by C. M. Mayo
In gloria Dei Patris Amen . . . The priest, his back to the congregation, drones on. She is glad she does not have to look at him: he looks like a demented barber. Altar boys swing their censers, trailing poufs of smoke. The little bell rings. Because she has not confessed, Alicia does not join the queue to receive communion.
Last year on Ash Wednesday, they all went to mass at the Templo de la Profesa. On Tuesday, the Calle de San Francisco had been full of the din and clang of bands, and barefoot Indians stumbling around stupefied with pulque. By Wednesday, however, that street had been swept clean as a penny by the Zouave crew. As Alicia and her sister-in-law rounded the corner, they passed one last African in a fez and red pantaloons, raking down the gutter.
“I am beginning to have hope,” Pepa said, pressing her hoopskirt so that it tipped up, not so much as to reveal an ankle but enough to get her safely over the high threshold.
“Me, too,” Alice said.
In the dark of the vestibule, Pepa suddenly put her hand on Alicia’s arm. “For Lent, let us give up all sweets.”
“O Moses!” Alicia had laughed. “All sweets? I could not endure that”
“Nonsense. We’ll do it together.”
That afternoon, however, after forgoing not only the pie but her customary two lumps of sugar in her coffee, Alicia had come upon Pepa in the pantry, with her fingers in a box of bonbons! The memory of that now sends Alicia into a silent rage. She exhales through her nose.
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris . . . the priest intones.
Angelo shuffles back to his chair. He kneels and rests his forehead on clasped hands. She wants to shove him in the back. Can you not see, no one is listening? How can you tell me I am the one with the over-excited imagination? Why, that “host” on your tongue, it’s a scrap of flour! Get yourself examined by the nerve-doctor!
Arch-backed in her chair, Alicia sits as still as the silhouette on a coin. Suddenly, out of nowhere, something so funny pops into her head she can’t help laughing out loud: it was the way her brother Oseola, after he came out of the swimming pond, would put his cupped hand in his armpit and flap his elbow to make fart noises.
Angelo lifts his head. This time he doesn’t shush her; he only touches her wrist.
They come out of La Madeleine into a shadowless, hammer-dull day. A crowd of beggars, legless veterans, and pigeons. Angelo turns his collar up; Alicia pulls her fox-fur wrapper close. Her quilted and seal-fur-trimmed bonnet and muff are not enough to keep her from shivering. Angelo, wincing as he hobbles, has fallen victim to the gout. Again.
Ash Wednesday, as all the days, plods on in boots of lead, remorse and anger dragging behind each moment like Frankenstein’s creature. So many useless days of needlework, reading novels, newspapers, magazines; learning to play a mandolin (but then one of its strings broke), games of whist and jackstraws, driving, singing, letter writing, trudging the echoing galleries of the Louvre, buying heaps of things—a paperweight shaped like a chimpanzee, monogrammed stationery, sugar plums at Boissier.
The Grand-Hôtel’s hydraulic lift: how delighted Salvador was at first to ride it up and down. So noisy, so confining. It made her feel like a pea in aspic.
Back in her room, she changes clothes for the third time. Then she goes out for gloves to match the dress with bachlik fichu she’s having made by Worth. “Bonjour, Madame de Iturbide.” The clerk slides out trays of merchandise, one after the other, and another, and Alicia yearns to ask, not Would you have this in a darker hue? but Can you not see the axe in my chest? Where is God’s mercy, that no one will pull it out by the handle?
On the most simple of errands, Alicia must confront children on every boulevard: bundled into prams, holding their nursemaid’s hand, carried on their father’s shoulders, riding by, wee rosy faces, in whatever fiacre. On along and up the Champs-Elysées, she strolls, stopping here and there to peer in at amber bracelets, pictures of Tahiti, Turkish carpets, chinoiseries, but it does not matter where she is, what she is doing, in her mind, over and over, there comes the image, bright as life, of Pepa in the carriage, clutching the baby.
Alicia remembers the last kiss she pressed into her baby’s cheek—so vividly, it seems she can close her eyes, put out her hand, and caress that warm downy skin. Most of all she remembers her baby’s curls; her fingers tousling his curls, and his sweet talcum scent with a soupçon of raisin and roses—her baby’s smell. She would know it with her eyes closed.
It has been for five soul-deadening months that Alicia asks, How could Pepa, who claimed she loved her, have done this to her? Filled her head with princess dreams and lies, conniving lies, obvious now as the stink of a polecat! Alicia hates Maximilian and Carlota, but the one who brings the bile to her throat is Pepa.
Pepa promised: “I shall write to you every single day.”
But in Veracruz there was nothing, in La Havana there was nothing, nothing in New York, nothing in Washington, or London, in Saint Nazaire, or now in Paris—in Paris since late November—not one blessed word.
All Alicia has of her baby is a lock of his hair and his photograph, taken the day of his christening: he was then a bald-headed little man, just able to sit up. Much as she cherishes this picture and has, a hundred times, wept over it, this is not who he is now. April 2, the day after Easter, will be his third birthday. What does he look like now? Fruitlessly, she has searched the shops of Paris for his carte de visite—she has found one of Crown Prince Rudolph, the Prince of Wales, Prince Chulalongkorn of Siam, General Bazaine, John Wilkes Booth, that of every silly little actress and opera singer and poodle-trainer.
Oh, what have they done with his curls? What words, what songs has he learned to sing? Does he have his toy bunny, his blocks, his blue ball? She trembles for his safety. The Child of France has had measles. To stanch the rumors that he was on his deathbed, they sent him out for a drive before he was fully recovered, he relapsed—and nearly died, so the more scandalous newspapers say. And that eight-year-old dauphin whose parents were beheaded in the Place de la Révolution? Agustín Gerónimo said, “No worries, sister, the dauphin escaped.” Out of the many stories, the one he judged most likely was that the dauphin was residing incognito in a London suburb. If alive today, the dauphin would be an old man some eighty years old. But their Paris guidebook says that no, the fairy stories are not true; the pretenders are every one of them shysters. What really happened was, after his mother, Marie-Antoinette, was taken to the guillotine, the little prince was not locked but bricked into a windowless cell in the Temple Tower. Alone in the dark, in his own filth, he was slowly starved to death. As a souvenir, someone took a knife and cut out his heart. Dr. Evans has told them that last July, Mr. Bigelow’s four-year-old son died of a fever in the brain. Willie Lincoln died in the White House. Heaven is filled with the souls of children. Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Before she realizes what she is doing—at the corner of the rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré—Alicia has tucked her furled umbrella under her other arm, and crossed herself, and kissed the knuckle of her thumb.
Later, after buying five hair ornaments, three lengths of satin ribbon in magenta, mauve, and violet, and more silk hose than three women could wear out in a year, as she sits by herself eating a pistachio ice cream in the dining room of the Grand-Hôtel (a hall so out of scale—the adverts claim it can seat eight hundred—that it always, even with as many as two hundred people, feels empty), Alicia remembers that she has not yet decided what to give up for Lent. It goes without saying, meat is off the menu. Angelo is giving up his evening glass of Madeira. Agustín Gerónimo had first thought of giving up his pipe but then decided that, instead, he would sacrifice butter on his rolls.
“And croissants?” Angelo had asked.
“What?”
“Brother, they’ve a lot of butter.”
Agustín Gerónimo had coughed. “Can’t see it, doesn’t count.”
They argue about the daftest things. For his gout Angelo soaks his feet in a bath of
salt, ammonia, and camphor.
“That’s not enough camphor,” Agustín Gerónimo said.
“There’s plenty.”
“Ya hafta be able to smell it a mile away.”
“You can smell it in the hallway.”
“Well, you can.”
“That’s right, I can.”
They had spent last evening in Agustín Cosme’s tavern; both had sick headaches this morning. Angelo has this boy’s book of nautical yarns he sometimes takes out, a smelly old leather-bound thing their father gave him; it’s falling to pieces. Every once in a while, Agustín Gerónimo lets him read it aloud, but that usually ends badly, because at the worst possible moment, Agustín Gerónimo makes a loud guffaw.
Alicia scrapes the spoon along the bottom of the dish and she remembers: she used to give her baby tastes of fruit ices. The nieve de limón was his favorite. The ice was carted down from Iztaccíhuatl. At the piano, she would hold him on her lap and let him bang at the keys. They sang the alphabet song and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” When they went for a ride, in the coziness of their buggy, she would throw her shawl over his curls and bump noses and sing-song, We’re snug as two bugs in a rug!
When Angelo came home at midday, he would grab the baby, toss him up in the air, saying in English, “Hi baby, high to the sky!”
“High!” Agustín would say.
“You want to go high again?”
“No.” He would shake his curls.
“You want Papa to set you down?”
“No!”
“Well, little man, I shall have to swing you in the Big Clock!” The baby’s shoe clipped the vase, which broke, splashing over the carpet.
“How you spoil him,” Alicia said, and Angelo laughed at her. He said, “Who talks?”
Soon Atín, as he called himself, was learning to walk. Mother and baby had a game: he would crawl under her hoop skirt and then cling to her leg as she walked. ¿Dánde está mi Agustinito? Where is my Agustinito? Lupe would play along, scurrying up and down, knocking on cupboards and doors, crying out in her tiny tremulous voice, “Agustín, chiquitín, is he hiding here? Bless me, where could he be, my little heart?”
There was Lupe bringing him to her after his bath, his hair wild from the towel, his skin satiny with talcum . . . The angel’s breath weight of his arms around her neck . . . In his bedroom there was a drum-shaped table, and on the little featherbed in his crib, a calico quilt his grandmother had made for him. The way slats of sunlight came in through the shutters, filling the ceiling with a melon-like glow. The plank floors of heart-of-pine. On that drum-table, there was a silver rattle that had been a gift from Doña Juliana, and a silver cup, just big enough to hold a quail’s egg, from General and Madame Almonte.
It is safer to think about ice cream. This pistachio ice cream is delicious: she licks the little spoon clean.
As penance, she could give up ice cream, she thinks. But she won’t. She waves for the waiter, the handsome one, his apron fresh from the laundry and tied tightly around his hips. Carrying a tray of beignets aux pommes, he glides right by. How provoking! She is provoked by many things, among them, that she has been dining here nearly every day for more than two months and the staff have yet to address her by her title.
To another waiter, she calls out, “Garçon!” And when that achieves no effect (the waiter continues to the back counter, where he begins filling a salt cellar), she waves her hand above her head at yet another, as if, so it seems to the matron at the next table, to a chum at a country fair.
“Dieser Amerikaner! These Americans!” the matron mutters to her husband, who goes on with his soupe à l’oignon. After two more spoonfuls of the over-salted broth (markedly inferior to the Zwiebelsuppe he had at home last week), the Prussian count dabs at his mustache. With the ease of the most magnificent stag in the forest, he lifts his gray head. His baleful gaze roves over the mostly empty dining room until it settles upon the extraordinary but morose-looking creature at the next table. He remembers her; he had seen her dining with, presumably, her husband, last night. They were speaking English but he did not take them for English. In fact, he wondered whether this pair might not be the worshipers of the molten calf that his acquaintance, Dr. Evans, had spoken of at the dinner at the Prussian embassy. It appeared that this couple—the prince a Mexican, the princess a highborn American (if such a thing be conceivable)—had, in exchange for pensions and honors, handed over their son to Maximilian von Habsburg. The mother regretted it at once; their object in coming to Paris was to secure the return of their infant. Dr. Evans, as he has the ear of Louis Napoleon, was brought onboard this scheme by the American minister. Being a Prussian, this count has a low estimation of Maximilian von Habsburg. As a matter of principle, he has a low estimation of all things Austrian. Vienna, to this Berliner, is the epitome of laxity, immorality, and decadence. He also has a low estimation of anything connected with the primitive. Mexico, in a word, is primitive; he has zero interest in learning anything about it. Furthermore, he has a low estimation of Dr. Evans, a man of obscure birth, elevated to distinction by his friendship with a personage far above his station who, as a consequence, has a cloying sense of his own importance. A tooth-puller in the court of France! Dr. Evans is a messenger at best; a useful gossip, and one would do best to steer well clear of such company on a brief sojourn. He has come to Paris to put a stop to his wife’s nagging. She insists on seeing the sights now, in this ridiculous season, because the situation between France and Prussia is a tinderbox awaiting a spark. It is not Berlin that will go down in flames.
“Garçon!” Madame de Iturbide has flagged her man. Petulantly, she pushes her empty dish to the corner of the tablecloth. “I want another.”
“Oui, madam.”
She fixes the imperturbable waiter with a pout: “Tell the chef, I won’t have a doll’s portion.”
“With or without whipped cream?”
Alicia answers in a voice that contains the Apocalypse: “With.”
March 1, 1866
BASKET OF CRABS
A leader must see things not as he would wish them to be, but as they are. General François-Achille Bazaine, supreme commander of the French Imperial Forces in Mexico, is no novel reader. He remembers once, years ago, being told about a novel that was fashionable with intellectuals and other pointlessly affected people, which described, over the course of hundreds of pages, a whore’s fall from one of the towers of Notre Dame. How the pins in her hair came loose one by one, her gown went thus-way, and on and on in the most convoluted and microscopic detail. He had permitted his first wife, Marie, to read him a few pages of the opening chapter. He would have traded those ten minutes for an hour of torture. “Basta!” he said, and he stood up, took the book from her hands, and threw it in the fire. “You are going to foul your mind with this trash.” She slapped him. He was young then and arrogant. Had he known better, a lot of things might have been different with Marie. Perhaps she would be alive today. He is alive because of her, that is the irony. Fifteen years in the sands of Algeria, in France, the battlefields of Solferino, the Crimea, over the ocean to Mexico, and all through the long lonely year of the siege for the city of Puebla, it was her love that had been his talisman—and then, when he called for her, to learn she had died in Paris, in the arms of her lover, an actor! The shock of it, a bayonet to the solar plexus.
Bazaine had survived it, but with a new understanding of how, when one surrenders one’s heart, grievously one can be wounded. And how much more vulnerable one is when one has a child. His Mexican wife, Pepita, is expecting his first child. His love for his little family frightens him as nothing has frightened him before. Not that Pepita would love another, he has too much dogged courage for that class of fear. It’s this: he must protect his family, but the Mexican Empire is that whore, falling. Because of Maximilian’s airy-fairy extravagances, the experiment has failed. Should Maximilian hesitate much more before he abdicates, short of a miracle, there is only one way this wi
ll end: in a blood-soaked heap.
The army maxim: never reinforce failure.
The last contingent of the French troops is scheduled to evacuate from Veracruz, in a mere year and six months, in October 1867—and possibly, as it would be, in Bazaine’s view, advisable, the schedule may be accelerated. Once the French are gone, there will be reprisals. Pepita’s family’s property may be confiscated, her aunt Doña Juliana—God knows. Until then, it will be a grinding, heavy-hearted wait. As supreme commander, Bazaine as a point of honor will be Last Man Out, that is, the last French soldier to lift his boot from Mexican soil.
Would Pepita’s family have permitted the marriage had they known it would turn into this? A question, to Bazaine, as useless as dropping a bucket down a dry well.
Yes, some had thought him ridiculous for courting a sixteen-year-old. In Algeria some had thought him ridiculous for courting Marie—then known as the Señorita María Soledad Tormo, barely out of childhood and the most alluring flamenco artist in the colony. A rose tucked behind one ear, she would tip her head back to blow smoke rings, a series of them, ha, ha, ha. When she was not dancing with her castanets, her beautifully shaped arms jangled with bangles; when she slipped out of a room, her orange-blossom perfume—concocted by witches in the souk—lingered, intoxicating. His commanding officer had warned him, “With marriage to such a person, you are throwing away your future.” But Bazaine was then in his thirties. His father had abandoned his mother. His social connections were few, and he lacked the polish, and, as he imagined, the proclivity to the ass-kissing necessary to secure the ones that could yield results.
Out in western Algeria, who else would have this battle-scarred legionnaire? He didn’t give a rat’s pecker what some stuffed shirt had to say about his personal decisions. Bazaine trusted his gut—in this matter of love, as on the battlefield. And consider his brother officers’ wives: thick-waisted, doughy-faced prudes and gossips. Naturally, they were envious of the youthful and vivacious Señorita Tormo; naturally the men were jealous. Time and again, Bazaine had proved himself—but for having come out of an elite school, they imagined themselves superior. As he used to say to his Marie, They know how to use an oyster fork, so they think that gives them the right to stab us in the back with it.
