The Empress: A novel

by Laura Martínez-Belli

  Carlota pretended to learn the news from Alfred himself, when in reality she’d been expecting the moment from the first day she loved him. She was unaccustomed to happiness lasting long. In fact, she was unaccustomed to happiness at all. Crowns were always made of thorns.

  “The emperor’s sending us to the northwest, Charlotte,” he said to her, gritting his teeth.

  “For how long?”

  “Indefinitely.”

  She fixed her eyes on his, reading him like a book.

  “Maximilian knows, doesn’t he.”

  Alfred nodded.

  The shame. Her honor felt stained. Here it was: the horror she had feared for so long. It was not the sin that diminished her, but the penitence.

  “Will we see each other again?”

  “It’s unlikely, Charlotte.”

  Carlota held her hands to her chest, trying to shield herself from the pain inflicted by an invisible sword.

  She gathered all her strength in order to recover the dignity and pride that she’d once had. That she’d always had. She forced herself to think. Alfred recognized a look in her eyes that opened up an abyss between them so wide that no amount of pleading, no expression of regret, would enable him to cross it. Carlota knew that duty came before pain. What was more, too many limits had already been crossed.

  “Then we say goodbye here, Alfred.”

  Van der Smissen felt as if the world were narrow and his agony immense.

  “Charlotte, I . . .”

  “You don’t need to say anything, Alfred.”

  He wanted to remain stoic, but he took a step forward to be closer to her. She could feel his breath and contained the urge to throw her arms around him. In Chalco she was a woman; at Chapultepec, an empress. She couldn’t allow herself the luxury of confusing the two. He knew it, too. He took her hands and kissed them with all the tenderness he could muster. They remained like this until they believed they’d found the courage to say goodbye forever.

  Van der Smissen loved her in silence for the rest of his days. He never admitted it to anyone, though they slandered him for it, and when drinking with the soldiers on a few occasions they tried to wheedle it out of him. For him, Carlota was sacred, and he never allowed the memory of their time together to be sullied by telling someone about it. That would be like sharing her. He respected her to the point of adoration. And for the time he had left to live, he thought that being in her service had been the most bitter privilege of his existence.

  Many years later, back in Belgium, he devoted himself for a long time to writing his memoirs. Memories of Mexico, he called them. Everyone believed he did so to leave a record of an era, an important time of his life. But in truth, it was his way to return to her. To be with her again. Mexico and Carlota, Carlota and Mexico: they were the same thing. He didn’t allow himself to betray her by mentioning what they had. It wasn’t necessary. Carlota was on every page. He wrote for as long as he could, for with each word he felt closer to her, until one day he had no option but to bring the memoirs to an end. That was when he felt the horror of her absence bear down upon his solitude. He woke and, once again, she wasn’t there, and every day for the next three years he lost her over again. But this time with the certainty of a forever that was too painful, for there were no more words with which to remember her.

  Tired, dejected, and alone at the age of seventy-two he took his lieutenant general’s pistol, drank a glass of cognac, closed his eyes, thought of his Charlotte, and shot himself in the temple.

  59

  1879, Castle of Laeken and Tervuren Castle in Belgium

  In the eyes of the world, Carlota lost her mind suddenly. But God knows she’d gone mad as slowly as a turtle making its way to the sea as gulls circled above threateningly. By all appearances she maintained the finery of her rank. They dressed her, did her hair, and tended to her with great care. She no longer suffered the mistreatment to which Bombelles had subjected her during her stay at Miramare, which she barely remembered now. However, while she had no lack of care, her letters revealed the anguish she experienced being trapped in the body of a madwoman, in a castle with no way out, a woman in a man’s world. A world that resembled a mousehole. If I had been a man, she wrote in her letters over and over again, yearning for another sex, another life, a body that was allowed to be in harmony with her mind. If I had been a man, Querétaro would have been avoided, Madame Moreau read with horror and also a little tenderness.

  But of all the letters, the ones that most disturbed her lady-in-waiting were those she wrote frantically to a certain Philippe. In them, danger always reigned. Everyone wanted to kill her, to make her sick. Poison her. And her only way out was to escape. She devised escape plans with extreme care and impeccable handwriting, gave precise instructions and other details that amused everyone except Madame Moreau, to whom they seemed so full of sadness and desperation that when she read the letters in secret she always ended up in tears. They all mentioned names from the Mexican adventure that Madame Moreau had never heard before. But she was struck by the lucidity with which Carlota recalled events in the midst of the ravings of her disturbed mind.

  With nothing better to talk about, the forty or so court servants found it extremely entertaining to try to stitch together the loose threads of the empress’s madness. Between them all—chambermaids, gardeners, coach house cleaners, chefs, cooks, kitchen hands, stable hands, grooms, pages, porters, guards, and footmen—they gradually built up a picture of what could have happened to make such a young woman lose her mind, and for them, the letters were the main source of information. Carlota gave them scraps every day. Her writing communicated clearly how her brother Leopold had stripped her of her inheritance: Leopold has become the treasurer of my patrimony, she said. Another outrage in the long list of violations that I’ve suffered.

  Poor woman, they all thought, though not out of pity. It was more an amalgam of respect and helplessness, aware that they were looking at a woman whose adversaries had tried to fold her like a piece of paper, but who’d proved to be harder than a tree trunk.

  Her ladies observed her with some affection when she bowed to the trees in the garden and, adopting the most exquisite protocol, struck up long conversations with them. If only her madness were always as innocent as this, Madame Moreau thought. Because when Carlota was at her worst she’d seen her violate the rules of decorum, making the hair of anyone witnessing these breakdowns stand on end. When it happened, the empress cursed with a vocabulary so crude it made everyone around her want to cross themselves. But the worst came at night. At night, she could be heard moaning as if the devil had taken possession of her, entering through her vagina and emerging through her mouth. By the time the horror-stricken Madame Moreau arrived to help her, she would find Carlota naked on the bed touching herself while she streamed tears, in the clutches of a memory, perhaps. A terrible spectacle.

  Madame Moreau tried to soothe her by holding her hands away from her thighs, and then, once she was calm, covering her with the sheets and holding her. There they remained, until she sensed her modesty returning. If I had been a man, she repeated, as she did in her letters. And later, in her own room, her lady-in-waiting prayed, saying a rosary forward and backward for the salvation of Carlota’s tormented soul.

  The torment grew worse in the letters. Each time she saw Carlota writing, the lady-in-waiting prayed to ease the sinful load that the writing no doubt carried. Indeed, after reading them, one had to wash one’s eyes with holy water. Carlota asked the person named Philippe to come and pull down her drawers and beat her.

  Come here, straight to my bedroom, without touching, with a rod, a whip, and a stick; hit me all over my body until my thighs bleed, from behind, from the front, on my arms, on my legs, on my shoulders. I will undress myself; I will endure everything as if it were nothing. Only cowards die from these things, and I am not that.

  Madame Moreau, a little excited despite her horror, held her hands to her mouth as she kept reading.
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br />   Of course, then you shall undress and I will do to your body what you did to mine.

  “Mary, Mother of God!” said Madame Moreau, and fanned her flushed cheeks with the letter.

  Marie Henriette came to visit her each week, and sometimes Carlota seemed so lucid that it frightened her. She still remembered the episode at Miramare, where the empress was kept for so long, and she asked the heavens to make sure she wasn’t making the same mistake.

  They spoke of Maximilian’s death, of his body’s greenish color from being embalmed twice and poorly each time.

  “Those Mexicans are savages,” said Marie Henriette. “They didn’t even have a coffin of his size ready.”

  “The Mexicans,” Carlota replied with restraint, “did what they could.”

  Carlota, in clear demonstration of her sanity, had commemorative tokens of the emperor’s death printed, showing Maximilian wrapped in a Mexican flag on a sinking boat.

  Marie Henriette sometimes doubted the severity of her sister-in-law’s condition and thought she was close to a recovery. But she was also tormented by the idea that they were treating Carlota as if she were deranged, when she was just sad and disappointed. So she was grateful when she showed signs of dementia, because then she forgave herself and the doubt in her faded, and then she felt as cruel as Leopold.

  But Madame Moreau had no doubts. She knew from the letters that Carlota had lost her mind, despite the periods of peace that manifested themselves from time to time. Her impure thoughts about the soldier Philippe continued, and Madame Moreau imagined him as a wonder of a man. What had he had with Carlota so that she wrote to him in such a sinful way? The gossip had always mentioned the Belgian colonel, Van der Smissen, and some had even said he was the father of an alleged child, yet the letters weren’t addressed to him, but to some unknown soldier. There was no doubt, Moreau thought, that he was not so unknown to Carlota. She imagined the empress being whipped by this lover and she broke into a sweat. Reading the lascivious letters awakened parts of her body that had been dormant for years. But Carlota was the madwoman, not her. She just read the frenzied writing of a disturbed mind and then confessed. There was no madness in that, she told herself. She did it to help her. To know how to calm her when she was struck by fits of insanity in the darkness of night.

  I flog myself all over, as if I were a horse, harder on my bare thighs. This gives me the most extreme pleasure, a gratification I’ve never felt before. My thighs swell red, blood and life rising.

  The lady wondered whether she should hand the letters over to the priest. Perhaps, she thought, she would show them to Pierre, the handsome thick-bearded cook, to help decide how to proceed. Yes, that’s what she would do. She continued reading just to make sure it didn’t mention a suicide attempt, as the letters sometimes did. The temperature in the room was rising by the minute.

  I whip myself in the very middle of my backside; I give myself a generous spanking, and the pleasure is so great that I forget that it is me doing it. On one occasion, I thought it was you, Philippe, flogging me. And so it begins: I am overcome with a furious need to be whipped. I take off my drawers and put them in a wardrobe. I lie on the sofa with my backside, the round part, in the air. I hold the whip in my right hand and flog myself in such a way that it hurts and blisters me.

  Madame Moreau stopped reading. Was there a worse hell on earth than that of wanting to inflict pain on oneself? And yet, why did the image of Carlota groaning with pain give her a tingling in her crotch? The devil was using the empress to torment her. She had to stop, but she couldn’t. Curiosity compelled her to keep reading.

  It would be more gratifying if we whipped each other.

  Madame Moreau stuffed the letter down her corset and ran to the kitchen. Hopefully, she thought, Monsieur Pierre would be alone.

  The years passed as quickly as the periods of sanity: they grew ever shorter. The mental breakdowns reoccurred with increasing frequency. So much so that there came a point when it frightened Madame Moreau more when she appeared sane. One way or another, out of sheer habit, she’d learned to handle her madness. Besides, Carlota wasn’t a violent madwoman. She allowed herself to be read to, she played the piano. And she always had an aristocratic aura that could soften the hardest of temperaments.

  But just when everyone had settled into a routine, Tervuren burst into flames.

  The fire started without warning, without revealing its source. The inferno took the form of tongues of fire that consumed the castle at a fierce speed. Some said it had started in the pressing room on the first floor, but confusion reigned. The flames devoured everything in their way. A lady took the empress out into the garden, where everyone, some with more courage than others, watched powerlessly as a vengeful fire swallowed every object and living being in its path.

  “This is serious,” said Carlota, “but beautiful.”

  Those who heard looked at her with horror, fearing she had started the fire for the simple pleasure of watching it.

  “You couldn’t have . . . ,” sobbed Marie Henriette.

  “No, no. It is forbidden,” Carlota replied.

  They looked back at the flames, which, according to Carlota, were dancing.

  “But now,” she said with a smile, “at long last, we shall go to another castle.”

  Though nobody dared say it, everyone was filled with reasonable suspicion. Everyone made the same assumption about who had caused the tragedy. The castle was reduced to black ash as volatile as Carlota’s mind, which never found its way back.

  She didn’t smile when they moved her to a medieval fortress surrounded by a moat. Bouchout Castle would be her new residence, her entire universe, the place she wouldn’t ever leave in the forty-eight years she had left to live.

  60

  1866, Cuernavaca

  When Modesto arrived at the Casa Borda garden with a group of Juárez’s soldiers to kidnap the emperor’s lover and kill her and her five-month-old son, Concepción was no longer there. She’d run home, to her mother, when she discovered she was pregnant. Her youth didn’t stop her from understanding that she couldn’t bring up a fair-haired child under Ignacio’s guardianship. He’d put up with her infidelities because they weren’t with just anyone; they were with the owner of the house, and for as long as he could remember, Ignacio had known about the droit de seigneur. As if that weren’t enough, the owner was also the emperor of Mexico. But the outlook was ever gloomier. Things were being said. There were whispers. The empire had foundations of clay. The money was running out, and there was nothing to pay the troops with. The French were visibly withdrawing. And Concepción, frightened, decided it was time to return to the fold and recover her true identity. She would take up her real name again, the one she’d renounced so many times, the one she’d tried to forget. It was inevitable. It was the only way she could disappear and become invisible to everybody, whether Juaristas or Conservatives. She had to disappear, in part because of common sense, and in part because, before leaving, Maximilian had asked her to do so.

  “If they arrest me or execute me, the child’s life will be in danger,” he told her.

  Concepción hugged herself, scared to death.

  “I have some friends, the Bringas family, in Jalapilla, who’ll take care of the child. You must get the baby to Sr. Karl Schaffer, the husband of the family’s eldest daughter. He’ll know what to do.”

  “You’re going to take my child away?”

  “It’s not your child; it’s the legitimate heir to the empire. You must understand: if it remains with you, it will be killed.”

  Concepción didn’t understand the full implications of these words. For her, the empire had never been bigger than the garden; still, she obeyed. Following orders without complaint had become part of her temperament. Her mother welcomed her with open arms and remained with her throughout the pregnancy. A long, mysterious pregnancy full of foreboding, because Concepción suspected that the baby would never be allowed to live in peace. And she was r
ight. He wasn’t yet six months old when a tall, bearded Austrian appeared to take him to Paris.

  On Mexico’s big day, the Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Maximilian set off for the capital. There, a court of distinguished men awaited to try to persuade him to abdicate or to remain on the throne, such was their indecision and confusion. Terror floated in the corridors. The sound of a plate being dropped in the kitchen made people jump, and they wandered the palace with looks of distress. All of their thoughts were sad. And an urgency to leave the country began to spread like a virulent disease. Finding themselves in water up to their necks, some decided to make their move before the emperor did, like rats abandoning a sinking ship. The staunch monarchists passed through the Murrieta house; having predicted that the vessel was going under, they packed their belongings in a chest and set sail for Europe. They tried to hide their feeling of being uprooted, and masked their farewells behind a veneer of good humor.

  “You know Mexico’s best city is Veracruz?” one compatriot said to another.

  “Veracruz?”

  “Yes, because it’s where you leave from!”

  They said goodbye to one another with warm embraces and set off on their self-imposed exile; it was that or the gallows. And many of them, without the courage to face the latter, chose the former.