by C. M. Mayo
Doña Juliana takes both of Pepa’s hands in hers. “Bring him with you next Tuesday?”
“If God wants it.” Princess Iturbide pulls away.
In the hall mirror, as Princess Iturbide adjusts her chapeau and pins it to her thinning hair, Doña Juliana yearns to ask if there has been any news of Angelo and Alicia—have they arrived safely in Paris? Did Alicia see her mother in Washington? The poor dear, is she feeling steadier? And Angelo, have the Parisian doctors cured his gout? Agustín Gerónimo, the eldest, was coughing so violently the last time she saw him. Is he—? But Doña Juliana dare not presume. She can hear the shade of Don Manuel whisper, as he so often did in the days when Don Agustín was their emperor, and he walked at his side through the hallways of power: Let discretion be our guiding star.
Princess Iturbide picks up her purse and fastens it to her belt. “You need not accompany me to the door.”
Doña Juliana cannot help herself—after a stitch of hesitation, she calls after Pepa, “Next week, if you can come, do bring Agustinito?”
But too late; Princess Iturbide, halfway down the stairs—greeting Mrs. Yorke and her daughters, who are on their way up—does not hear.
December 11, 1865
THE BOOK OF THE SEA
In the Grand-Hôtel in Paris, Angelo sleeps into the meat of the morning, dreaming: the king is dead. The roar rises from the crowd, who then? He lifts his palm and the sea cleaves. He strides—a Moses—onto the sand, the rock-strewn bottom. On either side of his path rise walls of water. They are crystalline; he can see the fishes swimming within. He strides on, swallowing planetary distances. It is so simple to bring forth a path through the sea. Why, he wonders, had he not understood this?
But another dream comes more often, indeed nightly, and again this morning upon the cusp of waking: in which he is being backed at saber point to the edge of a cliff. He wakes with his heart racing and his skin gone cold. Once, last week, he had woken up, thrashing the blankets, shouting “Pepa!” and woke Alicia.
Alicia rages that Pepa tricked her. Pepa could have convinced Maximilian to give back the baby. Pepa was always bragging that she had Maximilians ear. Maximilian has a good heart, doesn’t everyone say so? So, if he won’t give back the baby, it’s because Pepa . . .
Her accusing words are knives in his heart. Her misery is the fault of his family’s glittering burdens. He never should have allowed her, so naive and headstrong, to make, let alone influence, such a decision. Teeth clenched, he accepts this.
From the start, he had resisted it. Such costly honors, he should have— God, he could have!—held his ground. On the long crossing to Europe, his mind circled and circled until one day it stumbled upon the trapdoor of a horrifying realization: last summer, when Maximilian first ordered the family to quit the country, they could have turned to General Almonte. That was the lifesaver, right under their noses! Almonte, when ambassador to Washington, had been the guest of honor at their wedding, in the front parlor at Rosedale. A member of the delegation that offered Maximilian the throne, Almonte had served as regent under the French Occupation and now, if Maximilian had sidelined him, his wife was chief lady-in-waiting to the empress. But, the bastard of Father Morelos had obscure loyalties—perhaps, still, to Santa Anna? In no wise of the Iturbide’s social rank, this was not an individual to whom one would want to be beholden.
The head of the Iturbide family, however, is not Angelo. Agustín Gerónimo would sooner deign to oblige himself to a pickaninny.
But, God, Angelo thinks now, if they could have put aside their scruples! Anything, to accept a minor position in any European legation, even South American, anything, dear Jesus, would be better than to live like this.
Every day Angelo listens to his wife rail, for as long as he can stand it, which isn’t long: he has to go out. He unspools hours over newspapers in cafés, trolls the bookstalls, and the echoing galleries of the Louvre where he looks blearily at the same pictures again and again. What can he possibly say that Alicia would be able to hear? She has reason to insist that Pepa was overly persuasive, but it is not so simple. Maximilian is hardly Pepa’s puppet. Nor Father Fischer’s. If there be a puppeteer, it is Louis Napoleon. The irony is, Maximilian has exiled them to Louis Napoleon’s doorstep.
Patience, Mr. Bigelow had counseled when he’d come to call on the Itur-bides at the Grand-Hôtel. Mr. Bigelow reported that he had mentioned their plight to the French foreign minister and requested that, as a purely private matter, he receive the Iturbides. Drouyn de Lhuys’s answer had been a resounding, “Pas possible.”
It has now been more than two weeks with not a word.
They had so tightly grasped the hope that Drouyn de Lhuys might receive them, and then, having heard their heart-wrenching story, that he might speak to the emperor, who might then urge Maximilian to return their child.
Oh, would that it were, as Mamá used to say, flan frío, caliente el cuchillo, for a cold flan, a hot knife!
Angelo would have harbored no hope at all, but back in October, when they visited Washington, the secretary of state received him in his home—a rare honor, as Seward was still recovering from having been stabbed in the throat on the night of President Lincoln’s assassination. Angelo knew him from the early 1850s, when Seward was the senator from New York and Angelo was secretary and, as the ambassador had not yet arrived, acting head of the Mexican legation. (In conversation once, Mr. Seward had said that, second to the U.S. Constitution, his father’s Plan of Iguala was the most important political document of the New World. Seward had been showing off; nonetheless, Angelo, accustomed to so much casual disregard for Mexico, could not help but have been flattered.) By the end of this meeting with Mr. Seward, they had become more than acquaintances. As another of Mamá’s rhyming sayings went: el enemigo de mi enemigo es mi amigo, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It was a dangerous game to be getting into, but Maximilian left them no quarter. With Mr. Seward’s letter in hand, the Iturbides raced to Paris . . .
And after all these weeks on tenterhooks, to hear Mr. Bigelow counsel patience, Alicia had buried her face in her hands. Angelo had wanted to bellow out of despair. Instead, he said quietly, “We remain much obliged to you, sir.”
“Yeah,” Agustín Gerónimo said, “patien’, uh.”
There had been something lewd in his older brother’s expression, but it turns out he is suffering from an abscessed molar. He has such a holy terror of dentistry, he has been suffering in silence—swearing he isn’t hungry, or he’s trying to quit his pipe. Now there is no disguising it: the entire left side of his face is red and swollen. His neck is tender. This morning he’s taken such a quantity of laudanum for the pain that Angelo has to help him into his clothes. Dressed, Agustín Gerónimo staggers toward the chaise, steadies himself on the back of the bergère, then grabs at the doorknob, misses— Quite the drama, and all before the waiter arrives with the breakfast trolley, which perfumes the room with mint and fennel and alcohol. Always the alcohol, and now that the youngest, Agustín Cosme, has used his first payment to buy himself a tavern in Montparnasse . . .
“What’s this? Absinthe with your egg?” Angelo softens that comment with a small laugh.
From the chaise, where he is stretched out with a blanket over his legs, Agustín Gerónimo says, “You hav’ th’ egg.”
“I have eaten. An hour ago.” A wheezing cough.
“I shall fetch Dr. Evans.”
“God, no.”
“Brother, you ought not go on like this, putting nothing in your stomach. I really do think that a dentist—”
“Y’ deaf ?” Agustín Gerónimo gives him a lidded, yellow glare. “Gimme that glass.”
Stiffly, Angelo complies.
“Spoon,” Agustín Gerónimo commands.
Using the silver sugar tongs, Angelo places a lump of sugar on the slotted absinthe spoon. He hands it into his brother’s trembling grasp. “I’ll pour for you.” Angelo trickles the water over the sugar. As it falls through
the slots, the absinthe louches, turning from emerald green to a milky brownish green.
Shakily Agustín Gerónimo brings the glass to the right side of his mouth. He winces hideously. Angelo, meanwhile, wrestles himself into his cashmere coat. (Before crossing the Channel, they had outfitted themselves at Hill Brothers Tailors on Bond Street.) He picks up his beaver-fur top hat, but instead of putting it on, he holds it by the rim.
“Brother?” Angelo taps his hat lightly, as if it were a drum. “Let me fetch Dr. Evans.”
“Dammit!”
They begin arguing, and Alicia, in her dressing gown, rushes in from the bedroom. “What is it?”
Having opened the door to the hallway, Angelo says, “Adieu.”
“Darling, where are you going?”
From the end of the hallway come voices and the bumps of luggage being moved. These days, he’s so easily distracted. Alicia’s dressing gown is one he has not seen before: pearl white silk painted with—what are those, peacocks? It is, he considers, in questionable taste. Her turquoise slippers with orange tassels, also new, are ridiculous.
“Out,” Angelo says, pulling on his fur-lined gloves.
Agustín Gerónimo lifts his terrible head from the chaise. “I forbid you to bring that quack!”
Angelo slams the door.
Angelo makes his way down the Avenue de l’Opéra, and the sober moon gray edifice of the Grand-Hôtel disappears behind the crowds. He has no plan but to steady his mind. He will not go to any tooth-puller. In all his forty-nine years, Angelo has never disobeyed his brother. It is the way they were raised, to obey their father and, after his murder, to obey Agustín Gerónimo. Angelo is brusque with his wife only because he does not know how else a husband could be. Her happiness is his sun and moon and every star. Alicia, who was so vibrant, so bubbly, now has the permanent expression of someone who has been slapped. She bursts into noisy tears in a café, in the hotel’s hydraulic lift, and the other day as they happened by a toy shop. What did it was the sight of a little boy holding his mother’s hand as they came out; the child had a toy horse in his other mitten and he dropped it. Alicia picked it up from the pavement and ran after them. “Mercy bo-coop,” the woman said. (Now the war was over, Americans were arriving in droves.) From beneath a mop of straw-colored curls, the child looked up at Alicia and said, “My name is Michael!” “That is a fine name.” Alicia’s voice strangled in her throat. And there was the day last week when, as they were coming out of the Louvre, the Prince Imperial’s carriage sped past. Now anything, everything sets her off.
It has crossed Angelo’s mind that his wife may have become permanently unhinged. This provokes his impatience, rage even, but at other times a knee-weakening grief. He’d had such pride in her. She was no ñoño, whiner. Had Mamá lived, he feels certain, she would have rescinded her harsh judgment about Alicia. In Mexico Alicia had learned Spanish so quickly. He would give her books to read, and she read every one and asked questions about the words. Right away, she took to wearing a mantilla, and eating tortillas, beans, pico de gallo. She sipped tequila with salt on the rim of the glass and a squeeze of lime, and she did not hesitate to try jalapeño chiles, chiles de árbol, poblanos, eggs with machaca, tamales of all flavors. As for bullfights, his Alicia was not one of those wilting Anglo-Saxons; she wanted the best seat in the ring, and she cheered, “Olé!” with the rest of them. But that now seems an aeon ago, and Alicia a different woman. Confused, Angelo veers between treating her as a mulish child, or a vengeful goddess. How much easier it would be were Alicia’s wound in her body. A broken bone, he could bind up. To a cut, he could apply a salve. But for a mother’s broken heart? He does not have a clue what to say, and the wrong word, however well intentioned, is acid.
If Drouyn de Lhuys will not grant them an interview, so be it. The question is how Maximilian will react to their having met with Mr. Bigelow. Maximilian has his spies, and no doubt Louis Napoleon and Franz Joseph lend him theirs. The Geheim Polizei, Vienna’s secret police, has the biggest intelligence network on the continent. Very possibly, Angelo considers, when the Iturbides arrived here in Paris, Maximilian had already been informed of their meeting with Mr. Seward in Washington, for there was no one at the station to receive them. The following day, José Hidalgo, the Mexican ambassador, accompanied Angelo and his brothers to the bank—but with such insouciance, it crossed Angelo’s mind that Hidalgo would have sent a flunky had he not been greedy for news.
Once the business of signing the accounts and taking receipt of the funds had been completed, in the bank’s foyer, Hidalgo pressed Angelo, what was his view, when would U.S. troops cross the Rio Grande? Or, did Angelo think that, with Lincoln gone, the United States would recognize the Mexican Empire?
The answer to the first question would have been, no, sending troops to the border was a bluff, and to the second, never, or at least, not while Seward remains secretary of state. But Angelo, peeved at this affront to his brother’s dignity—the ambassador should have addressed himself to the head of the family—said only, “It is anyone’s guess.”
Hidalgo wanted to understand, what was this so-called Monroe Doctrine?
Angelo gave a curt explanation.
“But what is a ‘monroe’?” Hidalgo asked.
Agustín Gerónimo guffawed. He tried to disguise it with a cough, but too late.
Angelo had felt his stomach sink. He had thought, for a moment, that the ambassador was jesting. The pudgy-faced son of Spaniards, with pale skin made paler by a black beard, the ambassador had the visage of a Jesuit: deadly earnest.
Angelo answered, “James Monroe was president of the United States from 1817 to 1825.”
“Ah.” Hidalgo pressed his lips together.
They had embarrassed the ambassador. This was very stupid. Hidalgo was a personal friend of Eugénie’s; now that avenue of appeal, before even being looked into, was blocked. Hidalgo took leave of Angelo and his brothers on the street outside the bank, without having asked after their family or offered any service whatsoever.
The next morning, Alicia went to her interview with Mr. Bigelow. (For himself, a Mexican subject, to be seen going into the U.S. legation was unthinkable. It was risky, but he accompanied his wife as far as the café on the opposite side of the boulevard.) Alicia’s interview went well, and the following afternoon, Mr. Bigelow called on them at the Grand-Hôtel. Mr. Bigelow ended by declaring that, in all frankness, he did not expect the archduke’s government to survive the year.
Agustín Gerónimo smirked. It was already the end of November. “What, you think Maximilian’ll abdicate ’fore the end of next month?”
“It would be in the archduke’s best interest to do so,” answered Bigelow.
Angelo had also found it amusing to hear Maximilian referred to as “the archduke.” True, on coming to Paris, they had been surprised to learn how unpopular the Mexican expedition was, as evidenced by the graffiti in the streets and the rabid speeches coming out of the Legislative Chambers (French blood shed for a foreignprince, and so on). Nonetheless, Angelo did not alter his conviction that, despite the challenges, Maximilian, as the only realistic alternative to anarchy, could reign in Mexico for years to come. For the sake of conversation, Angelo had ventured a mild query. “But is not Louis Napoleon committed to staying in Mexico by the Treaty of Miramar?”
“Of course.” Bigelow picked up his umbrella. “Until he no longer finds it convenient.”
So, Angelo thought, the United States will make it “inconvenient”? That is a limp threat. Now, as Angelo is nearing the end of the Avenue de l’Opéra, the arcades of the Palais Royale coming into view, he could laugh out loud. In fact, he does, and the sound startles a woman with a basket on her head, who steps away wide, scattering chestnuts. Angelo does not see her, nor any of the crowd; the cocoa-seller with the barrel strapped to his shoulder; the hacks lined up at the curb, the horses’ breath coming out of their nostrils in puffs. The sky is a gathering tent of felt. He strides right by the c
orner of the Rue de Richelieu and the gypsy in a sheepskin coat, smacking at a tambourine.
Manifest Destiny? Angelo rolls his eyes. Yankees are overconfident by nature. They blunder in without a notion of the first switchback in the labyrinth of Mexican politics. On the one hand, there is Mother Church (what would Protestants know about that?). On the other, there is the Mexican Imperial Army’s officer corps (some rigidly ultramontane, others, ever mercurial, for or against Santa Anna). Then the caciques with their peons and thugs. Then the conservative landowners. And those Yucatecs keen to secede . . . And Santa Anna, that old one-legged lion with nine lives—at least one or two left to live—he must be skulking around somewhere, on Saint Thomas? New Orleans? New York?