Days of the Dead (22 page)

January nodded. “I’ve been empowered by Sir Henry Ward of the British ministry to look into the events surrounding the death of Don Fernando.” He made a move to take out the letter of introduction, but Pichon waved it away.

“Appalling.” The mad-doctor grimaced. “Simply disgraceful. Is that fiddler of Don Prospero’s still walking around free?”

“If you can call being held prisoner at Mictlán
free,
” said January. “When did Don Fernando first speak to you about his father?”

Pichon considered for a moment, mustache and eyebrows both bristling with the pursing-up of his face. “March,” he said at last. “After arriving in this country two months earlier.”

In the cloister around them, the imprisoned maniacs were gradually quieting. They were hampered in this by the two young gentlemen and their lady-friends, who went from door to door, peering in—one of the young men put the end of his cane through the judas-hole and then jerked it back again as if something had grabbed at it inside. All four laughed, the ladies holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses.

“Don Fernando said he wished to establish a permanent conservatorship over his father’s property, which he feared his father would dissipate in what he termed ‘freakish fits.’ He and Don Anastasio de Saragosse were able to provide me with considerable evidence about the worsening of Don Prospero’s condition, even before this latest attack on September fourth. Don Prospero’s pattern was one of extreme excitation of the nervous tissue, followed by prostration and a return to lucidity. In this case, the excitation continued rather than collapsed. When my colleague Dr. Laveuve and I were there, the patient had not slept in three nights, and was completely incoherent. Neither cold baths, nor bleeding, nor blistering seemed to have much effect, and there was . . . a division of opinion concerning restraint.”

“Between yourself and Dr. Laveuve?”

“Between myself and that ruffian who commands Don Prospero’s vaqueros,” responded the doctor with asperity. “This man—Vasco is his name—seemed to regard de Castellón’s ravings as perfectly natural and said that if his master were restrained he, Vasco, would be forced to put us from the property. The matter very nearly came to blows with young de Castellón, and only the intervention of Don Anastasio prevented violence.”

“But Don Prospero was eventually locked up?”

“For his own protection,” said Pichon. “And for that of certain members of the household. I hope that I am a good son of the Church, Señor, but when that uneducated imbecile Padre Ramiro attempted to exorcise Don Prospero . . .” His breath blew out in an exasperated hiss. “Don Prospero was locked up but not restrained. Bolts were put on the outsides of all three doors leading into his room. The young Señorita Natividad especially was troubled about being in the room next to his, and requested that her room be moved. Don Fernando seemed to think this cowardly. Perhaps he was right. . . .” Pichon shook his head again. “But in the end, nothing came of it, for her mother—horrid woman—insisted that she remain where she was.”

January’s glance crossed Rose’s, remembering the attempt to sneak a priest in to perform a hasty marriage. “And Don Fernando had the keys of all three padlocks?”

Pichon nodded. “He had the key to one of them—I believe the one on the door from the study into his father’s room. I had the other two. When Don Fernando’s body was taken down to the kitchen court to be washed, that scoundrel Vasco must have gotten the key, for while the body was being washed by the women, Don Prospero himself came down to the kitchen, with Vasco and some of his vaqueros, and demanded a drink of wine.”

Pichon’s mouth hardened again, and a bitter resignation flickered in his eyes. “After that, of course, we were simply told to leave. Vasco gave us the padlocks back when we rode out the following afternoon with Capitán Ylario. He said, ‘These are your property, Señor,’ and he grinned as he said it, as if his master had scored a triumph over us—which I suppose he had.”

The quieter madmen gradually resumed their places under the trees where, it appeared, they spent most of the day. The man with the children’s clothing returned to the fountain, still clutching his armload of little frocks and trousers, muttering and shaking his head. He refused to speak to the two visiting couples, who immediately went over to him and pressed him with questions, jests, and witty remarks. At last one of the young men said, “This is no fun. Let’s go over to the women’s ward at Holy Cross. I hear there’s a girl there who’s been in a hysterical trance for two years, ever since she was raped by a gang of muleteers. She re-lives her experiences over and over again. It’s supposed to be extraordinary. . . .”

“It was you who pronounced Don Fernando dead?” January asked Pichon.

“I did, yes. He quite obviously died of some poison that induces suffocation. . . .”

“Would you have any idea what poison?”

Pichon frowned, then shook his head. “Some Indian poison, I assume. All the soft tissues of the throat were swollen closed, the tongue protruding and the face swollen and blue, most terrible to see. He was dead when we came into the room, and had been dead for, I would say, at least two hours.”

“Would you be able to swear to that in court?” asked January. “Or testify to that effect to Capitán Ylario?”

Pichon’s lips tightened again. “I could, for all the good that it would do for a man of Spanish birth—a hated
gatchupin,
a
greigo—
to testify to anything before that worshipper at the feet of his precious country. But of course I will testify.”

“Dr. Pichon . . .” The attendant, still noticeably damp, came hurrying back up the path from seeing the tourists out.

Pichon nodded. “If you will excuse me . . .”

“One more question,” said January. “And my thanks to you for taking the time to help us. How dangerous is Don Prospero?”

“How dangerous is any man in this country, Señor?” The mad-doctor shook his head. “Sometimes you will have a patient who goes for years peacefully minding his own business, like that one. . . .” He nodded back toward the man at the pillar. “And then suddenly they change, no one knows why. Any man is dangerous to those around him, Señor. And particularly men who have power. We would all of us be safer if we each clung to our own pillar, and never exchanged a word with husbands, or presidents, or those who sit beside us silently drinking in the taverns, with knives stuck in their belts. I think Don Prospero is dangerous, myself. But it is not Don Prospero who killed his son.”

FIFTEEN

“You might try driving through the gardens of the Alameda,” suggested Consuela over a
comida
of kid stew and sweet tamales later that afternoon. “You would be sure to encounter either Natividad or her mother there, or if you drove along the Paseo de Bucareli or out along the canals. Those are the places where the fashionable ladies go, to see and to be seen.”

She folded up a tortilla as neatly as if it were a love-letter, and scooped up beans with it; food as excellent, thought January, as any of M’sieu Guillenormand’s French creations. “Though even if Señora Lorcha had somehow stolen the key to the padlock between Natividad’s room and Don Prospero’s, she would still need that of the lock between Don Prospero’s room and the study,
and
would have to get into the study to unlock that door from that side. I do not see how it could have been done.”

“I don’t either.” January made an impatient gesture, wanting to sweep the dishes from the table, to stride up and down the long room, to do something to relieve the anger and impotence and fear. “I’m grasping at straws, and I know they’re only straws. But until Cristobál locates Werther Bremer, there isn’t much I can do.”

“Even straws can form up a trail that leads somewhere,” added Rose, propping her spectacles with one forefinger. “I will drive out to the Alameda this afternoon and see if I can encounter Señora Lorcha: I suspect she would be more approachable by a woman unaccompanied than by us both, Ben. . . .”

“You mean she wouldn’t want to be seen speaking in public with a black man—she barely glanced at me the whole evening at Mictlán, as if I’d go away if she didn’t acknowledge me. But a quadroon woman could get away with it.”

“You can always come along disguised as a footman,” said Rose judiciously, and Consuela shook her head.

“It cannot be this afternoon. I have a performance tonight
—Cosi Fan Tutti,
if they can find a violinist who comes anywhere near Hannibal’s skill . . . or any skill at all. Tomorrow evening . . .”

“I can take a hack to the Alameda, and walk when I get there,” said Rose. “Because of the fence, there are no beggars to trouble me, and it looks quite unexceptionable.”

“It is, but that is not the point! Only people who are nothing walk!”

“I will walk,” said Rose firmly. “I haven’t walked more than five feet since I came to this city, and I feel that if I don’t get some exercise soon, you shall need to pour buckets of water over
me.
Benjamin, you can ride out to Tepeyac and pay your respects to the Virgin of Guadalupe, which I know you’ve wanted to do. Perhaps burning a candle there will be of some assistance, and in any case I think you’ll feel better.”

So it was that he did ride out, three miles across the tree-lined old causeway over Lake Texcoco, and knelt among the scattering of village women in the cavernous shadows of the great basilica, contemplating the curious image on the cloak. And he did feel better, though if the Virgin had any answers to the puzzle, she did not vouchsafe them there. Returning in the near-darkness, he had a long and annoying wait at the customs barrier and was nearly bitten to death by mosquitoes; he dreamed about the Virgin that night as she was pictured on the cloak, a brown-skinned Indian girl.

But he did not see her, in his dream, among the ruins of the Temple of Tonanzin, where the Indian Juan Diego had seen her. Rather, he kept glimpsing her from the corner of his eye as he worked back at the night clinic of the Hôtel Dieu in Paris, where he had trained as a surgeon. The clinic was as he remembered it, with its stone floors slick and filthy with the black acid mud of Paris that everyone tracked in; with its smells of unwashed bodies and wounds too long untreated; with the yelling of drunkards and opium-fiends in delirium and the hysterical sobbing of a young blond woman cradling a dead toddler in her arms. And as he bandaged knife-wounds and cleaned the gashes left by broken bottles, as he washed the bruises of whores or housewives beaten by their men and tried to tell the police that just because a poor woman’s child had died didn’t mean she’d murdered it, he kept seeing her out of the corner of his eye: that smiling brown Indian face, the shadowy blue of her cloak, the fugitive sparkle of stars in the air around her night-black hair.

Dr. Jean-Clair Laveuve, when they visited him the next morning—Wednesday—in his small and very comfortably furnished private asylum in the palace of a bankrupt and dispossessed Count, gave them substantially the same story they’d already heard from Pichon. “Franz de Castellón sought my advice about his father within months of returning to Mexico,” he told them, one pale-blue eye blinking huge behind his monocle. “At first Don Anastasio was opposed to the restraint of his good friend—naturally enough—but upon looking at the situation with fresh eyes, he came to agree, something one does not always find in those who have made up their minds.”

As he spoke, he threaded a large needle with heavy white silk. January and Rose had been escorted to the mad-doctor’s workroom in what had been the drying-room of the house, a high-ceilinged, whitewashed chamber now fitted with shelves for medicines. In contrast to the combination of confinement and neglect meted out to the city’s insane poor, Laveuve was a man who practiced all the newest methods being experimented on in France for the treatment of disordered nerves.

January read the labels: opium, calomel, cayenne, camphor, fish oil, beer, Indian hemp. A white porcelain head marked with the localities of traits—Causality, Ideality, Constructiveness, Foresight—gazed serenely at a rack where a row of brass clysters grinned like obscene teeth. On the wall a larger chart explained by means of a diagram that a woman’s “region of virtue” lay in her breasts and her “region of insanity” around her pubis. “Self-esteem” appeared to be located in her right shoulder.

Through the door, in what had been the coal-room, January could see that a swing had been fitted up, the newest method of treatment—he had read about it in
Lancet—
for calming lunatics by constant, steady motion. The strait-jacketed man tied in it moaned and cried under his eyeless, buckled hood as an attendant pushed him, again and again, in a long, dizzying arc.

The coal-room was also fitted with two “tranquilizing chairs.” Better than the chains above each cot at San Hipólito, January supposed.

“And on the eighth of September, you locked Don Prospero into his room with padlocks on the bolts of all three doors?”

The Frenchman nodded, a square-headed, fair-haired man wearing, like Dr. Pichon, a long-tailed coat and trousers rather than the older styles affected by the Mexican grandees. “He had attempted to kill his daughter’s confessor—who rather ill-advisedly sought to exorcise him. . . .”

“How?” asked Rose. “With a knife?”

“By stuffing his rosary beads down his throat. But between that, and his hallucinatory delusions . . .”

“Was that the first time,” asked January, “that Don Prospero had attempted to kill a man? Or an animal?” he added, remembering the shoemaker’s son in San Hipólito, and the rabbit’s heart swimming in its dish of gore.

“Aside from shooting at visitors who annoy him?” Dr. Laveuve raised an eyebrow and poked the needle through his sleeve to keep track of it as he began to mix bromide and opium into a sedative draft. “Personally, I suspect the—er—pot-shots are sometimes entirely for effect: Don Prospero is a most astonishingly accurate marksman when he has a mind to be. And mind you, there are any number of other gentlemen in this country—warranted by their relations as quite sane—in whose presence I would not care to be were they armed.”

An attendant—a burly man with an Indian’s impassive face—led a patient in, a horribly gaunt young woman whose shaved head showed bandages under the linen cap she wore. Laveuve switched to Spanish and asked her gently, “How are you today, Doña Francisca?” and she began to weep, tears flowing soundlessly down a face marked with old scabs as if it had been repeatedly raked with her own nails. The attendant helped her sit, as carefully and lovingly as if she’d been his own daughter, and held the opium draft for her to drink. Then he held her head between his hands while Laveuve took the needle out of his sleeve and pinched up the skin at the back of the girl’s neck, piercing the needle clean through the flesh. Her nape was dotted with little sets of twin punctures from previous procedures. Laveuve arranged a towel across the girl’s shoulders with the needle and trailing thread hanging down on it.

“It drains the excess liquids from the nervous system, reducing the excitation of the fibers,” explained the doctor. “Is that all right, Doña Francisca?” He patted her shoulder. She continued to weep without a sound. The attendant laid one huge hand on her strait-jacketed wrist, and murmured encouragement to her in a voice too low for others to hear.

“Did Don Damiano ever speak to you about his father when he was alive?”

“Once,” LaVeuve answered. “Just after I opened my sanatorium here. That was back in ’twenty-five, when things looked—well, different than they do now, politically. Nothing ever came of it, though. Don Damiano was too cowed by his father and too habituated to the situation at the hacienda to pursue the matter seriously. He traveled a great deal, Don Damiano, and spent much of his time at Don Prospero’s other haciendas, in Jalapa and the low country near Vera Cruz, and in Catorce, where Don Prospero has mines. Of course Don Prospero demanded that the boy Luis be left at Mictlán. It was only chance that Luis was with his father in Vera Cruz the summer before last when yellow fever broke out in the town.”

The doctor shrugged, and walked with them to the workroom door, which opened onto what had been the main courtyard. An elderly man sat there reading in the shade of a cypress-tree beside the small stone fountain; another was planting seedlings in one of the several big terracotta jars of earth along the sunny southern arcade.

“It was Don Anastasio de Saragosse who brought Don Damiano here, as a matter of fact,” Laveuve said. “But in those days he was mostly concerned about how to deal with his friend rather than whether or not he should be restrained. There was no talk whatsoever of restraint. And though Don Anastasio tells me now that Don Prospero has become worse in recent years—and indeed in recent months—personally, I can’t say that I see much of a difference.

“Of course,” he added, “by the time it was apparent that there
was
a problem with Don Prospero, Santa Anna had come to power and would not hear of his being restrained as a lunatic. Possibly he suspected that Don Fernando would not be as forthcoming as his father in the matter of gambling-debts and loans. And the vaqueros, of course, find his behavior not in the least discomposing. Don Prospero pays them well—and keeps the Army recruiters away.”

Glancing through the doors that led into what had been store-rooms, a wood room, and a room for making chocolate, January saw that they were furnished with cribs, coffin-like slatted boxes on legs. Again, he supposed, more humane than chains, but the thought of having a lid down that close over his face made his flesh creep.

“Is there any possibility,” he asked bluntly, “that Don Prospero might have gotten free of his room before his son’s death? Dr. Pichon said that the vaqueros let him out. . . .”

Laveuve sighed and shook his head wearily as he removed his monocle to polish on a handkerchief. “God knows. Myself, I don’t think he could have restrained himself from showing off his escape if Vasco had let him out beforehand. But I do not, as the lawyers say, know of my own knowledge that Vasco—or that dreadful Lorcha woman, with her marriage contracts and her drunken priest—didn’t somehow obtain a key and unlock one of the doors in the hour or so after supper. I know only that after Don Fernando’s death, and after Don Prospero was out, Vasco took the keys from poor Pichon at pistol-point; and I observed when I was there the other day that the bolts had been removed from the doors.”

“What will happen,” asked Rose, “should Don Prospero have another fit of madness?”

The mad-doctor shrugged, and bowed a little to her as the attendant on duty opened the courtyard’s outer gate. “Nothing, I should imagine. If by some chance he should behave so outrageously as to force the issue, I believe that the old man’s only surviving grandson, Casimiro Fuentes, would have legal conservatorship under the guardianship of his mother. But personally,” he sighed as Consuela’s carriage pulled forward from where it had been causing a traffic impedance for the past half-hour in the Paseo de Bucareli, “I cannot imagine what it would take to overcome the President’s fondness for a man who finds mistresses for him and obliges with money on demand.”

That afternoon, when siesta was done, Consuela outfitted January in the largest obtainable footman’s livery—in which he could barely move—a powdered white wig, and spectacles. “Now, whatever you do, don’t get down from the box,” she instructed. No worry there, January reflected, his breeches would no doubt come apart at the seams if he tried to so much as bend forward. “The seat is high, so that Señora Lorcha will see only that there is a black footman, and not that you are tall, which I think is what most people see of you even if they do not look at your face. Juan,” she added to the little coachman, “when the carriage stops, you give the reins to Señor Enero and help the Señora in or out.”