Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  11

  General Escobedo now awoke him, speaking exactly the right words of valor and chivalry, so that his heart was comforted; and for a moment more they reminisced, as if they had campaigned side by side, instead of fighting one against the other. Both had experienced San Blas’s red gnats, whose sting induces days of blindness; and both had been many times bemused by the vultures in Veracruz’s sandy streets. The Emperor shook the general’s hand. He heard Fray Soria murmuring in Miramón’s cell. Presently he knelt before the crucifix, and prayed again for his mother, Charlotte, his brother and himself. The reek of cigarillo smoke increased in the corridor. He heard more footsteps than usual echoing downstairs. The last time he had ever seen her, Charlotte’s lovely white oval face had been framed by the dark reboso as she gazed out scared and stiff. Thank goodness she was at peace! He prayed for Concepción and her baby. He prayed for Juárez. He wondered whether he ought to pray for the people of Mexico. He washed his face. As he was dressing he heard one of the colonels spitting on the floor. In good time the first cock crowed, and he rose, ready for a sunrise which would resemble oil paint on a cheap sheet of tin.

  12

  He made a good end, of course. Blond-bearded, he comforted his weeping confessor, Fray Soria, while the sombrero’d guards stood waiting at the door of his cell. The sun ascended, ready to drink his blood. Against his will he remembered the gleam of Bazaine’s head and that daily homily: Your Majesty, you fail to understand that Mexico is not Algeria.— In the streets, Mexicanas stood smoking cigarillos and watched him being led out. The smell of tortillas reminded him that he had received no breakfast. He found himself peering around for Dominga, that interesting damsel with her bag of fine-cut tobacco, but she was nowhere in evidence. An old woman spat at his feet. His escort indicated the cart in which he was to ride. The colonel inquired whether he had any complaints.— The Emperor told him: Never complain, for it is a sign of weakness.

  When they stood him against the wall there on the Hill of Bells, picking their teeth and wiping their foreheads, so inferior to his own troops, who had sparkled in their new caps and uniforms as they formed ranks in hope of immortality, neither he nor the spectators blinked. After all, they were people for whom it was nothing to see a gaunt white corpse strewn with bullet-wounds as if with roses.

  He wondered what would become of his two thousand nightingales.

  They shot him first. According to some accounts, his last words were: Vive Mexico! Next went jadehearted Miramón, then Mejía, who was so weak from typhus that he could barely stand. Both of them shouted: God bless the Emperor!

  As for the Empress, she outlived the spidery cactus behind the half-wrecked wall of long adobe bricks where the three were executed. (Pitying romantics erected a shrine there in 1901.) Peering out the window of her madhouse palace, she glimpsed World War I and said: One sees red. One supposes there is something going on because one is not gay. The frontier is black, very black.— Before she knew it, she was old, fumbling and weeping.

  Why did she suffer so long? This question finds a Mexican answer. When we choose a young man to incarnate Tezcatlipoca, the obsidian-mirrored god of kingliness, we kill him after a year of every good thing, so that our other young men will remain strong.— And in the month of Ochpaniztli falls the feast for Teteoinan, goddess of the ripe corn. Because weeping causes rain, which would be harmful at this season, we clothe her incarnator in gorgeous stuffs and lead her to believe that she will soon be brought into a great man’s bed, so that she laughs for pleasure and pride. Presently we mount her on another woman’s back. Then we decapitate her at once, and flay her, after which an outstanding man puts on her skin. This is what happened first to Maria Amalia and later to Concepción; for both got carried off young.—* But when a woman is chosen to be Ilamatecuhtli, the Old Princess, we must not permit her to be happy; for this is in Tititl, the seventeenth month, when we languish for rain. Only tears will bring that. So before we kill her, she must weep and weep, while she dances alone.

  When he had lain in doubt as to whether or not to accept the Mexican crown, she told him: Well, you have your butterflies. For my part, Max, I prefer a full and active life, with duties and responsibilities—and even difficulties if you will—to an idle existence spent in contemplating the sea from the top of a rock until the age of seventy.— But the rain which is our life required more of her than that; not until her eighty-seventh year could she escape. They say she died surrounded by the wide-eyed flabby smiles of ever so many amateurishly painted votive images.

  THE CEMETERY OF THE WORLD

  Woe is me, Llorona!

  Llorona, whether yes or no;

  the light which illumines me (oh, Llorona!)

  leaves me in darkness at the end.

  Mexican folk song

  1

  Veracruz used to be called the cemetery of the world on account of the plagues within its unsanitary walls. The following tale, whose heroine is even older than faded epaulettes, muted ribbons and those enameled decorations whose rows of narrow colored rectangles have long since been dusted down into pastels, may excite your doubt; but its setting’s pestilential virulence shines undeniable through the centuries, like the humid sunlight of that coast. The victims failed almost infallibly, first swelling until their rings cut deep into their fingers and their faces bulged with pus, so that at the moment of decease they often wore the fleshy-lipped grimace of an Olmec head. Three chroniclers date the worst outbreak of the disease to 1646, when the city refashioned its slaughterhouse into lodging for infantry companies. In sternly understated accents, a certain Fray Domínguez reasons out the effects of that miasma, contained within greasy dungstained walls and concentrated by tropic swelter, upon demoralized, unhygienic conscripts whose main diversion was drunken congress with the harlots of the port. But in the most ancient volume of the Archives of the Ayuntamiento de Veracruz, a ledger whose pages have broken loose from their grimy leather shell and whose inner knotted cords lie exposed, an unknown official not long after 1608 offered the proposition, unlike the apparent arguments which are lately proffered so commonly, that because the city (founded in 1519 by Cortés himself, who called it Villarica de la Veracruz, or Bera Cruz), occupied the site of the indigenous town of Quiahuyiztlaín, which the conquistadors had so brutally erased, a curse exhaled itself undyingly from the bloody soil. And in confirmation of the same I do here avow and swear upon my faith that in the hour after Vespers the figure of a veiled woman hath oftimes been seen, who upon unwrapping her face, which is said to be that of a low caste Indian or mestiza, breathes forth her diseased breath, whereupon people rapidly sicken, excepting only some scant few persons whom God hath spared, in order that they might make known to us these facts. Her dress is green, like unto a serpent’s hue, and she has been known to . . . in her left hand. For which reason . . . the jade fever. And then much writing is missing, thanks to layer upon layer of wormtracks which long ago riddled these pages into cunning paper cutouts of ice-floes and islands; following which a different hand informs us: It may be recorded that on the twenty-fifth of last January the Civil Fiscal consulted me as follows . . .—a round seal enclosing a crown upon a quartered circle. I myself give any curse small credit, since in 1599 Veracruz was relocated a trifle east of Villarica, and the plagues continued. At any rate, herewith:

  2

  Once upon a time, a plague ship came sailing home, with a cargo of munitions, chains, armor and icons for the Duque of Albuquerque, and all on board were either sick or dead, excepting only one. It was mid-morning, the winter sea a chalky bluish-grey, the warm clouds a trifle darker shade of that same hue; and the helmsman, whose name was Miguel Minjárez, began to hope that the Virgin had heard his prayers, and would continue to hold her hand over his head. But as they approached the harbor, dodging the familiar sandy isles, jade fever settled also on him, and the long piers seemed to pulse; Veracruz was welcoming him, rhythmically opening her arms like a w
oman measuring lengths of thread. Her palm trees bent toward him; her waters sparkled mockingly over the ribs of wrecked ships. Just as when a young woman’s hair has been so tightly bobbed away from the back of her neck that along the borderline between flesh and hair each strand glows against the skin like a lacquered shadow, while the tiny hairs on her arms shine white in the sun, so the edges of Miguel’s eyelashes seemed to illuminate the great woman who gathered him in: Veracruz, our Sweet Lady of Contagion; Veracruz, who smothers her lovers, breathing on them ever so adoringly with her green and filthy mouth. He wanted her now, and would do anything to come to her, but not yet here like those barnacled skeletons on either side; he preferred to sink into the ground. Death inflamed the corners of his vision, like the red-leaved almond trees of Veracruz. On the ramparts of San Juan de Ulúa, which ordinarily bristled with as many silhouetted sentries as a centipede’s legs, he glimpsed but a single soldier, sitting with his head in his hands. A black cloud of vultures overhung that island. Miguel steered away. As the city walls rose up ahead, he grew weaker; his way became as steep as the steps of a Totonacan pyramid. He prayed: Help me to kiss you, Lady Veracruz!— Remembering to overlay the tower of the Church of San Francisco upon the cathedral tower, no matter how they both contracted and swelled, he kept on course, sweating and nauseous, and so presently brought the vessel safely to anchor.

  3

  Pestilence must have outraced them to the port, or else the Indians had risen up again; because neither inspector nor guard arrived. The Isabela, lately in from a slave-and-sugar voyage, swung in her chains like a derelict. Both infantry companies were gone. Freeing the anchor, whose chains rushed down like the guts of a belly-slit heretic, Miguel cast rope-loops over the wharfposts and drew them tight. Then he passed ashore, into the power of the lady whom he loved. He would have summoned help for his comrades, even from the Marqués del Valle, who rarely forgave the disturbers of his leisure; but even that lord had departed from his tower, along with both sentries. The barracks was silent, the door ajar, and on the threshold lay the ripe green cadaver of an officer in his wheel-breasted armor, with vultures eating him. Miguel in his loneliness, confusion and fear commenced to pray to Our Lady of Remedies; but now his fever flared up irresistibly. In Veracruz, fathers wrap their baby daughters tight when the wind blows warm instead of hot; and so the roasting, steaming sensations which enwrapped Miguel were not utterly unpleasant; indeed, they seemed better known to him than the nearest islands, as if he might be going home. So he tottered dizzily across the zócalo where a few years since a temple’s stone arms had comforted the sacrificed, while today María Elena the pretty banana vendeuse who used to flirt with him was lying on her back with her arms outspread, dark fluid staining her swollen face and ants busy in her hair; the vultures rose off her as he neared; and he went on seeking the lady he loved: Veracruz, whose bosom was as lovely as the cemetery hill in Cempoala from which one can see the ocean, and whose eyes were as gentle as the wormholes shining like silver ice-crusts through the fine conservation paper in the Archives of the Ayuntamiento de Veracruz. Sickness fouled his liver, cramping it up tight against his ribs. Obediently he opened his mouth and vomited.

  Veracruz was wearing a greenish-blue cloak and a translucent veil. Smiling at him over her shoulder, she beckoned with her little finger. Miguel followed joyously. She led him into the doorway of a house on the street now called Avenida Nicolás Bravo, and if you wish I had furnished more complete explanations, please blame the silvery wormtrails between those twinned layers of translucent conservation paper, whose texture is as fine as a finger-whorl’s, because otherwise we would not have been robbed of what might have been the most significant trailings of brownish ink, written in those intuitive horizontals, with wide margins of the conservation paper on either side, the verso showing through like an inverted ghost; and on every page a spring coil of ink, which must be the verifier’s mark. Sometimes marginalia tantalize our researches in smaller but still neat characters.

  4

  From caja twelve, volume twelve, bound in acidic cardboard by some impoverished or benighted twentieth-century functionary, and accordingly embrittled, I now extract the eighteenth-century story of the deformed boy Jesús Sánchez, who, in despair because he could not find a girl to love him, somehow escaped his parents (who kept him chained to a mango tree, in order to protect him from the consequences of his own hideous appearance), shambled out of ken, and in three days, thanks to the kind offices of vultures and rats, was found naked in an abandoned establishment on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, the parts of him which had not been eaten being fruited with green pustules of the bigness of those galls on oak trees, from which ink is made, for which reason, with the concurrence of those who deserved to be consulted, and appropriate disregard for all others, the authorities thought best to burn the house; accordingly, as testified in neat script faded to orange, overlaying a jagged grey pillar of nineteenth-century water damage, the aforesaid cleansing was carried out, and the corpse buried decently in the cemetery—an unpleasant task even for quadroons, since its semiskeletonized arms remained outstretched as if to embrace the invisible. Between wormholes the following words taunt our researches: of jade in his mouth, which the prudent Fathers . . . Whatever these may have signified, within the next week two dozen families in the vicinity of the cathedral showed signs of yellow fever, which was duly cured with exorcism, prayer, but not before most of them had died. And if you disbelieve any of this, I refer you to that concluding guarantee of veracity: Escrito por la parte de la Policía.

  5

  Just before the Spaniards withdrew from Mexico, much the same befell a certain hacendado with gold and silver embroidery on his felted hat, whose double rows of silver buttons on his black jacket had not been able to buy true affection, and who was robbed of nothing after death, not even the silver spurs on his feet.

  And two months after the French landed at Veracruz, two of Maximilian’s soldiers disappeared, and because the plague city showed her occupiers such a sullen face, the French contra-guerrillero expert Dupin felt at first inclined to carry out some exemplary hangings, but then the missing were found, one in a dilapidated house on Callejón California and the other, of course, in that ruin on Avenida Nicolás Bravo. Dupin suspected that they had been decoyed by prostitutes to be strangled by robbers, but he could not explain the apple-green ovoids of polished jade in their mouths. The insurgents he hunted would never have been so obscure. Moreover, it came to light that the dead men’s valuables were in the possession of the very Mexicans who had discovered and reported them. They had pilfered the corpses, yes, but they were innocent of worse acts. Dupin contented himself with terrifying the relevant families. Then he set out on more consequential business, raiding deeper into the fever country.

  By now the ledgers of the Ayuntamiento were scarcely being kept up, while newspapers remained rudimentary except in Mexico City; so how often such murders (if such they were) took place cannot be known, and perhaps the censors passed them over in any event. The wavy hunks of decaying paper, with their faint smell of mildew, the stencilled wormtracks and the dark brown letters offset in orange mirror-writing, or sometimes corroding themselves through like stencils, do present themselves most picturesquely, and nobody with any claim to aesthetic sense can be unimpressed by the way that numerously lovely wormtracks at the top of some snow-white sheet make it resemble wedding lace. But what facts can be discovered? The researcher might just as well be driving across the freeway bridge and along the petrol-perfumed double highway, which is lined with grubby white-limed trees and wanders drearily past fences and concrete walls.