Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  “I should think,” commented Rose judiciously, sipping her coffee, “that the simplest way to discourage such importunate hospitality would be to win heavily at picquet. Hannibal’s quite capable of it. I’ve played with him.”

  “Oh, he won thousands of pesos from my father, and from Don Anastasio—the husband of Franz’s full sister Isabella and one of my father’s oldest friends. Don Anastasio’s hacienda lies just to the west of Mictlán. That doesn’t matter to my father. Hannibal took five or six hundred from Franz, which I think was the reason Franz threatened to kill him. Father gave orders to Vasco—the foreman of his vaqueros, who is loyal to him and could not abide either Franz or Anastasio—not to permit Hannibal to leave the hacienda, and when my father came down sick three days later . . .”

  “Can we return for a moment,” interposed January, “to the part about your brother threatening to kill Hannibal?”

  “Did they quarrel?” asked Rose. Beyond the open door the courtyard had fallen absolutely silent with the hour of siesta, the autumn heat pressing down upon the house and the city around it as surely as any evil fairy’s spell upon an enchanted castle. The servants had vanished; with the window shutters closed, the bedroom was stuffy and dim.

  “Quarrel? Dios, no!” Consuela dipped a fragment of pandolce into her coffee. “You know Hannibal never quarrels with anyone, not even when he has taken a drop too much opium. But my brother was a savage, Señora. A cold savage, who never raised his voice. When he was with the Army, Franz had three of his men flogged to death, one of them by his own hand; it is rumored also that he beat one of his servants here in town to death as well.” She shook her head, her face in its frame of tumbled black curls suddenly somber and very Indian.

  “So—three days before the wedding my father went into one of his crazy fits. God forbid that even the bride should have more attention paid to her on her wedding-eve than he. He began talking to his idols, and wandering about the house in his nightshirt, and thinking that Santa Anna—who as his dear friend was there for the wedding—was the war-god of the old Indians, to whom the ancient priests offered the torn-out hearts of living victims, which always makes the servants nervous.

  “Josefa—our eldest sister, as I have said, who does not have much use for me—sent at once for her confessor and for her confessor’s confessor, to pray that the Devil be driven out of our father. Natividad’s mother, Señora Lorcha, also sent for a priest, and tried to have my father marry Natividad before anyone could do anything about it, but Fernando arrived in the midst of that ceremony with two mad-doctors from town and had Father put under restraint. Hannibal tried to slip out in all the confusion and was caught by the vaqueros and brought back. It is fifteen miles to the city, you understand, and most of it open rangeland, and even with Father locked up in his room Vasco would not take orders from Fernando.”

  Consuela sighed and broke off another piece of pandolce. “So in the midst of all this praying and cursing and conversations with sacred jaguars and people who weren’t there, Hannibal was playing cards in the corredor upstairs with me and Valentina and Natividad, on the afternoon before the wedding-feast, with all of our respective duennas present, naturally. And suddenly Fernando came out of my father’s study and took Hannibal by the throat, and thrust him up against the wall and snarled, ‘Know that when I am master here you will pay dearly for your perfidy, Norteamericano bastard.’

  “And of course Hannibal replied ‘My dear Fernando, you’re as mistaken about my intentions as you are about my nationality and the circumstances of my birth,’ but of course my brother did not listen. He was not a listener, my brother Franz.”

  She angled her coffee-cup in her fingers; a hot sliver of light from the door touched the dark fluid and glinted in the garnets on her rings. “Since it was clear to all by then that my father was going to be locked up, leaving Franz truly in charge to do as he pleased, Hannibal tried to bolt again before supper but did not get even a mile. He was badly frightened, and with good reason. When Santa Anna arrived I know he asked him for protection and an escort back to town, but Santa Anna said that he would not go against the wishes of his dear friend Don Prospero. I think the situation amused him, and he would not intervene. He is cruel that way.”

  “Would Santa Anna have simply stood by and let Franz . . . Fernando . . . mistreat . . . a British citizen?” asked Rose uneasily.

  “That I don’t know, Señora. Santa Anna seeks to please my father because my father paid his debts for him. The general’s favor and his friendship are the reasons my father is still rich when most of the other old landowners are bankrupt from taxes and forced loans and losing all their men to the Army. But he is cruel, Santa Anna, and sly. He has no particular affection for Hannibal, and as I said, the situation amused him, like watching a cock-fight, or a bull being baited.”

  A corner of her lush mouth turned down. “I cannot say that supper was a meal notable for its sparkling conversation. M’sieu Guillenormand, my father’s chef, was beside himself for fear that the dinner would be called off altogether or that Santa Anna would go back to the city without sampling his efforts. Guillenormand said that it was just like my father—which of course it was—to go mad just when he, Sacripant Guillenormand, was on the point of serving up a dinner that would make his fame forever, as if anyone could make himself famous forever for doing anything in Mexico City these days. It was like something out of Molière or Goya, with Fernando glaring at Natividad, and Natividad’s mother looking daggers at Fernando, and Josefa watching Natividad’s mother to make sure she didn’t slip away and marry her daughter to my father when no one was looking, and the two mad-doctors trying to make polite conversation with the priests. . . . Josefa ate nothing but dry bread, to prove her sinfulness, and M’sieu Guillenormand threatened to kill himself on account of that, as he had done many times before. Franz got up and announced he was going back to the study to try to make sense of my father’s papers; we all heard him bolt the study door. Hannibal took the brandy bottle and two glasses from the sideboard and went out to the door that opens from the study into the corredor.

  “And three hours later my brother’s valet found my brother dead.”

  THREE

  They left Mexico City as soon as it was light enough to see. Consuela and Rose rode in an old-fashioned traveling-coach shaped like a tea-cup and slung on leather straps that made it sway like a ship in a gale, while January rode beside them, surrounded by an armed assortment of male servants and profoundly thankful not to be in the heaving coach itself. Though Rose had evidently been deemed sufficiently respectable to play dame de compagnie to a lady going to the home of her father—either that, or Doña Gertrudis, like John Dillard, objected to riding in a coach with los negros—both women were accompanied by their maids.

  “Of course Rose must have a maid,” Consuela had declared after siesta yesterday while supper was being laid on the table. “Your Padre Cesario was absolutely right. And you, Señor Enero, must have a valet.” To January’s protest that it would not be possible to locate servants of any kind—much less reliable ones—before departing for Mictlán in the morning, Consuela had replied with an airy wave of her hand and the words “We will leave that to Sancho. Sancho is my footman and he knows everyone in town. He will get you servants.”

  He had, too. For Rose, the wiry, rather wolfish Sancho had located—and vouched for—a slim, dark zamba girl named Zama, and for January he had produced a leathery, silent, elderly Yaqui Indian called Cristobál. At a reale apiece a week, with shabby livery thrown in from the trunks in Consuela’s box-room, it was a cheap enough means of establishing their credentials among the respectable: January was amused to see that while Cristobál fitted silently in among Consuela’s mounted henchmen, Consuela’s mestizo maid Pepita looked down her nose at the darker-skinned Zama and refused to share the same carriage-seat with her.

  He wondered how he and Rose would have fared on this journey had they not—through a strange chain of luck and circums
tance the previous summer—stumbled upon a moderate-sized pirate cache in the bayous near the home of Rose’s white relatives, in the swamplands south of New Orleans. Perhaps, as all the saints attested, money could not buy happiness, but it certainly made the misery attendant on being born of African parentage in Louisiana much easier to deal with.

  So they rode out of Mexico City like lords, with servants and a coach, as the flower-sellers were gliding into the town on their barges covered with poppies, singing strange songs in the old Nahuatl tongue.

  Within a few miles of the end of the northern causeway, January better understood how his friend could be held prisoner in a private home fifteen miles from the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Once away from the city and the lakes that surrounded it, the deforested land was utterly desolate. Across the chewed green mantle of what remained of the rainy season’s grasses, cattle wandered at will, save where horrific hedges of cactus kept them out of dusty village cornfields. Sopilotes circled lazily in the sky. Brush-choked gullies slashed the earth that the coach had to descend, rattling in every joint and trace, then heave free of again; with all his heart January pitied the women inside. Sometimes he would glimpse riders, half-seen in clouds of yellow dust. Free rancheros, probably, who held small farms along the few stingy watercourses, or the vaqueros of the wealthy cattlemen in short jackets and leather knee-breeches unbuttoned halfway up to the thigh, their long hair tied in silk kerchiefs beneath low-crowned leather hats. But the sight of them made January’s heart quicken with dread as he recalled the bandits in the pass: as he recalled Rose kneeling in the overturned coach, with blood staining her dress.

  It could have been Rose. It could have been Rose they buried in the little cemetery at Chalco—to leave him once more standing on the dark banks of the River Styx, trying to think of a reason to go on with his life alone.

  And there was nothing to stop them from being attacked, and robbed, and killed, except their own numbers and their own weaponry. In New Orleans January had grown, if not used to the thought that he could be kidnapped and sold as a slave in the Territories, at least accustomed to taking precautions. He now realized how different it was to be in a place where no one would care, or make the smallest attempt to stop violence or murder.

  Don Prospero de Castellón was called hacendado, but within his realm he was the ruler as surely as the Sultan ruled Turkey. There was, quite literally, no one to stop him—or the bandit El Moro—from doing exactly as he chose.

  “The British minister?” said Consuela when the carriage halted mid-morning so that the women could drink a little wine and rest from the endless, sickening jolting. “He looked down his nose when I spoke of Hannibal and said only ‘That worthless opium-eater,’ as if half the population of England doesn’t drop opium in their beer and dose their babies with laudanum to keep them from crying.” She snapped open her sandalwood fan and sniffed. A short distance away Pepita and Zama puffed on their respective cigarettos and ignored one another.

  January said nothing. Though he had long deplored his friend’s use of the drug, he understood it. The racking coughs of consumption could be stilled by nothing else. Hannibal had written to him in August that months of rest in Consuela’s flat had improved his condition wonderfully; January guessed that his friend would find, as others had found before him, that the golden key that opened the shackles of pain would prove to lock the gates of another kind of prison entirely.

  Provided, of course, that he lived to see the New Year.

  “Who was at your brother’s wedding-feast?” he asked instead. “You spoke of your sisters—Doña Josefa, the eldest, and another who is married to your father’s friend Don Anastasio. . . .”

  “Isabella,” agreed Consuela. “But she did not come to the banquet. She had a migraine, Don Anastasio said, but me, I think it was that she could not endure to see such a one as Natividad married to her brother. She is a woman much ill-done-by in the world—just ask her.”

  She spoke flippantly, but January had heard enough about the family—and seen enough of how society worked in Mexico—to guess that life could not be easy for any daughter of the mad and autocratic Don Prospero. There was no precarious middle ground, such as Rose had for a time occupied in New Orleans, for women who would not be dependent on their fathers or husbands.

  Between the loss of her beloved school in the wake of the cholera in September of ’33, and the finding of the pirate cache nearly two years later, Rose had eked out a living as a translator of Latin and Greek volumes for the owners of New Orleans bookstores, and had contracted out her skills in those languages to the few boys’ academies in the town, correcting examinations. In Mexico she would probably not even have had that chance.

  January, trained in France as a surgeon but knowing from bitter experience that his race effectively barred him from practice, understood that her position in those days was far more difficult than his own. He’d made a reasonable living as a musician, saving during the Christmas season and Mardi Gras to pay his rent during the summer doldrums when the wealthy whites left town. For a woman, black or white or colored, there were few things to do besides attaching herself, in some capacity, to a man.

  Consuela’s voice called back his thoughts as she ticked off names with her plump fingers. “There was Santa Anna, of course, and two, maybe three, of his aides—young friends of Franz’s, whose duty it is to go about after the Presidente and add to his consequence. There were the two mad-doctors Franz brought from town, Pichon and Laveuve, and in the opposing camp, so to speak, were the priests: Josefa’s confessor Fray Ramiro, the priest she brought in from town to exorcise the demons of madness from my father, and the priest Natividad’s mother brought in from town to secretly wed my father and Natividad while no one was looking.”

  “I’m sure that was responsible for some icy silences over the coq au vin,” said Rose, climbing back into the carriage once more.

  “I felt for the poor man, for even Josefa would not speak to him, and of course Señora Lorcha by that time was trying to pretend that it had never happened.” Consuela waved to the two maids to come, and Sancho, with a bow of almost burlesque exaggeration, helped her up onto the high step. “There was also Doña Imelda de Bujerio, and her son Don Rafael, who are also neighbors of my father, though Don Rafael, like Fernando, prefers to remain at his town house in the city, and leaves his hacienda at Fructosa to be managed by the mayor. Don Rafael is going to marry Valla—Valentina—so of course when Señora Lorcha tried to marry Natividad to my father, it would mean my father repudiating Valla’s mother, Melosia, and making Valentina into a bastard who cannot inherit.”

  “I see that the wonder is not that someone was murdered at that gathering,” remarked Rose as the carriage jolted into motion again, “but that only one person suffered the ultimate penalty.” She coughed on the dust but left the glass windows of the coach open. Having spent four days on the Vera Cruz diligencia debating whether to be suffocated or grilled, January could sympathize.

  “Were it not that Franz was going to have Hannibal whipped—possibly to death—the moment the company left,” said Consuela, with a wry twist to her mouth, “I would have derived a good deal of entertainment from watching my family at dinner, for of course Valentina flirted with all Santa Anna’s young aides, and Doña Josefa would eat only a mouthful of dry bread, and pray for my brother, and glare like a basilisk that turns men to stone. For two years, since she returned to my father’s house on her husband’s death, she has begged my father to permit her to retire to the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of Mary—because my father’s investments kept her husband from going bankrupt when the centralistas took over the government, he controls her money. And of course he refuses to pay the fees required by the Convent. He says he has never heard anywhere that Christ dickered like a marriage-broker over the dowries of his brides, and naturally the cost of a woman’s upkeep for the remainder of her life in a place of contemplation has never crossed his mind.”

  “
Would your brother have let her retire?” asked January, leaning a little in the saddle to speak through the window.

  “I don’t think so. He was a Protestant in his heart, my brother—en verdad, he became one, in fact, when he entered the military school in Potsdam, though he recanted once he returned to Mexico. But it was clear that he considered the Mass a foolish superstition, and the saints no more than the old gods dressed up in European clothing. And Don Anastasio, who is a scholar and a heretic, has pointed out that he was not so wrong in this, at least in the villages, where churches stand on the foundations of the old temples, and Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel wear the feathers of the warrior-god Huitzilopoctli in their hair.”

  The hacienda of Mictlán stood at the edge of a small lake, a high adobe wall pale against the dark background of clustering oaks. Watchtowers stood at two corners, grim reminders of the savagery of this half-desolated countryside, and the few windows that pierced the outer wall were heavily barred with iron and wood. Farther along the lake’s reedy shore the adobe huts and rough, palm-thatched jacals of an Indian village spread amid wide corn-fields, huts, and fields surrounded by hedges of thick-growing cactus. Men in the loose, thin breeches and tunics of indios worked at hauling in the field stubble for winter fodder, or hoeing among the bean-plants and pumpkins. Beyond the casca—what in Louisiana would have been called the Big House, though it more resembled a walled fortress—five tall, cone-shaped hills reared in far too straight a line to be natural. They were thickly blanketed in thorn and brush through which what appeared to be broken statues or pillars thrust up, like snaggled teeth.

  Wide gates stood open into a central quadrangle: dust, straying chickens, saddled horses, smells. On three sides, women sat or knelt beneath the dense shade of the gallery, clothed in the loose cape-like blouses and knee-length skirts of Indians, their black hair braided with ribbons, carding wool or twisting thread on old-fashioned drop spindles. From rooms behind them came the thump of looms; the stink of leather curing and soap being boiled filled the vast court like soup in a trough. As the carriage came to a standstill, a long-haired ruffian in leather breeches came from the shade to take January’s horse. At the same moment, a man’s melodious voice drifted down from an open door in the upstairs arcade: “Gentlemen, I beg you! Nothing is to be resolved by bloodshed!”