Mexico

by James A. Michener

  “Whose orders?”

  “Benito Juárez.”

  Don Alipio did not spit at the mention of the hated name, but Clay could see that he clearly wanted to. “Are you from Oaxaca?” and when the colonel nodded, Alipio grunted: “I thought so. They’re really going to shoot the emperor?”

  “The court-martial has condemned him. For the welfare of Mexico.”

  “Must we remain outside the city?”

  “You must.”

  The Palafox expedition thus came to a halt. But the idea that a decent man like the Austrian archduke, who had labored so diligently to ingratiate himself with the Mexican people, should be executed by a gang of Indians from Oaxaca was so offensive that Don Alipio, who felt responsible for Maximilian, having persuaded the young man to accept the imperial crown, suggested to Clay: “Are you willing to slip through the lines as a private citizen with no weapons?”

  “Of course, but for what purpose?”

  “To see what’s happening.”

  “What could we do about whatever we do see?”

  Don Alipio looked at him as if he were an imbecile: “Do! We give a grave man consolation—that we were there in his moment of agony. Come!” The two men, grabbing a handful of tortillas and leaving their big guns behind, left the guarded highway, slipped along the darkened edge of town, watched for pickets and slipped into the sleeping city. Working their way to the central area, they remained inconspicuous until Don Alipio found a way to accost a soldier without arousing suspicion: “Where will it happen?”

  “They say they’re bringing him to that wall.”

  “Are you one of the firing squad?”

  “They never tell us.” Then suspiciously: “Is this one a norteamericano?”

  “Came here after the war up, there. Citizen of Mexico now.”

  “Bad war?” the sentry asked, and when Jubal nodded, the man said: “They’re all bad.”

  They slept that night on the steps of a Querétaro church, and well before dawn they became aware of activity within buildings nearby. A troop of soldiers, perhaps fifty, marched out and took positions around a large square, not the central plaza, and with their rifles parallel to the ground they began pushing anyone who had come to see the execution well back of where the shooting would occur.

  When the sun was up, officials of various types scurried about the plaza exchanging assurances that all was moving ahead as planned, and three times the group with which Don Alipio and Jubal stood was pushed farther back until the don asked a soldier: “Where can we stand without being moved here and there?” and the young man, assessing Alipio as an important figure, took him to a place cordoned off from the general public. There they waited, and when the June sun was high, so many people started running about at once that Don Alipio whispered. “Now.”

  From a nearby barracks a troop of a dozen soldiers, neatly uniformed, marched out with long rifles and took a parade-rest posture facing a wall constructed of big stones fitted together by artistic masons in years past. With the arrival of the firing squad, Jubal realized that an execution was really going to occur, and he asked Don Alipio “Why?” The disheartened man deferred to a nearby newspaperman, who was eager to explain: “The ones who brought the young prince here did a good thing. All the European nations supported the plan, which would bring order to Mexico, but in the United States there was always suspicion. You’re norteamericano, yes?” When Clay nodded, the man said: “Monroe Doctrine, yes? Doesn’t it say no European interference in the New World? Well, when Maximilian arrived, you were too busy with your own war to worry about ours, but once peace came—the North won, didn’t it?” This Clay ignored. “When you had time to look south you saw Europe meddling in Mexican affairs and you said: “This has got to stop!’ and once you said that, all the kings in Europe grew afraid. They stopped supporting Maximilian. Result? That firing squad over there.”

  While the squad waited, some of them white-faced and nervous, people began emerging from what had been the emperor’s prison, and they too took positions facing the wall Finally an officer of some high rank appeared, and he stood close to the file of riflemen. Then came a priest, two soldiers and between them the tall, handsome Austrian whose rule over a nation about which he had known nothing had lasted only three years. Thirty-five years old, he was a striking man who looked imperial—slim, haughty in manner, composed and walking with a steady step and an almost defiant mien. Somewhere in the crowd a voice cried “Long live the emperor,” and Jubal, realizing that Don Alipio wanted to echo it, grasped Palafox sternly by the arm and the older man remained silent.

  An officer, moving the priest aside, offered Maximilian the customary blindfold but it was rejected. Staring straight ahead as if he wished to see the bullets leaping at him, he stood in sunlight and watched the commanding officer raise his sword, cry out the order, then lower his sword as his men fired their dreadful volley. Many of the bullets must have struck the emperor, for he fell instantly, bravely, and without a cry. The ridiculous adventure of Emperor Napoleon III of France and his fellow European monarchs had ended in tragedy.

  As the Palafox group rode back to Toledo, depressed and angry at the way Benito Juárez, Maximilian’s Indian opponent, had handled the affair, Jubal thought, We Americans are as responsible for his death as the Mexicans, but he did not voice this opinion. However, when they camped out the first night and the soldaderas moved in with their dishes, Don Alipio said thoughtfully: “The norteamericanos could have saved him, if they had wanted to. But they had other problems,” and now Jubal could speak: “With men like Grant in control they’ll never be able to do the right thing up there.”

  During the first half year that Jubal worked at the Mineral, he applied himself so diligently to the task of bringing the operation into modern times that he rarely went into Toledo in the evenings. He ordered machinery from Scotland, new devices for smelting ore from Sweden, and practical goods from the new industries in the northern United States. He did the last with repugnance, but had to admit that the prices were too attractive tractive to be ignored. One of his accomplishments that gave him the greatest pleasure, however, was the construction of a neat circular wall twenty-two feet in diameter and four feet high enclosing the upper outlet of the shaft, but with a vast hole in the middle to allow the Indian women to descend into the mine and then to climb up with their baskets of ore. No way had yet been devised for doing this with machinery, but whenever Jubal caught sight of the women being used like pack animals he felt frustrated. “Why can’t the men do that work?” he asked repeatedly and was never satisfied with the answer: “Because in Indian life, time out of mind, women do the hard work like tilling the maize and hauling the ore, while men do the work that requires thinking, like hunting animals, fishing, fighting the enemy and, in the mines, working at the face and chopping out the ore in the proper way.”

  But one fundamental practice at the Mineral he did change. In the old days, it was only after three or four women had fallen to their death because of some faulty stone in the stairs that that step had been repaired. Now with Jubal making the descent and ascent several times each week, and inspecting each step as he climbed, he saw that the problem had two parts: either the riser was too high, making the downward step dangerous, or the tread was too narrow or lacking a corner, making the foot slip off. By correcting these errors before they could imperil the women, he saved lives.

  One day while he was working with the stonecutter, a solitary Indian woman came up the steps and had to pause until the workman finished, and for the first time there in the semidarkness with the great stone-lined hole reaching downward, Jubal spoke with an individual Indian basket carrier. To his surprise she was not reticent, and in response to his interrogations revealed that she was nineteen, born to parents from a village not far from Toledo, baptized by priests in that area and sent by them to the mines as was traditional for young women of that village. She had worked in the shaft climbing up and down with her basket since the age of fo
urteen and expected to continue till thirty-five or a few years longer and then either to return to the village or to take a job in one of the caverns doing the jobs that centered in those spacious areas.

  “Why do you stop at age thirty-five?” Jubal asked, and the young woman had no explanation, but the mason working on the faulty tread interrupted: “Their legs. They can’t climb anymore. Well, they can climb, but not with baskets.” He grinned at the woman and said: “I couldn’t climb them either, with that load of ore,” and when Jubal tested the weight he said: “Me neither.”

  The woman said she had an Indian name, which Jubal did not understand, but also a baptismal name given her by the priest: “They said I was Maria de la Caridad. We’re always María and another name to make sure the Virgin Mother looks after us.” Her name meant Charity, and by popular custom she was known simply as Caridad. As she repeated the name Karee-thath she gave it such a sweet, melodious sound that Jubal looked for the first time at her as another human being, a person like his dead wife, Zephania, who had given her shortened name, Zeph, that same musical lilt, and in that moment of recognition the basket carrier became not a slave sentenced to this life of toil by her Church and her government but an individual person with a character, aspirations and a soul.

  In later conversations with Caridad, Clay learned that her ancestor many generations back had been an important Altomec woman named Lady Gray Eyes, who had destroyed the terrible ancient gods and paved the way for Christianity, but Caridad wondered if the new religion was in any significant way better than the old: “It was the priests who discovered the mine and who dug this hole and put us to work for them.” But when Jubal made inquiries about that, he learned that it was not Antonio, the first Palafox and the priest, who had done these things, but his brother Timoteo, who had been a kind of businessman and the operator of the mine in its earliest stages. And when he asked about this mystical Lady Gray Eyes, the Palafox men said: “No myth there. She was very real, and she did lead her people away from the hideous old gods and to Christianity. She had a beautiful daughter-in-law, Xóchitl, mother of the amazing Indian woman called Stranger. That one married the first Palafox, so all of us dark ones are her descendants; the light-skinned ones come from the brother who married a Spanish lady, and kept doing it—I mean his descendants married Spaniards, too.”

  Why, Jubal wondered, did the Palafox line of Lady Gray Eyes’ children now live in rural palaces while Caridad’s slaved in the mines? Realizing that he lacked enough background to sort out a complicated story, he paid no more attention to it, but something happened in the mine that showed Caridad was an unusual Indian woman and perhaps just as proud as the Palafox men, to whom she was, presumably, distantly related. One day when he was working in one of the deepest caverns where the donkeys were kept, a group of Indian men were trying to fix an intricate network of ropes around a donkey so they could lower it to the newly excavated cavern below. They were having such difficulties with the obstinate beast that the foreman, one Joshua with a big voice, yelled at Caridad, who was nearby: “Don’t just stand there like a fool. Help swing that rope.” When she tried to pass it under the beast’s belly, the donkey kicked, striking not Caridad but Joshua, who responded by knocking Caridad away from the operation and abusing her both physically and verbally. This Jubal could not tolerate, so he moved Caridad aside, told her not to worry, and himself fixed the sling under the animal and helped Joshua lower it to the next level.

  Thus occupied, he did not notice the effect of Joshua’s attack on Caridad, but when he finished the drop he chanced to look at her, and her face was many shades darker than before and she was biting her lower lip so hard that flecks of blood showed. Judging it prudent not to involve himself in Indian problems, he climbed up the stairs that now showed no danger spots, and by the time he was back at the smelter he had dismissed the incident altogether.

  However, a few days later Indian women came to his office screaming: “Señor, Joshua fall down the shaft. Dead.” Descending the stairs rapidly, he reached the cavern that housed the donkeys to find the dark place in turmoil. In the first moments of his investigation he learned that Caridad and others had been working to affix the sling to another donkey when Joshua had fallen backward and down the dark shaft. A woman named María de la Concepción whispered: “Don Jubal, he was no good,” and when he queried the men in the lower cavern one said: “I saw him fall, and he cried ‘Caridad,’ ” but this informant also said that Joshua was no good, and he had not told the other men of the foreman’s last word.

  Jubal decided that Caridad had pretty surely taken revenge on Joshua, and he concluded further that it was not preposterous to think that this determined little basket carrier might be descended from some strong-minded woman who had defied and destroyed the unacceptable ancient gods.

  * * *

  Clay was pleasantly surprised to receive an invitation from the Palafox men to what became almost a recapitulation of that memorable family dinner in 1847, when the owners of the Mineral first broached the possibility of Clay’s taking over the management of their mine. The same three couples were guests, and after drinks on the veranda overlooking the pyramid and congratulating Jubal on his accomplishments in improving the appearance and profitability of the Mineral, Don Alipio’s wife said as darkness fell: “Alipio, ask the servants to light the flares,” and brands soaked in oil were lit along the high wall that enclosed the gardens protecting the house. In this congenial ambience, with birds bidding the world good night, the group passed the hours from seven through eleven discussing the death of Emperor Maximilian and the deplorable consequences for his widow, the Belgian princess.

  “I loved her musical name,” one of the women said, and in a gentle singsong she recited: “Marie Charlotte Amélie Augustine Victoire Clémentine Léopoldine.”

  “Did she have no last name?” another woman asked, and the first said: “Seven is enough.”

  “But you didn’t say what happened to her,” and the doleful answer came: “Tragedy overwhelmed her. She lost her mind, they say.”

  “Did they shoot her, too?”

  “No, Juárez wasn’t cruel enough for that. She’s to go into exile, I believe—a sad misadventure, but we’ll survive, Mexico always does.”

  At eleven the party moved inside to the spacious dining room with its heavy oak chairs and silent Indian waiters, but before anyone was seated, Señora Palafox announced: “We have late arrivals,” and through the wide doorway came a most handsome couple, both in their late twenties, the man in a gold-and-blue uniform, the woman in an ingeniously decorated white dress whose minute stitching in light brown and gold made it almost shimmer in the flickering light. “This is our son-in-law Major Echeverría and his wife, our daughter, Alicia.” Turning to Clay, the mother said: “I think you met our daughter when you were here before,” but Clay was speechless, because just then a maid brought into the room a little girl of seven or eight dressed in the same exquisite China Poblana costume her mother had worn in 1847. As Jubal looked at the child the years passed, the war vanished, the terrible losses he had sustained were obliterated, and he was again twenty-four with the stunning victories of General Scott less than three months past.

  The protracted dinner, eleven till half past one, was for Clay a mixture of delight and torment, for although he was glad to see Alicia so radiant and happy as a wife and mother, he was distraught to think that a child who had impressed him so indelibly twenty years earlier, and who had lived in his memory ever since as that adorable child in her China Poblana, had graduated into a world from which he was forever barred.

  As the amiable chatter swirled about him he wondered: Why am I so fascinated by her? Could it be that she represents all I lost in the fire? Is she Zephania reborn? But he had scarcely phrased the possibility than he dismissed it. No, damn it. It’s Alicia herself. My God, how lovely she is! Then he almost broke into laughter at himself for his fanciful daydreaming. It’s that damned dress. How that Chinese girl must
have agitated the minds of Mexico. How she still agitates me.

  His eyes kept focusing on the child, and her mother, noticing this, said rather boldly: “You seem to be fascinated with my daughter’s dress. Do you recognize it as one I wore here years ago?”

  “I had hoped it was,” he replied, and was about to explain why when Alicia said: “It was my grandmother’s. It survived four generations.”

  Now he found himself gazing furtively at Alicia, and he saw that the promise of unusual beauty she had shown as a child had become reality. Not only did she have exceptional physical beauty but she seemed to have almost a spiritual force. Moreover, she talked sense: “Poor, doomed Carlota, she should have known their irresponsible adventure could come to no good end. No outsider could ever rule Mexico because it’s doubtful he could understand us—certainly not an Austrian.”

  “She was Belgian,” Señora Palafox corrected and her daughter said: “I was thinking of Maximilian. He should never have brought a creature like that to this savage land.”

  Alicia’s use of the word “savage” caused her uncles and her father to protest, but she defended her position with spirit: “I see it so. The horror of that pyramid out there. Our great-grandfather Timoteo branding all the Indians on the cheek. What things that infamous Cortés did. And the imbecilities of Santa Anna, eleven different presidents in thirteen years. Let me tell you, we’re a doomed land.”

  Her father said: “Much as I despise Juárez, I think he might bring stability to this country. At least let us pray that he does,” and on that hopeful note the dinner ended. And the Palafox men united in telling Clay: “You’ve exceeded our expectations. Now if we can only get the railroad to come our way, we’ll be protected,” and Jubal said: “That’s up to you, gentlemen. You know the people in control.”