by April Hill
He pulled a card from his pocket and studied it. “Hmm. Right hotel, same name. Caroline Foster. Private, four-hour tour of city, gratuities extra—and please make a note of that last part.” His brow was furrowed with mock concern as he read the card aloud. “Let’s see, now. Pick-up time, nine a.m. sharp. Which would make you fifteen minutes late, Miss Foster.” He grinned. “I was about to leave, but since we always overcharge them in the first place, we’re under strict orders to cut all the rich customers a little slack.”
“Do I look rich to you?” Carrie inquired irritably. To demonstrate exactly how poor she was, she held up the ugly purse, which had begun to ooze stray coins and hairpins from a ripped seam. “I asked for a full-day city bus tour, so if someone screwed up, at least it wasn’t me—for a change.”
“Actually, what you asked for was a four hour guided tour,” he corrected her. “Unless the clerk in there figured you for a chump and pocketed the difference, which has been known to happen in places like this.” He nodded toward her hotel.
“Yeah, I know,” she muttered, “but it got two stars in this guidebook I bought, called Affordable Places to Stay in Quaint Old Mexico City. You think maybe the writer lied?”
“How many cockroaches have you found in your two-star accommodations, so far?”
She groaned. “Three in the bathroom, and another two in a dresser drawer. The couple in the drawer appeared to be newlyweds. And this morning, I found what I’m pretty sure was a record-setting centipede in my shoe. He seemed like a very peaceable sort of centipede, but I flushed him down the toilet, anyway, along with the copulating honeymooners. Funny, I think of myself as a pacifist and a nature lover, but I’ve just never been able to warm up to cockroaches. Anyway, if I can’t get out of this private tour I didn’t want in the first place, how much is it going to cost me?”
When the tour guide smiled down at her. Carrie found it hard not to notice—for the second or third time—how attractive he was. “This is your lucky day,” he told her. “It’s been a slow week, which mean that you qualify for our discounted rate. Half off. Which means that I’m all yours for the next four hours, and I’ll even forgive the fifteen minutes you were late. Anywhere particular you’d like to start?”
“The main reason I’m in Mexico City is to see the Diego Rivera murals,” Carrie explained. “I’m a Diego Rivera fanatic, so I’d like to see as many of the murals as I can. I guess you could call me an artist, too, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Yeah, the sort of artist that people always politely refer to as struggling. I’ve never minded starving for my art, but I don’t want to wither away without seeing the Rivera murals in person, and at close range. It took me two years to scrape together enough money for this trip—and to afford this fabulous, two-star hotel, of course.”
The driver shook his head doubtfully. “The Rivera murals are going to take a lot longer than four hours. “If you want to really see them, that is. The sheer volume of what the man did is amazing.”
She gave him an appraising look. “You wouldn’t be a starving artist yourself, would you? In addition to being a tour guide for rich dilettantes?”
He chuckled. “I tried starving for a while, but I wasn’t cut out for it. So, I went into commercial art. That means I make a pretty good living doing what I like, but don’t have to worry about losing all my teeth to gum disease.”
Carrie laughed. So, not only was this guy a drop-dead gorgeous fellow artist, he had a sense of humor. “So, you just do this on the side? Drive a cab, I mean?”
“I had a three week vacation coming from the advertising company I work for,” he explained. “So I told a friend of mine I’d fill in for him for a few days, and take over his cab. His wife, Consuela, went into labor this morning with their third kid.” He opened the back door of the car. “So, do you want me to pretend to be a real tour guide, or do you know where you want to start?”
“The Palacio Nacional, I think,” she said, stumbling over the pronunciation. “I’m sorry. I tried learning a few Spanish phrases on the plane from Los Angeles, but I’ve never been good with foreign languages. I’m really impressed by your English, by the way.”
“Don’t be. I was born in Chicago. I came to Mexico City a few years back to study art at the university here, and liked it so much I decided to stay on for a while. My mom’s from Mexico, though. She came to the states when she was eighteen, and married my dad a couple of years later. I showed up a year after that. Eduardo Miguel Kennedy y Delgado de Ayala, but I’ll answer in either language—Ed, or Edward. My friends call me Ned, though, if you’d rather.”
When he extended his hand, Carrie took it in hers—and felt her face go suddenly warm. “Okay, Ned, then. And my name’s Caroline. Carrie, if you’d rather.”
He opened the rear door, and held it for her. “Hop in, Carrie.”
She hesitated for a moment. “Do I have to sit in the back? I mean, is it like a rigid company rule, or something? It’ll feel like I’m being chauffeured, and what would a good Communist like Diego Rivera think about that?”
Ned grinned. “In this cab, the price is the same, front or back, or whether you’re a capitalist or a socialist. It’s funny, though. When it comes time to leave a tip, I’ve never noticed much of a difference.”
“Oh, before I forget,” Carrie said, “I need to ask you something. I’ll be here through the ninth, so where’s the best place to watch the Cinco de Mayo festivities?”
He chuckled. “Well, there’s nothing we like better in Mexico than celebrating just about anything, but Cinco de Mayo’s not as big a deal down here as you’d think. The party they throw in L.A. is probably bigger, and more impressive. Even here, though, the show seems to be getting grander every year, but I imagine that’s probably for the benefit of the tourists. If you’re really interested in history, the best place to be on Cinco is in Puebla itself, where it happened. It’s surprising how many Americans still think the fifth of May is Mexican Independence Day.”
When Carrie blanched, he grinned. “You didn’t know that, am I right?”
She nodded, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I should have known. I grew up in Los Angeles, for God’s sake. I remember some of the story, though. About the beautiful, tragic Empress Carlota, who went mad, and died of a broken heart.”
He groaned. “I’m guessing you got that from that old movie, with Betty Davis miscast as Carlota, and Paul Muni trying to look like Juarez under ten layers of makeup.”
Carrie laughed. “I saw it on TV when I was in high school—when I was still addicted to romance novels and sappy movies. I cried my heart out when Carlota’s poor husband was executed.”
“A firing squad was too good for the son of a bitch,” Ned said cheerfully. “They should have boiled the two of them in oil.”
“But it wasn’t really Maximilian’s fault, was it?” she asked. “Or Carlota’s, either. They came here with good intentions, after all. After all, the French invited Maximilian —to be the new king of Mexico, right?”
“Sorry to disillusion you, Carrie, but that’s what happens when you get your history lessons from Hollywood. The French had no right to invite anyone to be King— and sure as hell not some out-of-work Austrian archduke with a spoiled rotten teenaged wife. Mexico wanted to be a republic. Maximilian wanted to be an Emperor, and thousands of innocent people in this country paid for his crown with their freedom—and their lives.
“That’s what Cinco de Mayo is about,” he went on, “not tragic, mad Empress Carlota. The truth is that the most famous battle took place before she and Max even got off the boat and set up housekeeping.”
“In the town you mentioned before?” Carrie asked. “Puebla?”
He nodded. “Exactly. It was in Puebla that a general named Zaragoza and a poorly equipped force of four thousand Mexicans beat the pants off eight thousand well-trained French regulars. At the time, the French army was the best in the world, and until the Battle of Puebla, it hadn’t lost a fig
ht in fifty years.” He sighed. “The glory didn’t last for long, of course, but it was a stunning victory, all the same, and made it clear to the rest of the world that Mexico wasn’t up for grabs.”
Ned smiled a bit sheepishly. “Sorry about that. I always get a little hot under the collar on this particular subject. I come by it naturally, though. When I was a kid, I grew up on my grandmother’s stories about the revolution. She always told me that her side of the family was directly descended from Zaragoza. Of course, she also claimed that we were related in some complicated way I never quite understood to Benito Juarez himself, and to Emiliano Zapata. And to just about every other hero of the 1910 uprising. And you don’t want to know what she called your beautiful, tragic Empress Carlota.”
* * *
Carrie arrived back at her hotel at eleven o’clock that evening, bone-weary, bedraggled, and footsore. Too many staircases and marble floors, and too many hours craning her neck for the best view of the massive murals at the National Palace. She kicked off her shoes, dropped into bed fully clothed, and fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. She had learned more about the life and work of Diego Rivera in one exhausting day than she had in six years of college and grad school. And Ned would be back for her in the morning, to continue the four-hour guided tour that had become something else, entirely.
Carrie’s whirlwind introduction to Mexico City had begun pleasantly enough. Ned had turned out to be a fabulous tour guide, a veritable fountain of historical and artistic knowledge who made his way through the city’s chaotic traffic jams like a native. He was charming and funny, and equally at ease in Spanish or English. By the time they stopped for lunch, Carrie had begun to take a distinctly unprofessional interest in her handsome tour guide. And unless she was misreading the signs, the interest was mutual.
Simply put, Eduardo Miguel Kennedy y Delgado de Ayala, American citizen from Chicago, Illinois, was without question the most interesting and attractive man Carrie had ever met in all of North America. Actually, after just one full day in his company, she was firmly convinced that Ned was the most attractive man in the entire world, but North America was the only continent with which she had any real experience. By the time he dropped her at the hotel, and held her hand just a little too long while inquiring if she’d like to see the National Museum of History next, Carrie had already begun naming their future children. Their firstborn would be named after Diego Rivera, of course, which meant that the baby would simply have to be a boy. Diego Maria de la Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez just wasn’t the sort of name you could stick on a baby girl.
* * *
The National Museum of History was housed in Chapultepec Castle, where the Emperor Maximilian and his tragic Empress had lived during their brief reign. The galleries contained several portraits of both of them, at various ages.
“You do have to admit that she was beautiful,” Carrie remarked, as they stood before a huge painting of the seventeen-year old Carlota, dressed grandly in a white silken ball gown and diamond tiara.
“Her family probably paid a fortune for that portrait,” Ned observed cheerfully. “They probably encouraged the artist to make it as flattering as he could. Europe was full of homely grand duchesses, and every damned one of them was on the lookout for a crowned head to marry.”
“God, you’re such a cynic!” Carrie cried. “Carlota was only seventeen when she married Maximilian, and from everything I’ve read, it was a genuine love match—like Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.”
Ned handed her the small book he’d been carrying all morning. “A friend of mine wrote this a few years back, as part of his doctoral dissertation. There’s a lot of stuff in there about Max and Carlota you won’t find on Wikipedia. Their marriage may have been a love match, but Max was eight years older than his bride, and he had some very specific, very Teutonic ideas of how to handle a wife.”
“Meaning?”
He opened the book and leafed through it for a few seconds, apparently looking for a specific passage.
“This is what Max wrote to a favorite cousin, back in Austria,” he said. When he read Maximilian’s words aloud, Carrie could tell that he was trying not to smile.
“When my dearest Charlotte severely displeases me, which has happened with increasing frequency since our arrival in Mexico, I have found it my unfortunate but solemn duty, as a devoted husband, to properly discipline her. My beloved wife is both intelligent and educated, but at times, when she has persisted in being willful and disobedient, I am compelled to punish her, as I might a beautiful, but naughty child.”
Suddenly, Carrie found herself wanting to avoid any further discussion of what the Emperor Maximilian might have considered “proper discipline” for his beloved wife’s misdeeds. But then, as it almost always did, Carrie’s curiosity got the better of her.
“Disciplined, how?” she whispered.
Ned winked. “Apparently, the Empress got her royal butt paddled—royally paddled, and on a regular basis. There didn’t seem to be anything kinky about it, just a good, old fashioned spanking, with a carved ivory hairbrush from a set Napoleon had given her as an engagement present. According to Carlota’s own letters, she got spanked when she wouldn’t listen to reason, for losing her famous temper with Max, or when she blew too much on new dresses and jewelry. Before she was married, Charlotte—or Carlota—was used to spending whatever she wanted. Spoiled archduchesses got to do that back then, since they were always using someone else’s money, anyway. But once she and Max arrived in Mexico, Napoleon III continued to control the purse strings, and he kept them on a pretty tight budget. So, when poor Carlota went over her monthly bauble budget, she got—and I quote—soundly and quite vigorously spanked on my bared buttocks.”
Still smiling, Ned handed the book to Carrie, who promptly sat down to read Carlota’s own flowery description of what happened in the royal couple’s gilded bedroom.
“I was instructed to place myself facedown over a great pile of pillows, with my lower portions elevated so that my naked buttocks were presented in the most immodest attitude imaginable. When I was thus arranged, it was Maximilian’s habit to take my ivory hairbrush from its customary place on the dressing table, and with no further comment, administer the painful whipping I had brought upon myself through my disgraceful behavior. I cannot fault my poor husband for disciplining me, since it was always done for my own benefit, and with my consent, however tearfully given. Indeed, I often fell to my knees in despair after I had been punished in this manner, to beg his forgiveness for having distressed him so. On these unhappy occasions, the spanking continued until I wept with remorse, and vowed to refrain from any repetition of the offense that had bought us both to this painful state of affairs. It was only when my remorse was deemed by my dearest husband and master to be genuine that my poor bottom was spared further blows. Whereupon, my darling Max would lift me up, adjust my clothing, and embrace me with such tenderness that my pain seemed to fly away on the soft wings of angels.”
Carrie slammed the book closed.
“Soft wings of angels, my ass,” she growled. “Good old Max sounds like your typical male chauvinist bully. The kind who apologizes for what he’s done, then sends the little woman flowers, or a box of cheap chocolates. Or in Max’s case, probably another diamond tiara she didn’t need. And Carlota fell for the act. After reading that drivel, I see what you meant when you said Betty Davis was miscast in that stupid movie. Betty Davis would never have let a sissy like Max spank her.”
As they left the museum, Carrie handed the book back to Ned. “Okay, now I know Carlota’s embarrassing little secret, but why on earth would anyone even write embarrassing letters like that to someone else?”
Ned shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe she was just lonely. After she went back to Belgium, hoping to raise enough money to help Max, Carlota started writing to her maid back in Mexico—a young woman by the name of Adoracion Flores, who was probab
ly around the same age. Carlota apparently regarded this Flores woman as a friend, and trusted her. But here’s the funny thing. The letters were written in French, and there’s no evidence that Adoracion Flores knew more than a few words of French. Anyway, when the maid died, in 1915, her son found the letters in a trunk, and offered them for sale to the highest bidder. Someone connected to the Belgian royal family started spreading it around Europe that the letters were obvious forgeries, and the son never found a buyer. They turned up again in 1983, at a little bookstore in Paris, which is how Paul—the friend I told you about—got hold of them. He traded a first edition of The Great Gatsby for them. Are they fakes? Who knows? Paul was never able to completely authenticate any of them, except for the signatures, which are genuine. Anyway, Carlota died in 1927, and the story goes that she never knew, or never admitted, that Max had been executed sixty years earlier.”
Carrie sighed. “And you don’t think that’s a tragic story?” she asked plaintively. “Well, except for that stuff about spanking. That, I just don’t get at all.”
* * *
They spent the remainder of that day exploring more of the Rivera sites, then had a late supper under the stars at a tiny café near the large blue house where Rivera had lived and worked with Frida Kahlo. Afterward, they returned to Carrie’s hotel, and climbed the stairs arm-in-arm to her dingy, fourth floor room. The moment she opened the door, though, Carrie saw that the stuffy little room had undergone a magical transformation. With the shutters thrown open to catch the late night breeze and a few stray beams of moonlight, and the single forty-watt light bulb glowing softly under an indigo scarf, the shabby room looked beautiful, and breathlessly romantic.
* * *
“Can we drive to Puebla, tomorrow? Or maybe tonight? In time for Cinco de Mayo?”
Carrie asked Ned this question over breakfast, fully expecting him to say yes, as he had to all of her earlier requests. But, this time, he shook his head. “Sorry. I told Benicio I’d cover for him, tomorrow. Tonight too, probably. His wife is coming home from the hospital today, and there’s always a lot of people looking for cabs on Cinco de Mayo.”