The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  “There will come a time when you will say something different,” sounded a voice behind him, coming from a man who was riding past, spurring his horse.

  “Was that intended for me?” Albert thought to himself, as he turned about and looked after the rider.

  Book III

  DEDICATED TO THE CREOLE MARIE LOLETTE BLOODWORD

  I see you, in your place, wringing hands

  On the heights of the Appalachians standing

  The image prophetic of our time, Cassandra,

  Foretelling misfortune.

  from “Cassandra” by L. Reizenstein

  Marie Lolette! More than nine years have passed since I first saw you beneath the deep-blue sky of Italy. It was near the Bay of Spezia, not far from the place where the flood bore away young Shelley, the beloved of Lord Byron. You had just come from Genoa, wishing to have an outing with your friend Taron among the groves of olive and orange belonging to the cavaliere Pittore. It was on a marble bench, decorated with the arms of two famed families of doges, that you met a young student with a tanned face, not yet paled by the kiss of women—you encountered him in the midst of his daydreaming, as he was tracing the verses of “Orlando furioso” on the narrow neck of his snow-white greyhound.

  “You are from Genoa, Signor?”

  “Would that I could say yes, Signora—but, sadly enough, I have come directly from Germany.”

  “Your accent has not betrayed you—but you were certainly not born in Germany?”

  “Not born there, no! But I am regarded as a German, though I was still playing with the tassels of a cardinal’s hat in Rome when I was six.”

  “Then you are really an Italian?”

  “Yes, from my mother’s side.”1

  “Then I shall take back the question I directed at you, Signor; I had already determined your origin from your reading matter, since a German would never be reading ‘Orlando furioso’ here in Spezia, so few miles from Genoa, but rather the ‘Frühling’ of Kleist.”

  “Could I pose to you the question you posed to me, Signora?”

  “I was born in Louisiana, and the waves of the Mississippi sang me to sleep in my cradle.”

  “From Louisiana? That was ever the land of my dreams, to rest under palms and to muse in the shadow of the forest primeval, that must be a divine pleasure!”

  Marie Lolette! What you answered me with has turned true. Two years after that meeting I left Italy to find in your birthplace crippled palmettos instead of stately, feathered palms, and sick giants of a lost time instead of a forest primeval.

  It drove me from your place of birth, for it bore no interest for me when you were lacking.

  Those words you called to me nine years ago, “Seek, but you will seek in vain,” have accompanied me on all my fruitless wanderings. The Niagra thundered it at me when I clambered its rocks and stared into its depths. I saw the Indian carving this with his tomahawk on a thousand-year-old giant in the forest. I rode through the grasses of the prairies, and I heard them whisper: “Seek, but you will seek in vain!” I saw a ship weigh anchor and longed to board it, and the masts groaned, “Remain here, for you are seeking in vain!”

  In vain, in vain! So many, many years! Finally you have shown me the way I have to go in order to find! I have launched myself on this promised path, and I do not need to stop my ears with wax or have myself bound to the mast, as did Ulysses, my companion in destiny. It would not have taken much for Circe to bewitch me and turn me into a pig. But a divine cowherd called “Husband” rescued me from this momentous metamorphosis in the nick of time.

  Chapter 1

  ONE YEAR LATER

  At the time the following events occurred, the portion of our city now known as the Fourth District had not yet been annexed. The Fourth District once had its own administration and bore the proud name of Lafayette. This denomination has continued despite the new classification, and no true resident of New Orleans who has any consideration for this prodigal son of a barfly queen-mother would ever use such a flat engineer’s expression as “Fourth District.” Proud Lafayette not only had its own municipal administration, but it even had an independent German newspaper. This paper was known as the Courier and the Lafayette Zeitung. It, too, had to surrender to annexation and renounce a monopoly over its area. The millionairess Madame Delachaise was supposed to have had some influence over the advance of our municipal boundaries. Her vast plantations, where Negro houses once stood and cotton once burst from billions of bolls, are now the faubourg or suburb of Plaisance and Delachaise, and where nigger-drivers once drove their massa’s black dogs to work, German enterprise and German patience has created independent property, each owner working his vegetable gardens and planting his magnolias and China elms by his own hand. Where once one rode through swampy plantation land, often slipping into mud up to the knee, now the finest roads have arisen and locomotives cross the land, signaling the active speculative energy and entrepreneurship of our contemporaries. Jefferson City, Greenville, Hurstville, Rickerville, Bouligny, all the way to Carrollton—who knows if in ten or twelve years they will not form a single city of New Orleans, whose area and number of inhabitants will exceed that of London and New York? And what then? What will then become of that fatal mark of Cain the South has burned into its own forehead?

  Let us look in on one family in Washington Avenue, living in an old, broken-down frame cottage. They are involved in a conversation that obviously must have grown out of a disagreement. Their faces are agitated and inflamed with excitement, and irritated displeasure can even be found in the expression of a newborn child stranded between two mattresses in a hatbox, once the repository for the hat of an officer of general staff.

  The other members of the family are all sitting around a large chest, some seated on overturned wash-basins, some on bundles of dirty laundry.

  A small girl of about five is standing next to her mother, her head in her mother’s lap.

  The mother is a woman of forty-nine, with a noble and impressive allure, a face that is earnest and inspiring of trust. She is dressed in a blindingly white, embroidered dressing gown, and she looks anxiously from time to time at a girl of seven sitting to her left, whose syrup-smeared hands have somehow to be kept away from her own fresh clothing.

  About her throat, white as marble, is a broad, black velvet ribbon joined in the front by a clasp of two doves. Her hair is black as ebony and covered in the back with a black net, a coiffure that makes her hair appear thicker and fuller than it is.

  Her dark eyes have a soulful expression and are seldom entirely open. Her nose has a slight bend in the middle, making a charming impression, particularly in profile.

  Save for some fading of her freshness of color, she has lost nothing of her earlier beauty. She is one of those rare women who are dangerous to young men even in her older years.

  She is Melanie, which is what her husband, former adjutant general of the King of B*, calls her.

  He is only five years older than Melanie and of a powerful, impressive build. His gray mustache and beard, his high forehead, the two deep creases between his eyebrows, his pursed lips, his short-cropped hair—everything reminds one of Wallenstein’s profile. His face, even if creased by deep wrinkles, has a fresh and cheerful appearance. The bright blue eyes are large and have an intense glow.

  He is wearing a long, blue coat with two rows of silver buttons bearing a lion in relief, a standing collar now creased over, on which one can see white threads where there once was gold braid.

  The old man was smoking his pipe, whose wooden bowl skillfully portrayed a boar-hunt in bas-relief. The silver fittings, half rococo, half modern, betrayed attempts to pry them off in order to sell them during a shortage of money.

  Hugo, a young man of eighteen, is playing with his fathers tobacco pouch, looking around and seeming bored and dissatisfied. He bears his right arm in a sling.

  His hair is light blond. His face is handsome, and it could almost be called pretty. His norm
ally clear, expressive eyes had dimmed much today because of his depressed and dissatisfied mood.

  One could easily take him for a sailor or deckhand owing to his red wool shirt and his leather belt with a knife holster at his hip. He also has the swinging, unsteady gait of a sailor.

  Other than the inhabitants, the little room in which the family finds itself holds little worth remark besides the strange furniture already mentioned.

  On the mantel is a picture of a young, pretty man in a page costume, surrounded by a wide, golden frame.

  He has a striking resemblance to Melanie—the same wonderful eyes, only they are blue instead of black.

  Looking at Melanie next to the picture, no one could doubt that the young man in the page costume, which was richly embroidered in silver and had epaulettes, was her son.

  “Amelie has fallen asleep in my lap,” Melanie declared with concern. “The poor child didn’t close her eyes all night. How glad I am that she’s sleeping now, poor child!”

  “I wasn’t able to sleep either, you were constantly pulling the blankets away, mother—father keeps telling you not to do that,” Gertrude whispered impertinently in a whiny tone. “I don’t want to lie next to you any more …”

  “Me neither!” murmured eldest daughter Constanze, a girl of sixteen. “I will just not come to bed anymore unless I get a decent cover—it is truly a scandal that a count’s daughter has to lie about on planks like riffraff. I will take my gold bracelet to the pawnshop tomorrow and buy a good featherbed, for myself alone—then no one will lie with me again.”

  “But Amelie, really?” Hugo asked ironically.

  “She least of all!” Constanze replied. “She should sleep with Mother by herself. Why did she lose my pretty ring in the street?”

  “I’ll never go to bed again,” Hugo interjected with irritation.

  “Why did Mother ever have to sell the featherbeds!” Constanze added in a languid tone. “We got nothing from that money at all.”

  “Father, you don’t need to buy any more tobacco,” Hugo remarked.

  “I would rather you had bought us sugar for our coffee,” another sniveled, “I cannot go on drinking it bitter like this, and we haven’t had butter in the house for five whole days.”

  “If my arm were only better I would go back on the boat as a stoker,” Hugo added with boredom, “then at least I would have something good to eat and drink—lying about on a bearskin with nothing to eat or drink is becoming intolerable.”

  “The emperor has lost all his rights when there is nothing left,” remarked an elderly lady sitting on a suitcase. She was known in the family as “Aunty Celestine.” She was intensely engaged in stitching a collar, now and then turning to ward off a little Bolognese dog that jumped up and snapped at her needle, the focus of all his attentions.

  When he became too bold, he received a stout slap from Aunty’s thin hand.

  As a hostile world might put it, Aunty Celestine was not entirely right in the head.

  The old gentleman, his wife Melanie, Hugo, Constanze, Gertrude, Amelie, Suzie (only two weeks old), and Aunty Celestine—this entire family had been living for a month in one room in a tenement on Washington Avenue. One would expect that these sorts of conflicts and tensions would arise, and that such shortages often brought the children into opposition with their parents, whose noble style of thought and love for their children caused them to respond either with silence or consolation.

  The eldest daughter, Constanze, was quite a pretty girl. She did not have regular features, but they were piquant, seductive, and charming enough. The slightest movement of her slim body was magical, and when she slept she was Pasithea herself* who retains all her beauty even in repose and when caught unawares, and who never is to be discovered without her charms.

  When in bed, Constanze lay like a sculpted goddess.

  The sole fault she possessed was shared with all her sex—she was, on occasion, more or less moody.

  She argued long and hard with her siblings until her mind escaped to that undiscovered world whose bright colors reflect the dreams of young, innocent girls.

  Aunty Celestine, who had been working intensely at her collar, now stood up suddenly, took a map from the wall, and rushed with it to Constanze. As she held it in front of her face, she moved her bony finger un-surely along the rivers of central Germany, finally halting at the Elbe, following the river’s course from Magdeburg to the North Sea.

  As was Aunt Celestine’s way, she lolled her head on her left shoulder as she hummed an old tune about a count’s daughter who had lived in splendor, was seduced, and ended her unhappy life in the deep.

  “I would rather you sat down again and worked!” Constanze growled, grabbing the map of Germany from her hands so that it flew toward Melanie and little Gertrude. “If the Irishwoman comes this evening for his collar and finds it unfinished, we will have nothing to eat again!”

  Aunty Celestine stepped back from Constanze and, waving her arms in the air in her usual manner, declared, “Little Constanze, I always knew you disliked me.” Then she turned to the other members of the family: “But I tell all of you, it is an utter lie that Aunty Celestine murdered her husband … but I did predict that misfortune … yes, I know, you dislike me … that’s why you torment me so!”

  “Celestine, I ask you for heaven’s sake, please be quiet, or don’t speak so. No one has done anything to hurt you,” Melanie turned to her, lowering the awakened Amelie to the floor. “We respect your misfortune and have happily received you. Now it is up to you to endure the misfortune which has come upon all of us unearned …”

  “Yes, I predicted it,” Aunty Celestine continued pressingly, “but don’t dislike me! … I was a beautiful, good girl, as young and pretty as Little Constanze—but it is an utter, utter lie that Aunty Celestine killed her husband.”

  “Would you please be quiet!” Hugo called out with irritation. “All day these crazy words. It is enough to drive anyone mad!”

  “Once you liked me a great deal, and you liked to read my songs—they were mad songs, weren’t they, my boy?”

  With these words, Aunty Celestine began a weird giggle that she produced almost every day in such conflicts. Then she would always fall into a remarkable ecstasy such as was attributed to the Korybantes, the servants of Cybele in ancient times.

  “Isn’t it true, your Aunty made mad songs, boy? I composed another one just yesterday, do you want to hear it?”

  Like a cat purring when it is in a good mood, Aunty Celestine began to hum a melody to a song, whose last verses are preserved here:

  So you are separated

  O faith, hope and love,

  So were stolen from me years

  Of youth’s finest forces.

  I sang on the banks of the Elbe

  There I joked and laughed,

  Now bad persons say

  I killed my husband.

  So we are separated

  My German fatherland,

  You great city on the Elbe River,

  You lovely North Sea coast!

  There was a certain charm in the manner in which Aunty Celestine presented these verses, a charm that cannot be denied in the song itself, even if it does not strictly follow the rules of meter. In any case, this song of the deranged aunty had more poetic worth than all the lyrics of all our living poetasters, taken together.

  “Ha, ha!” she suddenly burst out, “ha, ha, ha … Where am I? … We’re back in our Germany, on the Elbe, in our dear Magdeburg … ho, ho, ho! He is there among the prisoners, one arm yellow, one arm black! … ho, ho, ho! … Come as you are, come, come, but come fast! … Merciful God, help me … the prisoner is trying to free himself from his chains … Do you want to stay where you are … oh, oh, leave me alone, don’t kill me … I have never done you any harm—hurrah, hurrah, all you little folk, come as you are … tomorrow we’re going to America! … ho, ho, ho! … Did you pack my wedding dress and the great white veil with the Brabant lace! … Farewe
ll, Germany, farewell … We’re going to America! … Come, come, just come! … There! There you have it … the yawl has already set out from land—look, look, now they are climbing out of the yawl and into the great ship—there, there!”

  Aunty’s confused monologue had no visible effect on the family. They let her continue her strange noises and talk without interruption.

  After several minutes, she returned quietly to her original place, sitting on the large suitcase and resuming her sewing.

  The Bolognese dog jumped up to her, wagging its tail, and started snapping at the needle again.

  The newborn child in the hatbox began to cry, raising her little hands.

  Melanie rose from her hard seat, lifted Suzie from her strange bed, and sought to quiet her by clicking her tongue.

  At the same moment, Hugo arose and went to his mother, taking Suzie from her hands and kissing the baby so intensely several times that Suzie only cried louder than before until she was finally returned to Melanie’s arms and quieted down.

  The father continued to smoke his pipe without saying a word, looking to Constanze from time to time, who sat depressed and with lowered eyes, holding her gold bracelet in her hands, opening and closing it, examining it from every angle.

  Amelie gnawed on her nails to pass the time and seemed to be brooding as Mother held Suzie in her arms and calmed her.