by C. M. Mayo
He is riding up top with the driver, who wears a sombrero with the circumference of a buggy wheel. Baron d’Huart had started out wearing his sombrero—a loosely woven one, not so big as the driver’s but the biggest they had in that labyrinth of an Aztec market—but once the coach climbed to altitude and the air turned chilly, he exchanged it for the poppy-red cap he wore for grouse hunting in the autumn.
It is late; their coach has just departed from the inn at Río Frío. The sun having fallen behind the trees, the road is bathed in the blue shadow of the brief, disconcertingly brief, Mexican twilight. Baron d’Huart throws his shoulders back and fills his lungs with the pine-scented air.
“Que fresco! How fresh!” he says, eager to practice his Spanish on his companion.
The driver, throwing his lash, makes no reply.
Had the driver been a Belgian, Baron d’Huart would have been infuriated by such insolence; he would have had him fired. But the driver is a Mexican; to Baron d’Huart, a creature who forms a part of a tableau that is, in the altogether, picturesque. Baron d’Huart simply shrugs. He thinks to himself, vraiment, these Mexicans are an inscrutable race. But Mexico itself, why, Charlotte had every right to be proud, it is a world richer than he’d imagined. A land of dessicated cacti, hardly. Such a wealth of haciendas—they’d seen many from the highway, and they’d been shown photographs—vast plantings of agave, corn, sugar, coffee, cotton, and hemp. And what breathtaking scenery! Why the devil is he the only one with the gumption to enjoy it? He could not bear to keep himself cramped inside the coach, everyone smoking, snoring, sweating, when up here one can partake of an ever-changing panorama: now an Alpine Eden of rocky cliffs, sparkling rivulets, this forest for the Knights of the Grail. In the slice of Memling blue above, an eagle soars.
He does not know the word for “eagle” in Spanish. He points at the sky. “Pajaro grande . . . big bird.”
Again, the driver makes no reply.
Again, Baron d’Huart shrugs, though this time with a sad little sigh. He gives his cap a tug, and he muses:
Mexico City—Mexicans aside—well, it is a wonder. Its cavernous cathedral makes Saints Michel et Gudule in Brussels a mere chapel. Though Mexico’s Imperial Palace could in no way be compared to the gothic splendors of the Maison du Roi, it is nothing for Charlotte to be ashamed of. As for Chapultepec Castle, though excessively gusty out on the terrace, it offers far superior vistas than the Château Royale at Laeken. It is more on the order of Sorrento’s. One had to agree with Princess Iturbide, the sunsets over the Valley of Anahuac are incomparable. Mais oui, and ever so much more with an orchestra playing Chopin.
Yes, they were shown the New World’s Land of Canaan, its oceans teaming with pearls; yet-to-be-worked seams of gold, silver, copper, gypsum; fertile lands for tobacco, sugar, coffee, sisal hemp, cotton, and—all one would need is a proper lash—troops of natives to work them. Mexicans, being an inherently indolent people, cannot be expected to progress on their own. The mining engineers come from Belgium, Germany, Italy, and France; the telegraph and railway men are preponderantly Englishmen, Yankees, and American Southerners. Commodore Maury, the world’s great oceanographer, has offered his services to the Mexican Empire. Yes, what excellent fortune that the Confederacy has fallen, for so many of its good men have come to Mexico: Baron d’Huart had had pleasant conversations with a Dr. Gwin and a Colonel Talcott and a Judge Perkins. There were Confederate generals by the bagful: Shelby, Harris, and one by the most amusing name, Slaughter, who has set up a sawmill in Orizaba.
Orizaba: on the way inland from the coast, when the Belgian party had stopped there, General Slaughter had given them a present of his oranges. Oranges! After those solid weeks at sea—after the heat and stench of Veracruz, that vulture-infested port where one hardly dared touch anything to one’s lips—to have arrived in Orizaba, sweet-smelling Orizaba, to gardens of bougainvillea and gardenias, to cut-open oranges, cut-open oranges squeezed over cups of shaved ice—ice from the volcano, the Pico de Orizaba—it was as a gift from Olympus itself.
Phagomen kai piomen, aurion gar thanoumeta. He couldn’t resist quoting Epicurus.
Then he drank a whole glass of juice, straight.
From Río Frío, it is another two days’ journey to Orizaba. (Apparently, one must be grateful that this is the dry season.) From Orizaba to Veracruz, one can expect another long day, and from Veracruz to Ostend, by sea, a grueling three weeks. Then, Brussels at the end of March: the trees bare, the fields mud.
Baron d’Huart considers another attempt at conversation with the driver, but, “Ya!” the driver bellows, lashing his team with new violence.
What is the hurry, for the love of Christ.
This stick-in-the-mud did not want to proceed from Río Frío without an escort. This morning, from Mexico City, they had an escort, a gang of Zouaves, bronzed tattooed louts. There was supposed to have been a relief escort waiting for them in Río Frío. Where was it? The answer was the universal chorus in this country: Quién sabe.
Those Zouaves, following their orders, turned around.
An escort. Oh, the driver had to have an escort.
The fort at Río Frío was unmanned. Why that was, no one could say. Clearly it wasn’t needed. So, why an escort?
Es la costumbre, the driver said. It’s the custom. He insisted they wait in Río Frío until the escort showed up. There was an inn that must have seen better days when a couple from Bordeaux was running it; in all events, said couple from Bordeaux was nowhere in evidence. The stairs up to the porch were falling apart; the only decoration, nailed to the outside wall and left to molder, were the brittle-looking pelts of an ocelot and a wolf. It was the sort of porch that might have offered a row of rocking chairs, but there were no chairs. Inside, the party sat on benches. The food smelled of rancid grease and the cutlery, dumped without ceremony in the middle of the table, had been rinsed but not washed. The little raisin of a granny who served them said there was (curiously, she used the English) apple pie, but after such an execrable repast, no one, not even the adventurous Baron d’Huart, had the stomach to attempt it.
They went outside. Up against a crumbling stone wall, an emaciated bitch nursed two puppies. Chewed-up corncobs strewn about, cruddy with dust. Flies everywhere.
Still no escort. The driver proposed that they overnight in this hole. The Mexican Imperial Army officer accompanying the party also thought this advisable. General Foury, head of the Belgian delegation, refused. He said he would not touch a mattress in this inn, not by the tip of a barge pole. Overnighting in such a place was a sure recipe for sickness and diarrhea.
A dozen Zouaves, what for? To be sure, Mexico still has isolated pockets with remnant bands of Apaches, Yaquis, and suchlike savages who have yet to taste the fruits of civilization, but these are in the far north. Charlotte assured General Foury that, except for the few areas (mostly near the Texas border), where insurgents have recently been active, the country has been pacified. General Foury and the others had heard about holdups in the neighborhood of Río Frío. He asked Charlotte straight: “What about security on the corridor between Mexico City and Veracruz?”
Charlotte smiled at the question. “You must have seen yourself, large convoys make their way along it every day.”
That was true. On their way in from Veracruz, they had seen innumerable coaches, troop wagons, wagons of merchandise, droves of cattle. “But what about the bandits,” General Foury insisted. “Have they been cleared out?”
“Newspapers profit on sensationalism.”
“Don’t I know,” General Foury laughed gently.
“I can assure you,” Charlotte said. “You are perfectly safe.”
Subsequently, at a dinner party, Baron van der Smissen, commander of the Belgian volunteers, confided that the French troops in Mexico are so poorly disciplined, they have committed so many atrocities, they have become genuinely hated. There is less concern here than many presume in Europe about the coming French evacuation; act
ually, it would be a good thing to see the French go. At that dinner party, there was a Mexican general, a gnome by the name of Almonte. He did not disagree when Colonel Talcott said, angrily, that the French troops are sucking more out of the Mexican treasury than they are worth. The Mexicans, Talcott said, can stand up on their own. The Mexican Imperial Army was being trained and equipped— many Belgian and Austrian officers, Confederates, too, many experts in all matters from artillery to cavalry to logistics, are aiding in this enterprise. And by the way, a contingent of several thousand Austrian volunteers is scheduled to arrive in Mexico this May.
“Viva Maximilian! Viva Carlota!” Glasses clinked all around.
In Río Frío, at half past five, General Foury decided that they had waited long enough for this phantasmagorical escort of French Zouaves. Allons donc! They would drive on through the night to the city of Puebla, where they could be assured of hygienic lodgings and good food. Baron d’Huart was not the only one who agreed wholeheartedly, and besides, he was plum out of patience with the fuss that had been made over them over the past two weeks. As they were the delegation from the new king of the Belgians, protocol dictated certain things—but so much formality had become chafing. From the moment they disembarked at Veracruz, they had been escorted absolutely everywhere, morning to night their activities preordained to the minute. At first, one passively devoured the scenery, as one might whilst leaning back upon the cushions of a Venetian gondola. But soon one began to feel like a valise hauled about from place to place, or rather a schoolboy, for at every moment, it seemed, there was some professor prattling on. The cathedral: and in this chapel, the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and in that chapel, the story of Our Lady of Loreto, and in the next chapel, the story of San Felipe de Jesús, martyred in Nagasaki, and the remains of the Emperor Iturbide, oh, every blessed one of that cathedral’s chapels. The Basilica of Guadalupe. Chapultepec Castle and Chapultepec Park and Chapultepec Zoo. The baths of Montezuma. The Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. The Museum of Natural History. The Museum of Antiquities, and a viewing of the Aztec Sun Stone. A canoe ride among Xochimilco’s chinampas. A bull-fight, a fandango, an exposition upon the meaning of this dance, and the meaning of that dance. In the market they were surrounded by a phalanx of escorts and guided to first, the sombreros; second, the masks of Moors and Christians; third, clay whatnots and jewelry and all about the tribes who made them, their language, their costumes. Bloody hell! San Angel, Coyoacán, the snake-infested lava beds of El Pedregal? No, no going in there, that is not on the schedule, no, that would not be of interest to you, sir, no, believe me, there is nothing to see in that street, no sir, very sorry sir, no time for an excursion to Popocatépetl—
When an excursion to Popocatépetl was the single thing Baron d’Huart had been most keen to do! He has never forgotten, as a boy, reading in Bernal Diaz’s The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, how Hernán Cortez, requiring sulphur for his guns, sent two men down into that smoking crater by ropes.
And to hunt the rare breed of antelope found only on the flanks of the Pico de Orizaba: that was his other ambition. He coveted a trophy for the main hall in his chateau.
Charlotte said, “Our Indians call the Pico de Orizaba ‘Citlaltépetl,’ which means Star Mountain.”
Miss Know-It-All, her brothers called her. Baron d’Huart had last seen her three years ago in Brussels, when she had been her usual frosty self. But now, even in mourning for her father, she was so friendly, infinitely solicitous. “You must come back, and when you do, I shall personally arrange for an expert guide to take you to the summit.”
Was any sovereign more regal? The Belgians all agreed. Mexico agreed with her like nothing else.
Did she not miss the Old World?
“Never,” Charlotte said. “I am completely happy here.”
The highway has leveled out; the coach picked up speed. Baron d’Huart’s thoughts wander back to one of the dinner parties, when he happened to have been seated next to Princess Iturbide. This august lady had been granted her title by virtue of being a daughter of Mexico’s Liberator, the Emperor Iturbide. Her French was not so good as she seemed to think it was. To almost every other thing, she’d said, “Pardonnez-moi?” After the first course, he’d turned to the lady on his other side, Madame Almonte, wife of that gnomelike general. She smelled overwhelmingly of attar of roses—verily, enough to leave one destitute of appetite. Her French was too rickety a construction to attempt to stand on; fortunately, they could converse in English.
“What do you think of Mexico?”
Madame Almonte began with this tritest of questions, but only as an opening to press upon him certain points. She seemed to have the notion that he, the officier d’ordonnance of the duke of Flanders, was destined to be Europe’s own oracle on the question of Mexico. Peculiar and very disagreeable was her habit of gripping one’s arm for emphasis.
Wasn’t this just the luck, caught between two crones, whilst directly across the table, half-obscured by the heaps of flowers and candles, just a whisper too far to be able to exchange a word, was a creature worthy of the brush of Botticelli. A Fragonard’s goddess of Love! What was her name? How she had brought the spoon of sorbet to her laughing lips, an image that, once it appeared in mind, made his brain feel—a loud crack—it had exploded.
The sound reverberated through the trees.
Baron d’Huart, a ghost of a smile still on his face, fell backward. The mules bolted, the coach shook violently, and in a moment—in the midst of a hail of gunfire—his body bounced off, onto the road.
July 10, 1866
ONE STAYS THE COURSE
Years ago, in the Latomia of Syracuse, Maximilian was shown the grave of an American cadet who had been shot in a duel. Syracuse: its landscape denuded, its harbor silted up, the town, shining beacon of the Ancient World, dirty, ragged. The Sicilian sun was ever-fierce, but this did not prevent the denizens from dressing head-to-toe in black, their faces weathered, dark, hard. The Latomia lay a short hike beyond a dusty olive grove and a stream where old women were beating laundry with stones. Goat bells clanked in the distance. In this quarry where, according to Thucydides, thousands of Athenian sailors had been imprisoned after their defeat in 413 B.C., the wall of rock, ablaze with sun, carved the sky like a scimitar. The cadet’s grave was but a narrow space in the wall. To die and be buried in a place so strange, so far from one’s fatherland (Maximilian pictured the boy’s home as a clapboard house on the salt-lashed coast of Connecticut), it was so sad, so indescribably sad. He had never forgotten it.
In March, at the news that Baron d’Huart had been murdered, Maximilian and Dr. Semeleder abandoned Cuernavaca, riding straight through the night to Río Frío. There, while Semeleder attended the wounded, Maximilian was shown the body and given the particulars. The French military escort from Río Frío had never appeared—the Belgians, official emissaries of the empress’s brother, King Leopold II, had been left unprotected. Maximilian kept shaking his head in grief, in rage, it was unbelievable.
What would they say now in the courts of Europe about his government?
It was Bazaine’s fault: this absurd, this inexcusable dereliction of duty.
A casket suitable for conveying the body back to Mexico City did not arrive until afternoon. They loaded it onto the back of a wagon. Then, after sprinkling in a liberal quantity of borax, they nailed the lid shut.
Blow after devastating blow. Since that day, Maximilian cannot conceive of worse, but it comes, and another, knocking him down, down this hellish stairway of humiliation. March, April, May, June, and now, July, the worst yet, this gob-sock: his angel, his empress—the empress of Mexico—has left for Paris.
For some time, Maximilian had been flirting with the idea of abdication—in truth, though he’d said nothing to anyone until this week, since last summer when the military situation first began deteriorating. Over the past months, his thoughts had been turning more and more frequently to his castle by the
sea in Trieste—its landscaping, the decor for the Throne Room, the aviary— perhaps an aquarium? These projects, and his botanizing, have been his escape, his amusement, and—well—altogether necessary, for, as he tells himself when he glances at the ballooning expenses, Miramar is the face of Mexico in Europe. What impression would it give in Vienna if Miramar were left unfinished, its park untended? It goes without saying, for a sovereign, the scrupulous maintenance of prestige is paramount.
To Charlotte, however, he did not have the heart to confess that he longed to return to private life, or at least a position with smaller, more manageable concerns. In his mind’s eye, he could see himself at his desk there, the Bay of Grignano outside the window behind him, and before him his library, with its marble busts of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe aglow with the light from that sea.
He missed his mother, too.
But he’d had such a horror of the afterlife—stripped of his throne, who would he be? Charlie, whom he’d despatched to Vienna to renegotiate the Family Pact, had, in essence, thrown himself at a brick wall. The bitterest betrayal, however, was not the Family Pact, but the Kaiser’s order—one’s own brother’s order!—to hold back the desperately needed contingent of Austrian volunteers at the docks at Trieste. That treachery, which had humiliated him before the army, the French, and his own court, happened three months ago. The Americans had been threatening Franz Joseph that, if those Austrian volunteers departed for Mexico, the U.S. minister in Vienna would demand his passport. Franz Joseph’s excuse for capitulating? That he needed the men for the conflict with Prussia. Bah!
If Maximilian were to abdicate, those Americans would be puffed up, and he, mere worm, would have to grovel before Franz Joseph and his camarilla. What insultingly paltry pensions might Vienna begrudge an inconvenient younger brother? No longer an archduke of the House of Habsburg, Maximilian would be ex-emperor of a memory, a mirage. By what protocol would he be treated? Could he even show his person in the Hofburg? What would his status be in Paris, in Brussels, in Lisbon, in London? The Vatican? Caricatures in the French newspapers ridicule him as a Don Quixote spurring a Mexican burro—how much worse would it be without his having even windmills to tilt at! The lord chamberlains, the masters of ceremony, he knew how they worked, how they would find the most pettifogging ways to humiliate him.