Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  3

  As might have been expected, at dusk on the eighteenth he saw small hope of sleeping. This displeased him, for he wished to meet his executioners with that calm and decisive courtesy which demands a certain cast of face; it should not be said of the Emperor of Mexico that he appeared hollow-eyed at the end. In fact he had been unhealthy for years, but the valets who shaved and dressed this man had preserved him from his mirror-image. Like many of us, he believed himself somewhat younger than he was. His narrow pink face, whose eyelids were a trifle sleepy and whose chin hung too close beneath the mouth, had been widened by blond side-whiskers, and the matching beard extended his chin to normal length. Thus Maximilian at thirty; and if in truth he was closer to thirty-five, he remained as facile as ever on a horse, and nearly as attractive to women. He retained the confidence of a fresh and handsome man. It was this that he aspired to keep until the end. Insomnia could never undermine his dignity, but two or three hours of repose would increase the luster with which he smiled upon the executioners.

  If the word “noblehearted” brings a smile to any reader nowadays, so much the better, for Maximilian possessed precisely this old-fashioned quality, which was precious in its time, no matter that disuse has rendered it ludicrous. Turning over his feelings, he found, as he would have expected, no anger toward the seven soldiers who would shoot him, and he thanked God for that. Tomorrow he would forgive them, ask forgiveness in return and bestow a gold ounce on each man. As for the two who must die at his side, he compassionated them more than himself. That afternoon he had penned a telegram to his triumphant enemy Juárez, requesting that they be spared; let their punishment be upon him alone. No answer came. Well, so it must be. He was never to know that the kind and loyal Mejía could have saved himself, but chose his Emperor over his own desperate wife, who next morning would pursue the carriage, screaming and raising up her baby, until the soldiers thrust her down with their bayonets. Another thing he never learned, thanks to his abstention from the trial, was that two years ago Miramón had proposed to come over to Juárez. At any rate, on that eighteenth of June all three were good friends.— Although she had tearfully entreated his life at the knees of Juárez, who in his usual colorless way replied that he could do nothing for her, Miramón’s wife was more composed than Mejía’s; indeed, her resolution had brought the Emperor to tears a day or two before. Miramón must have been moved in his own way, for, kissing her hand, he remarked: I am here because I would not listen to this woman’s advice, to which Maximilian bitterly replied: Feel no remorse; I am here because I did listen to my wife.

  Yes, he sorrowed for them, but they would pull through; and of course he believed so deeply in that other antique thing called “renown” that the prospect of monuments comprised the supreme consolation; it would hardly have occurred to the Emperor that they might feel differently.

  He had prepared his will, although one of the witnesses’ signatures was lacking. Doctor Basch was to convey his rosary and wedding ring to the adoring mother who had advised him to stick it out in Mexico, and his gold medal from the Empress Eugénie to the old Empress of Brazil, the mother of his truest love. His corpse would be embalmed, so that his mother could see it.

  For his mother he felt extremely sorry. Of course she would manage to rule herself. As for Carlota (whom he still called Charlotte), he would have dreaded the prospect of somebody’s bringing sad news within the ken of her wide yet small eyes, for ever since Napoleon and the Pope had declined her personal entreaties to maintain the Empire, insanity infested her peculiarly flat-topped head, and her long white hands sometimes tore at the air. Fortunately, Maximilian imagined her to be at peace; for Mejía comforted him with the fable that she had died at Miramar.

  Sitting on the camp bed, he stared wearily at the ivory crucifix, which offered so little and so much, until his eyes closed for an instant. In the adjacent cell, Miramón was coughing, while the moon rose, and Austrian warships waited uselessly at Veracruz. It was half-past eight-o’-clock.

  4

  He had thought himself to be past bitterness, but presently, like mosquitoes singing round his head, bad memories rose up: the trial’s thirteen indictments, each an insult; the horribly gentle eyes of Fray Soria, who had accompanied the lawyers when they brought the verdict to his cell, while in the corridor the eavesdropping general and three colonels held their gloating breaths; and then Curtopassi, having weighed fidelity against expediency, coolly scissoring away his signature from that compromising bill of change through which the three of them had hoped to purchase their escape (Mejía jaguar-eyed as he thrust a single curse between the departing coward’s shoulderblades); Charlotte’s humiliated whispers to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who, so her women had pityingly assured her, could fructify any womb, should the heart but truly believe; and Charlotte pulling out her first grey hair, and Charlotte with her head down on her writing-desk (which once had belonged Marie Antoinette), silently weeping for hatred of Miramar; and the first time she withdrew her hand from his to walk alone at Chapultepec; and Fray Soria’s clumsy attempt to comfort him there in the chapel below the cells, directing him to that absurd votive scene, painted as if by a young child, with the caption On the 7th day of July in 1864, I, Ambrosio Alonso, having been captured and held as a guerrilla, was led out of jail to be killed although nothing had been completely proved against me, so I called upon the Lord of Wonders, who granted me this favor, so they released me, and I have commissioned this retablo,* giving thanks for the miracle—good God, their literalist idols! These people were all primitives, as even Mejía continued to prove in his sad thirst for images of the Holy Child of Atocha, who, so it is said, used to slip between the bars of Moorish prisons to bring inexhaustible supplies of bread and water to Christian captives, and now sometimes liberated the oppressed; well, it might be so, and in any case religion must never be mocked. Fray Soria brought him another retablo to handle. It was childishly done, of course. But for the benefit of self-discipline he pretended to admire this likeness of the roundfaced, smallmouthed, smiling Child. Sunshine glowed around the tiny sombrero which floated on His reddish-brown curls as if upon the water; white ruffles encircled His throat and the plump baby-hands which peeked from the sleeves of His crimson robe. One hand held the basket of loaves which resembled flowers, and the other a water-gourd on a stick, as He sat on his diminutive throne, old and young, sweet and knowing and unapproachable, more patient than ingratiating. I petitioned the Holy Child, and . . . The Emperor turned over the tin sheet, and in the matte darkness of the japanned iron saw his reflection as if in black water. Back came bad memories: his myriad brave soldiers who had been compelled to feed the earth with their own bloody hearts, Marshal Bazaine’s perpetual yet ever-altering machinations, now recapitulated, ever since Bazaine together with his troops had abandoned the Empire, by the bustling night-vermin on that crusted bandage around Miramón’s temples; not to mention the hangdog conferences, which all participants knew to be useless, regarding the interest, never mind the fiendish principal, on those infamous Jecker bonds (for which, to tell the truth, Miramón was to blame), Bazaine’s bald head gleaming still more hatefully than his smile when he said: Unfortunately, Your Majesty, you must meet your obligations to France!—and the antlike, inimical, invincible vitality of Juárez, whom he had once thought to welcome into his cabinet (never mind the fact that in every respect he resembled a servant), and whose orders had put to death a hundred captured Legionnaires at San Jacinto; the sadistic self-importance of the unshaven mestizo general and the three ragged colonels now sitting outside his cell, and none of their pistols clean; and that evening at Puebla on Charlotte’s twenty-fifth birthday, when their well-meaning host, an elderly hidalgo who had served Emperor Iturbide, thought to put Their Majesties in one bedroom, and the nearly imperceptible twitching at the corners of Charlotte’s mouth when the valet commenced to set matters right; the deciphered telegram with the word APPOMATTOX (had Lee defeated Grant, the Unit
ed States could never have rescued Juárez), followed in due time by that letter on the familiar stationery of Louis Napoleon, who had lured him into this adventure, and promised never to abandon him, explaining that in France it was no longer permissible to be mistaken; the embarrassing vulgarities of that former Texas circus-dancer Princess Salm-Salm, who had just now tried to save him by offering herself to Colonel Palacio Villanueva; that vile farewell kiss from his brother, who had smoothly encouraged him to fall in with Napoleon’s designs, then, when it was too late to withdraw without loss of honor, compelled him to renounce his Austrian claims; the treachery of López, who had received so many preferments at his hands; the moment when he understood from an indiscretion of the physician that Charlotte had gone mad in Rome; the silence that long ago morning in their stateroom on the S.S. Elisabeth (in those years they still slept together) when Charlotte realized that he had lost interest in her seasickness, and her dull gaze when he packed her off to Madeira, while he continued on to Brazil, counting her tears through an ivory telescope, listening to her sobs through a curtain at Chapultepec, watching from between the curtains of his palace window as a young woman in a dark blue reboso, kneeling on the cobblestones, supported in her lap the naked, bleeding corpse of a boy, probably a son or younger brother, stroking the dead face, gazing steadily up at him, as if she knew he were there; while a semicircle of poor people began to cohere behind her, all of them staring at his window, until a whistle sounded, his French troops leveled their bayonets, and he turned away—and by no means had he forgotten Concha Miramón, freshly married, who kept watching him with gentle dark-eyed hatred, as if he were the reason her husband must die; nor did he decline to recall his first jailer in this place, the cruel peasant whose narrow speckled face resembled a jaguar’s; he had locked Maximilian into the Capuchin crypt, sneering: You must stay here for the night, so that you realize that your end is near.

  5

  But then he smiled a trifle; for his recollected joys now came to comfort him, most of them surely for the last time. Of course he would remember Charlotte again and again, right up to the end, but so very many images of her did he possess that few could return at all, let alone more than once. How pretty she appeared in Lombard dress! He had loved to watch her planting flowers in the Alameda; at first she had been so much happier in Mexico than at Miramar, where he preferred not to remember her. So he flew there all alone, hovering like a fly or miniature ghost over the gold and purple bindings in his library, the busts of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Homer, the quill pen over the four-bezeled folio and the inlays of his writing-desk. If only he could always have been a fly! Smiling, he caressed the two silver candlesticks which Fray Soria had lent him. His guards gave him all the tapers he could burn. Once upon a time, he and Charlotte had lit ever so many candles at Miramar. He used to deck four Christmas trees with gifts for the poor children of Trieste, and watch shyly from the window. The flickering flames reminded him of tropical butterflies. He could almost hear the twitterings of his aviary. Now he remembered how he had stood away from the Mexican deputation there on the parquet floor of Miramar; he would have sent them out and returned to the orange seedlings he was propagating in his glasshouse, had it not been for unhappy Charlotte in her snow-white crinolines, and Charlotte in her yellow silk, with the Order of San Carlos glowing on her breast, descending the ballroom stairs in Mexico, even the Liberals applauding her (Miramón still wore epaulettes and a tapering dark vest embroidered with golden ivywork); Charlotte undoing her hair at Cuernavaca—oh, yes, Cuernavaca, with his orchids and birds, and that rose-grown old house, Charlotte weeping again in Cuernavaca, among the fountains and orange trees, and the door in the garden wall through which glided the gardener’s daughter Concepción, with her long blue-black hair outspread on her naked shoulders, while Charlotte signed decrees for him in Chapultepec. Smiling, Concepción pulled her shift over her head. She opened her arms. He was riding beautiful Mexican horses one after the other; he was commanding the Novara, with Trieste’s lovely pastel edifices beneath summer rain-clouds off to starboard, coming home to Miramar, mooring between stone sphinxes at the landing, where even the Italians cheered him and Charlotte awaited, dressed in white, smiling adoringly, gazing down into the clear green sea. Soon they would be in their separate rooms, gazing down the steep mane of treetops at Miramar. He and she, Their Mexican Majesties, were riding in through the arch to accept the fruits of Mexican gratitude. Her white fingers were curling round his elbow as they descended the staircase, he appropriately overtowering her, she comprising a tiny-headed cone of many skirts. But perhaps he had never been so happy as when he had gone botanizing and insect-collecting in Brazil, wearing a white suit and a green-veiled hat. He remembered the butterflies he had captured there, and the trophy-bulbs and saplings he had collected for his gardens at Miramar. What if he had followed his inclinations then, and trekked forever deeper into the Matto Grosso? Charlotte would have been sad, of course. Besides, the oxhide slave-whips employed upon the blacks were abominable; he had prohibited those in his own Empire. For the last time he was welcomed by his hordes of loyal Indians dressed in white, waving fern-garlands; yes, he abolished peonage throughout the Empire; once more Miramón was decorating him with a bronze medal on behalf of the Mexican Army; the Pope received him; Trieste glowed after a summer rain; Concepción opened her thighs; he became Admiral of the Austrian Navy; and in the rising sun he rode down from Chapultepec in his sombrero and grey charro outfit, and on the edge of the road petitioners were humbly waiting; often some young mother with a child in her arms begged him to spare a son or husband from the firing squad, and he was rarely as joyful as when he could oblige her (Bazaine got furious, of course)—but this memory likewise had some present pain attached to it; before its claws could catch him he fled to that time when he was young and voyaged through King Otto’s Greece; there were slave-wenches exposed for auction in the market at Smyrna; that was the first time he had seen so many undressed females in one place, and realized the unbearable attractiveness, actually quite bearable, of sin (it provided particular pleasure to remember it here, because a well-bred Mexicana hides all but her eyes behind her reboso); then he visited Maria Amalia de Gloria, his first and truest love, who had died of consumption during their engagement; but tomorrow’s rifle-barrels were staring at him, round and shining like a jaguar’s eyes. Quickly he remembered the silent golden clocks with blue enamel numbers, the pretty clocks at Miramar; and again and yet again he remembered Concepción in Cuernavaca, eighteen years old, with the blue-black hair.

  Again he stared miserably at the ivory crucifix, longing to slow down or reverse time, or, if that were impossible, for everything to be over. Whatever agony awaited him in the morning would not, he hoped, last long—although he had heard of cases when the first or second volley failed to kill.

  6

  Mejía had informed him that Juárez would renounce the Jecker bonds. This staggered him. If Juárez could do it, why had he failed to do the same? (The answer: Marshal Bazaine.) Freed of debt-weight, he might have been able to spend a decent fraction of his revenues on the people, and what if they had then come to love him?

  7

  The fear in his belly, which would most likely receive some of their bullets, he defeated with the certainty that however cruel the faces of the firing squad might be, he would regard them as if he were staring into a dark mirror. So he calmed himself. Then, upon the well-bred tranquillity of his courage, there grew a stain, not unlike the image of Christ’s exhausted, bloody face which appeared on Saint Veronica’s veil. It too was a face, but stone, wide-eyed and cruel. He could not say where he had met it before. Presently this apparition likewise faded, allowing him liberty to reconsider the cramp in his belly, which had spread to his chest. He smiled, understanding and accepting that until June nineteenth these feelings would come and go, in much the same way that in the mornings the longtailed crows descend on the zócalo of Veracruz, vanish in the afternoon and
come swooping back at evening.

  He would have liked to stroll in the cloister once more. It lay immediately outside, and they sometimes led him there for exercise. Whenever he entered its garden of orange and lemon trees, he remembered Cuernavaca. At any rate, he preferred to ask nothing of these people.

  The general must have gone to the latrine; his pistol made a special noise whenever he laid it on the table. Two of the colonels were chuckling over something. It must be very dark outside. He wished he could have seen the sunset. At this time of year in Trieste there comes a certain quarter-hour when a long stripe of setting sun reddens the middle of a row of cypresses whose crowns are golden and whose lower trunks silhouette themselves. Not far below, Miramar overlooks the sea. The Emperor remembered this.