The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

by C. M. Mayo

  “Dice,” said the other. He turned back his cuffs, as he did so, passing his violin case from one hand, and then to the other. The lining under the cuffs was hardly regulation: purple silk with a stamped pattern of Chinese dragons.

  Where had he had that done? The admiring cornetist wanted to know.

  “Mademoiselle Louise.”

  As they came around the corner, chickens scattered. A rooster came flying at their boots; the violinist gave that impudent bird a kick—which probably killed it; but neither of the men bothered to look back. They started up the path to their barracks, a crude setup in the barn. Beyond the roof of the hacienda’s chapel shone the persimmon pink hump of the great snowcapped volcano.

  “The Mexican Matterhorn,” said the cornetist.

  “I’ve never seen the Matterhorn,” said the violinist.

  There was a dissatisfaction in their tone. They had not been paid. They had not—yet—seen action. True, for the rest of their lives, they could boast of their exploits in “Amerika,” serving the younger brother of the Kaiser. Still, Mexico had not—yet—matched their expectations, so searingly romantic, nourished on stories of the Conquistadors, and boys’ adventure books, including such exotica as scrappy translations of X. Salvatierra and Fenimore Cooper.

  “You’ve seen Stromboli.”

  “Ja.”

  “And Vesuvius?” (They had come to Mexico on different boats.)

  “Fogged in that day.”

  They did not know if they were going on to Veracruz, and from there, who knew by what route, to Christmas at home or back to Mexico City. Or what. Not knowing, forever waiting, that was the Purgatory of being a soldier.

  When it’s all said and done, said the one—this was years later, the First World War breaking out over their old white heads— you’re a raisin bakedin a cake. After Mexico, they would meet again, by pure happenstance, in Weissbrunn’s daughter’s tavern in Ölmutz. Maximilian’s portrait hung over the mirror that spanned the bar. They raised their steins, “To Max!” They carved their initials and “MEXIKO 1864-1867” into the ancient, almost black wood of their table. They talked of their children. They both had grandchildren who loved to go into the attic and try on their old uniforms, the boots, play with the saber and rust-locked pistols. The one had a granddaughter who’d taken his silver medal for “Merito Militar”— and you know what the naughty monkey did with it? Hung it as a picture in her doll-house! Roars of laughter. And then, after more beers, remembering all the ones who were gone, tears.

  But now, in an hacienda outside of Puebla in the sunset of October 25, 1866, with a brisk and swinging stride, the two young Hussars come through the gate and out onto the road. A church bell clangs. From so far away that the sound is almost like birdcalls, a pack of dogs howl. A star has come out; then two. Now the volcano, soot gray with dusk, is full before them, making any other comment impossible.

  “I want to get up there.”

  “All the way?”

  “The flank.” A soft clicking as the violinist turns the dice in his pocket. “There’s a rare breed of antelope.”

  They could be bivouacked here for a day, for a week, or a month. Everyone has a conjecture, but no one knows. If, on a Sunday, a man went up onto the flank of that heap of rock to bag an antelope, well, it might be his one and only chance!

  A tiny granny, hunched under a load of firewood, scuttles past.

  The cornetist kicks at a loose cobblestone and it rolls, wobblingly, into a thicket of cactus. It is almost too dark to see. Here, by a crumbling adobe wall, they stop and light their cigars.

  BOOK THREE

  pero es cierto que el dolor nos avisa con tiempo su llegada

  but it is true that sorrow announces its arrival beforehand

  —CONCEPCIÓN LOMBARDO DE MIRAMÓN,

  MEMÓRIAS

  AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

  Years blurred by. Fourteen of them having passed, in March 1882, Mr. John Bigelow, retired from diplomatic service and now a gentleman farmer, journalist, and lawyer active in New York civic enterprises, determined to visit the sister republic. He had always been an eclectic traveler, ever-ready to inspect the home of some obscure French philosopher, Alpine hamlets, undertake the rigors of Sicily, even (as part of his research for the cause of abolition) Jamaica and Haiti. Having played a modest role in, as he always claimed, the nonetheless inevitable demise of the Archduke Maximilian’s soi-disant “imperial” government, he was curious to see Veracruz, the pyramids of Cholula, Chapultepec Castle—in short, the sights. Above all, however, his purpose had been to inform the readers of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and therefore himself, about the Mexican railroads, a question of special interest on Wall Street.

  A three-week itinerary having both sated his curiosity and definitively depleted his patience, in Orizaba, Bigelow and his eldest daughter, Grace, boarded the train for the last leg of their journey back to Veracruz. Grace had filled her steamer-trunk with exotic horse-gear (saddle, bridle, stirrups, and a smart, snug-fitting little jacket and matching sombrero). She had found much to amuse her, though she disliked the food, and the pesky beggars, and she thought bullfights, for the way they exposed the horses to being gored, an abomination. Her father, however, had, on the whole formed a less than stellar opinion of Mexico and its prospects. Certain regions had potential, one could not deny it, but the conjectures of such as Baron von Humboldt— whose now decades-old researches had so enthralled Louis Napoleon, poor Maximilian, and now, so many of these latter-day promoters—amounted to nothing but fairy tales. Mexico remained sunk in a mire of banditry and poverty, both the result of pervasive and systematic financial, political, and spiritual corruption. Why, it turned out that even Mexico City’s Protestant bishop was involved in financial shenanigans! As Bigelow confided to his diary: The horse he showed us was not such as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on.

  Forever after, forever after, the clack of the wheels on the track seemed to chant, as the blue-tiled domes of Orizaba and the station’s squad of cavalry grew smaller. A sweet smell was fierce in their nostrils: Bigelow and Grace looked out their windows, through smears of grime: from the foothills of the snowcapped Pico de Orizaba to the meadows yonder, plumes of smoke billowed. This was the season for burning cane. Ahead, where the track curved, hovering above it was a cloud of buzzards and other birds of prey.

  Madame de Iturbide had said, in ten years time, her son would be president.

  In Mexico City, Bigelow and his daughter had met young Don Agustín. A well-mannered cadet in the Colegio Militar, he was tall—remarkably so for a Mexican—and altogether Anglo-Saxon in his complexion. In a portrait, if not for a franker gaze than any Habsburg’s, he might have passed for a younger sibling of Crown Prince Rudolph.

  After her husband’s death, Madame de Iturbide had educated her son in Washington and, for a spell, a Jesuit boys’ college in Belgium. That college, his mother said with quite the sparkle, was not far from the castle where Carlota had been, these many years, locked away. And Carlota, Madame de Iturbide claimed, was not so folle as they made out. On her father’s death she inherited six million dollars; her brother, King Leopold II wanted to prevent her from remarrying, to keep that money for himself.

  So, Grace asked Agustín, had he seen Carlota?

  “No,” Agustín said.

  Bigelow had liked the boy’s frankness. Grace, at twenty-nine, was closer in age than his grandfatherly self. What was her opinion of him?

  Oh, he seemed nice enough.

  Bigelow was very much enjoying his daughter’s company, but there were times, and this had been one of them, when he especially missed his wife’s conversation. Mrs. Bigelow was the wisest, most perceptive little person, articulate and, in private, forthcoming with her unvarnished opinions. But Mrs. Bigelow also had a spiritual side, a deep well of compassion that, he knew, helped temper his sometimes excessive severity. Judge not, that ye be not judged—unlike himself, Mrs. Bigelow did not have to chastise herself in this regard. As
she often said, no matter how you pour it, there are always two sides to a pancake. It had been a sore disappointment for him that, instead of coming with him to Mexico, she had elected to visit some of her connections in England.

  Would Mrs. Bigelow have agreed with him? He had the sense the young Iturbide was doomed. (Are we not all doomed?) An overreaching mother, an improvident country—miscreants, marauders, and kidnappers abounded on every street corner and turn of the highway, if one were to believe the stories—but more than this lay behind his intuition. How not to dwell on days gone by? Louis Napoleon and his only son—that poor child, so tender an age when his father surrendered to the Prussians, the glittering capital sandbagged, starved. In exile, still suffering from stones, the French Caesar ascended to his Maker’s Kingdom from a bed of agony, and infinitely more would his agonies have been had he known what cruel trap Destiny laid for his boy. Three years ago, on a reconnoiter with the British Army in the South African bush, Prince Louis, aged twenty-three, was killed by Zulu spears.

  Methodic in his travels, Bigelow was always avid to make the acquaintance of key players, but it was late in the game when he bethought himself to look up the Iturbides. He’d had some justification, however, not to think of it sooner. The Juárez government, having tried and then condemned Maximilian to death before a firing squad, was hardly likely to have issued passports to the Iturbides. True, a parade of years had gone by. Juárez himself was dead and buried. The “Republic” was now in the firm grip of one of his generals, Don Porfirio Díaz, a Mexican species of Augustus, who, whether in the office of the presidency or behind it, controlled the army and the revenues—and would, in the manner of Machiavelli it appeared, open the gates of Mexico’s Holy of Holies to any class of foreigners so long as they offered gold enough to grease his palm. But Bigelow assumed that, having recovered their boy, the Iturbides would have stayed on in Europe where, as for so many Americans, their dollars stretched to lengths unimaginable at home. He himself had kept his family for several years in Berlin for the benefit of the children’s education.

  In Mexico City, Bigelow’s first foray was to the U.S. legation where he and Grace made the acquaintance of the ambassador, who turned out to be a judge from Louisiana. In his ignorance of the country, its geography, history, politics, and cultural personalities, this individual revealed all the enterprise of a man who, having consumed a mint julep or three, was content to siesta in his hammock.

  Grace had asked the judge about the Mexican ambassador in Washington (she meant Don Matías Romero, a distinguished and very patriotic gentleman mentioned at length in Lester’s Mexican Republic for his exploits on behalf of the republic during the French Intervention). “Is Romero a Spaniard?”

  “No,” the judge said darkly. “He is an Indian.”

  “An Indian? How is that?”

  The judge answered, “His father was a priest and his mother a nigger. If that doesn’t make an Indian, what does?”

  From his recent reading, on the train in, Bigelow realized the judge had confounded Romero with General Almonte.

  On leaving, Bigelow muttered, “Tom Corwin, where are you?”

  “Who is Tom Corwin?” asked Grace, taking her father’s arm.

  “He was our minister to Mexico—and a better man than myself.”

  “Oh, Pa, you’re too modest.”

  Bigelow, feeling the altitude, wanted to rest; Grace wanted to go as far afield as the floating gardens of Xochimilco. They compromised and went to view the Aztec Sun Stone. In a bookstall Grace found a colored map of Mexico prior to the U.S. invasion of 1847. Bigelow was very pleased to spend only four reales for an unblemished copy of the trial of Maximilian. (He was also offered a document from the archives of the Inquisition, but as it appeared to be authentic, he did not trust it had come into this dealer’s hands by blameless methods. Accordingly, he refused it.)

  After his interview with the head of the Casa de Moneda and a director of the Mexican Central Railway, next on the touristic itinerary was the cathedral—a prospect that, though he felt duty bound to see it, in truth held little interest for Bigelow, for it would be, the guidebook assured, entirely Spanish in its aspect, and he had toured so many cathedrals in Europe (most recently, last summer, those of Monreale, Palermo, and Naples). They all piled together in his mind, these excesses of masonry and stained glass, gold enough for herds of Golden Calves, the vividly gruesome images of martyrdom, relics of hair, teeth, finger bones enshrined in silver—so many priest-ridden medievalities—the bells, the smells, the drone of tour guides, and the murmur of their sheep-like charges, all muddled together like voices in dreams. His soul found no repose in such places.

  He would have no priest of Rome come between himself and his Savior!

  To get into the vestibule, they had to run a gamut of whining and importuning beggars, the blind, the crippled, the aged, the leprous, and filthy Indian women suckling infants. Once inside, their guide fell to one knee and made the sign of the cross, a gesture finished with a kiss on the thumb.

  His name was Ignacio Pérez. He wore expensive-looking brogues, but his shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows. He had a thick shock of shiny hair and strong-looking teeth, which made him appear young; his long, beak-like nose and dark, sunken cheeks made him appear old. He might have been twenty-five or fifty-five; it was impossible for Bigelow to tell which.

  “It looks like a jail,” Grace whispered. All along the western wall, one after the other, stretched a chain of cell-like chapels, their treasures, ivoryfaced saints, crucifixes, age-dark paintings, reliquaries, secured behind locked iron bars.

  “Look at this, Pa.”

  “This,” Ignacio Pérez began, “is the chapel of San José de—”

  “No,” Grace interrupted. “I mean these.” She indicated a heap of ribbons and rags and shoestrings, each knotted to a pad-lock—brass locks, iron locks, square, round, big, minuscule. Bigelow counted thirty, forty—

  “By Jove, what a lot of locks,” he exclaimed.

  “These,” Ignacio Pérez said, “are offerings to a very important saint, San Ramón Nonato.”

  Neither Bigelow nor his daughter could recall having heard of said saint. Bigelow took a step backward, to clear the path for a blind couple, the man probing, tap, tap, with what appeared to be a broken-off broom handle, the woman shuffling behind, her hands clamped to his shoulders and her face, wanderingly alive, to the ceiling.

  “You see,” Ignacio Pérez said, “we are near the confessionals? San Ramón Nonato protects us against gossip, rumor, and false testimony.”

  “Interesting,” Bigelow allowed. He strolled on, his hands joined behind his back. Daniel Webster had a theory that, in the long run, the people who fed on milk would dominate the people who fed on oil. Exchange “milk” and “oil” for “Protestantism” and “Catholicism,” Bigelow thought, and there you have it. He believed in tolerance and the separation of church and state, but how far could a country get when its people had all their thinking done for them and they were all taught to obey the dictates of Rome?

  Before the chapel of (so the placard said) San Judas Tadeo, an ancient granny, barefooted and with dirty ankles, was praying, eyes closed, into her clenched hands.

  Grace, having given this individual a wide berth, whispered loudly to their guide, “Is that woman worshiping Judas!”

  Ignacio Pérez smiled wanly. Apparently, he was used to this question. “No, not Judas Iscariot. This is, as you say in English, Saint Jude Thaddeus.”

  “Who?”

  “Grace!” her father said, raising an eyebrow. “You haven’t been reading your Bible.”

  “San Judas Tadeo,” their guide went on, “is the patron of impossible causes. After Our Lady of Guadalupe, some say that San Judas Tadeo is the most beloved by us Mexicans.” He crossed himself for a second time. “I myself was saved from the yellow fever. He has granted many millions of miracles.”

  Bunkum, Bigelow thought. But, it was eerie enough to startle him,
the moment the word “miracles” left their guide’s lips, from somewhere beyond the choir stalls on the other side of the nave, a falsetto, sweet and clear as a crystal bell, began to intone a prayer. Santa Maria, ora pro nobis . . .

  With this beautiful music in their ears, they came to one of the last chapels, that of San Felipe de Jesús, the first Mexican saint, a missionary martyred in Nagasaki, which explained the enormous cage-like pagoda of gold-leafed bamboo set out front of the chapel’s bars. This chapel received little sunlight; had their guide not explained each of the several paintings set into the altar—the mutilation of San Felipe’s ear, San Felipe’s premonition, San Felipe’s crucifixion, the intercession of the Holy Child, and so on— Bigelow would have been able to make neither head nor tail out of them.

  “San Felipe was martyred on February 5, 1597. And you know what, in his family home in Mexico City, on that very day . . .”

  Bigelow and Grace said nothing but waited politely.

  “There was an old dried up fig tree on the patio, and it came back to life and gave fruit.”

  “Hmm,” Bigelow said. He coughed.

  Having finished his story, their guide stepped down, but he did not move on. He was waiting for them to notice something.

  Grace said, “What is that fancy chair in there?”

  Bigelow had not noticed any such thing. He came close, stepped up, grasped the bars, and peered into the gloom. In the far right-hand corner, beneath a red, white, and green flag, there was indeed a golden armchair—a throne—its legs and arms carved to resemble sheaves of wheat.

  “That,” said Ignacio Pérez, “was the throne of the Liberator, Emperor Don Agustín de Iturbide.”

  Bigelow noticed now the plinth, a marble the gray of foie-gras, set into that right-hand wall, and above it, an urn. Above that—one really had to look to see it—was a portrait of the man in profile.

  Mexico’s George Washington, as it were. Iturbide, Bigelow thought, looked rather like Murat, king of Naples.