by C. M. Mayo
Count von Thun touches his head. “I do not feel it.”
“He bite you!”
Having gone as far as his dignity permits, Count von Thun straightens. He still has the dulce de cacahuate in his hand.
In German, Maximilian says, “Try it. It is a marzipan of the peanut.”
Count von Thun bites into his dulce de cacahuate, and nearly chokes. Truly, it is one of the most detestable things he can remember ever having tasted. Dry as chalk, it sticks to his teeth.
“Mmm,” he says, making an effort to swallow. In the meantime the tyke has crawled over to the bookcase and begun pulling out books.
Maximilian says suddenly, “I have been thinking of India.” He lifts his chin and, in the direction of the open door, exhales a pencil-stream of smoke.
“Ah?” Books go on thumping to the floor—and there is another noise. Just outside the door, the emperor’s bodyguard has begun snoring.
“As I was telling your British counterpart, the other day, we Mexicans have much to learn from their example in India.”
“Hmm.” Count von Thun wishes he could have a glass of water and tries, discreetly, behind his handkerchief, to clean his teeth with his tongue.
“As their Hindus have demonstrated, elephants are most useful in logging hardwoods in mountainous terrain.”
“Hmm.”
“We have extensive hardwood forests all along our Gulf Coast and in Yucatan and Chiapas.” (Another thump.) “As well as in the north as far as Chihuahua. Mahogany, oak, walnut, really, what we have is a cornucopia of hardwoods.”
“You would import working elephants for logging?”
“Precisely.”
“From India?”
“New York City. Our consul there has been in negotiations with a circus.”
It takes all of Count von Thun’s diplomatic nerve to maintain a straight face.
“But,” Maximilian continues, “we are already benefitting from a number of extraordinary innovations. I am sure you know all about our henequén, or sisal hemp production in our very rich haciendas in Yucatan? Now, in Lower California, our northwestern peninsula, with the aid of the modern diving apparatus, we will be expanding the exploitation of our pearl beds along the Sea of Cortez.”
“Ah.”
“Near the islands off La Paz, in Lower California, one of our Yaqui divers has brought up a black pearl the size of a lemon.”
“Hmm?”
“But the shape of a pear.”
“Hmm.”
“It weighed in at three hundred and fifty seven grains.”
“Ah.”
“There was an article about it in Le Moniteur.”
“Hmm”.
Maximilian goes on in this vein, Count von Thun carefully calibrating his reactions—or rather, noises—to fall within the range distant from disdain on the one hand and false enthusiasm on the other. To put it undiplomatically, Maximilian is full of beans. They are standing in the center of the room; behind Maximilian’s shoulder, between the two oil paintings of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, a prize-winning cockroach works its way down the wall. On the tiles, close enough that Count von Thun could put out his boot and crush them, a line of ants marches toward the door. The air stirs. Maximilian’s expression suddenly fixes on something outside. Count von Thun turns his head.
“You missed it,” Maximilian says.
“What?”
“A hummingbird. There is a nest under the eaves. The other day I found the gardener up on a ladder. He meant to remove it, but I forbade it.” Maximilian goes over to his desk and comes back with a tin plate covered with a handkerchief. “Lift it up.”
Upon the plate rests a thumb-sized lump of feathers: a hummingbird. “Professor Bilimek’s treasure of the morning. A cat got it.”
“Fast cat.”
Maximilian squints through the smoke of his cigar. “Pick it up.”
“Another Aztec delicacy?”
Maximilian laughs.
Count von Thun cups the cadaver in his palms. For the first time he is genuinely astonished. “It does not weigh anything.”
“Our Aztecs call the hummingbird feather huitzilihuitl, or pure spirit. It is breath and sun.”
Count von Thun rolls it from the one palm to the other. Its feathers are black, yet they shimmer with all the colors of the rainbow.
Maximilian says, “It is the only bird capable of flying backward.”
Count von Thun replaces the cadaver on the plate. Pleasantries dispensed with, this is the moment for Maximilian to bring up business.
Instead, Maximilian puffs his cigar. He looks around himself and then, suddenly, says in English, “Hello?” He dips his head under the desk. “Little cousin?” He straightens. In German: “Where is he?”
Count von Thun shakes his head. He follows Maximilian outside.
“Sir!” The emperor’s bodyguard has snapped to shocked attention. He squares his heels.
Maximilian says, “Where is the prince?”
“Sir! I have not seen him, sir!”
Maximilian yawns. To Count von Thun, he says, “Can’t have gone far.” He taps some ash onto the grass. “Shall we?”
Music floats over the lawn. Along the pathway by the fountain, in the cool beneath a coconut palm silvered with sun, a maid hurries past with a teetering basket of towels on her head. Maximilian and the ambassador continue down the veranda in the direction of their luncheon (the smell of baked fish becoming stronger), and just as they approach the flowered mass of the table, they hear, this time from the other side of the hedges, from the steps that lead down to the horse stables, the child’s screams.
February 14, 1866
CHEZ ITURBIDE
The instant the child’s arm snapped, on the other side of the world, in her seat at the Paris Opéra, his mother began to fan herself desperately. Her lips parted, as if suddenly she beheld, not down upon the milling stage but hovering before her in midair, the gruesome vision.
Every cell in her body knew that her child had been hurt; he was crying for her. Flooded with helpless anguish, she began to weep. Angelo, exasperated, whispered into her ear: “Get a hold of yourself.”
“Something has happened to the baby!”
“Darling, please.” Angelo put his hand over hers, less to comfort than to quiet her. He had so hoped the distraction of this evening at the opera would settle her nerves, and these were expensive box seats—front row, with a clear view across the orchestra pit, of the imperial box. Behind the tricolor bunting, Louis Napoleon sat watching the stage intently. Eugénie was regal as a marble Diana, supremely aware of the eyes upon her. At her throat (much remarked upon before the curtain came up) sparkled a ruby the size of a walnut, and in her hair an aigrette of ebony feathers and diamonds. The foreign minister, Drouyn de Lhuys and his wife were seated to the left of the imperial couple, Madame in precipitous décolletage and a necklace of sapphires. Even in the dim, as she turned her head: blue sparkles. Perhaps, Angelo considered, it was this mute proximity to the objects of their efforts—so cruelly tantalizing, why, he could have tossed a glove and it might have landed in the emperor’s lap. Was that what had set Alicia off? But, as he’d always told himself, it’s God’s own mystery what fancies flit about in a woman’s head.
A crash of cymbals. On the stage the crowd of garishly costumed peasants parted, and to a solitary violoncello’s F sharp stretched taut, Adelina Patti glided toward the footlights, raised one luminous arm gloved to the elbow, splayed her fingers, and uplifted her rib cage into a glorious aria—ruined by his wife. Half the theater, it seemed, including Eugénie, glanced in their direction. The stern matron in the next box glared at Alicia.
“Shsh!” someone behind them hissed.
Angelo scraped back his chair and took his wife by the arm.
Outside, Alicia could not stop crying. Under the arcade they stood in the bone-chilling night, their breath a ghost between them. Angelo reminded her, Drouyn de Lhuys was not their only line of commun
ication to the emperor. There was Dr.Evans, Bigelow’s extra-official and direct conduit, it turned out, to the innermost salons of the Tuileries. (The week before Christmas, Dr. Evans had extracted Agustín Gerónimo’s molar.) And as Alicia well knew, a friend of a friend of Agustín Gerónimo had agreed to write to Maximilian. It could be a month before Maximilian might read it, but, Angelo said, the letter was on its way. And Bigelow had cabled his counterpart in Vienna, who could be counted on to put a word in at the Hofburg, and that would be sure to embarrass Maximilian.
“Bigelow cabled Vienna! Why did you not tell me?”
Her face broke his heart. “Because, darling, I just found it out and we were rushing to make the curtain.” He put his arm around her waist. “You see, things are moving. But we must have patience.”
Alicia turned away from him. Her voice had become brittle. “Something has happened to the baby. I know it.”
“You must stop exciting your mind.” He gave her his handkerchief; she blew her nose. Once she’d finished, he pushed a hand at her back. “Shall we?” He meant to take her back to the hotel.
But Alicia stayed right where she was. She cast a glance about her and sniffed the air. She adjusted her fox-fur wrapper. “Do you know what?”
“What.”
She twisted her mouth. “I loathe this city.”
Angelo closed his eyes. The previous summer, when they were negotiating with the empress, Alicia had repeatedly declared that to live in Paris would be le rêve de ma vie—la grande vie—le douceur de vivre—she’d trotted out her schoolgirl French every chance she got. But now she turned her tearstained face back to his. In the gaslights she looked gray and haggard. He did not want to look at her. He looked at his watch. He wondered, very angrily, what he might do with the rest of this wasted evening.
She said, “Don’t you hate Paris, too?”
He examined his shoes.
“Don’t you?” she insisted.
“In a way.”
“It is de trop. Gigantically overrated!”
“Yes,” he said, only because he did not want to be standing out in the night air.
“Adelina Patti is a mediocrity of a soprano. De mal en pis.”
He had decided to placate her. “Yes,” he said, though, absolutely, he disagreed.
“We should be given a refund.”
“Yes, darling, tomorrow.”
Alicia turned on him fiercely, her little beaded bag swinging on her wrist. “The Opéra does not give refunds.”
“Yes.”
She stamped her shoe. “Yes! Is that all you can say, ‘yes’? You are—” But then she saw the look in his eyes. They both knew what she had been about to blurt out. When she’d tried that on him the other day, he had answered her, with a coolness he had never shown her before, If you think so little of your husband, I suggest you consider going back to live with your mother. She now cried out, “Oh, oh!” covering her eyes; she swooned, but he caught her, pulling her back up as if she were a rag doll. He had lost his patience.
He said, gripping her arm, this time without compromise, “Come. You can cry oceans in the hotel.”
The curious thing was, the moment her husband said that, Alicia’s tears dried up and she has not shed one in the two weeks since. It is February 14, as it happens, Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. She is much grieved that, socially, the winter has been a complete folie. Not having been received at court, what then could Madame de Iturbide be expected to be invited to? All the savoir faire in the world would not gain her entrée through those elegant doors behind the high walls of the Faubourg.
Lent: one is supposed to give up something in penance, but why should she, when she has sacrificed her whole heart? Or rather, had it ripped out of her! What kind of a God can be so cruel as to allow her to suffer so? Could it all be a fraud? Does He even exist? A sin of a question, she thinks. Ought she to confess her spiritual decay? She intended to, back in December, however, the English-speaking priest was not there. Confessing in French? What a bother.
But maybe the problem is that she has been praying to the wrong saint. San Judas Tadeo, Saint Jude Thaddeus, patron saint of impossible causes— what was Doña Juliana thinking to suggest him? It would have been better to get started with the Santo Niño de Atocha, protector of children and prisoners. But nobody cares about that one here in France.
The past weekend, their nephew Salvador had been let out of his school, Sainte Barbe des Champs. “Can we ride horses in the Bois?” Salvador said. “I want a horse. I would be so happy to have a horse.”
“Might find one on the menu,” Agustín Gerónimo quipped. But not even Agustín Cosme laughed.
Salvador, with his angel-fish eyes, his unruly hair, has grown a full inch; he is nearly as tall as Angelo, though so skinny he might blow away in a stiff wind. To put some meat on his bones, they took him to la Maison Dorée. It was full of Yankees, nouveaux riche. The couple at the next table was shamelessly eavesdropping. Shyly, as the waiter was handing round the menus, Salvador asked, had there been any news of the baby?
“Not from Pepa directly,” Angelo said. They had heard from their relative in Toluca, José Malo, and also secondhand—from Angelo’s sister, Sabina, the nun in Philadelphia—that the baby was healthy.
Alicia, dry-eyed, said, “Your auntie Pepa has stolen him, you see.”
Alicia has taken to casting down these truths, how they shatter like goblets. In the silence that follows—a silence like that of a farm in snowfall—she does not cry.
“Sister,” Agustín Gerónimo gently chided Alicia. “Let us forgive Pepa. It is Maximilian who will decide matters.”
Alicia keeps her hand locked around her other wrist. But sometimes, she cannot help it, she twists her hair. She’s developed a bald spot she has to keep covered with a curl. She bites her fingernails. Fragments of songs, little earworms, tunnel into her brain, Da de da de boom-bah . . . They’ve rented a piano; after hearing Salvador play, for several days, over and over, she kept hearing the first three stanzas of Hail Columbia. Two days ago, she awoke with these words ringing in her head: the stone was shattered by the silence. Outside it is forever gray. If the feeling that envelops her had a color, it would be a sooty, pulsing red. She always feels cold, but her anger—fury of a Hecuba!—is a sun that has dried the sea to a vast gritty plain. And on that anger shines, on and on, ferocious, obscene. There is no shadow, no contrast. Only the rash at the back of her scalp. A stye. A sore throat for the first week of December, and a running fever at Christmas. Pounding headaches, and this never-ending sandpaper ache, the hollowness in her chest.
Cables, letters go out into a world so enormous, it seems beyond logic that the same sun and moon shine over Mexico City as over Paris. One night, she awoke and for some reason felt drawn to the window. She parted the drapes and there, balanced like a ball upon the mansard roof across the street, was the moon. Her dream, though fading, still held bright in her mind: she’d been in her bed in Rosedale in the room she shared with her sisters and, for some reason, gone to the window. She looked out and there, high above the Potomac, hung the moon. The orchards, the fields, the houses and buildings of Georgetown, all the way down to the warehouses and the bone factory and the wharves, the scene was blanketed in snow. Beneath the window, the hedges along the driveway were shining pillows. A doe leapt across the drive.
Then, wisp that it was, the dream vanished.
At the window, she whispered to the Paris moon, “Take my love to my little boy.”
Her child! To think of him, she put her hands to her ribs.
“M is for moon, who sings a tune.”
Moon: a big yellow cheese. Her baby was sitting on her lap while they looked at the book.
“N is for nut, rolling down the roof of a hut. O is for opossum, which, roasted is very toothsome.”
And the Paris moon, pale and mottled, seemed to offer its smiling benevolence. Its glow iced the shingles of that roof, the outer fold of the drapes, and her left sl
eeve.
Yes, in the turn of the clock, it would shine upon Mexico.
Her fingertips warming the glass, she went on gazing at this strange pearl, eye of the sky. After a while, it moved up and shrank to half its size. A scarf of cloud drifted across it.
Three weeks ago Louis Napoleon announced to the Corps Législatif that he would be withdrawing his troops from Mexico in stages, beginning in October. Paris is still abuzz: is this an admission of defeat or a signal of success? Louis Napoleon claims that the Mexican imperial government is strong enough to stand unaided. Mr. Bigelow, however, claims that the “archduke’s” government will collapse. It is too early for anyone in Paris to do other than guess at Maximilian’s reaction; it may well be that the news of Louis Napoleon’s decision has not yet even reached Veracruz.
What did this mean for getting the baby back?
“Prob’ly nothin’,” Agustín Gerónimo said.
“Anything,” Angelo countered.
Alicia: “If Maximilian abdicates—?”
Angelo: “I expect he will remove his court to Trieste.”
Alicia’s hands flew to her cheeks. “Trieste! We shall have to go there—”
“Darling,” Angelo interrupted. “Let us take one day at a time.”
Agustín Gerónimo kept his pipe in his teeth. “Eh, dottle. Maximilian’s not—” But the rest of what he wanted to say was drowned in coughing.
Yes, time has crawled on bloody knees all the way to Ash Wednesday. At midday mass in La Madeleine, front row center, on one of the plain rush-bottomed chairs, Alicia sits, arms crossed, with a puckered expression. Behind the altar, a stone Mary Magdalene ascends to heaven in the arms of a pair of angels. When Alicia first set eyes on these sculptures nearly two months ago, she leaned over and whispered to Angelo, “Aren’t they beautiful?” Washington had nothing of this caliber. (Georgetown’s Holy Trinity was so Spartan, the reverend used to joke that it could pass for Presbyterian.) But now, halfway into February, the bitterest of her life, Alicia decides that the face of this sculpted saint and imaginary winged creatures are simply dégagé: blasé as three artist’s models, which is exactly what they are. French tarts!
