Days of the Dead (12 page)

The view from the top of the pyramid was breath-taking. The red-tiled roofs of the
casco,
the leaves of the trees in the ladies’ courtyard, the myriad corrals and pens that sprawled behind the kitchen, the gilt cross at the top of the little chapel—all these things seemed to January as if he viewed them through a microscope, perfect, distant, like miniatures etched in glass. The rangeland spread out around the pyramids in a green-splotched symphony of dusty brown and tawny gold, slashed by arroyos where thorn and trees and brush grew thick. Close to the feet of all five pyramids on the north, a shallow depression of the ground was thick with oaks and paloverde: like the water to the south, regular in shape, the work of men’s hands.

“The Indians said when a warrior died in battle, or a woman in childbirth, they return to this world as butterflies,” Don Prospero told them. “Myself, I think they become hummingbirds, who fight for their territory like warriors, if two want flowers from the same bush. It is the one thing that concerns me about your murdering Fernando,” he added abruptly, turning back and fixing Hannibal with one coldly staring blue eye. “He’ll be angry about dying the way he did, like a sickly woman, or a feeble child, instead of in battle like a man. I don’t know what he’ll have to say about that.”

“Θεωυ ευ γουυασί κειτα , I suppose,” sighed the fiddler. “It lies in the lap of the gods, rather like a celestial napkin, and one can only hope death has given him some perspective on the matter. Not that Fernando was ever one to take notice of perspective before.”

“Do not jest, my friend.” Don Prospero folded his arms and stared out into the shining spaces of the sky, as if reading things written on the air that no one else could see. “Generally I leave the gods and the dead to deal with their own affairs, but I fear my son will be angry. You may find yourself in trouble.” Then he set off down the pyramid—straight down its steep side—calling out behind him, “Come along now—plenty more to see. . . .”

The noon sun beat down, reminding January that he’d had no breakfast, and the thin air had a sparkly quality, like the onset of migraine. Don Prospero insisted on climbing all five pyramids, though the middle three—which had formerly supported the temples of the Moon, the Stars, and the Rain—were much worn down, that of the Stars being barely more than a shallow hill. “I dug up that statue of Tezcatlipoca here. . . . Here’s where I found Coatlique, the slut. . . . Worse than Helen of Troy,
she
was. . . . Why Menelaus didn’t simply repudiate her I’ll never understand. Would have saved everybody trouble. Take a look at that bas-relief: see how the heart itself is singing in the priest’s hand?”

Doña Filomena wailed and sobbed and swore she must stop and rest, but when she did so, Don Prospero signed to two of the vaqueros who had accompanied them up the pyramids and they pulled her to her feet and dragged her: Hannibal stumbled along behind them in chalky-lipped silence. Though he looked better than he had the previous winter in New Orleans, he was still not strong; January had to put a hand under his elbow and half carry him up the last slope of the Pyramid of the Sun.

“The beaten road, which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,”
quoted the fiddler faintly, his breath rasping in his throat. “
Who travel to their home among the dead.
Occasionally the thought of the prison in Mexico City does cross my mind displaying certain charms.”

“You wouldn’t like it,” said January as his friend sank to the ground at the pyramid’s top. He unslung from around his neck the water-bottle he’d taken from his saddle—nearly empty now—and handed it to him; a few feet away, Doña Filomena clung to Don Rafael and loudly proclaimed that she was about to die. Looking around, January saw that instead of wailing and protesting and demanding to be permitted to stay behind, Valentina had merely fallen back from the others and was nowhere to be seen. He walked to the edge of the pyramid’s level crown and looked down the slope, in time to see the girl’s slim figure—black against the saffron and buff of the land—vanish into the dense belt of trees that lay along the north.

Curious, he walked farther along the foundation-stones of the old temple at the pyramid’s top and caught sight of that black dress again far below. Ordinarily the leaves of the heavily wooded depression would have hidden her, but it was late in the year, and the oak at whose feet she knelt—at least, he thought she was kneeling—stood at the edge of a little clearing where the broken statue of a jaguar lay on its side.

Although he wouldn’t swear to it, January thought he saw Valentina take something from beneath her
manga
and slip it in among the roots of the oak.

EIGHT

Returning to Hacienda Mictlán, January found Lupe’s rabbit still enjoying rollicking good health.

“Whatever ended up in Fernando’s tea,” sighed Rose, poking a tuft of maguey-flowers through the cage’s bamboo bars and glancing up as January came into their room, “—if it was in fact in the tea—it wasn’t put into the caddy in the kitchen. I managed to talk Guillenormand into giving me a sample of the contents of the other caddy—the jasmine and rose-hip blend Fernando drank to settle his stomach—and it seems to have been equally benign.”

She got to her feet and staggered, catching herself on the bedpost. January set down the tray he’d brought from the kitchen and caught her arm. “It’s nothing,” said Rose, rubbing her knees through her skirts. “In between checking on Compair Lapin’s health”—she nodded toward the dozing bunny—“and making discreet enquiries about that green Meissen tea-service, I spent the greater part of the day in the chapel with Doña Josefa, which eventually earned me her account of her father’s bout of madness and her brother’s death.”

She sat on the bed and pulled up her skirts and petticoats to feel gingerly at her knee-caps. “They tell me St. Jerome prayed so much, he acquired knees like a camel’s, but they didn’t mention what his back must have felt like after a long day at the altar.” She unclipped her garters and rolled down her stockings, and January exclaimed in alarm at the bluish bruises just below the patella, where the flesh would have pressed to the stone of the chapel floor.

“Paloma told me—she was part of the jolly little gathering in the chapel as well—that both she and her mother routinely faint after a few hours of this. If I hadn’t encountered this kind of thing elsewhere, I’d suspect that Doña Josefa was as mad as her father. Did M’sieu Guillenormand send that food along with you? How kind of him . . . since of course Doña Josefa doesn’t eat a mid-day
comida. . . .
”

“She’s her father’s daughter, anyway.” January brought the tray over to the bed: a brioche, fresh butter garnished with mint-leaves in a little Sèvres pot, a noble wedge of Brie de Meaux, and two exquisitely sweet French Faro apples, plus a carafe of Reisling that wouldn’t have been out of place at a Montmartre inn. “Don Prospero doesn’t seem to get hungry and assumes that no one else does either. . . . But you didn’t have to do that.”

“Well, in fact, I did,” said Rose. “Another woman I would have asked to tea and gossip, or engaged on a mutual sewing project—much as I hate sewing—but somehow I knew that wouldn’t do, with Doña Josefa. One needs to spend time in company before confidences begin to flow. I’m quite all right. Mostly what I felt was boredom, and a nagging consciousness of fraud. But I couldn’t very well tell my hostess that I don’t believe God has the slightest interest in how many hours human beings put in on their knees.”

She buttered a chunk of the brioche as she spoke. Down below them, the steady thump-thump of the workroom looms that made up the daytime heartbeat of the
casco
was silent with siesta; the chatter of the women around the lower arcade was stilled as well. Even the vaqueros had retired to the shade to sleep.

“Thank goodness they decorate their altars like a hashish-eater’s dream—at least there was plenty to look at. Though I’ll admit I could not avoid the resentful reflection that you, who go to confession and actually enjoy prayer, should be the one to clamber about the countryside in quest of pagan deities, while I—a pagan or the next thing to it—should be condemned to spend the morning in prayer and much of the afternoon admiring Josefa’s collection of sacred ironmongery. Do you know she wears a belt of nails under her clothing, with the points turned inward so that they dig into her flesh?”

“I wondered what it was,” said January drily. “I can smell infections and blood at five paces. She doesn’t make Paloma do that, does she?”

“Not yet. Paloma is ‘innocent,’ she says, though goodness knows how long that indulgence will last. Innocent or not, she makes the poor girl sleep without a blanket on a bare plank, with a block of wood for a pillow, to prepare her, she says, for her ultimate destination at the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of Mary in town. She spoke with passionate envy of Don Rafael’s sister Pilar, who will shortly be taking vows there: Paloma did not express an opinion. Because she
is
innocent, Josefa lets the child sleep on a flat plank rather than one with a one-inch stringer of wood nailed up the middle, and forbears to wake her up three times in the middle of the night for prayers. I will never understand Christians.”

Anger tinged her voice, and she returned to buttering her bread and spreading the thick soft cheese upon it. January stepped to the door and listened to the silence of the court, gauging the slant of the hot bars of sunlight that splashed across the red-tiled arcade. Where the arcade angled into the wider
corredor,
the door of the corner room—the room that had been Fernando’s—stood slightly ajar, left by the servants who had cleaned it in Santa Anna’s wake.

With scarcely a rustle of petticoats, Rose slipped up barefoot to his side.

She saw the direction of his look, and they didn’t exchange a word; then, like two mischievous schoolchildren, they slipped through the door and down the arcade, past Hannibal’s room, where the fiddler lay like a dead man across his bed in the straw-smelling gloom, and down to that half-open door at the corner.

The tidying hands of the servants had passed over it, stripping the bed, rolling up the carpets of red-and-black native weave. Alone of the bedrooms in the house, this room had an armoire, with marquetry doors that could lock, clearly of European work. The desk contained nothing but neat sheafs of blank paper in several sizes, ink, seals and wax, chamois-leather penwipers and three patent steel-nibbed pens polished clean as a British rifleman’s gun. There were also visiting-cards wrapped in paper
—Fernando de Castellón,
with an address on the Calle San Francisco—and a ledger bound in gilt-stamped green leather, which January slipped into his pocket. Ranged across the back of the desk were the three patent Argand-model lamps Hannibal had spoken of, still containing a little oil, and near the window—which was set high in the wall and looked onto the pyramids, not the
corredor—
a small blue-tiled heating-stove of German design.

The armoire was unlocked, and contained only a small satchel that held two white linen shirts, some clean stockings, a volume of Hegel, and von Ranke’s
History of the Latin and Teutonic People.
The fly-leaves of both were inscribed, in a rather unformed hand, with the name Werther Bremer. There was no sign of the green-and-white Meissen tea-service or its chest.

“What now?” whispered Rose when they regained the sanctuary of their room. “If I thought there was a single servant awake in the kitchen—except for M’sieu Guillenormand, who sits up reading Parisian liberal newspapers as a protest against local laziness—I’d suggest calling for bath-water, but I think you’re going to have to wait for that. Perhaps,” she added meditatively, putting her arms around January’s waist from behind, “if we both thought very hard about it, we might find something to do of which Josefa would completely disapprove, in revenge for the day we’ve both had . . . ?”

January grinned and covered her hands with his big ones. “It’s an idea, my nightingale, and one we’ll have to pursue . . . and God knows I need a bath.” He released one hand to brush at the thick yellow dust on his sleeve. “But before it gets dark I want to ride back to the pyramids and see what it was Mademoiselle Valentina cached under the roots of that oak-tree.”

Within minutes Rose had changed into riding-clothes, and the two were slipping stealthily across the kitchen yard toward the corrals. “If I thought we could do so without drawing the attention of every vaquero in the place,” added January softly, “I’d suggest we steal three horses, leave a note for Consuela, and make a break with Hannibal for Mexico City now. This place is dangerous.” He looked back across the silent quadrangle, the bare, dusty ground and the high yellow walls, each archway of the two arcades, upper and lower, a choir of silently singing mouths of shadow, and was reminded of the ranks of carved skulls in the crypt of the Lord of the Dead.

“You feel that, too?” asked Rose, and January looked down at her, hearing the uneasiness in her voice. “It’s a completely illogical feeling,” she admitted in the tone of one apologizing for error, and he shook his head.

“No: it’s a deduction that your mind has made from clues you haven’t yet realized are clues.” He led the way past the radiant heat of the round
comal
ovens, and out through the wide stable gates. “Don Prospero is unstable—and dangerous. Just because he’s protecting Hannibal now doesn’t mean he won’t turn against him after November second—or even sooner, if he has some dream of the Jaguar-God. And if Werther Bremer turns out not to have done the murder, that means that the real killer is still here on the hacienda. Since we don’t know why the murder was committed, that means we have no guarantee that he—or she—won’t kill again.”

As January had expected, the moment he and Rose emerged from the small postern at the back of the kitchen yard into the tangle of corrals and sheds that constituted the hacienda’s stables, a shaggy-haired, scar-faced vaquero materialized from the shade of a paloverde tree and asked, “Can we be of help?” Since it would be foolish to ride through this bandit-haunted land alone, January explained—in his most educated Spanish—that
la Señora
Enero had a desire to see some of the statues and ruins that surrounded the pyramids, though of course neither of them had any desire to wake Don Prospero for another expedition. . . .

The vaquero grinned his understanding, and whistled for a couple of companions, who emerged, yawning and scratching themselves, from where they’d been sleeping on the ground in the shade. While they were saddling horses, January’s Indian servant, Cristobál, joined them, silent as ever, apparently from out of nowhere. As they rode out, January and Rose continued their conversation in French—many of the vaqueros barely spoke Spanish.

“According to Josefa,” said Rose, “Don Prospero had been slipping toward mania for several days before his attack on the fourth of September. Generally, she says, his spells last about twenty-four hours. Then he’ll sleep for another day, and then he’s well, or as well as he ever is. On the fourth he was definitely disoriented, shouting that voices were speaking to him from the air, and unable to recognize his family. Nobody worried much until the seventh, when Don Anastasio sent for Franz; by the morning of the eighth, as Hannibal said, Prospero had to be forcibly restrained.”

January shivered at the thought of the four preceding days, of living with Don Prospero roving at large. “No wonder Valentina was making plans to get out of there. I only wonder that Paloma didn’t try to bolt, too.”

“Josefa wouldn’t hear of it,” said Rose drily. “Josefa seems to have had the same idea that Señora Lorcha did, and tried to get her father to sign over the ten thousand dollars it would cost for her and Paloma to enter a convent—leaving poor little Casimiro alone in his grandfather’s care, though no one seems to have thought of that. Josefa was livid when Señora Lorcha’s priest showed up for the clandestine marriage of Prospero and Natividad, because, of course, then Fernando arrived hot-foot with his two mad-doctors in tow and took over everything. Santa Anna and his aides arrived on the eighth as well.”

“And Fernando intended to go through with marrying Natividad?”

“After that he had to.” Rose drew rein a little, following January as he led the little cortege down into the thickly-wooded depression in the ground that flanked the pyramids to the north. “I think he guessed it would only be a matter of time before Señora Lorcha forged proof that Natividad
had
married Don Prospero on the eighth, and as his wife was entitled to a third of his property in the event of his death.”

Here among the trees, the air stifled in the lungs, and the gnats and mosquitoes swarmed. Undergrowth tangled in thickets like thorned wire, and among the close-crowding gray boles of oak and juniper, January seemed to feel the watching eyes of those who had held this land before the Spanish, those proud, secretive faces cut into the stone of the crumbling temple walls.

He nodded at his wife, his mind still filled with the picture of that poisoned and chaotic house in which Fernando died. “Natividad probably reasoned that if she couldn’t marry a man who’d be safely locked away in an asylum for the rest of his life, at least she could marry one who might be killed in Texas before she would ever be required to live with him. Given Fernando’s proclivities, there was a good chance she’d never be asked to live with him at all.”

“It’s generous of you to attribute to her the powers of reasoning.” Rose ducked a low-hanging oak-branch, the tiny, stiff gray-green leaves snagging at her riding-hat brim. “She may have been doing only what her mother ordered. Josefa says Franz invariably referred to Natividad as ‘that cow,’ not so much from his contempt for women in general—an attitude he seems to share with his father—as because of the money she cost the estate. But Werther had no such financial admixture to
his
motives. He never let a day pass without some slight or mischief: pebbles in shoes, ink-spots on silk, sometimes worse. Of course, since Josefa never exchanged a word with Natividad or her mother, she didn’t know much, and it seems to have entirely escaped her that all that enmity from Werther had any other root than righteous indignation against a harlot. What Natividad thought, I have no idea.”