The Empire of Yearning

by Oakland Ross

  “I have summoned you,” Maximiliano said at length, “in order to make a proposal. You are aware, I imagine, that Poliakovitz has passed on.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Poliakovitz. My private secretary. He succumbed to the yellow fever. A terrible thing.”

  “I am sorry to hear it.”

  “A great shame. His family will grieve the loss deeply. I only wish there were more I could do to ease their burden, but …” He shook his head. “In any case, his remains are to be returned to Europe. Meanwhile, we must accommodate ourselves to new circumstances.”

  The Austrian shifted in his chair. He reached forward, plucked a cigarette from a humidor. A servant hurried over with a wooden phosphorous match. Maximiliano inhaled with evident pleasure and then released two plumes of bluish smoke through his nostrils.

  “I have decided,” he said, “to offer the position to you.”

  Diego realized that, in some inexplicable way, he had been expecting to hear these very words ever since Salm-Salm had first mentioned the emperor’s European secretary and his fragile health. Even so, he found he couldn’t speak. Expected or not, now that it was being made, the offer had the effect of dumbfounding him.

  “I see I have rendered you … verblüfft,” said the Austrian. “How do you say it in Spanish?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “The French would say sidéré.”

  “Ah, pasmado,” said Diego. “Yes, it’s true.”

  He was speechless, or very nearly.

  It was a dilemma. What should he say now? He did not hesitate long. “Baldemar Peralta,” he said.

  The Austrian cocked his head. “I beg your pardon?”

  “My friend, in the Martinica. That night at the opera, you said you would pardon him. I wonder …”

  “You wonder if I shall keep my word, even if my word was wrested from me in a most reprehensible fashion.” The Austrian ground out his cigarette. “Yes, I shall. This Peralta fellow and all his confrères—they will go free, as promised. On one condition. I insist that—”

  “You know that Maréchal Bazaine opposes the measure.”

  The emperor frowned, evidently unaccustomed to being interrupted in mid-sentence. “Of course he does.”

  “I’m serious. He is dead set against it.”

  “He told you so?”

  “No … I mean, no, Your Majesty. I have heard it from others.”

  “Who would be well advised to hold their tongues. As for Bazaine, he is a military man and thinks in military terms. That is his profession. But I possess a wider brief.”

  “Won’t this cause a rift?”

  “Not for a moment. The man will carry out his duty no matter what. Personal happiness does not come into it. He is a field officer, whereas I am the emperor. They don’t compare.” He gave a low, gentle laugh. “Don’t worry about Bazaine.”

  “What of Márquez, then?”

  The Austrian shook his head. “Shameful business. The fellow has no remorse at all. Says he’s glad he did it.”

  “He’ll be tried, of course?”

  “Yes, of course. Tried and acquitted. There’s no other way. Bazaine and I have discussed this in detail. A conviction would play havoc with army morale. We can’t afford it. We’ll pack him off to Constantinople. It was Bazaine’s idea, and a good one, too. He’ll be my minister plenipotentiary to the Ottoman Empire. He can’t cause much trouble there.”

  The Austrian waited a moment. “I believe I made you a proposal.”

  So he had. But the man had also mentioned a condition. He would release Baldemar and the others on one condition. Now Diego understood. By most lights, the idea was unthinkable—he, a liberal and a republican, acting as secretary to an emperor, and a foreigner to boot! He should retrieve his hat and leave this building at once.

  Only he couldn’t—for what then would become of Baldemar?

  He sat back in his chair. So this was the condition the emperor was attaching to Baldemar’s release, the price he himself would have to pay.

  “Your Majesty,” he said. Already, the honorific had become easier—not natural but not entirely alien, either. “I wonder if you have noticed that I am deprived of the use of my left arm?”

  “The circumstance has called itself to my attention, yes. I presume you are not left-handed?”

  “No. I somehow managed to avoid that curse.”

  “Then we need not worry ourselves further on the subject.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.” Diego hadn’t expected the absence of most of an arm to be sloughed off so easily. It unnerved him a little. He hesitated before raising another qualm. “I wonder,” he said, “if Your Majesty has not also noticed the colour of my skin?”

  “You mean that you are brown skinned? An Indian?”

  Spoken without hesitation, as if these were niggling matters not worthy of consideration.

  “Not Indian,” Diego said. “Mestizo. Half Indian, half European.”

  “Very well. Mestizo then. I’m not sure I see your point.”

  “What I mean to say,” said Diego, “is … I mean … would you not prefer someone who—”

  “Is white? Is that what you mean?”

  Diego nodded.

  “What? One of these puffed-up creoles who call themselves Mexican? Dear God, they appall me, and I only just got here. No. Please. I beg of you. Spare me that.”

  What next ensued was a discussion of Diego’s duties, should he accept the position. Mention was made of likely remuneration—an otherworldly sum. In the end, Diego begged leave to consider the matter. He would provide his answer in two days, three at most. He rose to his feet. “Your Majesty …”

  Again the emperor arched his eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “I have another question.” Diego swallowed with some difficulty, his throat exceedingly dry. He said, “Why me?”

  The man smiled. “Why you? Well, Chapultepec Castle, for one thing. Let’s not pretend otherwise. It was a recommendation that showed great discernment. We expect to decamp for the palace in a matter of days. The women, especially, are in raptures. Besides, you are Mexican. You can explain things to me—customs, habits, principles, and beliefs. Moreover, you speak French, which is an immense help, given the state of my Spanish. Finally, your dress.”

  “My dress?” said Diego. “Oh—charro.”

  “Eh?”

  “Charro, Your Majesty. It’s our name for this style of clothing.”

  The stamped boots. The tight-fitting pantaloons, sometimes with spangles along the seam. The voluminous white blouse. The bolero jacket, sometimes with gold piping on the lapels.

  “Charro. I see. Well, I was struck by it at once, that first time I saw you. In Veracruz, I think. No one else was dressed this way.”

  “No,” said Diego. “It is less common now than before, for obvious reasons.”

  “Obvious? Why ‘obvious’?”

  “It is the way liberals dress.”

  “Explain.”

  “Mexico’s liberals have mostly fled to the north, you see. With Benito Juárez. Or many of them have.”

  Maximiliano tilted his head. “And so I take this to mean that you are a liberal too?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “A happy coincidence then.” The man smiled, revealing the yellow stains on his teeth. “For I may be counted as a liberal myself.”

  CHAPTER 12

  IN FORMER TIMES, Diego and Baldemar Peralta would often spend their nights at the cockfighting pit at San Antonio de las Cuevas, roaring with the other misfits who crowded onto the sagging wooden stands. It was a notorious dive, infested with gamblers, loan sharks, prostitutes, and other reprobates. A two-inch bog of sawdust, urine, vomit, and spittle carpeted the rotting wooden floor. Hordes of shrieking patrons crowded the perimeter of the ring. They dangled over the railings, beating their fists in the air and crying for blood as the fighting cocks tore each other to pieces. This was his and Baldemar’s agreed-upon meeting place.<
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  Diego knew he would find Baldemar here eventually, and eventually he did. But at first he barely recognized his old friend, who materialized through a dense fog of cigar smoke and evaporating sweat. For one thing, Baldemar lacked his customary wire-rimmed spectacles. His hair was long and stringy, his jaw grizzled by a patchy beard. Corpulent most of his life, he was now shockingly thin. Meanwhile, some kind of rash inflamed his neck and what could be seen of his forearms. He made a pitiful sight, but Diego recognized him all the same, and his spirits lifted at once.

  He hurried over, pushing his way through the crush of reeking flesh that crammed every corner of the dank and fetid place. He set his still-bruised hand on Baldemar’s shoulder. The man started. He looked up but at first seemed to recognize nothing. He was practically blind without his spectacles.

  “Calm yourself, mano,” Diego said. “It’s me.”

  Baldemar was convulsed by a fit of coughing. His insides rattled aloud, as though his ribs were bits of scrap metal that had broken loose from his chest. He spat up something and groaned before wiping his lips, shaking his head, and struggling to his feet. He had tears in his eyes, from pain or effort.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  They left right away. The place was too loud, too bloodthirsty, too loco. They found their way on foot to a pulquería they knew from years past. Memorias del Futuro, it was called. Soon, they were both slouching at a sway-backed wooden bar in the faint light of a half-dozen tallow candles, quaffing pulque from crude irregular glasses, shaped like bottle-bottoms and tinted green.

  Diego entrusted some coins to a boy and dispatched him to a taquería nearby with instructions to bring back two servings of tacos al pastor. There would be more coins when the food was delivered. The meal arrived in minutes, heaped on a pair of tin plates. The two men tucked in at once, rolling the hot morsels of beef into the warm tortillas, along with chopped tomatoes, onions, and jalapeños. With grease dripping down his scraggly beard, Baldemar recounted his ordeal in the Martinica. When he reached the part about refusing the initial pardon, Diego shook his head.

  “Idiot,” he said.

  Baldemar wiped his beard with the back of his hand. “You’d have done the same.”

  “I would?”

  “Sure. Anyone would.”

  Diego wasn’t so certain, and he suspected Baldemar knew it. He raised his glass of pulque and took a long, slow draft. “You’ve seen Ángela?”

  “You think—?” Baldemar began to cough again. When the fit subsided, he gestured at his miserable frame, from bony shoulders to crumbling boots. “You think I could walk into a hospital looking like this?” He snorted and shook his head. “As a patient, maybe. Otherwise, I’d be wanting a gun. Márquez must have a dozen of his goons stationed around the place, on the lookout for me.”

  Diego nodded. It was true. He himself had been barred from entering the Hospital de Jesús Nazareno, where Ángela was said to be convalescing from her wound. The hospital was under guard by Mexican soldiers, and it seemed a power struggle was under way. Until three years earlier, it had been the Roman Catholic Church that administered Mexico’s hospitals. But, with the liberal reform laws, the state had confiscated most Church properties. Now, with conservatives in the ascendance again, the Church was trying to regain its real estate and its former powers. The army, or some part of it, seemed to be taking the Church’s side.

  Diego rubbed his jaw, wondering whether to speak of Ángela’s son. He finally decided, why not? But it turned out Baldemar knew the story already. He had no more idea of the boy’s whereabouts than Diego did. Servants at the house on the Street of the Sad Indian had told Diego that a party of priests had rounded upon the residence the same night Ángela had been shot, and they had carried the child away. They insisted they were acting on Church authority and had waved documents in the air, official-looking papers with red ribbons and seals. Nobody seemed to have any idea where the boy was now.

  “I’ll bet Labastida knows,” said Baldemar. The archbishop. “He’s behind this, one way or another.”

  Diego nursed his drink. Probably Baldemar was right. But he himself didn’t know what to make of it. As for Márquez’s fate, he told Baldemar what little he knew.

  “They’re sending him where?”

  “Constantinople.”

  “To do what?”

  “Stay out of trouble. Stop shooting people at the opera. That would be a good start.”

  “He won’t go.”

  “I’m serious. They’re sending him.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Diego tried to explain. After the shooting at the opera, Márquez had stood trial. A sort of trial. The entire proceeding was a fraud, of course. The only charge against him was causing a disturbance—a joke in itself—and he’d defended himself with the claim that his gun had discharged by accident, a tendency it had. The magistrate acquitted him on the spot.

  “He won’t go,” said Baldemar. “Or he’ll get as far as Veracruz, and then he’ll come back. He hates liberals too much to leave. He can’t pass up a fight. Besides, he still has to kill me.” Baldemar made a face, an oddly boyish expression. “I mean, I tried to kill him.”

  Diego nursed his drink. It was true. He found it hard to imagine Márquez letting that episode go unavenged. The recollection reminded him of something that had been troubling him ever since Ángela had first told him her brother was in the Martinica, sentenced to die. The truth was, Baldemar had acted alone in his attempt on Márquez. Apart from drunken bravura—boasts that no one could take seriously—he had failed to tell Diego what he had planned, much less enlisted his aid. He put the question now. For God’s sake, why not?

  Baldemar stared into the darting light of the candle flame. “Because.”

  A smarter man would have left it there, but he was bound to be stupid. “That’s no answer. I mean it. I want to know why.”

  For a time, Baldemar didn’t say a word. Then he sat up straight. He said, “Because I didn’t think you’d have the sauce for it. Since you ask.”

  Diego felt the hackles rise at the back of his neck. He wanted to say something harsh, something that would prove to Baldemar he was wrong. But he stopped himself. This was not an argument he could win. Both men remained where they were, leaning on the wooden bar, contemplating the darkness broken only by uneven patches of candlelight. After what seemed a reasonable period of silence, Diego announced that the Austrian had offered him a position as his private secretary.

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not. He likes the way I dress.”

  “He’s a maricón?”

  “No. He just likes charro. That’s not maricón.”

  “Depends,” said Baldemar. He took a swig from his glass, wiped his beard. “So. You’re serious.”

  “I am.”

  “You a lifelong liberal …”

  “He claims to be a liberal, too.”

  “The hell he does.”

  “Anyway, he offered me the post. His secretary died, of yellow fever. I haven’t said whether I’m going to take it.”

  “But you are.”

  “I am?”

  “Of course. What do you think?”

  “In a way, I almost have to. After all, you saved my life once—and now the Austrian has saved yours. Where does that leave me?

  “In the man’s debt?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t. It leaves you very useful to our side. That’s what it does.”

  “The liberal side?”

  “What else?” Baldemar frowned. “You have to ask?”

  “No. I just meant … I don’t know.”

  He wanted to say something about the way the Austrian made him feel. In the man’s presence, he could almost imagine having two good hands. He could almost envision himself being white of skin, or at least he felt no need to fret about his skin’s darkness. It was the same way he’d sometimes felt with Baldemar and even with Ángela. He looked at the c
eiling, locked in silence. It was hard to put these feelings into words. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  Baldemar looked up. “Just don’t be a sap,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Baldemar sighed. “You know the way you get. All sappy. You see the other side of everything. God, do you see the other side of everything. This time, don’t.”

  “You mean, with the emperor?”

  “There you go. He’s not an emperor. He’s just a fucking maricón with a sorry excuse for a crown. Don’t see things his way. That’s all I’m trying to tell you. Just don’t.”

  Diego felt his blood running hot. It was the same way he always felt when Baldemar took aim at him. Inevitably, Baldemar won. He was bigger, stronger—or so he’d always been. Right now, Diego could have put his old friend on the floor with one blow from his only hand, already clenched into a fist. He let the muscles relax. He wasn’t going to hit anyone. Baldemar was wrong, that was all. But men had been wrong before.

  “Fine,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

  The two went back to inspecting the candle glow and the gloom. A small man with a wispy grey moustache replenished their glasses of pulque, scooping the liquid from a shallow tub with the half shell of a calabash.

  Diego cleared his throat. “So, what are you going to do?”

  Baldemar said he didn’t know, but Diego didn’t believe him. Surely he’d had plenty of time in the Martinica to plot out what he’d do if and when he got out of the place. One thing was sure, it was bound to involve guns. Diego pulled his Colt repeating pistol from his belt.

  “Take it,” he said.

  “Hijo de puta.”

  “Go on. Take it. You said you were in want of a gun.”

  “And you won’t be?”

  Diego shook his head. “I’ll be all right.”

  Baldemar pondered that for a time. Finally, he said, “A loan. When this is over, you’ll get your pistol back.” He closed his hand on the revolver and tucked the barrel into his belt. “What happened to your hand?”