Carlota dipped her pen in the ink. She took a deep breath. She was beginning to feel energy build inside her, as if with each line, with each word, she was reinforcing her oath as a sovereign, as if once again feeling the pride and dignity they invested in her on the day of her coronation in the city’s cathedral. She felt like an empress again. She remembered how alone she’d felt at Miramare, how boring her life would have been had Mexico not presented itself as a font of opportunity; she remembered how much she’d sacrificed for a country that was not her own. She was so far away and yet so near; she had devoted herself body and soul to a common good greater than her own, out of duty. Thanks to Mexico she’d learned how to live.
And having filled her heart with this spirit, she wrote:
Put yourself in my place and ask yourself if life at Miramare was better than life in Mexico. No, a hundred times, no. I prefer a station that requires activity and duties, even difficulties, to contemplating the sea until the age of seventy . . .
She slowly breathed out. At last, she’d said it. She had gotten it off her chest. She had wanted to shout it from the rooftops for so long. She felt freer, lighter. Her soul was a feather floating in the air. She paused for a few seconds before continuing.
This is what I have left behind and this is what I have acquired, and now draw a veil over it and do not be surprised that I love Mexico. Farewell, dear Countess.
With affection,
Carlota
She reread the letter and folded it in half, then she lay on the bed, looking up at the ceiling with sadness in her soul. Without her knowing why, tears began to cascade down her face, until she slept.
52
In Maximilian’s words, Cuernavaca was an earthly paradise, and he had no qualms about saying so in a letter to Carlota. He described the divine plain of a broad valley stretching in the distance like a mantle of gold, the mountains rising up one after the other in whimsical forms, tinged with the most marvelous colors, from pinks to purples and violets. Some were fragmented like the rocks on the Sicilian coast, others were covered in green like the Swiss mountains, and behind it all, standing out against the dark-blue sky, were the gigantic snow-covered volcanoes. All of the seasons of the year coexisted there because there were none, reminding him of Italy’s forgiving May climate. The city of eternal spring, it was called. Such a landscape was worth fighting for. Carlota, no longer captivated by her husband’s poetic spirit, replied without much interest.
I’m glad you are happy in your paradise. For me, there is no longer a paradise on earth.
The empire’s end was at their heels. Maximilian was receiving letters from Napoleon III telling him that, despite his promises to never abandon him, he would have no choice but to do so. The money was running out, and the troops couldn’t be sustained. After many negotiations, Bazaine agreed to pay the Belgians and Austrians, but not the Mexicans. There wasn’t enough money even for uniforms. Maximilian sent emissaries to Paris to intercede with Napoleon III and Eugénie, but they grew increasingly disenchanted.
“Perhaps the idea to create the empire was not altogether good,” Eugénie said, doing a volte-face. “It’s sucking us dry! What do they expect? For France to pay for the soldiers’ every last button? Tell them it’s impossible. Our duty is to France.”
Napoleon listened to his wife, wanting to wring her neck.
“So now the empire’s a bad idea? At what moment did it go from being the most glorious page in modern history to being a bad idea, Eugénie?”
“The moment Maximilian became incapable of sustaining himself, of course.”
And though his wife’s shift of opinion annoyed him, he recognized that there was truth in what she was saying. Maximilian had spent a year and a half drafting utopian laws instead of governing, and time was bearing down on them and bringing with it the prospect of war with Prussia.
It wasn’t just France whose loyalty was in doubt. Austria, under pressure from the United States, put off the embarkation of volunteers who were supposed to depart for Mexico.
“Faithless cowards!” complained Maximilian when he heard the news.
But when everything turned sour, he went to Cuernavaca, where even the shadows glowed with their own radiance. If they could have seen it in Europe, he would have been the envy of any Hungarian, with his wavy beard down to his chest and a red moustache that covered his bad teeth. If they could see how he drove wild horses like a ranchero and heard his good command of Spanish. He lived as if he’d never lived any other way, because when everyone else turned away, Concepción displayed a naïve and innocent affection, devoid of any political interest, that filled him with tenderness. Nobody had ever looked at him with such clear eyes. Nobody—not even Carlota or Schertzenlechner—had come to him in search of the man; they were always looking for the archduke, the emperor, but never Maximilian.
And for him, this was glorious.
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, Carlota felt emptier than ever. Melancholy and depression flattened her, and it seemed that nothing in the world brought her comfort. She had no desire to do anything. Her dreams had been fulfilled, and there was nothing left to imagine. They were all gone.
Sharing her husband with Schertzenlechner had been painful, but in her heart and in her head, she knew that she couldn’t compete with that love. She could never give him what Sebastian gave him, and in a way that made her humiliation more tolerable. But Maximilian preferring another woman—that was an unbearable pain.
He was never there, neither governing nor facing up to the chaos that lay ahead, and Carlota knew that it was because of her. She knew it. That woman sucked his brains out and distracted him with God knows what indigenous tricks. Otherwise, how could it be that with the imperial coffers empty, instead of halting the renovation and provisioning at Casa Borda, these had accelerated? Maximilian, with the letter from Napoleon III informing him of the troops’ withdrawal, spent his time making drawings of the work to be carried out. Beauty, Carlota thought contemptuously. Always the beautiful and the vacuous before the practical.
She was beginning to feel hostility toward everything Mexican. The country to which she’d given so much was suddenly taking it all away. Constanza was the only person she confided in.
“Mexico City rejects us. They don’t want us, do they, Constanza?”
“Why do you say that, Majesty?”
“I see it. I feel it. They’re false. They put up victory arches, but it’s just adornment. Mexico’s national pride has been wounded; a lot of dirt, a lot of corruption for centuries. I can’t fight that.”
Constanza froze. She responded in kind to the empress’s sincerity.
“You’re right, Majesty.” The young woman changed the subject. “Have you been taking the herbs I gave you, Majesty?”
“Yes,” she said, a little embarrassed.
“And have you noticed any improvement, Majesty?”
“Oh, Constanza, the emperor spends two weeks of each month in Cuernavaca! He’s there more than he’s here. I even had to set up a Mexico City–Cuernavaca telegraph so he could attend to the country from under that woman’s skirts. It’s a disgrace.”
“Be patient. Keep taking them, and before you know it you’ll see that everything will be different, Majesty.”
Very different, she thought with a pang of remorse as she tidied papers on the desk. Turning around to face Carlota, she felt afraid: bewitched, Carlota was staring blankly. She was wandering while looking into the void, and yet her mouth broke into a smile. A madwoman was looking at her.
“Majesty,” Constanza called to her nervously. “Are you all right?”
Carlota came around.
“Huh?” she said, coming out of her trance.
“Nothing, nothing, Majesty.”
They pretended nothing had happened.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Majesty?”
“No, you may leave. Thank you.”
“With your permission,” she said.
Out
side, Constanza stopped behind the door and held her hands to her mouth to suppress a sob. She was certain, as she’d never been before in her life, that she would burn in hell for eternity for quietly poisoning a good woman.
53
1867–1869, Castle of Laeken, Brussels
Every evening, the sky over Laeken reverberated while, with a vacant stare, Carlota played the Mexican national anthem on the piano. People asked her why she played it, and Carlota, making their hair stand on end, answered, “Tell the emperor not to worry, Napoleon will never abandon us.”
He’d already abandoned them. Mexico hadn’t been among Napoleon’s concerns for a long time, for better or for worse, but she clung to the green, white, and red with the same confidence she had years ago. For her, time had stopped. Stuck in a clock that didn’t keep time, it didn’t disturb her in the slightest.
The appalling state in which Carlota arrived shocked even her brother King Leopold, who had a heart of ice. Seeing her, he didn’t know how to react. He’d heard stories about her condition but thought they were the usual exaggerations of women, incapable of assimilating defeats and misfortunes with a soldier’s fortitude. But once he saw her before him, he felt pity for her: his poor sister had been reduced to skin and bone. The anguish of her abandonment had consumed her, giving her the appearance of a thin, pallid ghost, her freshness gone. Whatever beauty she’d possessed had evaporated, leaving a sediment of fear. She had the expression of a dog that had been brutally abused and feared everything. If somebody approached without making their presence known, Carlota jumped. In some kind of desperate attempt to swallow herself up, she hunched over like an armadillo in its armor; just as impenetrable, just as coarse.
Arriving in Laeken seemed to revive her lucidity. She recognized the corridors and rooms where she’d played as a child, the portraits on the walls were familiar to her, and she grew fond of her late father’s little dog, which she sat with on her lap for hours, stroking it. She was home. Reluctantly, she allowed her new ladies of honor to dress her and brush her hair, looking at them with suspicion as they held their hands to the sky, imploring her to trust them.
“Nobody is going to hurt you, Archduchess,” they said.
But the memory of Constanza lashed at her like a thunderbolt. Every face was a face of betrayal, of gradual poisoning. Constanza giving her herbs to drink to attract a man’s love: Drink, Majesty, drink. Constanza, the lapdog that wags its tail, licks, and then bites. She shook her head to cast Constanza Murrieta’s face from her mind, wanting to be able to suspend her disbelief, her stupidity.
Her suspicion wasn’t entirely unwarranted, since it was Leopold II who chose the ladies. Her eldest brother’s sinister look terrified her. For now he only growled, but Carlota knew that he was also a rabid dog waiting to bite.
Even so, Leopold went for walks with her, though Carlota sensed that it wasn’t for the pleasure of her company but to see how mad she was. Her instincts weren’t deceiving her: Leopold’s motivation was not kindness but to test how far he could stretch the cord without it breaking, and at times Carlota’s sense and good memory disconcerted him. She remembered each name, each street, each look from the politicians, ambassadors, and ministers she’d met in the last two years, even if she had spent only minutes in their company. Not even the Goffinets demonstrated such lucidity, and they had to rely on each other to put two and two together. Why did they say, then, that his sister was mad? She spoke coherently, which was doubtlessly an inconvenience: the more deranged she was, he thought, the better for Belgium, because it would mean the return of the Belgian state’s hundred thousand florins from Austria. Leopold felt his stomach clench when he thought of the Habsburgs basking in his sister’s wealth, his poor, stupid, foolish sister. With the Goffinets’ help, he’d already managed to render void her joint ownership of Miramare and Lokrum—half of which belonged to her through her marriage to Maximilian—and the debts with the Habsburgs had been annulled. Not a single centime from the Belgian coffers would be paid to the Austrians. And all thanks to two things: the fact that Maximilian had never consummated the marriage, and because his sister, as everyone knew, had lost her sanity. Leopold hoped that nothing would change. Carlota’s madness couldn’t have been more profitable. So whenever Marie Henriette told him, with joy, how she’d visibly improved, that she was becoming more beautiful and had put on weight, instead of smiling, Leopold’s expression turned as stern as a cook boiling cauliflower.
Marie Henriette also noticed Carlota’s distrust of her ladies. She could see how uncomfortable she felt among unknown women; she’d never seen so much fear in her eyes, as if the ladies, far from helping her and assisting her in her tasks, were spiders weaving a web on which to wait to devour her.
One day, trying not to upset her, she asked, “Did the ladies in Mexico treat you well?”
Carlota dropped the frame in which she was embroidering a handkerchief. Marie Henriette, feigning ignorance, picked it up and gave it back to Carlota. She pretended to count the stitches on her embroidery and persisted:
“What were they like?”
Carlota stared at her.
“Sinister.”
“What makes you say that?”
“They were bad to me. They made me believe they loved me, that they respected me, and then they bit off my hand. Especially . . .”
Carlota broke off.
“Especially what?”
“Especially her. Constanza. She was the worst.”
“Did she hurt you?”
“She went all the way.”
And then, leaving the embroidery on her lap, she sank into silence again.
Marie Henriette didn’t need to know any more. She knew betrayal like the back of her hand. And Dr. Bolkens had said it was likely that Carlota had been poisoned in small doses for a long time. Straightaway, she set about trying to find a lady-in-waiting who was loyal, honest, incorruptible, and, if possible, with more patience than Job.
After several interviews and drawing on her instinct, she knew who among all the castle’s inhabitants was right for the position. Her name was Marie Moreau; she’d been born in Friesland the daughter of a general. Alongside her chambermaid, Julie Doyen, she would be responsible for looking after the empress. They’d been in Marie Henriette’s service for years, and she knew them well. They were quiet, caring, and with iron stomachs. They would be the queen’s eyes and ears and would report back to her.
Like the breeze cooling summer evenings, Carlota felt as if life was worth living again. She reemerged like a bud forcing its way through dry earth. Marie Henriette devoted herself to her with the same dedication she’d shown her daughters long ago. She oversaw every detail, from her clothes to her food. They walked in the gardens arm in arm, they embroidered together, and Marie Henriette soothed Carlota when she woke in the night soaked in sweat, seized by panic and the final tremor of her paranoia. Her fear of being poisoned gradually subsided. She ate meals twice a day, snacked once, and stopped drinking from fountains. Sometimes she even laughed, though it was a laughter devoid of happiness.
On their evening strolls, Carlota looked at the mountains and, at a slow pace, her memories flooding back to her, she often spoke to Marie Henriette of how beautiful Mexico was.
“If only you had seen it,” she said. “There are few places so lovely on the face of the earth. The snow paints silhouettes on the mountains; the sun doesn’t shine but burns insolently; the trees dance . . .”
Each time this happened, Marie Henriette put herself on guard and commended herself to the angels so that, by the grace of God, she didn’t ask her about Maximilian. She knew one day she would have to tell her that her good, beloved emperor, who as it turned out was neither good nor beloved, had been executed by firing squad. That before dying he’d ordered his locket ring containing his first love Princess Maria Amélia of Braganza’s hair, which he wore every day, to be delivered to his mother, Princess Sophie. Marie Henriette’s legs shook when she thought of Maximili
an’s greenish body, twice badly embalmed in an attempt to preserve it on its journey to Vienna, before being placed in three coffins: one lined with velvet, another of wood, and a final one of zinc, made to measure because his long, noble figure didn’t fit in the caskets of commoners. But days went by, leaves yellowed on the trees and fell to the ground, covering the earth in an ochre mantle, the icy winter arrived, and Carlota still hadn’t asked. Marie Henriette sensed that Carlota knew the emperor was dead, because she never asked after him. Her indifference could only mean an unequivocal desire to remain in blissful ignorance, and Marie Henriette wasn’t going to be the one to destroy it for her. But there was only so long that reality could be ignored. Carlota would have to be told that Maximilian was dead, because with her condition improved, she could read the newspapers. Every day she was brought a copy of L’Étoile belge, but first they checked that it didn’t contain news about Mexico.
Carlota knew they were hiding something, because sometimes she asked sarcastically, “Will I be allowed to read the paper today?”
And they all gave false smiles.
They decided that it would be Father Deschamps, who’d married them and from whom she had received her First Communion, who would give her the news. On January 12, 1868, almost seven months after the execution, the priest said to her, “The emperor is dead, the Mexicans executed him. He was shot like Iturbide.”
“Then it’s all over now,” said Carlota.
Tout est fini. The idea struck her head-on, stunning her.
“So, we no longer have a throne?”
“I’m afraid not, child.”
And just when he was about to tell her they should pray for Maximilian’s eternal peace, Carlota clapped her hands and, leaving Deschamps openmouthed, said, “We must petition Napoleon for the Spanish or Italian throne!”
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