But when Madame Moreau interviewed this new lady, she sensed a different aura about her. She’d interviewed enough women to be able to identify a true commitment to service when she saw it: caring for a noble required the devotion of a cloistered nun. And for some reason, Madame Moreau felt that a force greater than duty had brought this woman here.
“So, mademoiselle, you say—”
“Constance, madame.”
“Yes, yes, Constance, of course. You say you knew the august Empress Carlota in Mexico?”
“That’s right, madame.”
“And what was your role at the palace?”
“I was a lady of the court, madame.”
“And what brings you to Bouchout Castle?”
“Duty, madame.”
“Are you not a long way from home to be fulfilling your duty?”
And the woman, in impeccable French with echoes of another language, said, “Well, madame, I was with the empress when she was still of sound mind, and I have never in my life encountered a more brilliant spirit or a braver woman. I want to accompany her in her illness as I accompanied her in health.”
“I see.”
And then she added, “I fear I didn’t do everything I could at that time. I hope to be able to remedy this and find some peace. The empress suffered a great deal, you know.” The woman seemed to remember something that caused her anxiety. “May I ask you a favor?”
Madame Moreau raised an eyebrow.
“Oh?”
“Please don’t mention to the empress that we once knew each other. I don’t want to upset her.”
Moreau’s sleuth’s nose put her on guard.
“I hope,” she said, “that you’re able to atone for your guilt, Mademoiselle Constance.”
The lady pressed her lips together.
And then Madame Moreau declared, “You can start tomorrow.”
Constance was the Belgian identity she gave herself without the need for a baptismal font; behind her, buried in some part of Mexico, she left Constanza.
The next morning, she arrived at Bouchout Castle wondering whether Carlota would recognize her. She didn’t know whether she would have the strength to look her in the eyes, whether she could hold her gaze. Madame Moreau led her to see the empress.
“Majesty, may I introduce your new lady-in-waiting, Mademoiselle Constance.”
An owl could not have opened its eyes wider. Constanza trembled. Had it not been for Madame Moreau’s presence, she would have gone down on her knees to beg for forgiveness that instant.
The empress seemed to have a sudden breakdown. She started destroying everything she could lay hands on: books, prints, drawings, paintings. She broke everything except the pictures of Maximilian, as if in some kind of trance. It was her own quixotic burning of the novels of chivalry. Madame Moreau moved to restrain her by the arms and shouted to Constanza for help.
Constanza approached, and looking her directly in the eyes, she said, “Your Majesty, of all the empresses I know, you’re the only one who does this.”
With Madame Moreau looking on in astonishment, Carlota was instantly calmer.
They looked at each other. Constanza spoke to her without needing to say a word.
After a few seconds of silence that brought with it the sound of a calm sea, she said, “Don’t be afraid.”
“Who are you?”
“Constance, Majesty.”
Waves broke on the coast. The tide was going out.
“Don’t be afraid, Majesty,” she repeated. “I’m going to take care of you until my final breath, you hear?”
Carlota nodded. And then, to the surprise of Madame Moreau—who was ready to die and rest now—Carlota embraced Constance, breaking down in tears on her shoulder.
As if life were giving them a second chance, they became inseparable again. Constanza wasn’t sure whether she’d recognized her, though she thought not. Nor was she sure whether Carlota would know that she’d been the cause of her insanity. After that violent outburst, she showed no more signs of distress. Madame Moreau didn’t link the fit of rage to Constanza, for similar outbreaks had happened in front of other people.
Constanza washed the empress, changed her morning outfits for indoor dresses fit for a princess, and did her hair, though it saddened her enormously to see that Carlota no longer had her long black locks because, for hygiene, they’d been cut short. Constanza dressed her in colored hats to match her dresses, and went to great pains to lace her shoes with the same fabrics. Though Carlota had never been particularly concerned about how she looked, she was sensitive to compliments made to her about her appearance. She liked to sit with Constanza at the piano and play à quatre mains, and sometimes, when the rain fell in the gardens, they stayed inside playing cards.
Always during the first few days of the month, Constanza took her to the jetty on the castle’s moat, took off her shoes, and said, “Let’s dip our feet in the water, Majesty.”
With this childish game, Carlota was able to keep count, perhaps not of the years, but of the days. They rode together in a carriage along the park’s paths while Constanza read to her. Sometimes, she thought the empress had fallen asleep as she read, because for chapters she didn’t speak at all, but she soon discovered that she simply liked silence. Then, facing the sun, she allowed the rays to wash over her face with her eyes closed. Constanza was intrigued and dismayed, watching her have lengthy conversations with imaginary people in many different languages. She spoke easily in French, Spanish, English, German, and Italian, and Constanza remembered the woman she’d once known with fondness. But, if she paid attention, she could tell that the conversations were disjointed, meaningless, interrupted by laughs that would make the devil himself shudder.
Mexico always featured. Sometimes it was in a more veiled way than others, but it always came out like snails after rain. In the middle of playing a song on the piano, Carlota would begin to play the opening bars of the national anthem, “Mexicanos, al grito de guerra.” Constanza felt her stomach wrench. On other occasions, she asked Constanza to bring her tortillas. And when they strolled among the trees in spring, and the triumphant flowers opened their petals after the winter, Carlota held her hands to her chest, marveled at the plants’ resurrection, and exclaimed, “And Maximilian isn’t here to see this!”
Constanza knew that, in the passageways of her memory, Mexico was present, clinging to the cortex: a green, white, and red rust of ambiguous and confused recollections.
Her blood froze again one afternoon when, for no apparent reason, Carlota said to her, “I was happy in Mexico.”
Constanza stopped her embroidery with the needle in the air. It wasn’t just a random sentence. It wasn’t a vague memory of her experience. It was as if the empress knew that Constanza knew, too. And it was true. Despite it all, in Mexico, Carlota had been happy.
Caring for her in the last years of her life was the penitence Constanza imposed upon herself. Taking care of her until the end. Watching over her. Loving her as if she were a sick mother, accompanying her in her madness as a silent witness to her misery, was the way she found to apologize for burying her alive.
65
1866, Mexico
When Philippe left the Murrieta house never to return, whatever dignity Constanza had left went with him. He knew her secret. Perhaps he would keep it, perhaps not. But she’d just committed the worst indiscretion an informant—a spy—could commit. Who was she trying to fool? She had been neither. She was a minion. Everyone had manipulated her at will, at their convenience. She left the library in search of Petra, finding her in the kitchen preparing nopales.
“Petra, will you tell my mother I’m home?”
The girl immediately dropped her machete-sized knife to go in search of Doña Refugio.
A few minutes later, she arrived to greet her daughter with astonishment.
“Constanza!” she cried, and she ran to hug her.
Constanza watched her mother come down the stairs with h
er usual expression, but something was different, because Constanza didn’t run to embrace her. She wasn’t sure whether the change was in her mother or herself. As a child, she’d thought of her mother as all-powerful, all-forgiving, the place she could go after rolling in the mud with the pigs. Why couldn’t she feel that now? Suddenly, she understood. Her mother would always be a mirror, the model to copy as she grew older. And at that moment, she felt an enormous sense of loss: she no longer wanted to be like Refugio de Murrieta.
“My dear child, are you all right?” she asked without waiting for a response. “Come, come, let’s go to my room.”
Alone, she spoke with great seriousness.
“Tell me, Constanza, what happened? Is the emperor going to abdicate?”
“I don’t know, Mother. I haven’t been at Chapultepec for some time.”
“Where have you been living?”
“With Modesto. He hid me in his house.”
“Modesto and you . . . ?”
“No, Mamá. Though he hopes, I suppose.”
“But why did you go? You should be with the empress.”
“I couldn’t do it anymore, Mamá. I feel dirty. A murderer. Look at what I’ve become!”
“Murderers run people through with swords.”
“You think? What is Salvador, then? And Joaquín? No, Mamá, no. You condemned us. You used us at your convenience.”
“No. That’s not what I did. I gave you the chance to do something for your country.”
“And what country is that, Mother? Look at us. Hundreds dead, thousands . . . for nothing.”
“Not for nothing: for everything. In war, you kill or be killed. There’re losses on both sides. You complain for no reason, Constanza.”
“I didn’t want this, Mother. I can’t sleep at night.”
“But you will, dear. You will. Juárez is regaining our sovereignty. Soon, everything will be how it should be. Mexico will be ours. Were you happy seeing us governed in a foreign language? One day, you’ll look back and realize you did the right thing.”
“I killed a brilliant woman, Mother! Haven’t you heard the stories? She’s lost her mind, and . . .”
“And what?”
“She’s pregnant, Mother.”
Refugio crossed herself.
“It’s better if the baby isn’t born. If it is, they’ll kill it anyway,” she said.
“I don’t know who you are anymore, Mother. How could you say that?”
“You’re the one I don’t know. Look at you! Accept the consequences of your actions with dignity. Even Carlota knew that duty requires sacrifice.”
“You can’t imagine how much,” Constanza said, as if to herself. And then she stood. “One day you’ll regret that you condemned me, Mother.”
“I didn’t condemn you, dear. I taught you to be free, to make your own decisions. If you’ve been condemned, it’s your own doing. If blaming me eases your guilt, then so be it. But don’t fool yourself.”
Constanza left the house in a state of bewilderment. Sadness. Desperation. She wanted to run away. Forget about everything. Sometimes, she thought killing herself was the only way out. Yes, perhaps that was what she had to do. End her life after all the senselessness. But then she reconsidered: it couldn’t end like this. There had to be another solution, another way. For the first time in ages, she felt the need to pray. A void in her soul was crying out for her to connect with her spiritual side again, to read the Song of Songs again and marvel at the poetry of the sacred scriptures, to say the rosary again with her sister, to look at the great void inside her again. To return.
When Constanza left, Refugio sat on her bed in the solitude of her room, sad and pensive. She wondered what she’d done wrong. She considered whether other decisions would have been wiser. Whether another life would have been possible on this earth, whether other paths could still be chosen once the paving on this one had crumbled to rubble. Constanza, her Constanza, was suffering. The last thing she’d wanted was for her daughter to be unhappy. She had so many plans for her girl. So much life to show her. She’d pushed her toward the best version of herself. Wasn’t that what she’d been doing from day one? From the moment she saw her, she’d known her child was destined for greatness. And what had she achieved? Tears and bitterness. Had she made a mistake? Doubt made the hairs on her arms stand on end. A shiver of guilt ran down her like lightning cleaving through the sky before thunder. And what if Vicente was right and it would have been better to let the girl serve in the court, fall in love with an idea, work toward a utopia? Should she have left her to find her own way? Her head was spinning. Look what you’ve turned me into. The words echoed in her conscience. Advising an intelligent woman wasn’t easy. That was the cost of having judgment. Refugio knew that every sin carries its own punishment. The truth was that it hadn’t been hard to persuade Constanza, and sometimes she’d wondered whether the price for using her was too high to pay. Time would begin to put things in their place, and suddenly Refugio felt afraid.
66
1867, Querétaro
As Karl Marx was publishing Das Kapital, Alfred Nobel was setting the world alight with dynamite, his new invention, and Maximilian was falling from grace—with a shipment about to reach Veracruz of two thousand nightingales he’d ordered to release among Chapultepec’s trees.
The emperor had walked into a trap. As soon as informants reported to the Juaristas that the imperial command was in Querétaro, in no time, the city was besieged by twelve thousand men led by General Mariano Escobedo, another seven thousand under General Riva Palacio, and a further two thousand belonging to General Porfirio Díaz, men who’d managed to evade the clutches of Marshal Bazaine for years and had never stopped fighting, not then and not now. In total, the Republican army now numbered sixty thousand men. And Juárez had managed to negotiate a loan from the United States of America to fund the war against the empire.
Despite the chaos, disease, and shortages of water and provisions that ravaged the people of Querétaro, the artillery fire raining down on the walls, the broken windows, the deserted streets, and the looted stores, after two months of the Juarista siege, the emperor still made time for ceremony. He decorated his men on the anniversary of the committee of Mexicans who’d traveled to Miramare four years earlier to petition him to establish the empire, and despite the hunger, thirst, and death that circled them like zopilotes, his men were touched that their sovereign was ready to share their fate. No monarch has ever descended from the throne to suffer the greatest dangers and hardships alongside his soldiers, they said to him. And Maximilian felt that, for the first time, he was doing the right thing.
Querétaro was dying of starvation. Maximilian’s messengers who went out in search of provisions wound up hanging from bridges with signs saying “The Emperor’s Post.” It was a matter of days before the town succumbed, for even in the imperial ranks there were discordant voices calling for the act of insanity to end. Orders were contradicted. Nobody was obeyed. Weariness. Exhaustion. Betrayal.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, Carlota was held at Miramare to hide her pregnancy, to make her give birth in isolation so that her child could be taken away from her. She was in a constant state of distress. She was afraid all the time. Through some kind of magical connection with Maximilian, she felt the emperor’s terror at the turn of events. Or was it her own fear?
The empire fell at Querétaro.
At four o’clock in the morning on May 15, 1867, Juárez’s troops stole through the Cruz neighborhood and occupied Plaza de la Santa Cruz without firing a shot.
“My emperor,” his men said to him, “there are Juarista troops in the plaza.”
Surprised but with resignation, Maximilian looked at Prince Salm-Salm, a loyal German friend, and said in his language, “Salm, it’s time for a bullet to make me happy.”
Horrified, the prince replied, “Escape, Majesty.”
“No, I will do no such thing. Habsburgs do not run away.”
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br /> He dressed, and at that early hour headed with his most trusted men to Las Campanas Hill. They were on foot: they had eaten their few remaining horses out of hunger and desperation. A Juarista colonel called Gallardo—who did justice to his name, which meant gallant—allowed them to pass.
“Let them through,” he said. “They’re fellow countrymen.”
Just an hour later, General Mariano Escobedo sent a telegram to the governor of Michoacán:
I’m pleased to inform you that the Convento de la Cruz has been occupied by our troops. The staff officer in charge there handed over the battalions who surrendered at their order.
On the little Las Campanas Hill, imperialists gathered after arriving on foot of their own accord to join the emperor, without knowing for certain whether it was the end or whether they were mounting a resistance. The bells rang out in the churches; in time with the ringing, there were cries of Viva la libertad! People in their houses did not know what to think, confusion reigned, and many just prayed to God for the siege of Querétaro to end, whoever won, before they starved to death.
Maximilian turned to one of his men.
“Is it possible to break the enemy siege?”
“I don’t think so, Your Majesty, but if you ask it of us, we will try. We’re prepared to die.”
The emperor gave a slight smile. Die. A word he was becoming accustomed to. Betrayal. Another word that he was still not wholly accustomed to. Because Miguel López, the man who had baptized his son, had opened Querétaro’s gates to the Juaristas with the benevolence with which Saint Peter opens the gates of heaven. But it didn’t matter. He would lie buried under Mexico’s walls, betrayed or not. It was what destiny had decided.
The Empress: A novel Page 33