by C. M. Mayo
“Go!” Weissbrunn shouted.
“You will shoot me in the back.”
“If you do not go,” Weissbrunn said, “then I will shoot you in the face!”
The Mexican fled, his arms jack-knifing up the path, and Weissbrunn ran the other way, crashing through the bushes.
Afterward, when he came back to the pond, Weissbrunn found fresh sand sprinkled over the blood. The gold tooth that had fallen there was gone. Tere and Agustín were feeding the ducks again, as if nothing had happened. Weissbrunn came up behind them. He dimly realized, this little nursemaid now held his career in her hands. For this elephantine fuckup, he wouldn’t get sentry duty, it really would be a court-martial. Beneath her nursemaid’s cap, Tere wore her hair in coiled braids. Her hair was so dark it almost seemed blue. Many times, Weissbrunn had wanted to tell her that.
“Um,” he began, and then he held his breath.
He wasn’t sure how to say what he wasn’t sure he should say in the first place. Besides, what a dumb-fuck thing to say at a time like this. I like your hair. It looks almost blue.
Tere flicked a piece of tortilla into the crowd of birds. Frau von Kuhacse-vich had said she was the assistant pastry chef’s cousin. Christ, she’d know everyone in the kitchen, all the Mexicans. And Tüdos, that magpie, he talked to Frau von Kuhacsevich, and she talked to everybody.
Keeping her eyes on the pond, Tere spoke as she always spoke to him, in a shy voice, as if to someone else.
“I won’t tell.”
What was he supposed to say to that? The breeze riffled the ahuehuetes and brushed over the water, erasing their reflection. He thought to himself, You stupid, stupid fuck.
Tere bent down to hand Agustín another shred of tortilla. “Don’t eat it, sweetie, it’s for the birds.”
Weissbrunn fumbled out a cigarette and put it in his mouth. And then, Tere came up to him and boldly put her hand on the case.
Weissbrunn said, “I didn’t know you were a smoker. Be my guest. But I warn you, they’ve got kick.” He meant the cannabis he’d crumbled into the tobacco.
She kept her hand on the case. (The hand. The hand. He tried to blink it out of his head. Ein, zwei . . .)
“What?” Weissbrunn opened his eyes. “You want one? Take one.”
She pulled the cigarette case.
“Hey,” Weissbrunn said, pulling it back. It was silver, it had his father’s monogram on it. This was one of the last things he owned that he hadn’t lost at cards. She tugged with a fierceness that so surprised him, he let go. She hid it in a pocket deep within the folds of her skirt.
Weissbrunn took of his hat. He plowed a hand though his hair. Under his breath, he said, “Eh, ffff.”
Still cooling his heels outside the nursery, Weissbrunn can tell by the angle of the sun puddling by his boot, another ten minutes killed. He yawns and shifts in his folding chair. If he’d give his right arm to be with Fünfkirchen’s ulans, he’d give his left for a cigarette.
A goddamned cigarette!
He slides his pistol out of its holster. He lays it across his lap. He drums his fingers along the barrel. His finger, almost by itself, curls around the trigger. He lets the pistol swing; he twirls it. Then—it always flares into his brain out of nowhere: the hand, the hand, that fucking hand on that fucking fence rail, Ein, zwei, drei . . .
What if he just blew his brains out?
The end of the barrel: He presses it into his temple. He can feel the steel ring of the trigger against the flesh of his finger. With his thumb, he cocks the hammer. One squeeze—one little squeeze would do it. Now?
Not now. Not yet.
He lays the pistol back across his knees, just in time to touch the visor of his cap. “Grüss Gott!”
Frau von Kuhacsevich answers, “Good afternoon!” as she swishes by, her keys jangling.
And in her wake, Frau Furchterregend throws open the nursery door.
“Weissbrunn!”
He’s already snapped to attention. “Your Highness.” He shoves the pistol back in its holster.
“We will be attending a children’s party on the Calle de San Francisco.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Weissbrunn follows her and Prince Agustín, grumpy-faced in his starched white-lace frock, and Tere, who has sprayed herself with orange-water to conceal the smell of what she’s been smoking. Her eyes are red.
They amble down the corridor slowly, because Frau Furchterregend’s hip is bothering her. All the same, Agustín falls down on the slick marble and cries. He reaches his little arms up for Weissbrunn. Weissbrunn wants to pick him up and carry him, but he cannot do that in front of Frau Furchterregend.
Slow, slow, to have to move so fucking slow, and behind a screaming two-year-old, Weissbrunn feels sure, any day, any moment, his skull is going to explode.
December 5, 1865
THE WIDOW DE GÓMEZ PEDRAZA, AT-HOME
La Sociedad—that newspaper, as Doña Juliana de Gómez Pedraza / likes to say—is little more than adverts for over-priced flubdubs and a dose of sugar-coated fantasy. Anyway her cataracts make reading well nigh impossible, and so, as she hasn’t the vim to get about, Tuesday, her at-home day, is “newsday”—though the idea of news puts hummingbirds in her stomach. Public security appears to be going from troubled to catastrophic. A neighbor may have been murdered. The French are no longer trusted. Last week Madame Bazaine, her niece, warned, “Do not expect to see us here at this time next year. That is all I can tell you and you mustn’t repeat it.”
Moreover, in addition to the smaller aggravations of wartime, which to Doña Juliana are not small, three times Chole has burnt something since Tuesday last. This morning it was a batch of date-and-walnut cookies—with dried fruits and nuts at four times the price they were last year this season! The smoke has been fanned out of the kitchen—but not the stink, and it will be hours after the last of the visitors will have left before the windows in the drawing room can be shuttered.
Dressed in black, perfumed, and her gaunt face rouged and powdered, Doña Juliana glides on velvet slippers into her drawing room. The chairs, the chaise, and the two sofas have been arranged in a circle. She fluffs a cushion, straightens an antimacassar. Then she inspects her sideboard laid out with cups and saucers, and, proud upon a China stand, protected by a dome of glass, her famous pine nut-studded chocolate cake. She then eases herself into the wing chair by the window—the window with the crack she dare not grudge a peso to replace. And its frame wants a coat of paint. And the mozo has been conscripted into the army, she supposes (Pablito simply disappeared one day last spring), and so, it is Chole who shall have to scrape the bird droppings. She’s been reminded twice, and she’s yet to do it.
Doña Juliana reminds herself: Al bien buscarlo, al mal esperarlo. Look for good things, wait for bad things, as Don Manuel used to say.
This wing chair is the one in which, fourteen years ago, Don Manuel breathed his last. In the embrace of its cushioned, red-leather depths, his widow used to spend her days embroidering cloaks for the Templo de la Profesa’s effigy of the Virgin, but since her seventieth birthday her eyes have been ruined for fine work. The Almighty in His Infinite Wisdom has taken this pleasure from His servant, as He has taken so many things, so many dear ones. She leans over the arm of the wing chair, her mantilla draping her elbow, and peers down into the street: a canyon of shadow. Her vision may be fogged, but she can make out that it has not been swept. “¿No toman chícharros? Won’t you have peas?” A woman with a basket passes below; her lilting call fades. There are fewer ambulantes. The lard-seller has not come by in over a week. Opposite, over Count Villavaso’s porte-cochère, the black bow and ribbon has been knocked askew; a length of it trails to the flagstones.
She is hoping to see her niece’s carriage—it always scatters traffic and, once parked, attracts a crowd. A good six months have gone by since the wedding, but Doña Juliana is not yet accustomed to hearing Pepita called Madame Bazaine. Pepita has been going around with no less than thr
ee bodyguards, sometimes as many as four, an ostentatious number it seemed to Doña Juliana until Pepita explained, the general insists upon it. And the general, Doña Juliana knows, is not an ostentatious man.
Tsk, Doña Juliana clucks her tongue: there, hurrying past in the street, goes Lupe—again. Doña Juliana would recognize her ex-galopina anywhere: the pigeon-toed gait, the skinny white plaits bouncing on her tiny humped back. She’s up to mischief, but what? (Where can Lupe be eating?) That little ingrate was the bane of Chole’s days. Poor old Chole, who hard to believe, is now even more frail than her mistress.
Such has become the once grand house of the Gómez Pedrazas: a cold cave for a widow and her arthritic, bad-tempered, increasingly forgetful cook. In these nearly three months since Angel and Alicia’s departure, it has been sheerly by the resources of her rapidly dwindling bank account in New Orleans, and her niece’s intervention, that Doña Juliana has managed to keep the third floor of this house vacant. Everyone else in Mexico City—Mrs. Yorke, even Conchita Aguayo, one of the empress’s ladies-of-honor—has been obliged to billet officers. Some may be gentlemen, Mrs. Yorke claims her are, but Doña Juliana can imagine the uncouth characters they would have visit, their women, drinking, card-playing, language she would not wipe the floor with— Tsk, Doña Juliana clucks her tongue again. In all her years, Doña Juliana has seen more soldiers than she could shake a knitting needle at: Spaniards, royalists, revolutionaries, liberals, for the empire, for the republic, legions of bugle-blowing Yankees . . . Why, last Tuesday, one of her elderly visitors, after one too many tequilas, declared that it no longer mattered a pin to her which uniform a soldier wears, be it blue or green or gray—a soldier makes war. And what is war? It is the making of widows and orphans.
The Demon’s work: that is what Lupe must be up to. Twice last week, from this window, Doña Juliana has spied her tagging after a ruffian in a cutaway coat so big on him the tails were dragging on the ground. He wore his sombrero low over his forehead. Too low. He was hiding his face. At once, Doña Juliana rang the bell for Chole.
Had Lupe come by?
Chole mumbled at the floor.
“Don’t be shy with the truth. Did Lupe come to this door?”
More mumbley-mumble.
Doña Juliana had not run a household all these many years for nothing. Servants, she knew perfectly well, tried to protect one from whatever they fancied might be upsetting. The better to gauge things, Doña Juliana put her lorgnette to her eye. “Tsk. Out with it.”
“She came to the door, yes.”
“When did she come to the door?”
“Yesterday.”
“When yesterday?”
“Before the coal was delivered.”
“What did she want?”
“I saw it was her from the judas window. I did not open.”
“You did not speak to her?”
“Señora, I did not.”
“Not one word?”
“Two. I told her, Go away!”
Doña Juliana leaned in close and, through that lens, narrowed her eye. “Do you swear it?”
“Before Jesus Christ Our Savior.”
“And before all the Saints?”
“So help me.” Chole crossed herself.
The lorgnette went back into Doña Juliana’s pocket. “Good. That is what I want to hear.”
One had to drill it into servants, the new, the old, the trustiest, that never, ever were they to open the door to anyone other than the master’s family and recognized friends. One could not repeat the warning often enough; for a servant to open the door heedlessly—but once!—could be the very invitation to mayhem and murder. Such has been the disgraceful situation of this country in every one of Doña Juliana’s years, and it is getting worse.
On no account is an ex-galopina to be allowed into this house. Least of all Lupe, that silly rabbit. How her head swelled up like a soufflé when Pepa de Iturbide had the absurd idea to make her the nanny to the grandson of the Liberator! “What do you know about babies?” Pepa had asked that little mosquito. “All that God wants me to,” Lupe answered, an answer that described the grass the Goliath of Truth was standing upon—but left out the Goliath, which was that Lupe knew nothing whatsoever. She could peel and chop, and if pressed, pluck birds (she was too squeamish to wring a chicken’s neck, Chole always had to do that work).
Of all the servants in all the years in this house, Lupe was hands down the most insolent, fork-tongued, and conniving. There were the disappearances over the years: a silver thimble, a pearl earring, one of the cuff links Don Manuel swore he had left in a dish on his bedside table . . . a cigar or two . . . a sock . . . a spoon, small things one might have misplaced, but then it happened a time too often. Chole complained Lupe stole her soap slivers. It was out of God-fearing charity that Doña Juliana first gave that orphan a job in her kitchen and kept her all those years—what had it been, over fifty years? Doña Juliana had warned Alicia when she sent Lupe to cook for her: “She’ll do, but keep her in the kitchen.” And then, when the Iturbides left, once again Doña Juliana offered to keep a roof over Lupe’s head. And what was that one’s answer? To run off, just as that mozo probably did, with who-knows-who.
“Shuh!” she shoos a pigeon from the ledge.
Sitting by an open window in December invites catarrh, Doña Juliana’s doctor would scold her—the doctor she has now. She has outlived three. She likes to say, the reason is, she’s not let one grain of tobacco cross her lips. She luxuriates in fresh air—the freshest possible. In fact, she used to take her sewing and a parasol to preserve her complexion up to the flat-roof. From there, she could see what seemed to her the whole world: the volcanoes in the distance, and closer, the sunrinsed towers of the cathedral. One had to come around to the side of the maids’ quarters to see it: yonder west, past a stretch of fields, rose the rock crowned by Chapultepec Castle. With the setting of the sun, the façade turned a marvelous tufa pink; it brought to mind a box of Spanish nougat-candy. Before Maximilian, it housed the Military College. If the wind happened to be blowing her way, she might catch the tat-tat of drums.
From the wing chair Doña Juliana peers down into the street again. A page of La Sociedad skids along the cobblestones, like a bird with a useless wing. Not in years has her first visitor been so tardy. When Don Manuel was alive, on Tuesdays she would receive as many as two hundred—countesses, wives of bankers, of ambassadors, of cabinet ministers and generals. This drawing room was often abuzz with twenty, thirty, forty of the most important ladies in this country. Sure as the moon calls forth the tides, with power and influence come swells of well-wishers, gossiphunters, the favor-seekers— you can never satisfy them all, and though you try, and though they offer you a face of sunshine, Lord knows what thunderbolts are hurled behind your back.
As Don Manuel often observed, it is when you are out of office that you learn which are your true friends. Of course, last year, when General Bazaine began courting Pepita, and she, Doña Juliana, served as chaperone, all of a sudden Tuesdays got busier. Madame Almonte showed up, that was a first . . . but the most familiar thing. Doña Juliana warned her niece, take care how you treat people, for when you are perceived as powerful, it is easier than you imagine to offend. Mi querida, one day, away it all will flow. And we shall all, whether queens or beggars, have to answer to Saint Peter at the gates of the Hereafter.
Doña Juliana gets up and goes over to her harpsichord. Hesitantly at first, then swiftly, her still nimble fingers dance up and down the scales. Her shoulders sway as she loses herself in the minuet. And so she does not see or hear her first visitor’s coach sweep up to the curb. The lackey, in full livery, hops down and snaps open the door. Out comes the last person on earth Doña Juliana is expecting to see today—Pepa, that is, Princess Iturbide.
As for Princess Iturbide, this December morning may be bright as the beginning of the world, but she is sorely troubled by a black cloud of worries, resentments, disappointments, and outright f
ist-clenching fury. She did not sleep well, and from the moment she got out of bed this morning, her mind has been churning. Would that Father Fischer were here! And the empress and half the cabinet not yet returned from their hair-brained expedition to Yucatan! Most confounding are Maximilian’s absences. He does not show himself in the theater, he does not ride, he does not drive. He squanders entire mornings being instructed in the Nahuatl language! For days at a time he meanders off to whatever flea-infested Indian village and, with his personal botanist, traipses about the countryside with butterfly nets. And, complaining of the cold in Chapultepec, he has taken to sleeping downtown in the Imperial Palace, where, according to Frau von Kuhacsevich, he keeps a stove going as if he were in the snowbound Hofburg! In Chapultepec Castle, Princess Iturbide and her tiny godson might as well be marooned on an island of savages. The von Kuhacseviches have lost control of the staff—to the point where, after dinner, whilst the Mexican footmen clear dishes and platters, an Austrian must pick each piece of silverware off each tray as it goes by—oyster fork, salad fork, cream-soup spoon, and etcetera. He lays the pieces upon a napkin he has spread on the floor in the corner, and then wraps it all up and carries it off to wash the silver himself. This in full view of all present! Such is the extent of pilfering: next the malachite urns shall have to be chained to the floor!
The single sunny spot in her life is that she has wrested control over her own and Prince Agustín’s schedules. When the empress was in residence, mornings were taken up with interminable tours of orphanages, hospitals, schools for paupers, and then, the tertulias, state dinners, balls; for herself, Pepa was left with only the most niggardly portion of the day. Over the past month, however, she has had her mornings free to search for a residence and, also, to go shopping and visiting. She is much in demand. But if she has very naturally slipped into being treated as if she were a priceless and fragile sculpture, by no means has she forgotten her friends. This morning she dedicates to visiting the widow of one of her late father’s most loyal supporters. Yes, Doña Juliana, widow of Don Manuel Gómez Pedraza, the aunt of Madame Bazaine, and, it so happens, Angelo and Alicia’s ex-landlady.