Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (40 page)

At least it appeared that, as he had requested for his mother's sake, the executioners had left his face unmarred.

Presently he became accustomed to what he was. And once he said to himself:
Very well, let me be a corpse,
he felt easier, and the casket-doors
closed. Now he was permitted to rise away from himself. The sun resembled the halo around the head of Our Lady of Refuge, and he gazed down on the casket when Juárez arrived, and two soldiers opened it. The President, small and dark, was the sort of man who should have been a servant at two and a half reales per day. He looked at the corpse's face in silence, then turned away. Maximilian observed him pityingly.

Now the envoy from Vienna had disembarked, and Juárez made any number of difficulties, in order to teach the Habsburgs their place; but at last the casket began to ride away in a black-curtained
caratella
*
over mountain roads and past great stone heads half sunken in the earth, until it reached the coast, where the
Novara
lay at anchor. Their Mexican Majesties had departed Miramar on this very ship; and there had been a hundred-gun salute. Now came the return voyage in the black-draped salon of the
Novara,
back to Istria; here by Ragusa lay the isle of Lacroma, whose ruined monastery he would have rebuilt had he not fallen so deeply into debt for Miramar; hearing this, darling Charlotte had bought the island for him as a surprise. And so his corpse came home, to pigeons and white sea-light, while he watched above, and the black-creped hearse waited in Trieste to receive it. He had become Massimiliano again. A weeping peasant woman raised up the little child in her arms, so that he could outstretch his chubby hand toward the casket. People in black stood bowing and crossing themselves; among the younger and poorer he seemed to recognize some who in childhood had found gifts beneath one of those four Christmas trees at Miramar. Had they finally forgiven him for being Austrian? His brother's secret police feared him no longer. Nowadays they even guarded his monument, which read:
MASSIMILIANO, IMPERATORE DEL MESSICO
. He felt great joy and comfort to see them looking after him in this way. Here he had embarked on his first long sea voyage—seventeen years ago! In the fleet they still respected his innovations; he had retrofitted ships and enacted the great dockyard at Pula. The flags flew at half-mast everywhere in Trieste, except of course at Miramar, where Charlotte was not to be told. For the first time he wondered whether she might remain alive. To
abdicate the Empire, having already signed away his Austrian rights, and be confined here with her, year after year—and if she were truly mad . . .

She used to say:
Anything is better than to sit contemplating the sea at Miramar, with nothing to do but watch the years go by.

He fancied he could almost see her in the Oriental Salon, looking through the tall narrow casements into the sea.

With great relief he saw that he, at least, was still dead. Ever so gently they carried him into the black-decked car of the special train. The cathedral bell tolled; the train began to move. Overhead he followed, smiling down on the Friulian vineyards. The grapevine, they say, lives sixty or seventy years, like one of us. He could not tell why this pleased him. His sensations resembled the sweetness of visiting Maria Amalia's grave in Madeira (Charlotte, of course, had not been pleased). Just as when upon first disembarking from the S.S.
Elisabeth
in his snow-white suit and stepping into the Brazilian jungle he had nearly shouted for joy, because all the butterflies his wealth and labor had gathered into his cabinet at Miramar seemed to rise up into rainbows about him, and the exotic botanical curiosities in his glasshouse unfurled into towering fullness overhead, their flowery vininesses as seductive as the way that Charlotte used to part her hair when she was nineteen, so as the special train sighed onward his true self expanded and blossomed, drinking the incense of freedom; it was the moment when the book gains life and the dream grows real at last. Just before his Empire ended he had sent to Miramar for two thousand nightingales; they were en route when he was captured. Now all these birds were rising and singing around him. Slowly, slowly they journeyed, with the bells tolling in each place they passed, so that at last he felt loved. And ever more slowly they rolled into Vienna, where again the casket was opened, his brother standing stiff and straight with fists clenched at his sides, while his mother bent forward to kiss his forehead. Why couldn't she have done that before? The heaviness of her bowing reminded him of the drooping of Christ's head upon the cross, and she kissed his whitish-yellow forehead. Then he was carried to the Habsburg crypt, and with a golden key they locked him safely into a tomb of pure marble.

Next he dreamed that after the Mexicans had called upon him to be Emperor they took him in hand and crowned him with a quetzal-feather headdress whose semicirclet of long and close-packed jade tendrils was underlined by soft red arcs of blood-red and sky-blue, dyed by their artisans in the great city where he reigned
amidst cool
night winds. They presented him with a palace of onyx, whose windows overlooked jungle branches against a rainy sky. There they taught him to play many flutes most delightfully and to inhale the perfumes of flowers as would a nobleman of the highest degree. One of his flutes was fashioned of jade, changeably green like Charlotte's eyes; and its mouthpiece was the semblance of a lizard's head. Another flute was of fragrant wood, and a third of bone inlaid with silver and gold; there were as many others as he desired; and they all belonged to him. But what he enjoyed even more than playing his beautiful flutes was sniffing the fresh flowers which the Mexicans presented to him. This brought him great joy; and even in the dream he faintly remembered the vanilla-scents and orange-blossoms of Cuernavaca. They pierced his ears and hung golden rings from them, which pleased him still more than when every member of his suite had been personally decorated by Napoleon. They gave him golden bat-pendants and jade lip-plugs for his own; whenever he liked, he drank triple-refined pulque from a jaguar-legged bowl, and he could not imagine any greater contentment. They bestowed upon him a mirror of black obsidian. Then they led to him his first love Maria Amalia de Gloria, and she was naked but for a headdress of flowers. Next they gave him Charlotte, who had become seventeen again, nearly as huge-eyed and delicate as when she was that child in the portrait by Winterhalter, with her white, white arms and white throat, and she too was naked, but she bore an ear of corn in her hand; and she and Maria Amalia greeted one another without embarrassment. When they presented her to him, he sensed that within his love for her grew something secret, beautiful, yet painful; it could have been a many-fingered jade-blue fern guarded by orchids; whether it was something intrinsic to her or to their marriage, or whether it might be inimical and extrinsic was better uninvestigated. But by then they were bringing to him Concepción, the gardener's daughter with the long
blue-black hair, whom he had left pregnant with his child, and she too was naked, and entered with shy little steps, carrying water in an apple-jade cup; she had always reminded him of the dove which in so many votive images rests upon the clasped hands of Our Lady of the Incarnation. Finally they presented him with the cigarillo girl Dominga who had brought this treasure of sleep to him, and she was lovelier than he had realized now that he saw her undressed among the others; it turned out that her brown skin was as smooth as Charlotte's; and she held salt in the palm of her left hand; the other women rushed to kiss her, just as the cherubs come winging to crown Our Lady of Light. These four now became his wives, loving him and one another, so that he never had to choose between them. So again he felt as he had upon entering the Brazilian jungle, with all his greenhoused and cabineted joys blooming up to veil the entire world in reality's fragrant mist. Concepción opened her arms to him, while Dominga danced with Maria Amalia, their jade ornaments clattering, and Charlotte reclined on the terrace, playing with the pearls of her necklace, slowly loosening her hold on her painted fan, another brilliant sunset spent. And it seemed that for a very long time he reigned in easy ecstasy, never ageing, with nothing to do but play the flute, embrace his women, discover himself in the obsidian mirror, and sniff the fragrances of flowers, which he came to distinguish with such expert knowledge that he seemed the wisest being in the world. Charlotte fed him of her tender corn-flesh, her small head nodding on that long pale neck. He drank from the body of Concepción, and ate salt from Dominga's skin while she tilted her head, watching him like a mother at her son's marriage, a lover memorizing her sweetheart's face or a wife leaving her husband forever. He crowned Maria Amalia with a wreath like unto the ruby roses and turquoise roses which retablo painters so often place around the brow of Our Lady of the Incarnation; and wherever she touched it, up grew a jade stem with many green pricklepods of gems, rising and glittering, until it budded into a flower as pink as her vulva.

Then one day (it had been but a year) they led him and his wives to a boat, whose fittings were plainer than he would have expected, and carried him across a lake toward a volcanic desert, while his wives sang him songs which he had never heard. He began to feel desolate. When they
reached the other shore, the Mexicans stripped him of his headdress and his mantle of butterflies and flowers, took his dark mirror, and ripped away his earbobs, pendants and lip-plugs, so that all that remained to him were his sandals, his loincloth and his incomparable flutes. He felt much as he had upon learning that Bazaine had destroyed all the munitions which could not be embarked from Veracruz. When it rains in Trieste, the pinks and peaches of the edifices go grey; and so it now seemed to go with the moments of his life, which muted more with each removal. His four wives said farewell to him one by one, calmly and without sadness. Concepción had pulled her shift back on, and Charlotte was once again well laced up, while Dominga, already in her grubby skirts, was throwing on her black-and-white linen reboso, one end of which dangled in front, the other behind her head; while Maria Amalia had once more become a marble effigy. He entreated them not to abandon him (which of course in waking life he would have been too proud to do), but they regarded him like empty-eyed stone goddesses, and the boatmen rowed them away, leaving him alone on that lava jetty.

Perhaps they would now give him some lesser wife with naked jade breasts and a black slit between her gleaming jade thighs, and black eye-holes and nostrils, and an oval black mouth-hole; perhaps they would recompense him with a spiderweb hung with turquoise beads; already he felt unfitted for the greater treasures of his brief epitome. His heart was as tobacco-stained as a Mexicana's hand. Threading his way between overgrown wells and courts, past broken waist-high columns, between broken walls and great stone heads half-sunken in the earth, he saw a barren stone breast, cracked, wide and grey, touching the low evening clouds, and sunshine silvering the edges of its dark steps. In the second year of his reign he had left Charlotte to administer the Empire while he climbed the Temple of the Sun—a grimly glorious experience. This pyramid was hardly so grand; on the contrary, it seemed to have been deliberately neglected. For a moment he could hope that he had been likewise dismissed. He looked around him. There was Tlaloc's wife Chalchiutlicue the water goddess, carved out of a tall block of stone, with her great flat headdress, wide eyes, and tiny indrawn arms. Bazaine's great bald head, fashioned out of lava, lay half-buried in the cindery dirt. On the faraway ridgetops right and left he spied columns of silhouetted waters.
So be it. Blowing a melody on his turquoise flute, he climbed the first stair. As yet the grief of leavetaking remained moderate. If the summit of the temple were abandoned, then he would go his own way, living out his life in grateful inconspicuousness. Essaying to dream of his white suit and green-veiled hat, in hope that his valets would presently appear to dress him, misery meanwhile aching in his chest, he completed that melody, which seemed to him the loveliest he had ever played. Then, as he began to ascend the uneven stone steps whose variegations made them resemble snake-scales, he saw the terrifying priests waiting above. At least he had never had to be one of those people who carries his own cross. So in resignation he climbed the steps, breaking his beautiful flutes one by one. Gazing back down across the lawn of weeds and ruins to the jetty and the lake, he searched for the boat, but it was gone. Across the lake he seemed to see Miramar's white tower with an orange light shining from one window, as if Charlotte were still alive and awaiting him. He thought he heard the general and three colonels singing the song about the wounded rider who goes through the world, bravely seeking death. He remembered once at Chapultepec glimpsing in the file of
guerrilleros
being led off to execution still another strange boy whose long eyelashes were drooping and whose mouth was half open as if with astonishment and exhaustion even while his chin somehow preserved a manly squareness; he intended to be as that boy had been. His grief had scarcely yet increased. Up those steep, dark and grubby stairs he continued bravely, breaking his last flute and throwing it behind him. When he neared the crowning platform, the priests drew back a little, as if to encourage him; the instant he set foot on it, they seized him, dragged him to the stone basin, which was painted red and blue, and uplifted their obsidian knives. He smiled at them, although he could not understand why he must die. The sky was already filling with vultures.

General Escobedo now awoke him, speaking exactly the right words of valor and chivalry, so that his heart was comforted; and for a moment more they reminisced, as if they had campaigned side by side, instead of fighting one against the other. Both had experienced San Blas's red gnats, whose sting induces days of blindness; and both had been many times
bemused by the vultures in Veracruz's sandy streets. The Emperor shook the general's hand. He heard Fray Soria murmuring in Miramón's cell. Presently he knelt before the crucifix, and prayed again for his mother, Charlotte, his brother and himself. The reek of cigarillo smoke increased in the corridor. He heard more footsteps than usual echoing downstairs. The last time he had ever seen her, Charlotte's lovely white oval face had been framed by the dark reboso as she gazed out scared and stiff. Thank goodness she was at peace! He prayed for Concepción and her baby. He prayed for Juárez. He wondered whether he ought to pray for the people of Mexico. He washed his face. As he was dressing he heard one of the colonels spitting on the floor. In good time the first cock crowed, and he rose, ready for a sunrise which would resemble oil paint on a cheap sheet of tin.