Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  “And you came with him?”

  Werther drew himself up. “I have served Fernando de Castellón since I was fifteen. He was like a brother to me. More than a brother. No one understood him as I did, his moods, his needs, his greatness. Not his father, not Don Anastasio—that sterile scholar of weeds! Not that pinchbeck Napoleon Santa Anna, who would not so much as chide that monstrous old man for keeping his murderer alive about his household, only that he might have someone to play cards with! Not that cowardly whore von Winterfeldt, who thought only to get me out of the country, and not how to avenge my master. . . .”

  January reflected wearily upon how everyone seemed to imagine that ministers to a foreign government had carte blanche to meddle at will—an impression apparently shared by some of those ministers themselves. What, he wondered, had Bremer imagined von Winterfeldt could have done to a British citizen without Santa Anna’s approval and backing? Marched troops on Mictlán and besieged it?

  “Yes, I lied. Fernando was dead when I came into the study at half past ten. Dead and cold. He must have died minutes after that Scheisskerl Sefton gave him the poisoned brandy. But I had to lie! No one was doing anything, not even Capitán Ylario, who of all men I thought must understand. ‘I found no will,’ he said, as if Sefton would not have stolen it when he murdered my master!”

  His eyes filled with tears again, and he leaned against the crumbling stucco of the arcade, striking it with his forehead like the frantic patients of San Hipólito. “A pettifogger and a coward, like all the rest! A betrayer . . . My poor Fernando! Betrayed by everyone save I alone! By those lazy, thieving pagan servants at the town house, who turned me out! I don’t doubt they were in league with that Schwartzer pig El Moro and the scum he commanded, and told them where to lie in wait for me in the alleys beside the town house, so that I dared not even claim my rights! Betrayed by those overdressed cowardly Affenschwanzen who were Fernando’s fellow officers, who would not do a thing to avenge him—who would not even take me on!

  “And all because I tried to stand by my friend. My poor Fernando trusted me and needed me. He had so much to bear. He was a brave man, Herr Januar, a noble man, and for that nobility alone they poisoned him, as everyone poisons and cheats and mocks the brave!”

  His voice broke. Most of the other prisoners in the yard had returned to their own concerns, rolling cigarettos or smoking them, some of them weaving hatbands of horsehair and beads—for sale via the guards, presumably—or making baskets. But a few remained, watching Werther with open incomprehension and scorn; January was aware of the glint in their eyes as they attempted to figure out how this encounter might be turned to their own good.

  From his own brief brushes with the law in New Orleans—his own stay or two in the New Orleans Cabildo—January knew there are always men who watch for their chance to prey on those who falter, who are confused or have no friends to watch their back.

  And Werther, he guessed, didn’t understand this.

  Yet.

  He had spent only the tail-end of one night in the prison yard.

  “He was of the true nobility, Herr Januar. A Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, descended in pure blood from the days before it was split and decayed, when the true Spaniards and the true Germans stood as one and ruled over the whole of Europe under God. But he was born too late, into degenerate times. Only I understood this, understood him. He was good to me,” the young man finished baldly. “Would you not do anything that you could, Herr Januar, to stand beside a friend?”

  It has to be one of Butler’s men, thought January as he walked with sinking heart along the stone passageway to the guardroom. What would a countryside bandit like El Moro be doing, lurking in wait in the alleys of the town to beat up wandering strangers? Not, he reminded himself, that he knew the local customs of Mexican banditry—perhaps it was usual to switch venues like that. But in three nights of listening to gossip at the card-tables, he’d heard complaints about léperos and burglars and house-breakers, but never about organized countryside gangs coming in to terrorize the streets.

  And he’d heard El Moro’s name mentioned several times, always as a highwayman who preyed on coaches and travelers outside the town.

  But somehow he couldn’t picture a black man, slave or free, giving orders to white Texians either, and Bremer had spoken of the black leader commanding men.

  He turned back and glanced over his shoulder, where the shadows of the arcade framed the great glaring arch of the sunlit yard. Bleak and desperate in his heart, wondering what the hell he was going to do now. Try to insinuate himself into Butler’s town house tonight? Werther Bremer hadn’t seen anything of John Dillard, anything outside the walls at all. Try to force the truth out of Valentina by threatening to expose her lover?

  God knew what counter-charge the girl would come up with.

  The evidence is fairly damning, Hannibal had written. . . . Damning? It was irrefutable. And tomorrow Santa Anna would leave for Vera Cruz, and there would be no rescue the next time Ylario rode out to Mictlán. Hannibal would be lucky if he survived a night in the prison yard before being hustled onto the scaffold.

  He could see Werther sitting with his back to one of the arcade pillars, his arms folded around his knees, looking fearfully around him.

  Hungry, almost certainly. And perhaps beginning to suspect what would happen once the sun went down.

  The temptation was strong simply to walk away. It would be days before Ylario heard his protégé was here. . . .

  And Werther, January knew, wouldn’t last days.

  A voice in his mind whispered, It would solve a lot of problems. . . .

  But there were things he knew that he could not do.

  In the guardroom he dug in his pocket and handed the sergeant five pesos. “Would you see the German boy gets put in a cell by himself?” he said, knowing that such accommodation was available on the upper level of the arcade. “And see that he gets his share of the food. Capitán Ylario will be asking for him, and will want to find him safe and sound.”

  Forgive me, my friend, he thought as he walked down the stone carriageway to the street, his boots echoing in the shadowy vault. But those of us who work for friendship’s sake must help one another as best we can.

  “Well, it explains at any rate why Ylario was so certain of Hannibal’s guilt.” Rose dipped a rag swab into an infusion of the tecomblate that Zama had bought for them at the local botica and squeezed the astringent wash gently into the wound on January’s arm. “But I’ll take oath Hannibal knows nothing of the will.”

  “If it existed at all.” January put a finger on the knot of bandage for Rose to tie. The cut was superficial and had all but closed by the time he’d returned to the Calle Jaral, but the lack of cleanliness prevailing in La Accordada made January willing to go through the pain of reopening and cleansing the flesh. “What Fernando found may have been only a draft drawn up by his father to force him into a marriage any sane man would draw back from. Don Prospero himself may have put it on the fire the minute the room was clear. God knows he’d never have heard the end of it if Doña Josefa learned about the thirty thousand pesos to the convent . . . presumably the Bleeding Heart of Mary.”

  “About which you can be sure I’ll ask Sor Maria-Perdita this afternoon.” Rose washed her hands in the second bowl of water on the windowsill of their chamber and tidied up the swabs. “Don Anastasio would know about the will, if anyone would, and he’s certainly not mentioned it—will we see him at Sir Henry’s tonight, do you think?”

  “I doubt it. Anastasio has no great opinion of Santa Anna. But he’ll be at the Chapel of the Bleeding Heart this afternoon when Pilar de Bujerio takes her vows.”

  “Will you write to Ylario about Werther?”

  January nodded with a sigh. “I have to,” he said. “He’ll find out soon anyway. Werther’s testimony about the will won’t make much difference to a judge who’s already made up his mind to put Hannibal on the gallows; at least now we know what
we’re up against. I’ll send a note to von Winterfeldt also. Even if, as a Holsteiner, Bremer is no business of the King of Prussia’s, von Winterfeldt may be able to do something for him. Certainly the guards at the prison won’t know the difference between one German principality and another.”

  “And I somehow suspect,” murmured Rose, “that one need not fear von Winterfeldt being overly scrupulous about the Principles of Universal Law.”

  Coming into the sala in search of notepaper, January found his hostess with a basket of marigolds on her arm, arranging the brilliant flowers in a series of terracotta pots on a little table set up in a niche at the far end of the room. Among them, carefully folded, lay an old reboso of faded black and gray; a necklace of red beads with a silver cross; a cheap rosary; a pair of brass earrings.

  It reminded January a little of the altars his sister Olympe, and the other voodoo queens of New Orleans, would make to the gods of Africa: images that spoke of their nature, and the things they were said to love, liquor and tobacco and flowers of certain colors.

  But this was smaller, and not a place of the worship of spirits of power but of single memories reverently held: four clay toy bulls with the paint nearly all worn off them, a doll whose face had been nearly rubbed away but whose black-dyed sisal hair was neatly braided. A plate of coconut candies lay between two gourds of aguardiente, a double line of tidily-arranged cigarettos, a bowl of spiced peanuts, a plate of tiny skulls wrought of sugar and painted silver and gold.

  “They like to be remembered,” Consuela said, glancing back at January over her plump shoulder. “Mama and Teresa and Joselito. It’s not like a big family offrenda, not like the one my father will have out at Mictlán, or Don Anastasio’s at Saragosse, as big as a cathedral, for all the various branches of the Avila family going back three hundred years. But Mama would always have one for her mama—my Abuelita Tita—and her mama in turn, and all my aunts and uncles. When you have very little, it’s important that you hold to what you have. And sometimes all you have is the memory of being loved, when there was nothing else.”

  In his dreams that afternoon, as he lay with Rose in the drowsy siesta dimness, January decorated his own family altar with flowers in his heart. On it he put his first wife’s single gold earring that had belonged to her mother in the deserts of northern Africa, probably only a few hundred miles north of where his own father had been born. He arranged her thimbles and her needles, and the feather aigrettes she’d put in her hats, and on a plate put honey for the sweetness of her kisses, and fire—in his dream he saw it dancing in a little dish—for the love that had been between them, fire that had never gone out. Of his father he had nothing, yet in his dream the altar was crowded with the magic light of the songs he’d sung, and the gift of music that he’d passed on to January as a tiny child. The pressure of a big, reassuring hand on January’s shoulder, telling the child he had been in those days of slavery and fear that everything would eventually be all right.

  The memory of being loved.

  From that beautiful altar he turned to the three-hundred-year-old altar of the de Castellóns, and he saw it strewn with trash and sprinkled with blood.

  Half a piece of dry bread on a French china plate.

  Natividad’s bridal veil, and a green-and-white Meissen tea-cup with a rabbit’s heart in it, floating in blood.

  A tortilla-press with blood and hair on its edge.

  And above all, the staring skeletal image of the God of the Dead.

  SEVENTEEN

  A bell clanged softly, the only sound within the dim-lit church. January crossed himself, and around him whispers swelled to a murmur like the rustle of wind through leaves. “It’s absolutely barbaric,” murmured a voice in his ear, and Don Anastasio slipped into the row beside him, far over to the side of the aisle but close to the immense grating of turned wood that divided the Church of the Bleeding Heart of Mary from floor to ceiling, like the bars of an American prison cell. “I’m surprised to see you here, Enero. You impressed me as a man of greater education than most of my relatives.”

  “I have learned never to have opinions about anyone’s relatives,” replied January in an undertone. “But I try to continue my own education wherever I find myself.”

  “An education indeed.” The Don’s thin mouth bent sourly under his neat black beard. “Where else can one look directly through a window into the fifteenth century?” He folded his hands as he spoke, though January observed that unlike most of the crowd who packed the church from the wooden grating to the outer doors, he carried neither rosary nor prayer-book. His black trousers and his close-fitting jacket of black linen were unrelieved by any touch of color—mourning for his brother-in-law Don Fernando?

  Or for the young girl about to leave the world?

  From the painted vaults of the ceiling hung a black curtain, a good thirty feet down to the floor. The floor itself was wrought of blocks of onyx, worn by the bare feet of penitents through the centuries. Despite a bound and bleeding St. Sebastian, a primitive-looking Virgin in a pink gown entirely covered with some of the largest pearls January had ever seen, and Stations of the Cross whose graphic gruesomeness would have made Goya queasy, the grating and the curtain gave the small church the air of a theater, as indeed, January supposed, it was. Those who knelt shoulder-to-shoulder with him, packing the cramped sanctuary to the doors, jostled and conversed much more like the audience at the opera than the witnesses of a solemn ceremony.

  Don Anastasio went on. “As if this country has not better things to do with its young women—girls of intelligence and breeding like Pilar, girls whose family could afford to give them decent educations—than to convince them from the time they’re able to walk that God wants them immured in prison to waste the rest of their lives in self-torture and grief. At least in India they give women the chance to bear and educate children before they burn them to death.”

  January said nothing. Having come early, he had secured a place not far from the grating that separated the public portion of the convent church from that reserved for the nuns. He wondered how Rose was faring, and whether Sor Perdita would cut short their conversation to participate in this ceremony. A few rows ahead of him he could see the de Bujerio family, lacking only Doña Imelda: among that swarm of unmarried and presumably dowerless female cousins, second-cousins, sisters, aunts, and great-aunts he recognized Doña Isabella, decked out in what Rose irreverently referred to as “Mexican mourning,” a black gown of extremely opulent fabric and cut worn with a parure of diamonds. Beside her knelt Doña Josefa, veiled and unadorned, her emaciated hands folded. There was no sign of the girl Paloma, or of Casimiro. Did Don Prospero ever permit them to leave Mictlán?

  A muted stirring just this side of the grille drew January’s attention. A dozen musicians filed in—guitars, cornets, violins, a bass-fiddle, and two clarionettes, like the orchestra for a dance. The organ in the rear of the church groaned out a sonorous note, and from the small square outside, January heard the crackle of rockets being set off into the afternoon sky. At the same moment the band burst into lively music—the Overture from The Barber of Seville, which made January wonder if the person who’d chosen it had ever seen the thoroughly irreverent opera. From the narrow door that had admitted the musicians, Doña Imelda emerged, gorgeously gowned in sea-green and gold and literally flashing with jewels. She took her place among her relatives and the music ceased, and with a faint squeaking of pulleys, the black curtain behind the grating lifted, for all the world, thought January, like the opening act of an opera. . . .

  In spite of himself, he thought, Yes, and the opera is Act Two of Robert le Diable, with the chorus of mad dancing nuns. . . .

  Don Anastasio was right. Whatever one felt about the Church, there was something in the scene beyond the grating that struck him as slightly hysterical and infinitely tragic.

  Candles blazed around the altar, the gold that plated every pillar, swag, and curlicue throwing back the soft waxlight in a thick, dusky
glory that is unlike anything else in the world. Banners, drapings, tassels of crimson, burned like blood; painted statues of saints gestured, bled, and blessed. At a table to one side, the Bishop of Mexico City sat, gold and scarlet himself, stout and benevolent, flanked by attendant priests. And on the floor before the altar, stretched prostrate in robes of funereal black, lay the nuns of the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of Mary, faces pressed to the floor, hands stretched above their heads grasping thick candles of white beeswax whose faintly honeyed smell rose above the musky pungence of incense.

  The nuns softly chanted, “Veni, sponsa Christi, accipe coronam, quam tibi Dominus praeparavit in aeternum . . .” to the girl who knelt among them, delicate and beautiful in her party-dress of pale-blue silk and lace, veiled beneath her crown of diamonds, her shield of gold and paint held like a bridal bouquet in her hands.

  January glanced sidelong in time to see Doña Josefa throw back her own veil, and the expression on her face was almost shocking to see. Hungry, furious, eyes blazing with envy and rage as she silently mouthed the words of what might have been prayer.

  “Adducentur regi virgines post eam. . . .” The nuns rose, singing, then knelt again and touched their faces to the floor, their voices sweet and eerie in the painted vaults of the church. “Proximae ejus afferentur tibi in laetitia. . . .”

  A priest came forward and raised Pilar, and led her to the bishop. The curtain came down and the band played again, Mozart this time, gay German dances, and again the chatter rose, exactly like that during the opera’s entr’acte. Don Anastasio looked as if he’d bitten into sour fruit, but he remained. It was true what Consuela had often said, that family was everything: one did one’s duty no matter what one felt. When the curtain went up again, January thought, Act Two—the wicked Elena is turning me into a heretic like herself. . . . But his smile faded at the sight of the girl Pilar lying prostrate on the floor before the altar, dressed in black and covered with black sack-cloth: jewels gone, lace gone, crown gone, as if she were truly dead. The nuns knelt around her, singing: “Me expectaverunt peccatores, ut perderent me: testimonia tua, Domine, intellexi . . .”