birds, flowering trees, and vines and oranges, the music of the orchestra and of the fountains, this bone-warming sunshine . . .
“Hurrah! Professor Bilimek, what have you to show us?” Maximilian sets Agustín on the grass. They have arrived at the veranda outside his office. The professor has a clipped white beard that makes his face appear both rounder and ruddier than it really is; his eyes are small and watery behind wire-rimmed spectacles. He removes his straw hat, mops his bald head, and then, from one of the many bulging pockets in his smock, he brings out a small jar.
“Etwas wunderbar. Something wonderful,” Professor Bilimek says. Switching to French: “Un petit bête du Bon Dieu. One of the good Lord’s little creatures,” he says, putting it into Agustín’s hands.
A Capuchin, Professor Bilimek is profoundly shy around adults, especially about his Spanish, which is why he lapses into French with anyone who cannot understand German. Years ago he accompanied Maximilian to Brazil and managed the entire expedition with nary a word of Portuguese.
The jar imprisons a ladybug. Agustín watches the ladybug crawl up the inside of the glass; then he sets the jar down on the bricks.
Off to the side, in the lime green shade of an espaliered fig tree, Maximilian reaches past the aphalandra to finger a leaf the shape of an elephant’s ear. To his secretary he says, “Monstera, or the Latin name is colocasia esculenta. In Brazil, however, the leaf is distinctly larger and more reniform. The natives use them as parasols.”
“Extraordinary!” José Luis leans in for a closer look at the very same plant his own mother keeps in a pot on the laundry patio of her house in Mexico City.
“But they are of no use in tropical downpours.”
“Goodness, yes. Yes, I can imagine!”
Grasping it low down on its stem, Maximilian snaps off the leaf. “Little cousin?” Agustín comes close and Maximilian bends down. “For you, a parasol just your size.”
Agustín giggles, but unsure what to do with the big leaf, he drops it on top of the jar with the ladybug. He runs out onto the lawn, into the shadow of the ficus tree, past the mango tree, and into the sunniest part. Here he bends his knees, puts his bottom in the air, and plants the crown of his head on the grass. After a pause in this awkward position, he flops over.
“Bravo!” says Professor Bilimek.
Agustín makes another somersault.
“Bravo! How many can you do?”
Agustín holds up three fingers.
“Drei? Three?”
“Drei!”
“Encore une fois! Once again!” Professor Bilimek says.
From the veranda, with his arms crossed over his chest, Maximilian watches the little boy with a glower of envy. To be an adult is to live in a kind of jail. To be a sovereign is to live in that same jail, but in iron fetters, and the key tossed out through the bars. He had so envied his elder brother’s having a throne, and been so angry at being bullied into signing that Family Pact . . . but his feelings toward his brother are beginning to soften a little. In this job he has grown old so quickly. As a matter of fact (he puts his hand to the top of his thinning hair), he is well on his way to going as bald as Professor Bilimek. In another year or two, Maximilian’s head will be a billiard ball—no, worse, a freckled egg. And from all the coffee and tobacco, his teeth have turned brown. He is no Romeo. Though his beard is looking fine. As a kind of compensation, he has been letting it grow. Proudly, he gives it a smooth.
“Little cousin, come!”
When Agustín runs back to him, Maximilian takes him by the hand and dismisses the others.
To abandon the sunshine for his office, even with the little “cousin,” is to come crashing back into a waking nightmare. Maximilian has granted the Austrian ambassador an interview before luncheon, in which he must steer his leaky craft between a Scylla and a Charybdis, that is, between impressing Vienna with his good governance of Mexico and opening the road to his possible return to Austria, upon which depends the renegotiation of the Family Pact.
The Kaiser was the one who had acted in bad faith, Maximilian believes. But now, nearly two years gone by since he was forced to affix his signature to that accursed scrap of paper, he realizes, the bitterest cup was the one he drank of his own volition, thinking it sweet syrup, whilst on board the Novara. That is, it was a grievous, possibly fatal mistake to have s
ent that protest, and so publically! Franz Joseph may harbor affection for his younger brother or, at least for their mother’s sake, pretend that he does. But as Kaiser he turns first to the men around him, and those hardheads already considered Maximilian a near traitor for having dared criticize Vienna’s barbaric measures against dissidents, and then, for having treated with Louis Napoleon. To protest the Family Pact in this way—it was Charlotte who insisted they send the telegram to all the courts of Europe, and that moron, Schertzenlechner, and Monsieur Eloin and—oh, it was to have goaded the beasts with a red-hot poker. He should have waited. He should have been played the game with more subtlety, using back channels, letting those who needed to, save face. Now, with the Family Pact in force, should Maximilian return to Europe, his pensions, his position, his ability to choose where to reside, where to travel, in short, his entire future would be at their mercy. He would be as a turtle without a carapace.
One never should have listened to Charlotte. One never should have allowed her, so young a woman, to exert such influence. Charlotte is forever meddling! She meddled in matters with the church; it would not be fair to blame the break with the pope on her, but perhaps her overly frank manner with the papal emissary—? It did not serve. (Well, Father Fischer remains in Rome; he has not yet picked apart that Gordian knot.) Charlotte, with her habitual rigidity, takes everything in a manner deadly serious. She suffers paralyzing headaches. She has been so emotional about her father’s death. This is why one must protect her from unpleasantness. One has given her the general tint of things, but specifics are best left unmentioned (for example, that the Iturbides, those ingrates, have gone to the U.S. minister in Paris to stir up an intrigue). One cannot discuss with Charlotte the possibility of abdication. If it happens—it might not—it is Bazaine’s fault! For letting the guerrillas walk all over him. The armies are bleeding more deserters every day, Bazaine admits it! More money, General Almonte says, more, more— while the French go on robbing the customhouses.
Monsieur Langlais may be a wizard with numbers, but no mere man can bring forth loaves and fishes.
Impunitatis cupido . . . magnis semper conatibus adversa—The desire of escape . . . that foe to all great enterprises, as Tacitus said.
But one is weary to the bones. Oh, to be a child again! To run free in the world! One could retire, this very summer, to the Adriatic, visit the island of Lacroma . . . one might make experiments with aeronautics . . . Reread Goethe and Seneca . . . pen one’s memoirs . . .
But would the Kaiser permit even that? From Vienna, Charlie reports that one’s popularity remains very strong, especially among the Hungarians. So the Hofburg could consider one’s mere presence within the confines of the empire a threat. Monsieur Eloin agrees. Perhaps the superior strategy would be to first, for some two or perhaps three years, establish residence in a neutral country—but which one?
A cigar smoldering between his lips, Maximilian leafs through his atlas, a prodigious tome bound in navy blue morocco leather, its pages gilded: The Sandwich Islands . . . Tahiti . . . he wets a finger and turns another rustling page . . . Australia’s Botany Bay . . .
Rajasthan? Say, a yearlong expedition to ride elephants and shoot tigers?
But one’s happy fantasies are cut short. The Austrian ambassador is ushered in.
His Excellency stands taller than Maximilian by a full three inches. Dressed in white linen trousers, a white blouse, and incongruously black boots, Count Guido von Thun has muttonchop sidewhiskers, low-set dark eyebrows, and the focused gaze of a stork about to pincer a fish. Having returned Maximilian’s greeting, stooping slightly, Count von Thun tries out his heavily accented Spanish on the prince, who is sprawled on the carpet, stacking his blocks.
“Mucho gusto en conocerle . . . Pleased to meet you . . .”
“Hola!” says the child, but without looking up.
His frock, Count von Thun cannot help noticing, is covered with grass stains. There is a frightful bruise on his left arm, just above the elbow.
“A right nice tower you have built there with your blocks.”
Agustín kicks it over with his sandal.
“Was that a castle?”
Agustín runs to Maximilian and clings to his leg.
Count von Thun persists. “How old are you?”
Shyly, Agustín holds up four fingers.
Maximilian, tousling the child’s hair, says, “You little liar! I know how old you are.”
Count von Thun had assumed the child was at least four. Agustín, biting his lip, holds up two fingers.
“That’s right, little cousin,” Maximilian says, “but you are almost three, aren’t you?”
Agustín nods.
“And you know when your birthday is, don’t you?”
Agustín swings his head, “No.”
“I know you know when it is,” Maximilian says. “Ho!” Agustín has crawled under the desk. Maximilian bends down, both hands on his thighs: “What are you doing under there?”
The ambassador, beetling his brow, rubs his chin, and then he scratches behind his ear. What is this about? There is a reason that, for his—that is, Vienna’s—benefit, Maximilian makes a fuss over this infant, but what is it? That one is supposed to see this so-called prince—this really is a stretch—as his Heir? That the idea is, one should run cable Count Rechberg, Do convince the Kaiser to send over a nephew lest the House of Habsburg lose this golden opportunity? War is coming with Prussia, perhaps as soon as May. The Kaiser needs Mexico like he needs a hole in the head. Austria cannot afford to make an enemy of the United States. (Already, Austria’s ambassador to Washington is under orders to maintain strict neutrality with regard to Mexico.) To allow a few thousand volunteers to ship over was a concession made out of family loyalty, to give Maximilian something.
And the Austrian volunteers might have achieved something, had Bazaine not kept them scattered, sent off on operations both trivial and absurdly dangerous. Count von Thun’s cousin, General von Thun, is the commanding officer of the Austrian volunteers. Last time they had spoken of Bazaine, he’d nearly choked with rage.
In any event, at the rate Mexico is falling into bankruptcy and lawlessness, Maximilian shall have to abdicate. The question is, when will he do it?
And this little boy? It was spectacularly stupid of Maximilian to have his mother arrested and deported. According to the police reports, she has taken her case to the U.S. minister in Paris. Typical of Maximilian! He coddles his enemies, and then when they go after him, he plays the ostrich. Faced with unpleasant decisions, he procrastinates—the most inane game. Which is how Maximilian got himself into such a tangle over that Family Pact. It was beyond ingenuous for Maximilian to claim he’d been surprised by it; Count Rechburg had presented the terms very clearly and early on. Geltungsbedürfnis, the need to show off—that has always been the weak chink in Maximilian’s armor.
Count von Thun does not have any feeling of charity for Maximilian’s byzantine fooleries. He never has. He takes out his handkerchief and mops his brow. Dressing all in white is not defense enough against this heat.
It offends him that capable officers are dying. He shall never forget his grief: Captain Karl Kurtzrock and sixty ulans slaughtered in Ahuacatlán. The Austrian volunteers, for the most part, roam around the sierra battling these monkeys, and stagecoach robbers and kidnappers with names like Loco de López, Hongos, and El Tuerto. Austrians should be serving the Kaiser, not this chimera of l’empire du Mexique dreamed up in the Tuileries. And to begin with, it was a scandal for an Austrian archduke to have condescended to accept a throne from a Bonaparte.
Further, this position has been no boon to Count von Thun’s career. One of Austria’s most highly regarded diplomats, he has been posted to Mexico not because Mexico matters but because its sovereign happens to be the Kaiser’s brother. Count von Thun would prefer Muscovite snowstorms to this puny farce. Look at this office: the upholstery, the paintings, the elaborately carved credenza—and, according
to intelligence, Maximilian has been regularly corresponding with his decorators in Trieste! It seems he is less interested in governing than in furnishing his Italian plaything. The latest letter intercepted was an order for a thousand nightingales to be placed in the open aviary behind the parterre overlooking the Bay of Grignano!
Out of the corner of his eye, Count von Thun spots the atlas open to . . . Rajasthan?
“Dulce de cacahuate?” Maximilian says, lifting an orange and black clay bowl from the edge of his desk. A pot like a pumpkin.
“A what, sir?”
“Ca-ca-hua-te, that is, ‘peanut’ in the language of our Aztecs.” Maximilian waves his cigar over the neatly arranged rows of paper-wrapped candies the size of doubloons. “These come from Mexico City’s finest dulcería, as we say, Süβwarengeschäft. El Paraíso Terrestre on the Calle de San Francisco.”
“I do not know it.”
“Shame. You must be sure to go there.”
“Quiero un cacahuate, I want a peanut,” Agustín says from under the desk.
Maximilian says in Spanish, “I will give you one, little cousin, but not until you come out from under there.”
“No!”
“Well then, little cousin, you may not have one.”
Agustín says, tugging at Maximilian’s trouser leg, “My rhino wants one.”
“Your rhinoceros!” Maximilian says. “What color is your rhinoceros today?”
“Seven”.
“No, that is a number. What color is your rhinocerous? Is he blue?”
“Tuesday.”
“Your rhinoceros is Tuesday!” With a chuckle, Maximilian turns to the ambassador. In German, Maximilian says, “Your turn.”
“Sir?”
“Ask him about his rhinoceros.”
Noisily, the ambassador clears his throat. He bends down, one elbow on his knee, and peers under the desk. In his awkward Spanish, he says, “Where is the rhinoceros?”
“On your head!”
