Days of the Dead (21 page)

The Tennessean’s blue eyes narrowed sharply. “Where’d you hear that?”

“At the opera,” said January. “Playing cards at the back of one of the boxes with about half the Mexican officer corps.” Dillard had looked as nonplussed as if January had said he’d been slipped battle-plans at a church-service. “Those cannon are so fouled with rust, I’d be surprised if you can stuff a ball down them, even if the men who’re selling powder to the Army weren’t adulterating it with coal dust and sand.”

“Bastards.” Dillard spat, indignant in spite of himself. By the amount of tobacco-juice in the grass, he’d been standing by the artillery park, making notes, for some time.

“You’re still outnumbered, though,” said January quietly. “Badly.”

“We’ll manage.”

“I pray you do. You remember what happened six months ago, when the state of Zacatecas tried to rebel against Santa Anna in favor of the old Constitution of 1824, as Texas is doing now. Not only were all the militia slaughtered, but Santa Anna turned his troops loose on the civilians as well.”

“I guess Mr. Houston’ll just have to keep that from happening,” said Dillard, and spat again. “I appreciate you telling me about the cannon and the powder and all,” he added. “I’ll pass that word along to Mr. Butler. They said when I came here it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t speak the language, but Lord—” He broke off, eyes going past January, and he let out a low, bemused whistle. “Well, now, will you look at that?”

January followed his glance to the extremely stylish barouche drawn by four matched cream-colored horses to a shady spot on the fringes of the reviewing-ground. In it, Natividad Lorcha fanned herself with spangled yellow silk and followed Santa Anna’s wide-shouldered scarlet form with parted lips and admiring gaze. When the Generalissimo turned her way, she lifted her hand in greeting. Santa Anna made his horse caracole for her, and swept off his plumed chapeau bras.

January was about to pass along Rose’s remark about a black mourning corset when realization dropped into place; he asked Dillard, “You know the young lady?” and was astonished at how off-hand his voice sounded to his own ears.

Dillard chuckled. “Well, we were never introduced. But I do know the last time I seen her, she was walkin’ out with one of Santa Anna’s best friends.”

January nodded wisely, with as much a man-of-the-world grin as he guessed a white man would tolerate about a woman who, if not precisely white, wasn’t black either. “A pretty good friend, I’d say.” Both men laughed.

But Rose, when he recounted the conversation to her minutes later, said, “
Dillard
is Valentina’s lover at the garden wall?”

“He has to be,” said January. “Where else would he have seen Natividad and Don Prospero together?”

“Then Butler’s slaves—or freedmen, as the case may be . . .”

“. . . suddenly have a connection with Werther Bremer after all,” finished January softly. “Though why Butler would have sent slaves or former slaves after Werther when he had Dillard and his other secretaries for the job still escapes me.”

“Possibly it wasn’t Butler who sent them, but Dillard himself.”

“Possibly. Either Dillard saw something or learned something—God knows what—on the night of the murder, or more likely Valentina enclosed a note of some kind with the parcel she passed over the wall. Hannibal isn’t the only man in the Valley of Mexico capable of translating Spanish to English, though there doesn’t seem to be anyone on Butler’s staff endowed with that particular talent. . . .”

“That’s very harsh of you, Benjamin,” reproved Rose, angling her head to peer over her spectacles. “You can’t expect Mr. Dillard to entrust his love-letters to the pig-headed rhinoceros. In a way I’m relieved that it isn’t Ylario taking the law into his own hands. . . .”

“And he may still be.”

“True. But it does leave us with the problem of how we’re going to get around Butler. . . .” She switched effortlessly to Latin as Consuela and Doña Gertrudis, trailed by the faithful Sancho, appeared beside the carriage and climbed in. “How we shall deal with the butler if we cannot find the valet.”

By the time January reached the cypress grove near the artillery, Natividad’s carriage was empty. One of the soldiers guarding it—there were six of them, more than were in charge of keeping Texians with memorandum-books from counting the field-pieces in the artillery park—informed him for the sum of a reale that La Señorita had indeed gone to take her
comida
with the Generalissimo and his officers. With as much of an appearance of leisure as he could muster, January strolled among the picnickers who had now spread themselves out among the cypress-trees around the fringes of the parade-ground, scanning the crowd for sight of Natividad’s mother. He saw no sign of the squat, black-clad figure, though he did see a number of cock-fights, a dog-fight, dozens of assignations, and Don Tulio de Avila y Merced running a faro-bank for an enormous crowd of young officers and gentlemen, with every sign of carrying on into the evening.

As January, Rose, Consuela, and Doña Gertrudis returned across the marsh to the town, the smell of smoke and cooking from the Army camp and the drifting music of a dozen bands followed them for miles.

Before departing for the review that morning, January had sent a note to Dr. Hernan Pichon at the Hospital of San Hipólito, and Rose had dispatched another to Consuela’s aunt in the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of Mary. Upon their return, they found replies to both these missives, Dr. Pichon bidding them to visit on the following day—Tuesday—and Sor Maria-Perdita arranging for Rose to call on Friday afternoon.

In France it was still considered an amusing way to pass an afternoon, in some circles, to visit mad-wards and watch the antics of the lunatics, though this was no longer as fashionable as it had once been. Some of January’s friends in Paris—writers and artists of the Gothic genre, mostly—claimed they did so out of a desire to “more deeply understand the human emotions through the dreams of madmen,” though January suspected this argument as less than honest. As a medical student, he had visited the wards of Charenton and the Salpêtrière, and had found nothing either enlightening or amusing in the stink of excrement smeared on walls or voided into clothing, in the droning chatter of those chained figures in the shadowy cells, in the howls that echoed from the wards where the maniacs were confined.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?
Macbeth had asked, and two hundred and thirty-five years later, it seemed, no one was any closer to an answer.

The hospital administrator, a gravely elegant man who looked like a French marquis, greeted them in the entry-hall of what had formerly been the monastery of San Hipólito, and led them across the wide central garden. Men lay stretched on the grass beneath the pepper-trees, or walked about under their lacy shade. At one side of the cloister a man stood with his face to a pillar, his arms wrapped about it as high as he could reach. Another was spreading out children’s clothes over the rim of the fountain, talking rapidly to himself, and stopping every few seconds to bend and drink deeply from the water. There were two other well-dressed couples in the garden who January guessed—by the European dresses of the women and the way they put their heads together, talking and pointing—were simply curious visitors, perhaps in quest of deeper understanding of human emotions.

“These in the garden are the privileged ones, you understand, the quiet ones,” explained the administrator. “The furious are kept in the monks’ old cells. . . .”

“BASTARDS!” a man’s voice screamed. “Bastards, robbers, murderers . . . !” A man burst from the big door at the far side of the court, stark naked and swinging a three-legged stool like a weapon. He dashed straight for the outer gate, January and Rose springing to one side out of his path and the administrator to the other. “You can’t make me! You can’t make me . . . !”

Dr. Pichon and a burly attendant who reminded January strongly of Werther Bremer’s bull pounded after the escapee, running him to earth near the man at the pillar, who buried his face against the stone and clung to it as if it were his sole hope of life.

“Hold him!” yelled Pichon as the attendant wrestled the naked patient on the ground—the patient struck at his attacker with the stool, shouting words seemingly at random: January caught “principles” and “justice, yes, we need—we can’t make a world—yes, darkness—we can’t—yes. . . .”

January caught the stool and wrenched it away—the man’s strength was terrifying. The administrator seized the patient’s thrashing legs and sat on them, and one of the visiting gentlemen ran up also to assist, while the two ladies clung to the remaining tourist and shrieked. Around the garden the other “quiet” patients began to mill and shuffle, crowding away or running to look or simply dashing excitedly back and forth in the arcade.

“Get them out of here!” yelled Pichon as he dipped a bucket of water from the fountain, leaped up on the stool, and dumped the water over the heaving patient’s chest and face. Water splashed everywhere. The gentleman visitor sprang back with a cry, and the leg he’d been holding down flew up and smacked January—now holding an arm—across the temple. “Another,” Pichon gasped, thrusting the bucket at Rose, who obediently dipped it full from the fountain again. An attendant raced up with a second bucket, and for some minutes the mad-doctor stood on the stool, dumping bucket after bucket of water over his patient, while January, the administrator, and the first attendant all got as soaked as if they’d stood in a shower-bath.

“The rats,” screamed the madman desperately, “the cats and the rats—rats chase the cats . . . !” Water poured into his mouth and January wondered that he didn’t drown. He was probably halfway to it when the attendants dragged him, gasping, to his feet and into the nearest open cell. During the whole of the chase and the water-treatment the men confined around the cloister had howled, pounding on the doors of their cells. “Get the others inside,” commanded the administrator to the dripping attendant at his side. “Señor, if you will excuse us . . . there is no danger, none whatsoever, but it is better if these quiet ones are taken away until the shouting is over.”

“Of course.” January was mentally charting the fastest route to the gate that led from the cloister back to the vestibule, or, at a pinch, looking for which open cell was the closest, into which he and Rose could dive in case of real trouble. The two visiting couples clung together in a corner of the garden, the women still shrieking, the young men gawking as if at a stage-fight in a melodrama. The man who’d been laying out the children’s clothes had sunk down beside the fountain, weeping, and wept still more when the attendant wouldn’t let him gather up all the little garments again and take them with him; he clutched what he could to his chest as he was herded toward the door of what had been the monastery refectory. The man at the pillar stubbornly refused to release his grip on it.

“I am trying to do my job and you all refuse to let me! Let me alone, let me do what I need to do. . . .”

In the end they let him.

“Will you help me?” Pichon asked January. “You are Señor Enero the surgeon, as you said in your note? This man should be bled at once, before he regains his breath or his strength.”

January followed Pichon to the cell. He was no great believer in bleeding but knew so little about illnesses of the mind that he was unwilling to argue what might be legitimate treatment. In any case, it would certainly quiet the madman down. The madman still lay on the stone floor of the cell where he’d been dumped, dripping and sobbing; January unbolted the door and held the man’s arm while Pichon took a scalpel from his pocket, uncapped it, and, using the bucket from the fountain as a bleeding-bowl, drained close to a pint of blood from the man’s arm. Even in the dim illumination that came from the judas-hole in the door, January could see the madman’s arms both laddered with the half-healed cuts of similar operations. Under the straggling beard his face was young, gaunt, and twisted with terror.

He put up no fight as January and Pichon lifted him onto the bed—after losing that much blood he probably couldn’t—and the doctor chained him to the wall by neck and feet. “I shall have the shackles taken off in a few hours if he remains calm,” said Pichon as he carried the bloodied bucket from the cell and January bolted the door behind them. “In a little while I shall puke him—that seems to calm him. He is the son of a shoemaker in the barrio of San Pablo—he started cutting up animals as a boy, and last year viciously assaulted the child of a neighbor. He said voices coming out of the shoes in the shop told him to do so.”

He shook his head, deeply troubled. “The administrators of this hospital would have it that he—and others like him—became this way because of their sins. When I came to work here they were still ‘whipping the Devil out of them.’ Barbarians.”

In the cloister, a damp and rumpled Rose was still talking to the man at the pillar. “Since I have been here, the output of sugar has grown from one kingdom to three,” the man was explaining. “And all because of my efforts—which these fools here don’t understand.”

“One day they will,” Rose assured him quietly. “You may be sure of that. Here is my husband—I must go, sir. But thank you for explaining to me about the sugar, and the lightning in the air; I didn’t know that before.” She rejoined January and Pichon, touching January’s soaked sleeve. “Do you feel saner and calmer after the water-treatment?”

“Much,” January replied gravely, and Pichon looked at him with startled enquiry before realizing it was a joke. “Dr. Pichon, thank you for making the time to see us; we know you’re busy here.”

“Busy? God, what a jape! A hundred and two madmen and not a thing to do for any of them but keep them from hurting themselves and hope they get well. One feels a fraud.”

Pichon shook his head, his hard, naturally disapproving mouth bracketed with lines of frustration and disgust. “Intemperance or love is mostly what brings them in here, but other men drink too much, love too much, and survive it. Why not these?” He sighed. “Well, my thanks to you for your help, Señor Enero, in any event. You said in your note you wished to know about Don Prospero de Castellón, I believe?”